Teaching STEM Online
23 Nov 2021Speaking of papers, Mina Sedaghatjou led a group of us across Europe, Canada, and the United States in a project on teaching STEM online. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, suddenly, all classes were online classes. And for teachers not experienced with teaching online, this was a sudden and drastic change. Prof Sedaghatjou brought a bunch of people together to host STEM teaching seminars which are still on YouTube:
Based on these experiences, we wrote the article “Teaching STEM online at the tertiary level during the COVID-19 pandemic” which is now available in the International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology. Here’s the abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic not only impacted people’s lives globally, but also pushed faculty to quickly adapt to an online teaching environment and continue it until the end of the school or academic year. This study is urgently needed to gain an understanding of the challenges STEM faculty members face during the COVID-19 era as they make the transition to teaching online, while many of them engage in this shift for the first time. The initial results of an online survey of 101 International STEM faculty members showed that online evaluation and pedagogy are the most disrupted dimensions of e-learning when instructors struggled to re-orchestrate their teaching during such an unprecedented event. In addition, while the affective domain of teaching is identified as the missing dimension of an e-learning framework, adoption of the new technology is rated as the area of least concern for teaching STEM online.
