Abstract:

The whole world experienced a degree of lockdown due to Covid-19 pandemic. This forced major changes for all education stakeholders: professors, curriculum editors, parents and students. In a matter of a couple of weeks, 1.2 billion children in 186 countries needed to move operations from in-person meetings to fully online. Nearly 93% of households with school-age children report some form of distance learning during Covid-19. Suddenly, the home-schooling option became interesting for many parents and professors needed to learn fast the skills to teach online. This brought up the need for online platforms that meet the requirements of both supporting the traditional in-person model – the mimic of a blackboard, the support for questions and answers to spur meaningful interaction, evaluation through tests and grading through an objective assessment of the student’s learning curve – and also a context where the accountability between students and professors help maintain high ethics standard for the whole educational process.

This paper proposes a model of a web application which was built as a balanced compromised between the need to provide a working solution fast, but also who meets these challenges and responds to the feedback of each stakeholder. It is a response based on a qualitative study on the student body and faculty of our university which aimed at learning about what went well in the first semester teaching online, what went wrong and what needs to be different in order to strategizing for successful ways of moving forward during pandemic. This paper does not discuss the student and faculty data itself as much as provides a description of an online education application that aims at effectively and rapidly accommodate the two camps for the well-being of the COVID age classroom.

Keywords:

Covid19 lockdown, online education, e-learning, accountability, collaborative learning.