Emergency remote teaching and learning experience

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In this blog article, I will share with you a snippet of my emergency remote teaching and learning experience. I have been experimenting with the blended learning approach for over 5 years, the move to delivering fully online a full-time undergraduate unit was a new and interesting experiment. I will continue my experiment in order to determine which online teaching and learning strategy is effective. 

Apart from the traditional classroom lectures and tutorials, academic staff members have been using Moodle as a learning management system to share documents on our unit webpages using the resource modules, submit assessments via the various activity modules, and collate assessments using the Gradebook function. This fusion is an integral part of the blended learning approach.

I teach a maximum of 3 full-time undergraduate units per semester with a class population of between 30 to 40 students for each unit. That means a total of between 95 to 120 students per semester. The 3 units that I teach every academic year in the first semester are:

  1. IR202 Theories of International Relations
  2. IR302 International Law in International Relations
  3. IR431 International and Regional Security 

I decided to teach or facilitate the unit IR431 International and Regional Security fully online because;

  • it was a year 4 unit and students have 3 years' prior experience of using Moodle as the University's learning management system.
  • the Niupela Pasin talked about safe distancing which will reduce the risk of spreading COVID19.
  • I wanted to see whether one could teach a full-time undergraduate unit fully online.

My main teaching and learning strategy for the unit as stated in my unit outline is the Student-Led Seminars. The aim was to encourage students to engage in self-learning and peer learning. Also, to help them understand the importance of teamwork and to enhance their communication skills. Most importantly, to help achieve the learning outcomes and develop the selected graduate attributes.

The seminars were conducted in the classroom, a period for comments and questions was scheduled after all the presenters completed their presentations. The commenting and questioning period constituted the participation part of the assessment task where I tested individually their higher-order thinking skills of analyzing and evaluating.

My requirement was for the students to be part of a group for the seminar presentation. I downloaded a Microsoft Excel version of the class list from Moodle and then numbered the students from 1 to 7. I used the sort function to group the students into 7 groups. The 7 groups were assigned a weekly question or statement derived from the required readings. The required readings are grouped under 5 themes connected to the concept of security. 

The challenge for me was to think about how I would use the same approach but stage the seminar presentations online using the Moodle platform. I was advised by the University's Moodle Administrator about the possibility of using the Big Blue Button plugin on Moodle. However, the option was not feasible due to various technical issues.

The other option was to use Zoom to conduct the seminars. My Zoom account was not a paid account, I needed more than 40 minutes to allow for comments and questions at the end of the presentations. I had to think about how I would facilitate the commenting and questioning period because the marking criteria was designed to mark individual participation. 

I had used the video and audio plugins on the Atto editor before and saw their usage as a possible solution. Instead of asking students to post in writing their comments and questions in the various discussion forums created on the Moodle unit webpage. I asked them to post as audio and video files within the allocated time period after the presentations on Zoom.       

Majority of the students preferred using the audio plugin to record and share their comments and questions. I listened to their audio files and kept a tally in order to allocate marks for participation. A total of 30 marks was given to students who participated in the 10 weeks' seminar.

A few students used the video plugin to share their comments and questions. Their video files were viewed by their peers who gained knowledge from the general comments or comments made in response to questions.  

Therefore, the students analyzed what their peers said or what was written in the required readings. Then they evaluated by making judgement based on the knowledge they had acquired or the theme of the seminar presentation. Their evaluation was shared as audio or video files that means their higher-order thinking skill of creating was also tested.

Sadly, only 4 students out of 37 students enrolled in the unit completed the online unit evaluation administered by the University's Quality Assurance Division. The overall grading given by the 4 who evaluated the unit was a satisfactory and only 3 of them made comments which were negative. None of them talked about how we used Zoom for the first time, or highlighted some of the positive things that they experienced during the semester.

As such, it was difficult for me to determine whether the main strategy that I used was effective in achieving the learning outcomes, or helped developed the graduate attributes. I also do not know their general perception about the emergency remote teaching and learning approach taken due to the COVID19 pandemic.  

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