Rapid Transition of a Technical Course from Face-to-Face to Online

Abstract

Just like most universities around the world, due to the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, senior management at Singapore Management University decided to move all courses to a virtual, online, synchronous mode and gave instructors a short notice period—one week—to make this transition. In this paper, we describe the challenges we faced, the practical solutions we adopted, and the lessons we learnt in rapidly transitioning a face-to-face master’s degree course in text analytics and applications into a virtual, online, course format that could deliver a quality learning experience.