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.

Wearing All Our Hats at Once

Women in academia often wear many hats, mainly those of teacher, academic, and caretaker. Feminist standpoint theory—the use of women's personal stories as a lens to view unique circumstances of their social group—has guided the authors' use of personal accounts to highlight the challenges faced by women wearing these hats during the pandemic. The authors' stories detail struggles in the female experience, creating the learning environment favored during in-person instruction, navigating unprecedented changes to the doctorate program, and addressing feelings of inadequacy as caretakers. The authors hope that women can see themselves in these stories and find a sense of empowerment as part of this unique social group. The authors' stories should open conversations about supporting women as they teach, research, and create a work-life balance during an unprecedented time.

Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL) During COVID-19

In response to the surging COVID-19 pandemic, the government of Ghana shut down all schools on March 16th, 2020. This compelled many higher education institutions globally and in Ghana to adopt emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL) to ensure continuity of academic work. This chapter chronicles the experiences of Ghana Communication Technology University (GCTU) with the ERTL from March 2020 to date. Specifically, the chapter discusses what they did as an institution in terms of ERTL from the perspective of management, faculty, and support services. In this chapter, the authors provide a chronology of experiences with ERTL, the rationale behind actions taken, the mode of implementation, as well as the results of ERTL for faculty and students. Based on these experiences, the chapter advocates for the adoption of the pragmatism, accessibility, content, context, and empathy (PACCE) framework as a useful heuristic tool in ensuring equity and effectiveness of ERTL.

No Student Left Behind

The end of 2019 was punctuated by the emergence of an infectious disease spread through human-to-human transmission. This resulted in the suspension of contact classes as countries tried to contain the widespread virus. institutions were thus left with only one option: e-learning. E-learning entails the electronic delivery of learning experiences through the use of electronic mail and can either be synchronous or asynchronous. Through sociolinguistic lens embedded in the funds of knowledge and Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy, this chapter reports on a qualitative study that sought to delve into the pivotal role language play in the e-learning of multilingual undergraduate science students at a university in Zimbabwe. The students received e-learning lessons in the form of videos and narrated slides in English with subtitles in Shona and Ndebele languages. Data was collected through focus group interviews held via Microsoft Teams. This study suggests commendatory cognitive and socio-cultural benefits of multilingual e-learning pedagogy and espouses its use in higher education.

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.