Lockdowns, social distancing, and COVID safe hygiene practices have rendered the usual face-to-face course delivery options all but impossible for many higher education institutions worldwide. A ...forced transition to online learning has been the only viable option for preventing a wholesale closure of many institutions. The aim of this study is to identify the role of educational technologies in the transition from face-to-face to online teaching and learning activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper identified five challenges to transitioning to online education experienced by higher education institutions: synchronous/asynchronous learning tool integration, access to technology, faculty and student online competence, academic dishonesty, and privacy and confidentiality. From the studies examined in this literature review, strategies for successful online implementation were also noted. These included: providing e-learning training support for faculty and students, fostering online learning communities, and expanding traditional face-to-face course delivery to incorporate more elements of blended learning. A Technology Enhanced Learning Hub that encapsulates the learning process within a modality-neutral learning space is presented as a suggested framework for delivering higher education programs in this challenging environment.
COVID-19 in Dutch higher education de Boer, Harry
Studies in higher education (Dorchester-on-Thames),
01/2021, Volume:
46, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this contribution to the Special Issue of Studies in Higher Education, I describe developments during the COVID-19 pandemic in Dutch higher education along three lines. First, the context is ...outlined in chronological order. It concerns the evolution of the pandemic in the Netherlands, complemented by the general situation at my own university - the University of Twente (UT). The UT has almost 12,000 students, about 30% of whom come from abroad.
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Many of the foreign students come from neighbouring country Germany (12% of the total number of students). The university is located in the east of the Netherlands, close to the border with Germany, and has a beautiful spacious campus. The nickname of the university is the Entrepreneurial University, which underlines its character. The second part of my contribution gives an overview of a number of measures and issues that were taken during the COVID-19 outbreak in the Dutch higher education sector. The third part contains a number of personal perceptions and gives an impression of my state of mind in recent months.
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The COVID-19 pandemic caused mass disruption to higher education institutions (HEIs) across the world and has since led to vast debate on how to manage HEIs and how to deliver course content to ...students beyond the crisis. The emergency shift to remote learning has led many HEIs to adopt more flexible course delivery in the longer term. Drawing on international and multidisciplinary perspectives, "Moving Higher Education Beyond COVID-19" explores how HEIs may use crises as an opportunity to develop, to transform, and to improve their institutional resilience. Authors draw on many novel and innovative practices mastered during the pandemic, including approaches to teaching, and the related learning and managerial practices. Collectively, the authors argue that COVID-19 has served as one of the most important push factors for universities to redesign their approaches to teaching and learning, and thereby also rethink their business models. With insights for researchers, course designers, and higher education leaders, "Moving Higher Education Beyond COVID-19" is a must-read for moving your institution forward beyond the pandemic.
The Covid-19 crisis has given rise to existential questions around the university during and after Covid-19. How might we re-imagine the future of HE and the post-coronial university? This article ...reflects on utopian and dystopian imaginaries which have emerged from the pandemic by narrating the hopes and fears for the future as held and felt by students and academics at the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University. My podcast Cambridge Quaranchats forms part of the methodology of this project: set up as an affective, collaborative and open access audio journal, I have used podcasting since the beginning of the UK lockdown to publicly document the crisis of Covid-19 and its impact on Cambridge's academic community. Podcast conversations were used in private research interviews with students and academics to sonically elicit further reflections on new horizons of the possible for the post-coronial university. The resulting data reveal that in the shift to online learning, the most prominent fears connect to the loss of education as an embodied and communal experience. A fully online university is consistently described as a dystopian outcome of the pandemic, yet moving some educational activities online may lead to increased accessibility and participation in HE. The post-coronial university will need to develop a blended approach to education that safely and flexibly combines virtual with face-to-face teaching in order to inclusively accommodate the diverse needs of students, whilst retaining a sense of embodiment and community in HE.
