Abstract:

At our university, as in schools around the world, professors and students and their families have dealt with the stresses and changes to life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost overnight, professors and students had to make drastic changes in their teaching and learning experiences. These changes were stressful and added to the pressures of the closing down of much of the work and social lives of people all around the world. Our university decided to move to online learning in most classes at the university. We moved online in March of 2020 and have remained online for the 2020–2021 school year. As time progressed and it became obvious that online learning was going to be a long-term process, the authors of this study decided that our teaching and learning strategies would have to change to meet the new needs of our students. Although we had experience teaching online, those experiences were developed for asynchronous teaching with students who had chosen to work online for a variety of reasons (e.g., work full time, are married and have children, must care for older people). The biggest need for these students is the ability to access their coursework according to their schedules. The online students generally are older and have more life experiences than do traditional day students. Most of our day students had not taken online courses before the pandemic. The biggest issue, in our view, was to figure out how to replicate or adapt the teaching and learning experiences from face-to-face classes to an online experience. We quickly realized that making students (and professors) remain online for hours at a time was not productive for anyone. Therefore, we decided to attempt to develop more effective ways to work with our students, have the students work with each other, and have students interact with the curriculum. The results indicate that, although our efforts were imperfect, most students believed their experiences were more positive and productive because of our attempts to meet the needs of the students during these stressful times.

Keywords:

Student learning, pandemic, online learning, online teaching strategies.