Going Online - A New Necessity?

22 years ago I opened my first e-mail account. There were no search engines that I knew of at the time. Yahoo! and Hotmail were the two most popular e-mail services, which did not have search engines yet. 

About two years later I saw the first Webster online course ad. Kentnor (2015) notes that online courses started appearing in the United States in early 1990s, but saw rapid growth in the late years of the decade. By 2002, over 1.6 million students were enrolled in online tertiary courses, and another 6 years later the numbers nearly tripled (Allen & Seaman, 2008 cited in Kentnor, 2015). As a prospective university student at the time, quite keen on doing an undergraduate degree in the US, I remember being very skeptical about it. To be fair an online degree was very different then. It was more like distance education, a degree by correspondence. The effectiveness of online degrees was questioned by employers (Columbaro and Monaghan, 2009). 

Nearly two decades later, although the online degrees have gone a long way forward in terms of delivery mechanisms, including provision for synchronous and asynchronous delivery, this tendency in employers' perceptions still persists (Roberto & Johnson, 2019). 

Nevertheless, the COVID 19 became a game-changer. Universities across the world were bound to consider online education. Luckily the university, I worked for had seen the potential in blended learning as a tool to enhance students' educational experience before the pandemic, and so the online learning platform had already existed. It had been used more like a repository for learning materials, but it provided the foundation for further enhancements to be considered.

With the announcement of lockdown in Uzbekistan in mid-March 2020, faculty was bound to adjust to the online educational mode. For a few weeks, I too, delivered the seminars by Zoom and posted extra reading materials on the Intranet, our learning platform. The exams were administered in the "take-home" exams format with tasks posted in the morning and submission deadline set for the night of the same day. There was no discussion of the online pedagogies just yet, the ready solution had to be delivered. 

Over the summer that followed, however, the realization set in that the online mode may be extending and we need to consider enhancing our professional qualification to the online pedagogy. Simply zooming for half an hour and posting reading materials did not meet our quality standards. We had to adjust to the new reality.

Besides, even if the lockdown would be lifted professional development on online pedagogy would only complement teachers' existing qualification and enable them to use the benefits of blended learning in the future. There was, therefore, no question about the needs to expand faculty' capacity to teach online and make use of a full spectrum of contemporary online teaching tools. 

As the Director of Student Support Services I had the tough task of designing one of the first online courses students would be taking - the burst-mode Induction or Orientation Course that secondary school graduates would have to complete in their first week at the University. It was a necessity. 

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References:

Columbaro, N.L. and Monaghan, C.H. (2009). Employer Perceptions of Online Degrees: A Literature Review. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 12 (1).

Kentnor, H. (2015). Distance Education and the Evolution of Online Learning in the United States. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 17 (Nos. 1 & 2).

Roberto, K.J. and Johnson, A.F. (2019). Employer Perceptions of Online Versus Face‐to‐Face Degree Programs. Journal of Employment Counseling, 56 (4), 180–189. Available from https://doi.org/10.1002/joec.12132 [Accessed 14 August 2020].