E-ARAL NATIN | 11
ONLINE LEARNING BARRIERS:
UNRAVELING THE CHALLENGES FACED BY ADMINISTRATORS IN HIGHER EDUCATION by: Marie Joy Payumo-Salgado & Daniel Ong
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) were caught unprepared when the entire country entered lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For private schools, it was worse, since all private HEI’s were still struggling to overcome the financial impact brought about by the K-12 implementation. Public schools on the other hand were cushioned because the government continued picking up the bills, but nevertheless saw their budgets upended by the shift to remote learning. The pandemic truly impacted both private and public HEIs. The team interviewed administrators from two northern Luzon schools, Saint Mary’s University (SMU) and Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University (DMMMSU) - Mid La Union Campus, to identify the common challenges the HEI administrators encountered when their schools shifted to online learning. These are their responses.
READINESS OF THE FACULTY MEMBERS Both schools were caught unprepared by the sudden need to shift to remote learning. Since both are conventional face-to-face institutions, they had few teachers capable of remote and online learning, necessitating the provision of substantial teacher training. DMMMSU responded by conceptualizing a “3C’s framework” - Communication to Connect and Collaborate. The State University partnered with DMMMSU Open University and nearby private HEIs to forge a functional collaborative academic operation. This partnership leveraged the needed technical skills of qualified faculty members into a shared resource that facilitated the retraining. SMU also established a framework called the Marian Compassionate Teaching Framework to promote academic resiliency through the four operative principles of Clarity, Communication,
