ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, universities worldwide quickly adapted to an online teaching setting as an emergency measure. During this rapid adaption, individual academics were given the challenge of teaching online [1]. Due to the vast discrepancies between the usual pedagogical approach to online teaching and to online teaching necessitated by the pandemic, the latter limited itself to instructor-centred knowledge transmission [2]. More recently, learning has moved back to the on-campus setting. This paper reports on one instructor's change to on-campus sessions based on experience in transforming pre-pandemic on-campus sessions, which were explanation centred, to pandemic online sessions, which were activity-centred and therefore more engaging for the students. The post-pandemic on-campus sessions comprised three parts: (1) Whiteboard Centring, (2) Case Study Introduction, and (3) Solution Envisioning. The sessions were strongly student-centred and incorporated a 15 to 20-min break. The material covered in the sessions was examined in the module's unseen 2-h examination. When compared with previous results, the students performed better overall, and inspection of the examination scripts suggested that more of the students had a better understanding of the material. The paper discusses the extent to which the improvement reflects the student-centred approach. In addition, a 70–30 rule is proposed as a way of both characterising the instructor's student-centred approach and offering one guide to instructors as to whether they themselves are adopting a student-centred approach. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, universities worldwide quickly adapted to an online teaching setting as an emergency measure. During this rapid adaption, individual academics were given the challenge of teaching online [1]. Due to the vast discrepancies between the usual pedagogical approach to online teaching and to online teaching necessitated by the pandemic, the latter limited itself to instructor-centred knowledge transmission [2]. More recently, learning has moved back to the on-campus setting. This paper reports on one instructor's change to on-campus sessions based on experience in transforming pre-pandemic on-campus sessions, which were explanation centred, to pandemic online sessions, which were activity-centred and therefore more engaging for the students. The post-pandemic on-campus sessions comprised three parts: (1) Whiteboard Centring, (2) Case Study Introduction, and (3) Solution Envisioning. The sessions were strongly student-centred and incorporated a 15 to 20-min break. The material covered in the sessions was examined in the module's unseen 2-h examination. When compared with previous results, the students performed better overall, and inspection of the examination scripts suggested that more of the students had a better understanding of the material. The paper discusses the extent to which the improvement reflects the student-centred approach. In addition, a 70–30 rule is proposed as a way of both characterising the instructor's student-centred approach and offering one guide to instructors as to whether they themselves are adopting a student-centred approach. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on higher education. Universities worldwide had to transition abruptly to online teaching, which was unexplored territory for most academics. The transition came bearing a new set of challenges: while on-campus lectures allow direct visual contact with students, enabling academics to use body language and eye contact to help encourage student engagement, these are absent in online sessions. As a result, lectures can become monotonic, with little interaction and indeed lacking the depth that engagement can motivate. This paper describes efforts by one academic to address these challenges, motivated by student feedback. The challenges were addressed by bringing in a more storified approach based on sketches, relegating the usual PowerPoint presentation to a supportive rather than a central role in the lecture sessions. An interesting change observed as a result of this approach was that the academic’s style changed from an expert teaching style to a facilitator teaching style. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.