Education lecturers’ perceptions of organising systematic online teaching and learning during COVID-19 pandemic conditions in 2020 at two selected universities in South Africa

In this article, we view epistemological access as organising systematic teaching and learning, and we focus on teaching and learning online during COVID-19 pandemic conditions in 2020. We used a Survey Monkey questionnaire with two universities in South Africa that moved their teaching and learning online to survey whether lecturers thought that the extent of epistemological access was affected when this happened. Our findings indicate that lecturers feel that the emergency teaching and learning did compromise their teaching, and, while most used existing face-to-face materials online, and some changed the content when they went online, they changed the assessment formats. We argue that these changes, although understandable given pandemic conditions, did not necessarily constitute the kind of carefully designed, paced, sequenced, and assessed online teaching and learning that also enhances epistemological access. We indicate that if one is to accept that the so-called new normal in education will largely be online, then the quality assurance of online teaching and learning will become unavoidable. © 2021 Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. All right reserved.

Weaving healthy behaviors into new technology routines: Designing in (and for) the COVID-19 work-from-home period

Sitting in front of computers has become a major part of our workaday routines, challenging us in maintaining active and healthy lifestyles. This challenge becomes even more salient during this worldwide work-from-home period due to COVID-19. While a wide variety of existing interactive systems have been developed to facilitate health tracking and healthy exercises, relatively little research concerns incorporating healthy behaviors as HCI elements. To maximize pervasive health benefits in users' technology routines, this workshop sets out to explore a design paradigm that enables users to use lightweight, healthy behaviors to perform daily interactions with computing systems. To navigate this new design space, this workshop calls for interdisciplinary endeavors, synergizing expertise from HCI design, health informatics, persuasive technology, exertion game, and psychology. © 2020 Owner/Author.