Abstract:

Confronting teaching in Covid period, when universities all over the world where basically thrown into completely new situation where physical classrooms could not be used in conventional way as before was a challenging task. This included having to convert conventional on-site classroom into an on-line class at an extremely short notice. In many situations the access to sophisticated on-line teaching equipment were often limited. The authors of this paper were working in the business department of two Icelandic universities and did some experiments during these difficult times. This paper reflects on experiments they did, concluding with recommendations of methods that could be used in the future. It is basically and evaluation on what their experiments will lead to an could possibly be applied by other university teachers.

General innovation theory has demonstrated that crisis situation often leads to new applications and changed setup that can help to improve the effectiveness of existing processes and conventional systems. In the 21st. Century, technology is often the source of valuable methods that can be combined with conventional approaches to create new approaches to fulfil needs in difficult situations. Covid was a situation that forced lecturers to find new ways to deliver and create knowledge among students. As approaches were not generally ready or available the Covid period was a melting point to experiment with existing tools like on-line applications (e.g. Teams and Zoom).

Based on action research, this paper summarizes the experience of the authors developing two easy to apply approaches that turned out to be quite effective in on-line teaching, readiness assurance assignments based on real-life situations and splitting up lectures in extremely small sections and follow-up discussions.

In the readiness assurance assignments students needed to find their own example and apply it to theory. The assignments were based on real life situations that can be far more effective than focusing on the theory in isolation. The examples were either from the students own experience or cases covered in the course. As the participation of students were initially based on their own assignment, they tended to feel more comfortable with their participation than in more conventional approach to teaching. Furthermore, this approach created lively debate and increased engagement among other students.

Another approach was to split lectures up in small slots and open discussion based on real-life examples after each section. It turned out that students were very satisfied and reported that they would recommend all classes to be organized in this way. Similar to the readiness assurance assignments, this approach also induced participation and provided grounds for lively discussions.

Following these experiments the authors as well as some of their colleagues have used these methods in other courses and different situations, so they have become a part of teaching arsenal of techniques that are becoming part of conventional teaching processes in their universities. This furthermore highlights the question whether these new learning approaches should become an increasing part of teaching in the future. Although this research is only based on the experience of two professors, it indicates an avenue for further research in the age of very turbulent changes in the teaching environment.

Keywords:

Experiments, Covid, crisis, teaching approach, real-life.