Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

JORDAN OPPORTUNITY FOR VIRTUAL INNOVATIVE TEACHING AND LEARNING

Relating to this, the idea of the student voice has been developed throughout the project lifespan. Beyond the feedback given from the E-Tutors, participating students have been encouraged to give feedback through pre and post activity surveys, modelled on the DIGCOMP tool, to help inform the project. Although some of the surveys did receive low participation numbers, the embedding of student feedback in virtual learning activity opens the door for a strengthening of the student voice through feedback within teaching and learning in Jordan.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/1 had a profound and tangible impact on the JOVITAL project that cannot be understated.

The initial period in March/April 2020 saw the project hit a period of uncertainty, with many of the Consortium partners being forced to wait for local governmental guidance on JOVITAL members’ ability to work and travel. An application was ultimately made to extend the project into 2021 to mitigate the move to operating in an entirely online space. By May 2020, international travel restrictions forced JOVITAL to abandon site/partner visits, prevented the planned E-Tutor summer school in summer 2020 and restricted the ability of the mobile VCL hubs to move around Jordan.

Due to the Consortium having to operate within highly uncertain circumstances, virtual Consortium meetings were set up, but focussed on project management and the delivery of the remaining VCL activities, which curtailed the ability to create the strength of Community of Practice around the use of collaborative online learning in Jordan. In addition, many of the participating consortium institutions experienced various lockdowns, some of which prevented teaching and learning from occurring in class. The original vision for the VCL delivery was that preparatory work would take place in the classroom, before the online activities took place. However, institutions shifted to online teaching and learning during the pandemic and the Jordanian cap on online learning was temporarily lifted to accommodate this. As students may not have been used to working completely in an online environment (it must be emphasised that the very purpose of the JOVITAL project was to encourage this via the use of VLEs and VCL activities), this will have impacted on the ability to provide the same level of pre-activity support and preparation.

Crucially, the timings of the delivery of the latter two VCLs were delayed, which had implications for E-Tutors, many of whom had graduated since being trained in 2019, and so were unavailable. With a full extension not being permissible by the funder, this meant that the JOVITAL project could not realise the future-proofing element of the E-Tutors, as only one group of students as E-Tutors had been trained. The E-Tutors are now unlikely to be able to engage in future training and peer-learning sessions as many are now in further employment. Nonetheless, this does not preclude Jordanian HEIs from considering ways to train their own E-Tutors based on the JOVITAL model.