Perspectives From a Multicultural Affairs Office Professional

The purpose of this chapter is to contextualize the challenges that the office of multicultural affairs staff at one state university experienced while moving to virtual learning formats. This study seeks to offer four specific recommendations and best practices for both multicultural affairs offices/centers and higher education institutions, in general, to ensure that students who utilize these virtual format spaces will continue to develop a sense of belonging within the institution. The author historicizes the formation of Black cultural centers and their development into multicultural affairs, tracks the public recognition of the essential importance of these centers and diversity and inclusion programming, and outlines the issues and problems the OMA staff faced in virtually providing a continued and ongoing sense of belonging for diverse students and staff. Higher education institutions can use these recommendations to inform the future of virtual multicultural affairs offices.

A Roadmap for Development, Implementation, and Evaluation of Virtual Practicums in Teacher Education

Education for students in the P-12 setting has been subject to significant changes due to access to the internet and online education availability and most recently, the novel coronavirus (COVID-2019) pandemic; therefore, teacher preparation must meet the demands of this new reality through efficacious preparation programs that reflect this reality. Teachers must meet students' unique needs across virtual platforms, which requires mentoring, practice, and training. Today, there are very few programs that prepare teachers to work in an online P-12 setting. Additionally, there is limited research on how to supervise pre-service teachers in an online setting; therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to present a theoretical framework for virtual observations of a pre-service teacher learning to teach in an online P-12 setting. Along with recommendations for partnership development, implementation, and evaluation, a protocol is offered, and recommendations for future research and conclusions are offered.

Teaching All Students to Write During a Pandemic

Writing instruction in K-12 classrooms can be challenging under the best of circumstances. During the COVID-19 pandemic, writing instruction became even more challenging, with teachers shifting to online, distance, and virtual learning in an instance. With the time investment and attention required to teach writing well, teachers were faced with new obstacles and questions. In addition to understanding best practices for writing instruction, the pandemic unveiled more access and instruction inequities. Specifically, teachers found that students would engage in lessons, activities, and remote instruction at differing levels, ranging from fully invested in the instruction to completely absent instruction. Therefore, this chapter synthesizes best practices for virtual writing instruction and provides recommendations for applying these best practices for various learner situations to alleviate some inequities.

Strategies for Meeting the Needs of All Learners Online

Online learning is the new education method; it may be termed distance education. The classes will be held online, and the educational materials are made available to the students through the internet. The recordings of the classes may be stored for future reference. This chapter elaborates the factors, related problems, and solutions that are important to be met to fulfill the needs of the online learners. The listed factors are electricity, sanitation, social peace and safety, economy, literacy, communication and devices, internet, religion, abhorrence, and intellectual expert group. Apart from the listed factors, there may be factors that are region-specific, unknown, and hidden factors, but the majority of the discussed factors have a global impact. The inference of the global scenario for online education decocts the observations of this chapter and provides amicable solutions. The feasibility of online education is analyzed from a global perspective to get suitable solutions.

Preparing Future Teachers for the Challenges of the Digital Learner

With the recent pandemic, a rapid shift from traditional classroom learning to online learning has educators scrambling for resources, tips, and training tools to make the transition as smooth as possible for all involved. Traditional classroom teachers have been trained on various teaching strategies and how to apply teaching excellence standards to their physical classrooms. However, the training often falls short when transferring these same strategies and standards to online learning. This chapter aims to expand upon the work of Chickering and Gamson to provide those resources necessary to promote this transfer of skills. The application of prior research, along with some practical suggestions, will help K–12 educators, administrators, and educator preparation programs (EPPs) apply these standards of teaching excellence to virtual environments.

Reflections of Faculty Teaching Online During the COVID-19 Pandemic

To survive the onslaught of coronavirus pandemic all higher education institutions (HEI)s worldwide had to move their educational services to either a hybrid modality or a completely online platform. This shift in teaching modalities, placed the faculty members under a relentless pressure to adopt and adapt, to transform themselves into proficient online educators. How did this process of adjustment take place? How did the faculty members acclimatize to their new virtual classrooms? What dilemmas and choices were faced by the faculty members? are questions lacking empirical insights. Yet if this lacuna were overcome, it would provide “real life” insights pertaining to LMS systems, technological tools and apps, and psychological and social isolations which could impede the quality of teaching and learning. This chapter integrates autoethnographic narratives of three faculty members to “recreate the new normal” for HEIs worldwide.

Towards Digital Laboratories

This chapter discusses key elements when devising a transition from traditional laboratory classes towards a digital platform. First, an overview of the types of online and digital chemistry laboratory teaching methods is described. Then it is analyzed a specific case of an abrupt transition of curricula of a practical chemistry undergraduate class. The assessment will be argued with a series of tasks that aim to identify challenges using a real-life laboratory transition. This will be done by outlining the major influences of teacher's transition outtakes.

Inequality and Access to Online Education During a Global Crisis

The impact of inequality and technology on access to online education has received tremendous attention within the past two decades from researchers across the globe. What remains under-researched is the knowledge of how shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic affect access to online education. The main objective of the study was to examine inequality in accessing online education in the context of a crisis in a developing region. A mixed-method approach was used to collect and analyze online survey data based on 393 undergraduate students from six countries in Southern Africa. Both observable and hidden inequality sources such as income and participation in household chores compromise the quality of online education. A shift from face-to-face teaching to online education is likely to result in learning difficulties and deterioration in the quality of education. Policies such as the provision of free data improve the learning experience by reducing inequality. Therefore, decision-makers should take into consideration inequality in designing policies and strategies during a crisis.

Recognizing the Inequalities in Remote Learning Education

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the instructional approach in K-12 and institutions of higher education to be almost solely online. The challenges for schools at the beginning of the pandemic were immense. Schools faced issues such as not having a plan for families to access WiFi, students not having one-to-one devices at home, parents working at home without anyone to help students log in, special education population/disabled students unable to acquire adequate learning services, and students in poverty or experiencing homelessness who were helpless to quarantine and did not know where their next meal would come from. The closing of school doors exacerbated the historical and pervasive educational inequities and generational implications within marginalized communities. Given the tense relationships and not-great experiences with an education that many marginalized families have had, remote learning progression was a rocky one.

Inequities Revealed

With the onset of the pandemic associated with COVID-19 taking hold in North America in spring of 2020, higher education institutions responded swiftly to reduce virus transmission by shifting in-seat courses to virtual-only instruction. Many faculty and students had already been engaged in online teaching and learning from the semester's onset. Still, these students were not exempt from facing challenges and inequities directly related to, or coinciding with, the change in instructional delivery. This chapter serves to share the stories of a diverse group of four faculty and four students who were already engaged in online learning at the time of this mid-semester shift and identify key barriers experienced. The most common themes include parenting and childcare responsibilities, supporting colleagues and other learners, difficulty maintaining work and study routines, and the direct impact of illness.