Pervaiz Hoodboy, a distinguished professor and critical thinker, has opened a discussion through his article ‘HEC: seize the corona moment’ in the Dawn, dated 25th April, 2020 for those who actually care about the future of the country and its higher education system. This response highlights exceptional measures taken by the VC of University of Education for his deep concern for the higher education and its delivery to the students and to draw the attention of Higher Education Commission (HEC).
The University of Education, Lahore, a public sector university is accelerating large efforts to construct an astute online teaching program immediately after the outbreak of pandemic COVID-19. The VC perceived this difficult situation and rallied all the faculty members of the university to take immediate steps. He acted proactively in making policies and providing action plans to construct a parallel system of online education, running across all campuses and affiliated colleges of the university. Through taking incremental steps and daring decisions day to day, he developed the system that clearly addresses the content, delivery and learning facilities for the students. The university is taking extraordinary pains to develop a coherent, recorded video lecture database and conducting virtual classes for ensuring student’s participation and response by the teachers through writing and holding virtual meetings with students during online classes. It is already working on the parameters Prof. Hoodboy suggested to the Higher Education Commission (HEC) suggesting, ‘let there be a freely accessible central repository where every professor is required to deposit all his/her recorded lectures, videos, notes, etc.’
Ensuring the maximum level of learnability through this online teaching plan, we, the teachers are provided with step by step guidance by VC and his committee to enhance our teaching capabilities. All faculty members seem confident to work hard for fulfilling the teaching parameters that certainly, is a primary responsibility of a teacher.
The faculty members are on an open forum as they dare to teach, ready to share their online lectures to the students of the university. They spend their day and night preparing quality lectures with proper references. They have entirely shifted from traditional teaching methodologies to the new teaching technologies on an emergency basis. They contributed courageously and positively to the whole pandemic. They have learnt to run and apply new software supportive for virtual teaching and approximately 10 new interactive tools, including Google Classroom, Zoom, OpenBoard and PowerSoft. The complete virtual set-up of education might need tons of resources, finance and time, but the University of Education (UE) contributed in building this new virtual setup in just one month approximately. The students are getting their lectures while sitting safe at their homes. The process has been streamlined now to a maximum extent. The VC of the university is spending his day and night to bring online teaching under a structured program starting from the 20th March. The faculty members are continuously receiving SOP’s, notifications and processes for online teaching plans.
Despite the fact of the closure brought by COVID-19, this structured plan is being reviewed and developed step by step and is up to date. The challenge is taken as an opportunity to improve the teaching quality and train the workforce to meet international teaching standards.
Currently, the online lectures approved by the quality committees, are being delivered through recorded and interactive methods, following the spring 2020 timetable. Additionally, the YouTube platform is being used as the storage of a central repository of recorded lectures for UE students. Participation of students is being ensured through records saved in GCR Application and students queries and their problems are being addressed through Google Meet and Zoom Applications. As far as the preparation of recorded lectures in advance is concerned, it is being regularized through monitoring the UE staff portals for online lectures through committees. Quality committees access prepared lectures directly through staff portals, check them and provide feedback before their delivery to the students.
Although innovations in content, delivery and students learnability is the next step but to establish the outstanding UE online teaching program during emergency time, set a new benchmark for all Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in Pakistan.
The author is working as an Assistant Professor of English in the University of Education Lahore and can be reached at urooj.alvi@ue.edu.pk
