Prior to COVID-19, the biggest challenge UCEM faced was building a student community. As a fully online university college, UCEM doesn’t have a campus, which means students aren’t able to meet or engage in person with fellow students or staff members.
Being able to help build these kinds of meaningful relationships is important for UCEM, as they enable effective collaboration—which is also a challenge when students and faculty can’t meet face-to-face.
Although some collaboration tools exist within Moodle, we generally look toward the wider educational technology toolset to deliver this. There is more to do in this area.
COVID-19 has been challenging—but as UCEM’s delivery is online, we’ve been less affected than traditional higher education institutions. That’s not to say there hasn’t been a need to adapt.
For instance, we successfully transitioned to a home-working model when the United Kingdom went into lockdown and have only recently opened up our Horizons office in Reading to a small number of staff. In addition to ensuring students receive a continued high level of support throughout their online studies, we also:
- converted our apprentice workshops from face-to-face to virtual workshops, incorporating wider online learning tools for collaborative and active learning;
- put in place contingencies in case there was a high level of staff illness due to COVID-19;
- implemented a system to issue e-Certificates to students who were due to graduate in June 2020; and
- implemented take-home exams that had been originally scheduled to take place in a traditional face-to-face setting in July and August.
There was also concern about whether systems’ capacity could cope with the increased demand. They were affected in the early days of lockdown, but Open LMS was quick to address and scale up resources as required.
In my opinion, UCEM has adapted well to these challenges. We’ve put several initiatives into place that have resulted in an improved user experience and which are likely to become part of our offerings going forward.
UCEM’s courses serve the real estate and construction industries—which have been heavily hit, particularly on the real estate side. As a result, the college has re-forecast its targets for the next academic year and adjusted its priorities accordingly.
Traditional higher education institutions are using online learning as a response to the challenges of COVID-19. The process of moving content online has been rapid, and there is a danger that the negative press associated with the transition to online learning could adversely affect UCEM, too.
It’s important to note, however, that a well-designed and delivered online curriculum is an effective, efficient, and stimulating way to obtain a degree, and UCEM has many years of experience and expertise in this area.