Teacher corner (base ...

Undoubtedly the recent pandemic of COVID-19 has changed many things in our lives and education is not an exception. Face to face teaching is no longer available (acad. year 2020-21) to the most of the higher education institutions. Hence, it is very critical for the institutions to provide online education in current pandemic times by deploying the available tools. Due to the fact that most of the universities along Europe do not provide face to face teaching online education becomes a necessity in order educational process be continued. As the initial goal is to mitigate the absence of face to face teaching in some cases a better outcome can be achieved through online teaching than face to face, by adopting the appropriate tools and techniques. The obtained knowledge and experience could be exploited beyond pandemic era in order effectiveness of educational process be supported.

Lecturing in online education is considered to be a very boring situation for the audience. Increasing the interest, productivity and creating an interactive environment between students and teacher as well as amongst students is a big challenge. Online teaching process can be supported by synchronous and asynchronous environments giving the opportunity to participants to collaborate and interact. As a response to pandemic era many of such environments arose and rapidly become popular among educational community.

This work proposes tools and techniques combined into scenarios for online teaching in higher education institutions and emphasizes on how to overcome online teaching’s obstacles and create a friendly and simultaneously productive online teaching process.

The rest of this work is organized as follows. Chapter 2 presents a review of tools for synchronous and asynchronous online teaching with a comparison for each category separately. Chapter 3 describes the development of innovative online teaching techniques tailored to a particular topic. Furthermore, examples on how to organize online course using a particular platform is described in Chapter 4 whereas guidelines on the way to support synchronous online teaching through live webinars is presented during Chapter 5. Guidelines on how to support and maintain interaction through online teaching amongst teachers and students as well as amongst students referring on Chapter 6. A suggestion of guidelines in the form of scenarios on how to support students’ projects/activities online is proposed throughout Chapter 7. Finally, Chapter 8 outlined how to assess the digital learning experiences using different forms of digital assessment.