As part of our mitigation measures to manage the adverse effects of COVID-19, SBC has implemented a comprehensive strategic shift to online teaching and learning, utilising Virtual Learning Environments, such as Chaoxing and Moodle. This shift supports our students across our programmes and levels, in order to maintain the quality of teaching and learning during the period of disease prevention.
Starting on January 28th, there have been cross-border video communications and online teaching and learning tests at home and abroad in SBC, supporting 68 online classrooms in the “course recording and Online Hour” initiative. We released 1590 online videos and 2079 documents for our more than 1200 Chinese and international students. As some students have returned to campus, lecturers from our different programmes are providing face to face tutorials for their students between 8:30 am and 3:20pm. Everyone wears face masks and uses the disinfection supplies provided, maintaining 1 metre social distance in a large classroom.
Dr. Ijeoma Okpanum, a lecturer at SBC and our Programme Leader of School for Business and Management meets students in T213 for around an hour every afternoon. “Many students are asking questions about the examinations and the course modules at the moment. I think the Office Hour is a good opportunity for both lecturers and students to summarise and discuss any issues, challenges and uncertainties. We also discuss theories and concepts covered in the lectures that students are finding difficult to understand.”
Meanwhile, the our online Office Hour provision has broken the limitations of both time and place. By working with our international lecturers abroad, difficulties, such as time differences, have been overcome. Dr Sam Fremantle, a lecturer in our School of Languages, Education and Cultures has expressed that the online teaching platform is very convenient as students just need to focus on the screen, with the teaching in the tutorial is more efficient.
Now, online teaching has become a exploration of new challenges and new opportunities. After two months of online education, our resilient SBC academics find that they are much more familiar with using online platforms. As a continuation of academic lectures, SBC will keep this new teaching and learning model, with online and face to face Office Hours for meeting between lecturers and students, which is also the teaching and learning model used by our international parter universities.
