Lessons Learned

JORDAN OPPORTUNITY FOR VIRTUAL INNOVATIVE TEACHING AND LEARNING

Despite project success around the creation and delivery of the VCLs and the training of E-Tutors some of the recommendations from the needs analysis were not fully realised. And as highlighted above, COVID-19 heavy impacted on JOVITAL.

Arguably, the main area that still require development are the ideas of a Community of Practice around the use of VLEs and VCLs in Jordan. Although the project was successful in undertaking the practical deliveries of four VCL experiences, the impact and uncertainty of COVID-19 meant that opportunities to come together as practitioners were limited, although a final online workshop did take place on March 23rd 2021 to showcase JOVITAL, which attracted a total of 109 participants.

Where virtual meetings did take place throughout the 2020/1 pandemic period, these tended to be more pressingly focussed on management and mitigating the impact of COVID whilst delivering the VCL activities, leaving little time to develop a Community of Practice on VCL in Jordan.

A further lesson learned revolves around the technology and availability of IT infrastructure across the Jordanian institutions. Although five institutional ‘Villas’ were created to support virtual online learning at Jordanian partner universities, the project had hoped to create a Mobile-VILLA with scope to travel around the Jordanian HEIs and wider, to offer mobile access to education to underprivileged learners and refugees. Due to complications with acquiring the mobile IT equipment and the impact of COVID, the ability to use the Mobile-VILLA was curtailed.

Related to this, the other major lesson learnt relates to the design and delivery of VCL/VLEs and their future-proofing. Initial feedback from the pilot and National VCL suggests that the choice of VLE resulted in students being put off by the design of the interface, which was viewed as being outdated and not user friendly. A particular issue was how the initial VCL environments were designed for traditional PCs and laptops, whereas Jordanian students wished to use their mobile devices to access the content. This resulted in many of the participants finding alternative methods of communication, outside of the VCL, which may have privacy implications due to the reliance on social media and telephone communication applications such as WhatsApp. Although the VLEs did improve by the time of the final Jordan-led eVCL, considerations of user interface and accessibility were frequently raised by the students. With this in mind, it is essential that any future collaborative virtual teaching and learning activity fully embraces the local needs of Jordanian learners and responds appropriately to feedback given by students.