Adaptive and flexible online learning during Covid19 lockdown

The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely disrupted higher education. During March-May 2020, universities had to move from physical campuses to online globally to curtail the spread of the virus among students and staff which has restricted and prevented hands-on learning on campus. One challenge facing UK Higher Education is that engineering students must obtain practical skills, which are required essential skills and can only be delivered on campus with university hardware/software. According to PSRB (Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Bodies) regulations, it is universities’ responsibility to ascertain the achievement of module learning outcomes. At Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU), we have identified several challenges for methods of online teaching and learning from observations and conversations with students: for challenges, students struggled as they had no face-to-face interaction with teaching and technical staff, no access to hardware equipment nor the campus library. Additionally, they had increased mental stress, digital poverty, reduced social contact with university life and experienced self-isolation. Opportunities, on the other hand, were identified as: flexibility to study in a comfortable environment, better pace and time, cost-saving, access to more online resources as a substitute, new simulation tools for equipment. To incorporate the opportunities of online learning, we have implemented a multi-faceted approach to mitigate the impact of challenges of COVID-19 on the learning, teaching and assessment such as:
• Adaptable online teaching, online live teaching (lecture and practical) session for synchronous learning and recordings of the live sessions.
• The provision of pre-recorded sessions for asynchronous learning and online assessment formation; virtual practical sessions; virtual CDIO project sessions so that students could utilize the benefits of CDIO framework.
• A virtual engineering cafe for supporting students psychologically during the pandemic.
All of these efforts were aimed at satisfying the learning outcomes and to improve the students’ learning experience. Therefore, students could avail the benefit of flexible online learning, reduce isolation and increase accessibility to the learning, the teaching materials and the resources as per their pace, place and mode. In this paper, we have emphasized the above teaching strategies to develop adaptive and flexible online learning method.