Page 59 - The Wish Stream Year of 2020

Teaching in times of COVID-19:
Developing and implementing
an eLearning strategy for Officer
Cadets – the case of DIA
The COVID-19 pandemic raised and con- tinues to raise significant challenges for officer education at RMAS, when it unex- pectedly hit in March 2020. A critical issue has been the urgent and unanticipated emergency transition from face-to-face (F2F) teaching to courses taught online. In this article, we reflect on the challenges and lessons learnt in devel- oping an eLearning strategy within the Depart- ment of Defence and International Affairs (DIA) to respond to this pandemic. In what follows, we focus on three key dimensions: staff, teaching and students.
Staff: Flexibility, Collegiality and Leadership
When the situation in the UK became increas- ingly more difficult in March 2020, there was the exigency to adapt quickly to the evolving situa- tion and to enable the department to deliver its learning outcomes.
With COVID-19 profoundly disrupting and changing what classrooms and learning look like, educators were navigating and continued to navigate a constantly shifting landscape. The first challenge to enable online learning was for staff to become eEducators. The differences between face-to-face and screen-to-screen for- mat cannot be underestimated. This passage
DIA landing page on the Defence Learning Environment (DLE)
Dr Norma Rossi & Dr Malte Riemann
disrupted the pedagogical culture of the depart- ment. The F2F delivery in the department has always placed a strong emphasis on the indi- vidual teaching style of lecturers and their ability to convey complex meaning through a person- alised approach to teaching. As Miyagawa and Perdue argue in their recent reflection on online teaching in the wider Higher Education sector, going from F2F to online delivery can be destabi- lising - suddenly what works and what does not becomes unknown.
The first step to face regarding this new context, therefore, is resisting the temptation of doing ‘business as usual’, simply trying to translate pre- vious practices without adapting to the new real- ity. For this reason, flexibility is paramount. First, members of staff in DIA had to develop their digi- tal competence quickly, regardless of their starting point. This involved learning how to use different platforms, especially MS Teams. Learning how to access this platform, manage online classes and locate students on this platform have been just some of the tasks that were to become an essen- tial daily activity for lecturers. Equally, flexibility has been central to our approach to teaching. For example, lecturers who were used to running their classes without any tech-support had to engage with new pedagogical tools that were alien to their teaching style, in order to better manage the pas- sage to the digital strategy.
It became clear from the outset that these chal- lenges could not be faced individually but needed a collective approach. Although working with lim- ited resources, a key step for the department was to adopt a shared approach to developing the digital competence of staff. Various steps have been undertaken in this direction. First, members of staff who were more used to these online tech- nologies eased the transition to online teaching
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