Abstract:

When Covid struck, I had a few main teaching concerns. My module is a large class group with around 1100 students; it is also a service module, servicing students from three different faculties at my university. Most of my students are novice learners and inadequately prepared for first-year tertiary chemistry education. In addition, most novice learners do not have the skills for self-directed learning and based on the points of the departure cognitive load theory, novice learners are very likely to be overwhelmed when confronted with the workload at the tertiary level which may lead to anxiety and stress.

My teaching strategy was effectively based on a face-to-face scenario, and I urgently needed to re-think and adapt a strategy that offered good online teaching practices as I wanted to ensure that as few students as possible were left behind or disadvantaged. After reflecting on the literature, I adopted the Discover, Learn, Practice, Collaborate and Assess (DLPCA) strategy as conceptualised and published for blended online learning by Lapitan et al. in 2021 as the basis for my online teaching strategy. The authors highlighted three pedagogical approaches in the literature and in practice to consider for online instruction. These are (1) synchronous, (2) asynchronous and (3) blended learning strategies. After careful consideration, the authors concluded that the blended online learning strategy seems to be the most practical method since it combines all the advantages of the synchronous and the asynchronous approaches and should work well for smaller class groups. I made a few small adjustments to this approach to better suit my needs for teaching a large student group. The DLPCA strategy aims to integrate all the different role players in a module, i.e., the instructor, the students, and available technologies to meet the challenges of higher education during the pandemic.

Comparative graphs were drawn to reflectively compare the averaged final marks for each year group from 2018 to 2022. This was done to show whether there were any discrepancies in marks between the different year groups. The graphs showed a close correlation between the final marks for the face-to-face delivery mode (2018 and 2019) and the online delivery mode (2021 and 2022). The same close correlation could be seen when the percentages of students that failed, passed, and passed the module with distinction were drawn over the same period. This indicated that the DLPCA strategy worked well in online content delivery. The marks for 2020 were skewed because of the sudden change in teaching and learning strategies worldwide and the accompanying chaos that followed. For this reason, I will exclude the 2020 results in this paper. Finally, there is also a good correlation between my teaching and learning practices and my overall lecturer performance as perceived by my students. This data was obtained from the annual Teaching and Learning Survey that the students could complete voluntarily and anonymously. This together with their key academic outcomes illustrated that the DLPCA framework that underpinned my online teaching and learning strategy was successful and well worth the effort.

Keywords:

First-year chemistry education, online teaching, DLPCA online teaching framework, Reflective practice, large class groups.