The corona effect on on-line education 

Erik Kikkenborg (NORDUnet)
Hans Hüttel (Aalbord University)

Q1.  How do you think that living with segregation for yet another six months will impact teaching?. And how do you think that would actually also force the institutions to look into different teaching methods?.  
I think we're forced to look into teach different teaching methods. Even before this I abandoned large lectures, I adopted the flipped approach because I would rather have a conversation with students, the monologue is not as interesting as the dialogue. But one has to look into different different strategies. Custom technology will not solve that. I don't think there is an easy solution. But hopefully this is something that we can benefit from even if and when online teaching is no longer the norm.   

Q2. How do you relate to the hybrid solutions where you have to prioritize the amount of people you can have physically in one place? Where you start thinking of less the traditional way but thinking in,” How to do the one on ones and having smaller groups”, as this is becoming the new norm. The new norm for how to do online learning and online teaching is a big challenge.   
I think the the large classes they were very much a product of of of management decisions and at being able to teach as many students as possible at the same time, and of course in that setting there's always a lot less interaction in the lecture theatre with 300 students as almost as little interaction as during an online session. So, it's probably a problem that we inherited and gotten even worse. Whereas I think when you look at project supervision, that's usually done in groups of you've got groups of, say, four to six or seven students. And there's a lot more interaction that way. So, it's also a question of human resources.  

 Q3. What about hybrid lectures - where there are both physical and remote attendance for lectures. They are being offered at some Universities?   
I think lectures could always be done offline. And that way you wouldn't have the same user bandwidth. Instead of having 200 or 300 students attending an online lecture at the same time, I think one could offload that burden and have it recorded with presentations and then the time spent together could be spent being actually together. To be honest, I would rather have everyone be physically present or everyone be online because often no matter what you do, the other half tends to get to feel neglected.   

Q4. Why do you think Microsoft Team got the upper hand over Zoom?   A Well, I think they won the hearts and minds of students
     
Q5. Others have tried to develop their own solutions in other parts of the world but eventually come back to the established players due to functionality & ongoing enhancements. Why would you succeed? 
I think we need lots of resources to do that as well. But hopefully everyone can see the problems that that we encountered during this I mean student interaction being what lack of student to track teacher interaction being low or even students to student interaction being low. 

Q6. What can NRENs do to contribute to the diversity of tools we need for more interactive design for learning?
I think once you ask the management  not to be so "Microsofted". To acknowledge that there are limits. I think the reason why the management got so "Microsofted" was that they were already in the habit.