Transition to Semi-Virtual Classrooms

Abstract

Educational institutions worldwide continue to improve their teaching and learning activities in almost all the facets of the profession. Upon the declaration of COVID 19 as a pandemic, learning activities were abruptly shifted from the in-person to virtual classroom activities. The transition required changes in the strategies and methods/styles of teaching. Despite the success in most of the activities, classroom interactions and assessments of students’ work emerged as areas that deserve more attention. The objective of this study is to develop a pilot project aimed at maintaining acceptable and secured levels of interactions and assessments. The setting for this study includes virtual classroom interactions, peer level tutoring sessions, and formative assessments. To improve the interactions, efficacious assessment methods deploying incremental levels of thinking were used. This requires a third-party program for embedding questions on prerecorded lectures. The questions were then randomized and assigned to the subjects. The use of hierarchical randomization of multiple-choice questions for the short quizzes resulted in reduction of cheating. The performance of the students in the four sections of a calculus course used for this project improved by 17%. For complete eradication of cheating, the midterm was returned from online back to the traditional classrooms. Such move will include the final exam in mid-December.