Abstract:

The paper is based on the experience of the authors in university teaching of four bachelor’s degree elective courses and their transformation during the COVID-19 crisis in the Summer semesters of 2019-20, and 2020-21 academic years from delivery in a blended learning mode to delivery in a fully remote online mode.

The main goal of the paper is to share experiences and learning results for courses’ transformation to remote online mode – to explain the theoretical background on which courses’ transformation is made, the technological tools for realisation, the consequences for the courses’ communication, the process of courses’ delivery, the obtained learning results, and the view of the students about their learning experiences and results.

The shared experience concerns four elective courses conducted by the authors - "E-learning", "Design, development and evaluation of educational software", “Instructional Design for Technology Enhanced Learning”, and “Digital Design and Multimedia – Graphic Design”. These courses are intended mainly for students in bachelor programmes in Software Engineering, Informatics, Computer Science, and similar at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI), Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" (SU).

In the beginning of the paper the wide situational context with respect to the requirements imposed by the COVID crisis in 2020-21 in Bulgaria is shortly presented.

Then the theoretical learning foundations on which the blended delivery of the courses are designed are briefly discussed. The blended delivery of the courses is based on the clear distinction between the face-to-face and the entirely online course activities, following from a theoretical point of view behaviourist and constructivist perspectives.

The theoretical foundations of transformation process from blended learning to remote online learning mode are explained, based on the learning foundations and characteristics of the blended learning delivery of the courses thus far.

The technological tools used in the fully remote online learning are presented, meant to substitute the face-to-face instructional and learning activities. The online learning activities, course structures, and practices that stay intact during the transformation process are presented and explained. The changes in the communication in the courses as a result of the transformation are outlined and discussed.

A flipped online learning mode of study is implemented as new courses’ component for better engagement of the students in the learning process, complemented with new interim assessment elements - short quizzes, meant to ascertain the students’ preliminary acquaintance with the study material.
The assessment structures in the fully online courses are explained.

The course learning results are discussed. The view and evaluation of the courses by the students are presented, on the base of two questionnaires administered to the students – the “standard” Faculty student evaluation questionnaire, and the purposefully developed by the teachers student evaluation questionnaire for the online mode of learning of the courses.

Finally, conclusions for the whole courses’ transformation process and the fully online courses’ delivery are drawn, and recommendations for future improvements of the courses in the mode of entirely remote online learning delivery are presented.

Keywords:

e-learning, blended learning, remote online learning, flipped learning, COVID-19 crisis.