COVID-19 and Learning Styles: GCET as Case Study

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused higher educational institutions around the world to close campus-based activities and move to online delivery. The aim of this paper is to present the case of Global College of Engineering and Technology (GCET) and how its practices including teaching, students/staff support, assessments, and exam policies were affected. The paper investigates the mediating role of no detriment policy impact on students' result along with the challenges faced by the higher educational institution, recommendations and suggestions. The investigation concludes that the strategies adopted for online delivery, student support, assessments and exam policies have helped students to effectively cope with the teaching and learning challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic without affecting their academic results. The study shows that 99% of students were able to maintain the same or better level of performance during the 1st COVID-19 semester. One percent of students had shown a slight decrease in their performance (about 1%-2%) with respect to their overall marks pre-COVID-19. The no detriment policy has succoured those 1% of the students to maintain their overall performance to what it used to be pre-COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the paper provides the list of challenges and suggestions for smooth conduction of online education.

Educación superior, modalidad hibrida en tiempos de pospandemia: Una revisión sistemática

“…La transición afectó profundamente la forma de enseñanza y aprendizaje: por un lado, evidenció las carencias digitales de muchos docentes, y por otro supuso una oportunidad para enriquecer su experiencia y capacitarlos en estas materias (Navarro et al, 2021;Peytcheva & Aleksieva, 2021;Marchisio et al, 2022;Singh & Meena, 2022). Los estudiantes fueron quienes mostraron mayor facilidad para adaptarse a la modalidad virtual, gracias a su mejor manejo de las tecnologías, excepto en regiones donde carecían de los equipos tecnológicos necesarios; esto mostró algunas brechas digitales (Choi et al, 2020;El Kayaly et al, 2020;Supriyatno & Kurniawan, 2020;Chávez et al, 2021;Hassan & Abdullahi, 2021;Malik et al, 2021;Villafuerte, 2021;Dindar et al, 2022;Domínguez et al, 2022;Yuan et al, 2022;Zhang, 2022). Por otro lado, las plataformas digitales como Zoom o Webex resultaron atractivas para los usuarios, aunque se reportó cierta retroalimentación negativa por parte de ellos (Zou et al, 2020;Parra & Granda, 2021).…”

The Contextual Environment as a Catalyst for Change in the Learning Process and Learning Styles of Students

“…Learning styles are the various ways in which each student retains and processes information during the learning process [12]. It is a classifier of the stimuli that best facilitate learning and the achievement of goals and programmatic objectives.…”

Roadmap to overcoming the Challenges of Cyber Security and Forensics Education in the age of distance learning and the COVID-19 pandemic

“…GCET at the time was using Blackboard as its Learning Management System (LMS) which enabled staff to use 'Blackboard Collaborate Ultra' to conduct live sessions with access to some unique features, such as, group discussion and meeting; with lecture recordings shared with students after the class using the students Blackboard account [7].…”

“…Since 20-25% of the population in the Sultanate has slow internet connection issues which can affect the students' performance during demonstrations, It was decided that recording of individual or group demonstrations could be done using Blackboard Ultra, giving the presenter access to students; along with usage of Kaltura which was used to capture the presentation and suitable to individual presentation. Blackboard Collaborative Ultra was most suitable for group based coursework presentations and demonstration [7].…”