Covid19: Exploiting the available technology for improving online learning and teaching

The transition to online learning, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, brought many challenges to educators such as engaging students, combatting cheating and dealing with new technology. Students, in virtual setting, often feel disadvantaged, isolated and invisible (Hrastinski, 2008) and traditional teaching approaches are ill-equipped to improve their experience. The technology being readily available in virtual settings creates many opportunities to educators to improve unit design and delivery in response to this problem. This presentation aims to showcase how technology facilitated the novel changes to a postgraduate unit to be appropriate for online delivery. The unit is PPMP20015-Research in Project Management and nested within the Master of Project Management Course at CQUniversity which predominantly attracts international students. Those students tend to be more vulnerable to disengagement and academic misconduct, compared to domestic students, due to their competing priorities and language barriers (Brimble, 2017; Bretag, 2019). Furthermore, the unit mainly covers research methods which have long been perceived by students as a boring and difficult subject due to the dry nature of the content (Sillaots, 2014; Winn, 1995). Those challenges informed the development of different teaching strategies aiming to provide a student learning experience akin to the experience in the ‘face to face’ delivery, if not greater. The presentation elaborates on the most effective strategies adopted in the unit which mainly include: 1) improving the faculty-student communications; 2) developing student-centred content; creating experiential activities closely related to the assessments and 4) revising the assessments to be more relevant, engaging and manageable. According to the first-hand observations, the strategies seems to have an obvious positive impact on student interaction, motivation and inclusion. Students’ performance has significantly improved in undertaking assessments and a few cases of academic integrity breaches were detected during the term. The presentation concludes by indicating technological barriers hindering the smooth implementing of the teaching strategies and possible measures to address that in future offerings of similar online units.