UWI Cave Hill sings eLearning praises

The University of the West Indies at Cave Hill is touting its eLearning platform, prompted by the suspension of classes in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, as a success.

It took fewer than three weeks for the campus’ predominantly classroom and blended learning model of teaching to be replaced by an online mode that many across higher education globally would have to adopt – emergency remote teaching, UWI said.

University officials have described the transition as a “mammoth undertaking” for an institution with over 1,000 staff, many of whom had been making limited use of the open-source eLearning platform, Moodle, that the university made available a decade ago.

The transition was coordinated by a 21-member Campus Continuation Committee for Online Learning, chaired by Head of Department in the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics Dr Janak Sodha. The committee consisted of deans, heads of departments and information technology specialists and other academics.

The Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), which offers a graduate certificate in teaching and learning, trained staff while the Campus Information Technology Services (CITS) facilitated the one transition for students. Ahead of the resumption of Semester 2 on April 6, two pilot initiatives were undertaken targeting novice students and lecturers.

Committee member Dr Glenda Gay, who lectures in Management Studies at the campus and who holds a doctorate in assessing online instructors, said the entire process was not without challenges.

Dr Gay said: “CETL, with its graduate certificate in teaching and learning, would have set the tone by assisting a number of colleagues in preparing for what is happening now. However, there were others like the part-time staff and the adjunct staff who may not have had that experience and we needed to bring them up to speed. Some were only using emails to communicate with students.”

“The learning curve was good for many of them and, of course, it took us longer to assist those who were not technologically savvy. The lag was more about what do we do with assessments in the various departments than telling staff what we need to do and when we need to do it.”

Forrmative assessment refers to in-class tests and assignments during the semester while the examination forms the summative assessment of a student’s aptitude.

She said: “We had about three weeks left in the semester. This meant that assessments were outstanding for courses. Then, we had to determine how we were going to work for the final exam since we couldn’t meet students face to face. The priority was getting the semester finished. The staff members, part-time lecturers and so on had to get on to the learning platform so that the students could finish in as smooth a process as possible.”

In adapting to the eLearning platform, IT support specialists now had to take into account face-to-face presentations for some courses or, in the case of the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination, the technicalities involved in the teaching more practical subjects such as dance and film production.

Offering further examples, she noted: “In an accounting course you’d have to write these long income statements.

“Now we had to look at how students could do that in an online environment, including those who only had access to a mobile phone and not a laptop. They would have been dependant on the university’s computer labs to do their work. Those were the kinds of considerations that came into play when we did the conversion.

“Another example was economics, where some persons were saying, ‘I have a lot of mathematical equations and I want to see how the student thinks through every stage’. Some lecturers believed this could not be converted to an online environment. The answer was ‘yes, it could’. The university has provided the eLearning platform, which has a number of tools that met all of those needs. Even with quizzes, questions can be randomised.

“The other thing that stood out for me was the issue of cheating. The items that are online can be randomised and we have the facilities to check the logs on eLearning and can see how long a student took to answer a question if, for example, they’re completing a quiz online. We can also see if they’re looking back at course material while answering the question.”

Dr Gay created over 20 ‘how to’ videos, each less than five minutes long, covering such areas as how to create an assignment, ‘how to upload my grades’, ‘how to check attendance’ and ‘how to grade my students’.

The  IT expert anticipates the eLearning platform will remain an integral part of teaching.

She said: “Now that lecturers are more aware, they can be creative with how they assess students. Yes, the traditional essays and so on will stay but we can now encourage students more with the ways in which we can assess their level of learning. For the final assessment, maybe some of the courses may go 100 per cent coursework. There’s a lot to rethink as we go forward.

“However, not everyone can ride a bicycle and, therefore, not everyone can be savvy in the online environment. That is why I maintain that a blended approach is good because it caters to those who can work online and supplement with those who need the face to face environment to understand the topic.”

University officials are touting the development as increasing Cave Hill’s potential to accommodate students overseas.

Dr Gay said: “All staff members (should) complete the graduate certificate in teaching and learning. It is an excellent programme and it certainly helps with having a plan b, c and d in place with regards to the online environment.

“Another thing I’ve learnt is since we’ve moved to the online environment and we’re all home, staff may want to work from morning to night. We could suffer from what could be adrenaline fatigue where we can become so exhausted because you don’t have that down time, or you’ve forgotten to take that down time to eat and so on.

“This has also taught us that we need to flip the classroom. You can record the lecture content, put it online for the students, release every week as necessary and update your content accordingly. Use your lecture time to bring out the creativity to help students learn instead of teaching new content every week.”