Abstract:

Global outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown regulations to facilitate social distancing, as a measure to control the spread of the virus affected all the sectors including education. The school and university, globally were closed. The pandemic forced the institutions of learning to transit to online learning, to facilitate teaching and learning remotely. Emergency remote teaching and flexible learning strategy were adopted. It was required for lecturers to be empowered to teach in this mode. It is argued that in China where the COVID-19 pandemic began, lecturers were introduced to online learning. This trend was observed in most of the countries. In South Africa, it was also required for lecturers to move their modules online in an attempt to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. It pointed out that a large number of lecturers and academics required support to develop online teaching and learning events. At a university of technology in South Africa, the remote teaching initiative drove the support staff, particularly the instructional designers to also provide emergency remote teaching support. Emergency remote teaching support (ERS) was developed to provide lecturers and academics with temporary support and remote empowerment for developing and designing the learning material for delivery in an online environment. For any training opportunities for both lecturers and students, experts should be consulted as not everyone can give solutions. The instructional designers were the relevant candidate for this task. The ERS aims to assist lecturers to move from conventional teaching to online or remote teaching with the incorporation of various tools on the learning management system to benefit the students. It was critical during this phase that the instructional designers ensured that pedagogy is taken into consideration because technology itself does not guarantee a pleasant or effective learning experience

The question posed in this study was: How were the emergency remote teaching empowerment and support programme implemented to prepare the academics for remote teaching during the COVID 19 pandemic outbreak? Participants in this study were the lecturers from the Faculty of Science and Management Sciences and the instructional designer responsible of these Faculties. The mixed-methods approach was applied. Data were collected by means of the Faculty WhatsApp group, feedback survey questionnaires and learning management system reports. It was found that most of the lecturers attended the webinars of the schedules session, even though they indicated technical problems during the session. The results shows most of the participants were new to leaning management system, the needed more time to build their modules before implementing with students. The findings revealed that pedagogical strategy used during COVID-19 for remote or online learning included flexible learning, synchronous and asynchronous learning, open learning. It is critical that academics be empowered for remote teaching and flexible learning to yield successful results.

Keywords:

Capacity development, emergency remote empowerment, remote teaching, flexible learning, learning management system, COVID-19.