Abstract
The widespread outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced almost every aspect of our lives to shift to online modalities. One outcome of the pandemic was to effectively establish digital learning as a major system for education. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the development and implementation of a web-based resource for college instruction. The foundation for this pedagogical tool is sociocultural learning theory. This instructional tool has been deployed with over 2000 students to date. Its successful employment with college students in India and the USA is outlined, and suggestions are included for its generalized use to other content and courses.
TopIntroduction
The Covid-19 pandemic brought with it lockdown-induced shuttering of classrooms and obligatory remote teaching in schools around the globe. The pandemic disrupted more students and schools than any other event in history, with nearly 1.6 billion students affected worldwide (EducationData.org, n.d.). Prior to the pandemic, nearly half of college students enrolled in traditional face-to-face classroom courses had not taken an online class, which left many unprepared for what was to come. The pandemic left significant numbers of teachers burned out, and stressed students and parents, in its wake (Pressley, 2021), as well as student mental-health issues related to lack of motivation, anxiety, stress, and feelings of isolation (Browning et al., 2021).
Globally, significant steps were taken to help teachers and students cope with the pandemic, including free internet access, free computing devices, mobile phone access to instruction, and instructional TV and radio broadcasts. The pandemic accelerated what was already happening in education - i.e., using digital technologies, interactive pedagogies, and the internet, in virtual classrooms. And it raises questions about how to seize on the current momentum and to continue in the exploration and implementation of new digital paradigms for learning. Simply, what are new opportunities for the post-pandemic classroom? How can we channel learners’ creativity, their motivation, and interest using technology in the curriculum, in crisis and non-crisis learning situations? These questions are addressed here through a description and assessment of web technology aimed at supporting global post-secondary student interactions post-pandemic.
Educational responses to the pandemic largely involved material and technical provisions, with less innovation and assistance concerning pedagogical methods and remote classroom practices. This chapter describes an ongoing collaborative project whose focus is developing, implementing, and refining an interactive pedagogy and technology for undergraduate learning. The work that is described in this chapter should be useful to educators interested in technology-driven methods and resources for teaching, during extraordinary times like the Covid-19 pandemic, but also during the normal course of instruction during ordinary times. The project uses an internet platform, EthicalEngineer.ttu.edu, to widen the scope of learning at an international level. In the current implementation of the internet platform, students from the USA and India read and reflect on case studies involving ethical dilemmas that are available on the website. Students post their comments and reactions to the case studies on the website. They also react to other students’ comments. Instructor-generated guidelines for developing a comment to a case study are provided on the website to help students think critically and gain clarity on their position. Immediately upon posting a comment, naïve Bayes-based machine methods provide feedback to students on the adequacy of their responses.
The goals of this chapter are the following:
Goal 1: Provide a principled theoretical basis for developing globally shared interactive learning contexts using an internet platform.
Goal 2: Describe the implementation and growth of the internet platform.
Goal 3: Describe an instructor’s strategy for introducing web-based learning to faculty colleagues and addressing faculty queries about web-based teaching.
Goal 4: Describe how learning is scaffolded for students, and how feedback is developed and implemented.
Goal 5: Report survey data from Indian students regarding their perceptions of the relevance, engagement, and utility of the website in terms of their personal and professional development.
Goal 6: Propose recommendations for how this learning model can be implemented and generalized to other content and learning contexts.
The current project is related to trends across colleges and universities to internationalize curricula, especially through innovation. Leask (2009) described curriculum internationalization in the following way:
Key Terms in this Chapter
Internationalization: In higher education, the process of integrating an inter-cultural and global dimension into the range of functions of post-secondary education, including teaching, learning, research, and service.
Ethical: Involving questions of right and wrong; related to moral principles.
Naïve Bayes: In text analysis, naïve Bayes algorithms are used to classify new instances based on prior learning from examples.
Sociocultural Theory: A psychological theory of human development based upon the principle that knowledge and learning arise from interactions of an individual in everyday social and cultural situations.
Digital Technology: Electronic systems and devices that process and store data, often involving human interaction, like video games and social media.
Pandemic: An epidemic of an infectious disease that crosses global boundaries.
Gamification: The application of typical elements of game-playing to other activities, like learning-games.