School of Chemical Sciences, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Biochem Mol Biol Educ. 2021 May;49(3):320-322. doi: 10.1002/bmb.21511. Epub 2021 Apr 9.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt suspension of face-to-face teaching activities in higher education institutions across the globe. The instructors and faculty at most institutions have had to adapt, invent, and implement adjustments quickly to adopt an online learning environment. This has been an extraordinarily challenging time for both students and instructors, particularly as many were not aware of the affordances and weaknesses of the online learning environment before it was uptaken. Particularly for chemistry and related disciplines, this change in delivery mode is even more disruptive in courses that have laboratory components due to loss of access to laboratories. As a teaching community, it was our responsibility to respond quickly and effectively to students' learning needs during this unprecedented global crisis. In our course, we provided succinct pre-recorded lecture-videos by topic rather than live-streaming of lectures. The recordings were made available to students a minimum of 24 h before the scheduled lecture time. Students were then provided opportunities to attend live tutorial sessions (held on Zoom and live Q&A feature on Piazza) if they had any questions that they wanted to ask the lecturer directly. We believe that the asynchronous sessions were more equitable than synchronous ones. This meant that students with difficult and challenging home/learning environments (i.e., disruptions at home, work/family schedules, poor internet, limited access to devices, etc.) were minimally disadvantaged. The approach worked well in general for teaching chemistry to pharmacy students and we believe that it can be adopted for other subjects.
COVID-19 大流行导致全球高等教育机构突然暂停面对面教学活动。大多数机构的教师和教职员工不得不迅速适应、发明并实施调整，以采用在线学习环境。这对学生和教师来说都是一个极具挑战性的时期，尤其是许多人在采用在线学习环境之前，并不了解其优势和弱点。对于化学和相关学科来说，由于无法进入实验室，这种教学模式的改变在带有实验室部分的课程中更为混乱。作为一个教学社区，我们有责任在这场前所未有的全球危机中迅速有效地满足学生的学习需求。在我们的课程中，我们提供了按主题录制的简明预录讲座视频，而不是直播讲座。这些录播视频在预定讲座时间前至少 24 小时提供给学生。如果学生有任何想直接向讲师提问的问题，他们将有机会参加现场辅导课程（在 Zoom 上进行和 Piazza 上的实时问答功能）。我们认为异步课程比同步课程更公平。这意味着，那些家庭/学习环境困难和具有挑战性的学生（例如，家庭干扰、工作/家庭时间表、网络不佳、设备有限等）受到的不利影响最小。这种方法通常适用于向药学专业的学生教授化学，我们相信它可以应用于其他学科。
