Agile Change to Digital Teaching during and after Corona Pandemic for Flipped Classroom Courses

The Corona Pandemic has a major impact on teaching at universities. Various stakeholders have to face new challenges when face-to-face courses are no longer feasible. The management of higher education institutions, teachers and their teams as well as the IT and didactics support are called upon to develop digital teaching and learning formats at short notice. This article aims to identify specific tasks and responsibilities with the help of two literature analyses and to transfer the results into a holistic overview of agile change for Flipped Classroom courses. This overview is based on a Change Management (CM) process to which tasks of agile development and change are assigned. It thus combines both short-term development under time pressure from an agile perspective as well as long-term necessary steps of CM. The necessity and usefulness of such an overview was determined before its creation. For this purpose, a short quantitative survey was conducted with 65 people, who have already passed through the entire CM-process of digital change in higher education teaching and are therefore regarded as experts. The usefulness and necessity of the overview were confirmed. The concluding recommendations for action address the possible use of the overview, the implementation of individual tasks and the joint action of the stakeholders during and also after the Corona Pandemic, which should support the change to digital higher education teaching.

Teaching with Compassion: Autoethnographies from the front lines of e-learning

In 2020 the landscape of teaching in higher education was forced to change given a global pandemic. As a result there were/are inevitable shifts in how course instructors develop and deliver their courses, as well as how they connect with students. Remote, or distance, learning is not a new phenomenon, and e-learning has been delivered across different institutions of higher education for approximately twenty years. However, scholarship in distance learning is dated and the empirical literature in digital pedagogy has gaps when it comes to best practices for teaching and learning in an online format. This paper highlights the importance of teaching with compassion as it fosters better relationships between instructors and students and helps to build community in learning environments. Relationships facilitate learning, and this is especially important in strained times - such as a higher concentration of online teaching and learning due to a pandemic. The notion of compassionate teaching is described. Using self ethnography and drawing on examples from their own course experiences, the authors present what has worked well in delivering small and large courses online. In particular, the first half of the paper focuses on backward course design, multimedia, accessibility, and forward/backward extensions. The latter half of the paper describes strategies embedded in a course and their positive effects for instructors and learners.

Designing and Implementing a Distance Education Plan: A Case Study at a School in Portugal in Pandemic Context

Considering the epidemiological situation of the new coronavirus - COVID 19 in Portugal, the XXII Constitutional Government decided, in March 2020, to suspend all classroom teaching and non-teaching activities in all educational establishments in the national territory. Consequently, all Portuguese educational institutions had to adapt to the new educational reality, where technologies play a leading role in ensuring communication, interaction and collaboration between all stakeholders in the teaching-learning process. Naturally, this adaptation took time and was accompanied by several opinions and guidelines issued by the Ministry of Education and other responsible entities. In general, these guidelines aimed to ensure that all students continue to learn in a pandemic context, regardless of geographical and temporal barriers. One of the guidelines issued was the design, development and implementation of a Distance Learning Plan in each of the Portuguese schools. Thus, based on the case study methodology, we intend to demonstrate the process of designing and implementing a distance education plan in a school in Portugal. The plan was categorized into three main areas - technology, pedagogy, and content - and arise from the theoretical model Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK). This plan was developed based on the consultation of all educational agents in that school, but, in a special way, of the students and teachers who were the protagonists in the educational process. Participant observation, recorded in the researcher's diary, was also another instrument used that contributed to the design of the distance education plan. The results of the study suggest that the plan designed, despite the improvements that it naturally had to have during its implementation, was adequate for the realization of the process of teaching and learning at a distance in times of pandemic.

Classroom Instructional-Based Technology as Predictor of Quality Services Delivery for Academic Staff in Delta State University

The study investigated the predictive powers of classroom instructional-based technology on quality services delivery of academic staff in Delta State University. Three research questions and three hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted a correlation research design. The population was 861 lecturers in the Delta state university with a sample size of 430 drawn through proportionate stratified method representing 50% of the population. A 30-item Classroom Instructional-Based Technology Scale (CIBTS) and 15-item Quality Services Delivery Scale (QSDS) were used for data collection. The scales were validated by three experts in Information and Communication Units. The internal consistency reliability coefficients of 0.78 and 0.81 were computed for CIBTS and QSDS through Cronbach alpha. Liner regression was used to answer the research questions while t-test associated with linear regression was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance level. It was found that classroom instructional-based technology can significantly predict quality services delivery of academic staff in Delta State Universities. More so, classroom instructional-based technology with the use of interactive whiteboard, video conferencing and virtual field trip can independently predict quality instructional delivery. It was recommended among others that the university authority should ensure that the lecture halls and classrooms in the university are equipped with functional interactive whiteboards. The academic staff should be availed the opportunity for capacity development and enhancement on the use of communication technologies such as interactive whiteboard. The university authorities as well as the heads of departments and deans of faculties should make available computers, projectors, internet connectivity, power supply, printers and flash drive that can encourage video conferencing. The academic staff should be very proactive in the determination of sites that can provide them needed information and learning through the virtual field trip platform.