The prime minister of the UK announced a set of restrictions on March 23rd. These restrictions included working from home if at all possible. At Emerald, staff often work from home anyway, and the dedicated Covid-19 team at Emerald had decided a week previous to Boris Johnson's announcement, that closing the office and having staff work remotely was the best decision in the circumstances. As most staff at Emerald were already set up for working from home, and this announcement was generally expected; the staff were prepared for this. Emerald have been providing flexibility to all employees who are required to care for their children, elderly or vulnerable dependents, allowing them to flex their work around their caring responsibilities.
Emerald have also worked to bring together a number of freely available research resources related to the Coronavirus group of viruses, and epidemics more broadly: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/promo/coronavirus.htm
Emerald are making these resources freely available to access throughout this public health emergency. Whilst these materials do not only relate to the current clinical challenges of COVID-19, they may provide relevant context to how the world reacted to other previous Coronavirus outbreaks, notably SARS. In addition, this content explores the wider impact on society and includes research on healthcare, education, homeworking, SCM and tourism. Emerald have also launched a publishing fund of £20,000 to cover the Article Processing Charges for research published on Emerald Open Research related to the outbreak and similar healthcare emergencies.
Included in this free content is a number of our case studies. We understand teaching with case studies is usually done in a classroom with students engaged and participating in the classroom discussion, but when restricted to teaching virtually, case studies remain a valuable tool to help student think critically. These cases have been selected as they are mostly short cases which can be read in about 15 minutes; allowing an immediate discussion around a single theme and all contain a full teaching note (available on request to teaching faculty only).
We are also excited to be working towards adding content on the Cases Hub on how to teach with case studies on an online environment. The Case Hub is free to register and use at https://caseshub.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/ and contains courses on how to write and how to teach case studies.
Finally we have extended the deadline of the Emerald/CEEMAN case competition to May 31st to allow authors extra time to submit their case. https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/research/awards/ceemancase.htm