Smooth transition from face-to face to distance learning at the University of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy in Kosice
Abstract
COVID 19 has affected the whole world in all areas of our lives. Also teachers and students at Slovak universities.
From day to day, we faced the great challenge of turning face-to-face teaching into distance learning. The simplest part was the realization of lectures in the online space.
We have been teaching lectures for many years using a slideshow. However, it was necessary to replace the board, where we draw detailed diagrams for students and write formulas, for a virtual board.
We replaced it with a graphics tablet. With it, we entered our comments and sketches directly into the presentations.
The big challenge for us was the implementation of practical lessons in the online space. Therefore, we focused on creating instructional videos for each practical task.
Distance education has been enriched with an individual approach to students. In the MS TEAMS platform, we created smaller groups of students and used the function of rooms.
The teacher addressed each group of students individually. We applied this form mainly to tasks that result in graphically processed measured values.
At the end of the practical exercise, short tests were prepared for the students, which were to replace the final personal interview of the teacher with the student. These provided the teacher with feedback on how the student understood the subject and the acquired knowledge.
Distance education is a new useful form of teaching, but not in all areas of education. At our university, the quality of knowledge passed on in distance form does not equal the quality of full-time teaching.