Redesigning Curriculum and Using Technologies During Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Bangladesh

Introduction

COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020, after having an outbreak in December 2019 (WHO, 2020; Dhawan, 2020). To control and prevent the spread of the virus, governments around the world implemented rigorous initiatives such as lockdowns and social separation, while others chose herd immunity (Shohel et al., 2021a). As a result, alternative solutions such as work from home (WFH) and flexible working hours were adopted. Some organisations, including a number of educational institutions preferred to close their face-to-face or in person activities after raising the spread of the Coronavirus in an alarming way (Patnaik, 2021). As a result, many educational institutions began their operations with distance learning approach (Shohel et al., 2021c; Barura, 2020), also known as 'emergency remote teaching' (ERT) (Bawa, 2020; Schlesselman, 2020; Talidong, 2020) or 'emergency remote teaching and learning' (ERTL) (Czerniewicz, et al., 2020). Many educational institutions were forced to close for indefinite periods of time, and many of them adopted emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL) strategy to cope with the situation (Shohel et al., 2021b; Shohel et al., 2022). Unlike the developed countries the developing or under-developed countries such as Bangladesh struggled significantly to operate online remote teaching-learning because of many reasons, for instance lack of experience and resources, infrastructural and logistical barriers, and all those psychological vulnerabilities that were felt by both teachers and students (Shohel et al., 2021a). Collectively, these questioned the readiness of the system to cope with the emergency situation with the existing curriculum of higher education and raised the issue of curriculum redesigning for higher education.

In the pandemic context, students were not in the face-to-face classrooms of a teacher-student collaborative physical setting. They are now free to choose whether they want to show their physical appearance or not in the digital platform of teaching-learning. Traditionally, before the COVID-19 pandemic, both teacher and student were bound to go to a classroom away from home. They were very much conscious about their physical appearance and they had to face unexpected extraneous variables like noise from nearby roads, vehicles, playgrounds, or households surrounding the school premise. This new normal era has provided us with a new understanding that classroom and class conduction could be similar in the post-COVID era as well. However, the teachers may be unable to address the issues related to students’ levels of understanding, talents, motivation and attention in a virtual classroom. So, face-to-face teacher-student relationships may be abolished or reduced through new normal circumstances. However, as there may be a tendency to show only the slides or documents by screen sharing with less discussion, students may get bored if the online classes are traditional lecture-based or analytical or too lengthy. To address the new call of time, technological adaptation (e.g., using interactive platforms) could help make the online classes more engaging and interactive, and therefore, adapting various technologies in online teaching and learning is necessary (Coman et al., 2020).