Both students and staff have responded swiftly, installed software on their home computers, and put in place tools that can handle a digital study and work life.
– We are really well underway and it is great to see what a transition students and staff have made in such a short time. Now the job is to ensure good pedagogical teaching, said the two deans at the frontline of the digital work that has been done, Morten D?hlen at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences and Sten Runar Ludvigsen at the Faculty of Educational Sciences.
Digital interaction on the rise
UiO?s new video service Zoom has increased from three to 2.000 users this last week.
There have been over 2.500 Zoom meetings at the university with approximately 24.000 participants and more than 1 million meeting minutes (16.700 hours) according to UiO´s digital barometer.
Over 1.500 meetings have had a student as an organiser.
The meetings vary in number of participants and duration. The largest meeting was a webinar at the Faculty of Law on the new emergency coronavirus law – the event had more than 600 people tuning in.
In Teams, activity has gone up as well. The number of users went from 2.500 to more than 6.000 in a few days. The amount of messages and active channels in Teams have also increased.
Digital learning platform
Almost all faculties have started using UiO?s digital learning platform Canvas the last few years. Here traffic has increased by 34 percent in the last week.
The number of active students increased by 400 – from 20.220 to 20.620 students. As for teachers active on Canvas, numbers increased with 170 – from 2.160 to 2.330 teachers.
Notifications found in schedules
It has become easier for students to find video lectures. A notification in their schedule tells them that they need to log in to see links with content that has limited access – for example, a video lecture or other recordings. The notification has been put in subject field schedules at all faculties, except at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, where recorded lectures are openly available.
All videos are also visible through the schedule in My Studies. The faculties are working on updating learning platform Canvas and the schedule planning system with digital teaching and by Friday 27 March, most of this will be in place.
– Gradually, UiO will move on from putting things in place to making all digital interfaces supplement and support each other. We have to look at how the new teaching services function for both students and staff, said Lars Oftedal, Director of Information Technology at UiO.
Research on digital teaching
Attending digital teaching is more demanding than being taught in a physical room. At the Faculty of Educational Sciences, a lot of research has been done as to how digital teaching can provide learning outcome.
– Engagement, studying before class, summing-up after class, and contributing with questions and clarifications are essential for all types of learning environments. This is enhanced in digital environments. In addition, conversations become more demanding because rules of conversation must be established and made more explicit than when teaching the traditional way, said Sten Ludvigsen, Professor in Learning and Technology and Dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences.
– We need to learn and develop good digital teaching services. It is a long-term project, but it is important that we get started and that lecturers can embark on gathering experiences. Then we need to develop research that looks into the learning outcomes of such methods, said Ludvigsen.
Facts/other numbers
- Statistics related to our digital services (in Norwegian)
- UiO web pages for digital teaching, with access to Helpdesk for digital services
- Statistics: UiO?s central web pages on the coronavirus has received more than 215.000 unique screenings. This page is performing well in Google searches, and is ranked high on relevant search keywords in both Norwegian and English.