The global challenge of COVID-19, in spite of its many unknowns, offers IS educators valuable instructional opportunities to tap into students' curiosity about the pandemic. Many of us have incorporated contents and designed new assignments that are timely, prompt critical thinking, spark creativity, and – ideally – provide a modicum of comfort during a time of alarming headlines and copious misinformation.
At Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, our students in the "Digital Media Entrepreneurship" course are asked to use COVID-19 as a catalyst for entrepreneurship or turn existing COVID-19 solutions into viable digital businesses. Those enrolled in "Organizational Communication" are designing digital solutions for pivoting to remote work in the term project. At UNSW Business School, Australia, IS students taking the "Business Research Methods" course are proposing studies on digital COVID-19 recovery; those participating in the "Business Analysis" course have applied concepts learned to examine how digital COVID-19 solutions can be improved.
"Digital Resilience" App
To help students prepare for these assignments and projects and navigate through the deluge of information, we co-developed a mobile app that provides an overview of IS applications and solutions in COVID-19. We chose to present the content through an app as part of our multimodal teaching strategy, which seeks to enrich the experience of students in a new learning environment precipitated by the pandemic. The "Digital Resilience" app organizes key issues around COVID-19 into topics, as follows:
- Technologies and applications (e.g., artificial intelligence, data analytics)
- Technological challenges (e.g., remote work, remote learning)
- Socio-technical risks (e.g., privacy, misinformation, social inequity)
- Trends and opportunities (e.g., digital health, touchless tech)
The app is intended to kickstart exploration of the topic with bite-size contents that students can access online whenever they have ten minutes free. For a more engaging learning experience, we designed several time-limited quiz challenges with leaderboards. There are also interactive practice quizzes for flexible, self-regulated learning.
Student Feedback
While the app was being processed for listing in Play Store and App Store, we provided our students with the progressive web app version. All of them appreciated the refreshing learning experience:
"I've always been interested in how digital technologies are used in response to crises. Although there is a lot of valuable information online which can be quite overwhelming at times, this app condenses that information into short, interesting readings. The readings even have practice questions at the end which I found useful because it reinforced my learnings from the readings. One thing I really enjoyed about the app is how users can play a timed quiz and try and beat the leaderboard. I think this competitive aspect of the app is great because I believe that users would get bored if the app had only readings. My only complaint is that the app takes some time to get started. However, once the app has loaded it is very efficient to use and provides a seamless user experience. Overall, it's a great app and one that I can see myself using to learn more about the role of digital technologies in crises."
"The digital resilience app is well designed and is a useful source of information for digital innovation and crises. I liked that the app was interactive, using a combination of videos, text, and a quiz."
"The information is very helpful, and I liked that I could complete practice questions before playing the actual quizzes. It is also useful to have both segmented quizzes (according to the topic) and quizzes that combine all the content, as this helps in consolidating knowledge."
"I think it's a great way of disseminating information and retaining the information through the practice quizzes…and I read through most of the information as well and I thought it was written quite well for people to gain insights into the 'practice impact' of innovation during the pandemic. The timed quizzes in the 'play' section are fantastic! They're quite clear and I learnt what 'infodemic' means!"
"I was immediately interested in the topics presented, being relevant to the current state of the world, and current technology innovations. I felt that the quiz questions did a good job of covering the content, especially having the variety of questions; true-false, multiple choice, select multiple."
"Leader board is a great incentivisation element for users to not only try do well in the quizzes but to stay engaged when they actually consume the content. A really great breadth of content and a great flow between the four sections."
Ongoing Development
We have made the app freely available in Google Play Store and Apple App Store, for use by all students across the world. The app will be updated monthly, with emerging topics and issues as well as inputs from student users and instructors. A global quiz challenge involving students from Australia, Canada, Singapore, United Kingdom, and others is also being organized. We hope that the app adds variety to the type of online learning resources provided to IS students as instructors leverage teachable moments in COVID-19. All suggestions are welcome!
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LG Pee, Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Email:
peelg@ntu.edu.sgShan L Pan, Professor, UNSW Business School, Sydney, Australia; Email:
shan.pan@unsw.edu.au------------------------------