Strengthening of e-learning at the leading Ukrainian pedagogical universities in the time of COVID-19 pandemic

Distance education has become the mandatory component of higher education establishments all over the world including Ukraine regarding COVID-19 lockdown and intentions of Universities to render valuable knowledge and provide safe educational experience for students. The present study aimed to explore the student’s and academic staff’s attitude towards e-learning and the most complicated challenges regarding online learning and distance education. Our findings disclosed that the online learning using Zoom, Moodle, Google Meet, BigBlueButton and Cisco has become quite popular among the students and academic staff in Ukraine in time of the lockdown period and beyond. Based on the Principal Component Analysis data processing we can conclude that students’ satisfaction and positive e-learning perception are in a good correlation with quality of e-learning resources and set of apps which are used while e-learning and distance education. Also, education style, methods, and manner predict willingness of students to self-study. The self-motivation, time-management, lack of practice, digital alienation, positive attitude towards ICT, and instruction strategy belong to the most important challenges of COVID-19 lockdown based on the students and academic staff interviews. Online learning on daily purpose should be used in the favor of strengthening of classical higher education rather than replacing the former. Blended education is the best alternative to face-to-face education, because the communication with mentor in a live environmental even virtual should have ushered the learners to complete online learning and improve its results

Enhancing digital and professional competences via implementation of virtual laboratories for future physical therapists and rehabilitologist

Being popular world-wide, virtual laboratories enter into different fields of education and research and practitioners have to be responsible for choosing the most suitable and then adapt them to particular field. The aim of the present work was to assess the effectivity of the implementation of Praxilab, Labster, and LabXchange virtual laboratories as the powerful digital tool into teaching protocols of “Clinical and laboratory diagnostics” discipline for physical therapists and rehabilitologist. We have carried out the online survey for 45 students enrolled in physical rehabilitation degree program. About 70% surveyed students reported that implementation of virtual laboratories in “Clinical and laboratory diagnostics” discipline met individual learning needs of students, helped acquired digital skills (25%), and supported them to stay ahead of the curve. The virtual lab applications, not only assisted harness students fair against lack of practical skills, but also brought about a new dimension to the classes and helped overcome digital alienation and gain their digital skills and abilities. Indeed, a virtual lab can’t completely replace the experimental work and teacher’s explanation, but it might support teaching activities of a modern mentor and learning activities of a modern student. Almost all of surveyed students (82%) expected that in near future the virtual laboratories would take the dominant place in the education market due to possibility of students’ pre-train the key points of practical activities before real experiments in lab and better understand their theoretical backgrounds. Thus, this study is intended to contribute to utilization of virtual labs by students enrolled in study physical therapy/physical rehabilitation with expected efficiency