Abstract:

All university teachers will tell you that their teaching mission is much more difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic than it was before due to many reasons going from logistics including faculties teaching experiences and online infrastructures to the socio-cultural aspects. In fact, at the beginning of the pandemic, most of the universities were not prepared for such a sudden transition to online learning and teaching where many deficiencies and logistic lacks were noticed. Progressively, academic structures including faculty members took actions leading to the adaptation to the new context which substantially improved the teaching performances and therefore the learning outcomes. Besides, socio-cultural environmental reasons should not be neglected where both faculty members and students need to stay motivated during the online teaching. On the one hand, the faculty member needs to deal with the virtual context with no vis-à-vis interaction, gestures use nor onsite feedback. On the other hand, students need to stay motivated and attentive while following their courses in isolation at their room with no face-to-face contact and communication with instructors and colleagues.

Far from escaping this situation, temptation of some teachers to implement online teaching strategies led to some extent to a failure and a give up situation inducing a leveling down of the teaching outcomes.

In this study, the aim was to implement an action plan into two courses offered at Polytechnique Montréal where students were put at the heart of the digital transformation to achieve a better coherence in the development of knowledge, of know-how and of interpersonal skills through a smart teaching approach.

The methodology that was employed consisted in establishing an active and collaborative pedagogical strategy in the virtual classroom to enhance motivation and students’ responses. The integration of the Information and Digital Technology tools was then performed along with the development of an adapted and flexible teaching strategies where students’ workload and number of assessments were reduced, and educational tools and materials were implemented. Therefore, a Light board has been designed to support student learning of these two courses allowing the recording and the editing of online course videos and laboratories.

Following that, a set of historical data was collected and compared to the academic results of the students of these two courses. The comparison showed that the used approach in the online teaching had a substantial positive effect to the academic success of the students. Moreover, a performed survey also showed that the followed pedagogical strategy provides precise, immediate and regular feedback to students and contributed to the improvement of their learning, motivation, autonomy and therefore promoted their success and satisfaction.

Keywords:

Online teaching, educational innovation, socio-cultural environment, “STANDARD”, Enhancement of Faculty Teaching Skills.