engleski

A teacher's view of organising university-level informatics classes in the era of a pandemic: Challenges detected and lessons learned

When in early 2020 a global pandemic caught the world by surprise, governments around the world decided to introduce a lockdown, thus temporarily stopping face-to-face teaching and learning in educational institutions. This was also the case in Croatia, where in a very short period of time teachers at all levels were forced to transfer their on-site classes into the online context. From the teachers’ point of view, such a situation may be described using the term ‘emergency online teaching’ and is characterised by a sudden and involuntary shift in the teaching and learning paradigm that caught many teachers off guard, leaving them with no alternative to online teaching. Courses that were planned by the teachers to be held on-site, using familiar teaching and assessment methods to facilitate and evaluate the set learning outcomes, now needed to be replaced with new methods appropriate for the online, distance teaching modality. Most teachers and, in fact, students, lacked appropriate knowledge and skills of adapting their work to the new situation, which made the task of teaching a rather challenging one. The paper at hand offers a reflection on the experience of two university teachers in organising and teaching a course in informatics in the pandemic era. The experience report compares three distinct periods of time related to the pandemic, namely (1) the pre-pandemic period, (2) the period of the initial lockdown (March to June 2020), and (3) the period of subsequent lockdowns (winter and summer semesters of the 2020/2021 academic year), showing how their teaching changed and evolved during each of the periods. It offers details about the course (learning goals, learning activities, class organisation and delivery, etc.) at each period, as well as authors’ insights into the challenges encountered and solutions employed, which may prove valuable to other practitioners in the field.

course delivery ; forced online teaching ; online teaching ; practice reflection ; teacher presence

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