How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Students’ Online Social Presence?

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has affected higher education institutions worldwide as they had to switch from face-to-face to online teaching almost overnight. This abrupt change made a huge impact on teaching, learning, and particularly, student engagement. This paper focuses on online social presence as an element of student engagement, which represents how students feel under synchronous online teaching. A survey was conducted among 244 first-year students to evaluate the impact of online social interaction, online collaboration, online contact with staff, online engagement, and online active learning on online social presence. Structural equation modeling was used to test and evaluate these multivariate relationships. Our study illustrates that all variables have a significant positive relationship with online social presence. In particular, online social interaction and online collaboration show a more powerful relationship with student online social presence. Thus, digital technologies should be adopted in a way that encourages students to actively interact with their peers

Operations Management Curriculum Development under Uncertain Situations: Lessons learned from the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a major disruption to Higher Education as face-to-face teaching had to shift to distance teaching overnight. In this paper, we describe the adaptation of an perations Management undergraduate core module, taught to 1st year students, from face-to-face delivery to emergency online delivery. In our online version, we utilized a mix of traditional and flipped classroom techniques. We adopted a ”live” online lecture, where students were encouraged to interact with their tutors and ask questions, and flipped ”live” online tutorials, where students and tutors discussed case studies. In addition, we used a web-based simulation game as a learning and assessment tool. After the simulation game was complete, we assessed our students using a reflective group presentation regarding the decisions they made throughout the game. Based on student feedback, the curriculum design and the module adaptations that we adopted for its emergency online delivery can be considered successful. In particular, students were satisfied with the module quality and structure. Following our experience from adapting our face-to-face module for emergency online delivery, we provide a framework for switching to emergency online teaching along with some useful insights and recommendations to Operations Management educators