Purpose Existing studies reflect that traditional teaching–learning relationships between supervisors and graduate students have become disjointed with actuality seriously. In particular, there are practical difficulties in handling many students from coursework-based postgraduate degrees under current university curricula. Therefore, this study aims to explore the relationship between research supervisors and graduate students on social media, which is popular among students. Design/methodology/approach This study surveyed 109 graduate students from two majors (population around 100 each) of a university in Hong Kong to explore their information usage for research on social media, related attitudes and their perceived supervisor relationships. The differences between the two majors were also compared. Findings The authors’ findings indicated that graduate students were active on social media, and social media has successfully provided effective alternate ways for students to communicate with their research supervisors. Social media could improve relationships between supervisors and research students and among fellow students. Besides education purposes, students also discussed their personal affairs on social media with supervisors, demonstrating enhanced trusted relationships. Graduate students also showed confidence in the further application of social media in higher education. Some differences between respondents from the two programs were also found in terms of communication contents, strengths, personal preferences and purposes for using social media. Originality/value Scant studies focus on the relationship between supervisors and graduate students under the current social media environment, especially for students from coursework-based postgraduate degrees. At a deeper level, for the widespread use of social media in the information age, this study explores the specific changes brought about by social media. Therefore, this study is of great theoretical and practical value to graduate education under the current social media environment.

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Whether we like it or not, we have been living with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) for more than 20 months now. It is a global pandemic, disseminating to everywhere on this planet. This pandemic has fundamentally altered many aspects of our lives and society, with short-term and likely long-term effects on health systems. Therefore, the Editorial Board of Library Hi Tech invites researchers from cross-disciplines to submit their latest research work and share their experiences with other researchers. Up to July 2021, we accepted eleven papers for the first series of the special issue. These 13 papers are related to the following topics:

After more than three years, we start to see the end of the tunnel of the COVID-19 pandemic and are ready for reopening (Abbass et al., 2022;Suh and Alhaery, 2022;Kumar et al., 2021).Here, the guest editors and co-editors would like to wish all of our readers and authors good health and let us walk through the pandemic together. We continue to present part 3 of our special issue on the COVID-19 Pandemic and Health Informatics in this issue. In the past two parts (Huang et al., 2021(Huang et al., , 2022, we presented 28 papers; in this issue, we present the following 14 papers on three aspects of research.

The widespread COVID-19 pandemic has not only posed a major health threat in Taiwan but also has challenged the nursing pedagogy. Both academia and the education industry are calling for a radical change of nursing pedagogy. Under such a call, the present study investigates an online collaborative knowledge co-construction mechanism—Crowdsourcing Collaborative Learning Strategy (CCLS)—to help student nurses acquire and practice functional knowledge on clinical operations targeted to the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) at anytime and anywhere via the internet service. A t-test on the pre-and-post test between the control and experimental group explained the effectiveness of the CCLS online platform. Two questionnaires were used to explore students’ perception of the effectiveness and the usefulness of the CCLS online platform. The findings suggested the CCLS online platform can help students to revisit their clinical performance via the recorded videos, facilitate student nurses’ self-reflection on their performance, and help student nurses to minimize the academic-practice gap. Participants in this study scored the CCLS online platform as helpful and easy to use during the learning process.