Abstract
In early March the United Arab Emirates shifted to Ministry-mandated remote learning. As the Campus Dean for the Abu Dhabi Campus of the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) this posed logistical challenges but also promised opportunities for my campus. As a teacher, I had many questions about how the territory of cyberspace would accommodate a pedagogy and process of active learning. I worried, too, about how the loss of community in the form of a physical campus and classrooms would impact studentsâ mental health and well-being. The open door policy of the Deanâs Office would certainly be a casualty of the shift to on-line learning. Propelled by the curiosity of a life-long learner, I decided to jump into the fray rather than sit on the sidelines as verdicts were rendered daily about remote learning. I registered for Idesignâan on-line course to learn the fundamentals of on-line teaching. By summer, I was ready to pivot fully with the rest of the campus and the world in explorations of on-line learning. I offered two hybrid remote Arts and Science courses (The Sociological Imagination and Reading the Harlem Renaissance) in the summer of 2020. In weekly encounters and pandemic journals, students and I grappled with the frustration of quarantine and our forced condition of on-line living and learning. In both classes, the web-based tool VoiceThread was used to take advantage of a âmultisensory environmentâ to create Communities of Inquiry (the CoI framework is widely understood as a space where teachers promote an active cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence). Following a brief overview of the timing and conditions of the shift to remote learning in the U.A.E., this paper will explore three pieces of student work as case studies in which role-play, virtual protest and writing projects were produced using VoiceThread. In each case, content, collaboration and community (building) bridged synchronous and asynchronous modalities producing new innovations for high-impact student centered learning in the face of Covid-19.Keywords: remote learning; pivot; teaching during Covid-19; Communities of Inquiry; VoiceThread; student centred learning; commentaryPart of the Special Issue Technology enhanced learning in the MENA region <https://doi.org/10.21428/8c225f6e.1fd869f8>
Highlights
In early March the United Arab Emirates shifted to Ministry-mandated remote learning
By late February 2020, with a global public health crisis gathering more insistent media attention my Provost in N.Y. advised me to prepare the NYIT Abu Dhabi campus for the distinct possibility of disruption. He asked, to the increasingly likely event of campus closures or other restrictions to proceeding with an on-campus semester? We talked through a range of practical considerations: What might an interruption mean for students and teachers displaced from physical classrooms? How could lessons and assignments be delivered? While his warning proved prescient, I had been a step ahead having already convened the NYIT Abu Dhabi faculty to discuss communications measures we should take with the student rumor network already abuzz
Too, have welcomed the reflectiveness that remote learning invited as we considered choices about what students really need to know and how to ensure that happens
Summary
Once I felt that NYIT Abu Dhabi faculty and students were safely settling into the rhythms and routines of remote learning I decided to enroll in a course on the fundamentals of on-line teaching that was made available to NYIT teaching faculty and administrators. The three conceptual areas of the Communities of Inquiry framework—Teaching Presence, Social Presence, Cognitive Presence—were introduced separately but were constantly linked as interdependent aspects of successful on-line teaching which must reflect an “integration of social, technological, and instructional processes.”. This meant that intentionality was brought front and center to allow reflective teachers to contemplate how to translate the learning experience from an on-campus to an on-line environment. The assignment was designed as a report to the Ministry of Education to encourage students to approach the real world—and in this case, the realities of the pandemic—as an arena for problem solving, applied learning, collaboration and communication
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