Two award-winning academics who were acclaimed for their inventive online teaching methods during the pandemic are gearing up for the academic year ahead.
The winners of the Creative Teaching Competition – staged as part of the Innovative Learning and Teaching Conference 2021: ‘Lessons from Covid-19’ – wowed judges and attendees with their unique ideas.
The announcement of the winners of the Creative Teaching Competition
Solution
Dr Maryam Almahdi, an Assistant Professor at Al Ahlia University whose research interests lie primarily in digital media, inspired her already tech-savvy students with her virtual walkthroughs, and Dr Mar de Fez Laso, a professor of Mathematics at the American University of Bahrain (AUBH), where the conference was held, came up with a solution to ensure cheating didn’t add up.
As the Covid-19 pandemic took its hold on the world and forced lecturers to conduct courses online, the duo rose to the challenges.
Not only did Dr Maryam have to teach a brand new course, dubbed ‘Digital and Social Media Marketing’ in a virtual format, she also had to teach it to “Generation Z students, who were born in the digital world and were already masters of technological use.”
Dr Almahdi in Bath, UK where she earned her PhD.
“I needed to go beyond their expectations and introduce the course in a creative context to challenge them in a fundamental way despite their tech-savviness,” she explained.
“One of the methods I decided to use was virtual walkthroughs, inspired by the online video game culture.
“In addition to offering audiences engagement and sociability, such walkthroughs mainly help gamers and viewers learn more about the game from one another.
“Similarly, videogame walkthroughs are all about following the gamer’s journey from start to end. So, applying walkthroughs as a method of teaching sees a student demonstrating their understanding of a certain online experience by walking them through it using the screen-sharing option on the virtual teaching software.”
One exercise involved students wearing ‘The Customer’s Hat and the Marketer’s Hat’. They had to showcase a digital experience as customers to better understand how marketers could capitalise on each step of their search journey.
Dr Maryam also gained access to a local business to give students a behind-the-scenes look into their search and display marketing activities.
“It was almost poetic how the digital marketing course went truly digital!” she added. “The most rewarding thing for me was getting to keep a high level of engagement and immersion in my students, despite the online mode of teaching.
“It really makes my day when my students say things to me like ‘Dr Maryam, the class is so engaging and beneficial, we almost forgot it was online!’”
Critical thinking was crucial, too, for Dr Mar, who was determined to lure her students away from a reliance on the Internet and online mathematics applications to solve questions.
Dr Maryam Almahdi with students from France, UK, and Saudi Arabia at Ahlia University’s Study Abroad Week 2020 after her lecture on digital entrepreneurship.
Inspire
“I wanted to ask questions that inspired the students to think for themselves, instead of asking questions any machine could answer,” said the professor.
“These engines, created originally to assist students on their learning, have now seen their goal reversed, as students use them to answer exam questions and leave the learning to others.
“When online tuition became the avenue for teaching, it automatically implied a distanced administration of assessments, leaving many mathematics teachers in dismay. In this new setting, the traditional model of testing appears a futile exercise.”
She devised a new type of assessment focusing on conceptual analysis and theoretical knowledge so as to bypass any technological loophole.
Instead of asking questions like: ‘Find the minimum of f(x)’, she started to ask questions such as ‘Explain how you find the minimum of a function’, and, ‘Please explain what a minimum is’, forcing students to delve deeper into the meaning and significance of such concepts.
Her physics classes were equally impressive, with home experiments among the highlights. “In one course the university provided a tool kit of electronics for students to carry out the experiments from home. Students enjoyed it very much,” said the professor.
“A colleague of mine learnt about what I was doing in class and thought it would be good to share my initiative with other educators,” Dr Mar told the GDN.
“I was also inspired by my students, who jumped on the online train and helped me and other teachers a lot to succeed in doing our jobs.”
The professor took it upon herself to perform a statistical analysis on her new method and it also concluded that the frequency of cheating noticeably reduced, confirming an increased use of critical thinking skills amongst the students.
Besides being a professor of mathematics at AUBH, Dr Mar currently holds the position of Programme Lead for the Arts and Science Department, with research interests covering maths, physics and astronomy.
AUBH chief operating officer, William Hurt, said: “When the Covid pandemic hit us, we all faced the same challenges, at the same time on a global scale.
“This conference has shown tremendous success, highlighting Bahrain as an educational destination globally, and has provided a unique opportunity for professionals and academicians from myriad fields around the world to discuss and share their findings and lessons learned from this pandemic.”
The conference included discussions on adapting teaching methods to the virtual classroom, as well as 16 think tank sessions and student-led talks. It brought together educators and panellists from all over the world, including the US, UK and Egypt.
amal@gdn.com.bh
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