How COVID-19 changed computer science education


The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected both staff and students in higher education. The Advance Higher Education Academy (AHEA) helped academics improve their educational practice during the pandemic. The AHEA offers a teaching qualification called Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP) or PGCert and awards the Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) after successfully completing the PGCAP. PGCAP assists academic staff to improve their teaching skills by reflecting on their teaching practice, evaluating their teaching methodology, and considering improvements in their current teaching approach.

UK academics must complete this qualification before being confirmed in office. It comprises four modules, three of which focus on teaching and one on action-oriented educational research. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching a module has become a particular challenge, especially when it has to be done online and students are scattered across different locations. A particular challenge with the new teaching method is to motivate the students. Therefore, the content of PGCAP has to be adapted and changed to the new online setup and the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic brings with it.

Post-COVID era

For PGCAP, it is more important than ever to help academics teach students, both in person and online, using the latest tools and technology. In this article, we discuss how PGCAP is helping new academics improve their mixed teaching. The pandemic offers universities the opportunity to reform their current teaching offerings by including online and face-to-face teaching in the curriculum. PGCAP encourages academics to use technology-based teaching methods (e.g. gamification) to improve the delivery of their modules through in-person and online media. Therefore, during the pandemic, pedagogy has been improved by the adoption of the following:

Online teaching platforms and tools

During this pandemic, online educational platforms have played a pivotal role, with content being delivered through platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and Blackboard Collaborate. In addition, online quizzes (Kahoot or Mentimeter) have also played a key role and used in different phases of an online session:

  • Beginning of a session: to test the students' prior knowledge and consolidate content from previous sessions.
  • During the session: to test student active learning.
  • End of the session: assess student learning after providing all of the content.

On the other hand, relying on too many unnecessary mentimeter quiz questions can cause students to lose interest. Hence this should be used with caution. The online teaching platforms also made laboratory exercises and course work easier (e.g. group projects based on coding). For group projects, this allowed students to interact and share with each other while building teams despite being in different geographic locations. Virtual learning environment (VLE) tools such as online pools on Moodle can be used to perform this function.

Various drop-in sessions were also planned to replace on-campus tutorials to solve student questions; This gave introverted students the opportunity to ask questions and type through the chat facilities available on the aforementioned online platforms. Interaction was immediate for both students and the teaching team, but required careful planning to make this possible for classes with more than 200 students. Solving the students' problems quickly increases their self-confidence and improves satisfaction with the teaching module.

New learning methodology

The flipped classroom model has become commonplace during the pandemic. It has enabled teachers to use various resources to improve their teaching practice. These include (but are not limited to): Kahoot or mentimeter-based quizzes, short videos or podcasts introducing a topic, a Problem Based Learning (PBL) case study, solving problems during the live session, animated PowerPoint presentations , team-based group activities such as “think pair and share” activities to facilitate teamwork, commented examples and demonstrate concepts with various online games.

Below are some examples of best practice:

  • Interaction and engagement: Using interactive videos with H5P helped gauge student engagement with the classroom content. In addition, it was used as a formative assessment to identify student learning needs. The teacher can then adjust the pedagogical approach to help students better understand the content.
  • Lecture recording: Most of the faculty recorded their live sessions and uploaded them to their universities' media servers, which helped students visiting the module from different geographic locations with different time zones. Despite the impact of the March 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, lecture recordings helped students follow the material through the recorded lectures at a later date.
  • Remote project deployment: Students are involved in a variety of mini-project evaluations where they must provide their results using a dedicated platform. With the pandemic, these platforms have become more used as students work on their projects remotely. One such example is the use of the OpenShift Container Platform, where students post their projects, making them easily accessible for remote assessments.
  • Laboratory interaction: Lab sessions were enabled using Microsoft Teams and online Google / Microsoft forms to enable student and demonstrator interaction. The forms were used by the students to get support from demonstrators and to encourage demonstrators to evaluate their assessments. In addition, quizzes were used in assessing laboratory work to measure student progress on both summative and formative assessments. Demonstrators can record the videos of any laboratory demonstration and upload them to the media portal prior to the laboratory meeting. Implementing this approach can save time and reduce student queries during the lab session.

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