How Instructors Initially Viewed Teaching Online in Higher Education in the UK During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Learning and teaching in higher education institutions around the world have been heavily affected by the outbreak of COVID-19 since the fall of 2019. Teachers were suddenly told to convert their classes online and to be prepared to teach virtually. An online focus group (n=9) was conducted during the initial period of lockdown in the UK at the end of March 2020 to find out about their teaching experiences of transition into online education. A number of challenges were identified in both synchronous and asynchronous teaching processes, including unfamiliarity with the learning management system, privacy concerns, student engagement, preparation time and technological issues. A set of best practices was developed for instructors teaching online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gather.Town: A Gamification Tool to Promote Engagement and Establish Online Learning Communities for Language Learners

“…Recently, teachers have used digital technologies (e.g. Google Meet) to create VLC for language learners (Putra, 2021); however, such virtual environments are often too formal and can inhibit interaction among students (Zhao et al, 2021). Gather.Town is a proximity-based video-conferencing (VC) platform that combines 2D game-like features with VC functionality (https://gather.town).…”

From online to offline education in the post-pandemic era: Challenges encountered by international students at British universities

“…As a preventive measure to curb the spread of the coronavirus, strict social restrictions have been adopted by many countries, such as keeping in place social distancing, remote work, and regional lockdowns ( Kaur et al, 2021 ). As a result, educational institutions around the world have been heavily impacted and forced to adopt a distance-learning approach ( Gillis and Krull, 2020 ; Lederman, 2020 ; Zhao et al, 2020 ). However, research suggests that there are many concerns associated with the sudden shift to online teaching, such as technical issues, student disengagement, and time zone differences, which may cause social and technical challenges for both teachers and students ( Fatoni et al, 2020 ; Lemay et al, 2021 ; Naddeo et al, 2021 ).…”

Use of Technological Equipment for E-learning in Peruvian University Students in Times of Covid-19

“…Learning and teaching in higher education centers is not exempt from the presence of Covid-19; this caused great changes for everyone, teachers had to prepare their classes to teach them online virtually and in that trance many challenges were identified to face in teaching, either asynchronously or synchronously; this change came with the unfamiliarity in pedagogical management (class preparation time, class participation, connectivity) [1], to obtain the progress of society education is the first thing to be a first quality citizen, many countries invest and are committed to the education of their country and with the emergence of ICT totally changed education in its four levels (initial, primary, secondary and university), because of Covid-19 the traditional teaching was left to oblivion to accept e-learning teaching in all educational centers worldwide, whose only solution to this problem was online learning with various methods such as e-learning having as a consequence the saturation of the internet line [2], with the emergence of Covid-19 emerged the teaching in the online version, giving rise to online surveys to investigate the challenges and characteristics of teaching and learning [3].…”