Discussion: View Thread

Teaching Within Constraints and Satisficing Everyone

Let us not demonize COVID-19; surely a lot of lessons learnt, on how to teach differently by differing both the technology and the practices used. Personally, I came out of this experience with a blended school of thought when it was to me a big no-no pedagogy.

Of course, we are all teaching in different countries with different cultures and different principles, ethics, and even Law. Where studying in groups, cheating, partying, and social life in one part of the world is different than other parts; and where insecurity and loss of family members touch us differently.

I was only teaching undergraduates this semester and the courses ranged from the very basic intro MIS course all the way to the internship and graduation project.

We started the semester with almost 2 months of face-to-face and that made things quite easy because we already knew the students. Naturally, the way the zoom sessions were carried out were very different from face-to-face class. So, I had to change the way I was teaching and the way I was examining the students.

During the COVID-19 days, a lot of changes took place mainly because we had to go online without even time to plan. This reflected strongly on the students being taught who were already devastated with the conditions and circumstances. Hostels and dorms were evacuated, and most of the students had to go back to live with their parents, students were not used to studying alone nor staying at home for such long hours and nor forgoing partying every weekend. Respondus, that the university imposed on us, did not just make the students uneasy, but also this software had no ability to handle exams on Excel, or Access, or SQL to name just a few. Some perceived its use as unethical and one of the universities had to discontinue using it because the students went to the Police and filed in a complaint.

My first Quiz was a simple Excel one and a couple of students probably cheated; as a result, my nephew, advised me to switch to Google sheets. Luckily, I had outstanding assistants who helped me out with this new form of exams, and each one of them was responsible for 5 to 6 students and I for the whole class.

As for the projects, the students taped their presentations but they were with us online to handle questions by the invited external examiners; an idea that was replicated from the AIS Student Chapter competition that Dr. Syler organized and I personally witnessed its success as one of the judges.

We all went into new forms of teaching and quickly mastered the technology and changed our ways of teaching; but the question is: was this enough? The focal point here should be the students, although not obvious but the students were stressed big time. Are the students and their level of understanding and flexibility with acquiring new added knowledge the same?

Without going into details or trying to advocate for the "Consciousness-Based Education" that is beyond our scope, I will just focus on what Maharishi termed the knower who is the student and how when "the mind is dull" it significantly affects the knowledge being processed; and how the "perception is different, the understanding is different, the emotions are different". (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, speaking to the American Association of Higher Education in Houston, Texas, 1973)

That said we need to make the knower in a state good enough to grasp what is being said to be able to come up with some added knowledge. This could be through some form of meditation (which is beyond our scope) or any other means that fits the contingency of the situation; bearing in mind that the means we successfully used in the past when teaching face-to-face, do not necessarily work when teaching online and that we need to look for different more creative means.

Some points to reflect on:

1. Attention on the students with more empathy, patience, and objectivity
2. A few minutes at the beginning of every Zoom class for informal discussions &/or icebreakers
3. Listening well and offering individual one on one "office hours"
4. Advocating for more professional counselling hours
5. Being patient with students who have connectivity issues (often in my part of the world)
6. Giving students the benefit of the doubt more than before
7. Interactive zoom sessions more than Panopto slides or voiceover PowerPoint slides
8. Screenshots of zoom sessions could help with attendance
9. Giving assignments that are worth the full grade once submitted to guarantee no cheating and to really understand the students' level of grasping (instant feedback on how we are teaching)
10. Google Docs is good for group projects because it is easy to track down the group member who made changes in the group project
11. Google Docs also helped when proctoring take-home exams to be able to track down who used the copy-paste function and who was simply typing word for word
12. Google Sheets also helped in proctoring by limiting answers being sent around and copy-pasted

To conclude, a contingency approach that helps the knower grasp the knowledge within the circumstances that are significantly affecting the knower's abilities. It is not just about changing our way of teaching using all the available technology, but also the way of teaching using those techniques that transcends the mind of the knower.

------------------------------
Dina Rateb
Associate Professor
American University in Cairo
Cairo
01006491499
------------------------------