The COVID-19 virus is having a profound impact across all aspects of society, including the provision of education. According to a recent article in Inside Higher Education, “teaching online requires an intentional, thoughtful approach to instructional design, especially when students are being asked to transition pace in the wake of COVID-19.” During this period of uncertainty, the Arm Education team would like to assist university academics in their efforts to manage this rapid transition to online learning. In this post, we gather a collection of practically focused global resources that will hopefully provide teaching staff with a useful head-start.
Academics are familiar with Jisc, the not-for-profit organization that provides technology solutions for the U.K’s education and research sector. They have recently posted ‘common sense steps’ on how U.K academics can continue to provide “support and a meaningful level of teaching and learning” to students during this unprecedented move to online education. Tips include how to deliver lectures online, provide virtual assessments, manage student inductions and recommendations on how to ensure that student well-being is maintained during this difficult period.
Additional recommended reading on this subject:
Many publishers are making their pay-walled content freely available for an extended period. This includes access to journal content, textbooks, and monographs.
Jisc has provided a comprehensive summary of publishers which have extended access to their content for academic institutions here. Additionally, Chest, a body responsible for negotiating software licenses for educational institutions has provided an overview of the home use rights they have secured with providers such as Adobe and Microsoft.
For other global perspectives, check out this excellent list posted by the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC), who are providing complimentary access to their content at an institutional level. If you require specific details for your region, we recommend you browse the ICOLC website to review the resources that the academic library consortium in your country is making available to faculty and students.
The Arm Education team are also offering a range of resources to universities to assist in the teaching of core Computer Engineering and Electronic Engineering courses on Arm. We can partner with academic instructors over the next months to open-up free access to our online courses and digital textbooks for a six-month period. To discuss this further, please email university@arm.com.
Of course, drawing on professional networks of peers, associates and colleagues can in fact deliver the most relevant resources in a timely way to scale up online learning. As an example, we asked Dr. Khaled Benkrid, Arm’s Director of Education and Research, what his network of peers in the academic community were sharing with him for delivering higher education courses online.
Yes, I have been in contact with colleagues of mine in the U.K academic community. Universities are still working out their plans, but they can be categorized in the following manner.
If I were still in academia, I would record my lectures as videos and upload them onto the University’s LMS for students to watch at their own leisure. I would use the LMS to run virtual Q and As. I would set exam questions (theoretical and practical) in an open exam style and give them the questions ahead of time with a deadline to submit through the LMS. To assess the exam properly, I would set exam interviews over video calls to make sure student submissions reflect their own work and that they have met the course’s learning outcomes. Of course, this works for relatively small classes (up to 20-30) but for bigger classes, I would look at an online invigilation tool.
We hope you have found this a useful starting point as you begin to manage the transition of your own courses to an online environment. This is by no means a definitive list, so if you have recommendations on additional resources we can add to this blog, please get in contact with us in the following comment section, or email us here.
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