By Foo Ming Li
The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) organised an online year-end workshop on November 11 with its partner universities around the world, including Han Ching University College of Communication (HCUC). The workshop discussed the topic of effective engagement of students during online classes.
Pro Vice Chancellor International of USQ, Professor Ren Yi’s welcome speech stated that the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted everyone around the world, especially those in the education sector, forcing the shift to online classes for students and lecturers. Professor Ren Yi added that more than 70 percent of students in USQ are taking their classes online.
Professor Ren Yi also stated that the USQ online curriculum has existed for more than 20 years and incorporates the use of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence as well as virtual reality. He attributed the success of online courses to USQ staff and experts of online learning.
USQ Associate Director of Digital Learning Innovation, Dr Julie Lindsay said the core business of USQ is prioritising the digital experience of students from every course to ensure that they have an effective learning experience with online classes.
“Students and lecturers of every course will have different experiences in their online classes, therefore USQ designs courses for the digital world by providing the right tools to academic staff and students,” she said
Lindsay emphasises the need to use more free digital tools like Mahara, Panopto, H5P, and Voicethread. These digital tools are encouraged to be adopted by academic staff to encourage active student participation and collaborative co-creation of knowledge with educators and classmates.
“Students are now using Voicethread, an online platform on which students present their case studies, using individual slides. Students also discuss the developments of their case studies, research progress, strategies, and updates. Their peers are able to leave comments on posted case studies using audio, video and text,” she said
In addition, Professor Christy Collis, Acting Director of USQ Office for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching said that the university had stopped giving long recorded lecture classes to students due to student exhaustion from online classes on Zoom.
She said the recorded lecture classes are now divided into a 15 to 20-minute video to allow academic staff to conduct classes in shorter segments. In addition, the syllabus is logically streamlined with other study materials to contain a 10-minute video, reading material, and quiz questions for students to engage with the lesson taught.
“Students will not watch the entire one-hour lecture video, and they will skip to the end of the video to watch the summary of the lesson. Moreover, they would pick a few parts of the lecture video to watch when they are doing their assessment.
“After USQ introduced the shorter lecture video format, students are relieved because the shorter format does not exhaust them,” Collis said.
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