As it appears the coronavirus will not be leaving us any time soon, educators are facing a dilemma, how do they balance teaching needs with safety? The answer it increasingly seems lies in effective online teaching.
Universities in particular face risks such as network overloads, a lack of experience amongst faculty, low student engagement, low learning collaboration and isolated professors.
In order to combat this, some useful suggestions have been provided over the past few months, and here we take a look at them.
With countries looking to limit the number of Covid cases as Christmas approaches, it is likely that another lockdown may soon be upon us. Consequently, university online networks risk being overloaded due to the number of people using them. This could prevent effective delivery of lectures and seminars, so, a way to prevent this from happening is to encourage professors to upload their teaching resources beforehand and guide students to learn at their own pace. Professors could then arrange discussions at their normal schedule.
Of course, asking professors to upload their teaching resources beforehand will do nothing to ease the situation if those same professors are not comfortable using online instruction methods. Therefore, to address this teaching should not be based on what knowledge the professors can deliver but rather should be based on what students need. Professors should allow students to express their opinions, reflect, act and develop their professional skills.
To follow on from this point, to ensure that students are actually learning, professors could use a test to evaluate students’ learning and their online participation process could be counted as part of their final results to motivate them.
In terms of learning collaboration, in order to prevent students falling by the wayside, universities/ professors can instruct students to form study groups according to their hobbies and cooperate to complete assignments. This could increase communication between students, help encourage students’ enthusiasm for learning and promote an autonomous learning atmosphere.
Finally on the issue of professors being isolated, one solution is to provide a platform for tutoring professors. Universities should place physical teaching and research activities online, including seminars and encourage cooperation to solve new problems that may arise from the teaching process, which would allow professors to learn effective solutions from each other.
It should be understood that professors are taking on much more work than before to adapt to online teaching, and though mistakes may have been made in the past, as the examples in Africa show, professors and institutes are quick to learn and adapt.
International Higher Education 