Worldwide, millions of children have missed out on early childhood education and care (ECEC) due to the closure of their settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known about the ...socio-emotional impact of these closures on young children. This paper draws upon a study of 506 parents of children aged 1–10 years in Ireland who completed the online Play and Learning in the Early Years (PLEY) Survey during lockdown in May and June 2020. Parents responded to a series of questions about their child’s play, learning and development during lockdown, and described the impact of the restrictions on their children’s lives. The study was approved by the institutional ethics committee. Findings indicate that most children missed their friends, playing with other children, and the routine and structure of ECEC and school settings. Parents described the negative impact of the closure of these settings on their children’s social and emotional well-being, which they suggested, resulted in tantrums, anxiety, clinginess, boredom, and under-stimulation. However, some parents did report positive aspects of lockdown for their children and the family, including more time to play with siblings and a break from the usual routine. While the findings of the PLEY study indicate that children’s socio-emotional development was severely disrupted during lockdown, with a variety of negative impacts, this experience was not universal. Moreover, the findings suggest that families missed the nurturing environment provided by ECEC programs that supported their children's socio-emotional development, as well as the structure and routine afforded by their children's participation in early childhood programs.
School closures in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic have left 45.5 million school students and 3.1 million teachers dependent on online teaching and learning. Online teaching and learning are ...an unprecedented experience for most teachers and students; consequently, they have a limited experience with it. This paper examines the views of secondary school mathematics teachers on E-learning implementation barriers during the COVID-19 pandemic at four barrier levels, namely teacher, school, curriculum and student. Furthermore, it assesses the relationship between barrier levels with teachers’ demographic background. Data was collected through an online questionnaire, involving 159 participants from lower and upper secondary schools in Indonesia. The findings of this study suggest that student level barrier had the highest impact on e-learning use. In addition, the student level barrier showed strong positive correlation with the school level barrier and curriculum level barrier. The study showed that teachers’ backgrounds had no impact on the level of barriers. This study stimulates further discussion on the way to overcome e-learning barriers whilst simultaneously maximizing benefits of E-learning during this pandemic and beyond it by highlighting the importance of students’ voices.
The COVID-19 school closures highlighted the importance of crisis management for school and district leaders. Crisis management, however, has not received sufficient attention from school leadership ...preparation programs or education leadership researchers. This article synthesizes research spanning schools and other organizations, including those in the private sector, to describe a framework for understanding crises and crisis management in schools and districts and the key competences this literature suggests for successful navigation of crisis situations. We use this framework to discuss leaders’ responses to the COVID-19 school closures in spring 2020. We conclude with an argument for more consciously incorporating crisis management training into both preservice and in-service preparation and support for education leaders and for opening new lines of inquiry into crisis leadership at the school and district levels.
Purpose: In India, the COVID-19 outbreak has been declared an epidemic in all its states and union territories. To combat COVID-19, lockdown was imposed on March 25, 2020 which has adversely affected ...the education system in the country. It has changed the traditional education system to the educational technologies (EdTechs) model, where teaching and assessments are conducted online. This paper aims to identify the barriers faced by teachers during online teaching and assessment in different home environment settings in India. Design/methodology/approach: Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of qualitative research methodology has been used in this research. The study was conducted among the teachers working in the government and private universities of Uttarakhand, India. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted among 19 teachers to collect data regarding the barriers faced by them during online teaching and assessment. ATLAS.ti, version 8 was used to analyze the interview data. Findings: The findings revealed four categories of barriers that are faced by teachers during online teaching and assessments. Under home environment settings, a lack of basic facilities, external distraction and family interruption during teaching and conducting assessments were major issues reported. Institutional support barriers such as the budget for purchasing advanced technologies, a lack of training, a lack of technical support and a lack of clarity and direction were also reported. Teachers also faced technical difficulties. The difficulties were grouped under a lack of technical support, it included a lack of technical infrastructure, limited awareness of online teaching platforms and security concerns. Teachers' personal problems including a lack of technical knowledge, negative attitude, course integration with technology and a lack of motivation are identified as the fourth category to damper their engagement in online teaching and assessments. Practical implications: The findings of the study can be helpful to the regulatory authorities and employers of higher education institutions who are planning to adopt online teaching as a regular activity in the future. The insights gained from the findings can help them to revisit their existing policy frameworks by designing new strategies and technical structures to assist their teachers in successfully embracing the EdTech to deal with any crisis in the future. Originality/value: Many authors have conducted research to address the problems faced by students related to online teaching and learning during COVID-19 in India. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that addresses the challenges faced by teachers during the online teaching and assessment in the home environment settings by using qualitative analysis (IPA) techniques. The current study replenishes the gap by contributing to the literature of online teaching and assessment under the home environment settings during the pandemic situation.
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