OPEN DISTANCE TEACHING PRACTICES IN PANDEMIC TIMES: DEVISING A SIMPLIFIED VIRTUAL PEDAGOGIC MODEL FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF SAINT JOSEPH IN MACAU, CHINA

The Covid-19 pandemics had most impact on teaching and learning processes in all over the world particularly considering the traditional universities that base their pedagogic processes on face-to-face teaching. The imposed lockdown implied that suddenly all teaching-learning processes had to move online which led to an increased use of and familiarisation with web conferencing technologies, thus intensifying, and driving new ways to learn and communicate while launching new or enforcing existing online learning communities. These online learning practices tend to be adopted after the pandemics thus establishing unstructured approaches of hybrid pedagogic models integrating both online and face-to-face classroom-based teaching-learning processes.

In this paper we report on online teaching practices during Covid-19 pandemics in context of the learning unit Research Methods in Design in the Master Program of Design of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Saint Joseph, Macau, China, where we have adopted open distance teaching and learning strategies based on student-student interaction through collaborative learning, asynchronous communication, and continuous assessment. Moreover, based on this experience we propose a simplified virtual pedagogic model for planning, organising, and implementing university level (hybrid) online courses by fully exploring the facilities offered by the educational digital technologies in view of the post-pandemic teaching and learning scenarios at a face-to-face university as the University of Saint Joseph.