Transforming Learning Activities at the Faculty of Education during the COVID-19 Situation

Abstract

The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19) has spread with alarming speed and has gone beyond expectation despite the forecast for the pandemic (Office of the National Economic and Social Development, 2020). There is no specific antiviral treatment for COVID-19 and there are no vaccines proven to protect the body against it. For these reasons, anxiety became society's prevailing condition and people are susceptible to panic attacks. The traditional face-to-face learning activities could not be carried out anymore, and teachers and lecturers have started to adapt the use of technologies to their teaching activities through online platforms. The teacher education sector in most countries is facing a multitude of barriers. The shift from a face to face environment to completely online environment has not been easy. Scull, Phillips, Sharma and Garnier (2020) stated that universities in Australia were in the same situation. They proposed the innovations included the conversion of all face-to-face course work units into online units, including synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities. According to Mishraa, Gupta and Shreeb (2020), the whole educational system from elementary to tertiary level has collapsed during the lockdown period of COVID-19 and online teaching-learning modes must be adopted. However, the main difficulty is that a large number of lecturers in the Faculty of Education may belong to the older generations – baby-boomers generation and Generation X, who have just begun to adopt more technology in order to stay in touch with family members and reconnect with old friends, while their learners are from Generation Z, who were born in a world surrounded with technology, and need technology in their education (Combi, 2015). Despite the fact that the lecturers have to suddenly adjust their teaching and learning activities, they can embrace technology at a faster rate than before due to the urgent need of the global crisis. COVID-19 has abruptly forced them to redesign their learning activities to be as meaningful as possible for the learners amid the chaos and confusion in the society. In the early stages of problem solving, apart from EduFarm which is Kasetsart University's main Learning Management System, the Faculty of Education also provided its own learning platform called CPED which was developed by one of the faculty members. It may be stated that the COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation of higher education in this faculty. Therefore, the goal of this article is to demonstrate the important impact of COVID-19 on the Faculty of Education in Kasetsart University, and the approaches of how our faculty members and administration team used to handle the impact. A study was conducted to find out: 1) What were the impacts of COVID -19 on faculty members and students in the Faculty of Education? and 2) What were the attitudes of faculty members and students regarding future solutions for this crisis? Short interviews were conducted with 58 participants: 10 instructors from all departments of Faculty of Education and 48 undergraduate and graduate students who were impacted by COVID-19. All of the data were analyzed by using a coding technique and it was kept in the safe place in which only researchers could access it. It is hoped that the findings of this study would serve as guidelines for other educational institutions to apply to prepare themselves as they face unexpected impact and situations in the future.