Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak locked down the university classrooms and transferred the teaching and learning activities to a virtual space. This paper discusses the challenges the teachers faced due to this dramatic transfer from habitual classrooms to virtual on-line classes. This small-scale empirical research focuses on two research questions: Which challenges and problems did the teachers face, which solutions did they find to overcome them? The study also investigates the techniques of synchronous on-line classes management employed by the teachers after the COVID-19 restrictions were imposed on traditional delivery modes in higher education. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 10 university teaching staff members who commenced giving online classes in March 2020. The research findings revealed that the main challenge for teachers was to find a learning platform providing videoconferencing tools, and the solutions were found basically through asking their colleagues for advice. The findings also identified one of the teachers’ concerns related to handling students’ misbehaviour during online classes, and a general need in developing teachers’ virtual class management skills.
Highlights
The outbreak of СOVID-19 had a huge impact on the activities of many organizations, each seeking particular ways to continue their functions in the situation of lock downs
During the past decade the majority of Russian universities started using the learning platform Moodle for supporting face-to-face classes with off-line webbased learning activities
The lock down of university classrooms pushed into being a new kind of blended learning – a combination of on-line and off-line web-based synchronous and asynchronous education
Summary
The outbreak of СOVID-19 had a huge impact on the activities of many organizations, each seeking particular ways to continue their functions in the situation of lock downs. In Russia, the higher education institutions since March 16, 2020 started delivering classes on-line, following the time-table of all the classes as it had been planned for the Spring semester of 2020. During the past decade the majority of Russian universities started using the learning platform Moodle for supporting face-to-face classes with off-line webbased learning activities The lock down of university classrooms pushed into being a new kind of blended learning – a combination of on-line and off-line web-based synchronous and asynchronous education. The teaching and learning activities went through a dramatic transfer from habitual classrooms to virtual on-line classes
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