SCU Poised to Help Students with Distance Learning during COVID-19 Crisis

As nearly 500 Soochow’s oversea students in China, Hong Kong and Macau are barred from entering Taiwan due to the coronavirus pandemic, the school administration on January 24^th established a response center to design reliable measures aimed at ensuring every student the access to education in a sustainable and effective manner.

The initiatives have been carried out in collaboration with Director of Teaching and Learning Center Hui-Chun Chu, Director of Computing Center Yung-Ming Hsieh, and their staff members, who have been seeking to solve technical problems cross-functionally. 

Instead of relying on just one single mode or medium, SCU introduced three plans to offer a comprehensive system for distance learning, including synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid online learning. The details are:

1. Synchronous online learning: It integrates the Moodle platform with cloud meetings software such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google meet, followed by online streamed videos of lectures for review.
2. Asynchronous online learning: It integrates Moodle with screen-recording software such as RecordScreen, EverCam or PowerPoint, and uploads the videos, audios and other course materials to OneDrive and Moodle.
3. Hybrid online learning: It integrates screen-recording software with Moodle to provide course materials, accompanied by synchronous online discussions.

Microsoft Teams provides instructors with functions such as synchronous online teaching, screen recording during classes, etc., while Microsoft Stream helps stream the lecture videos for students to review after class.

To familiarize instructors with how to operate distance teaching software, Instructional Technology Division held 11 schoolwide workshops and many more departmental in-service training, and had operating manuals and teaching aids ready for teacher’s use.

With the assistance of diversified online learning systems and software operation trainings, both teachers and students in SCU shifted from resisting to accepting these brand-new teaching and learning aids. Teaching and Learning Center will continue striving for integrating traditional and modern teaching modes to make possible better experience of distance learning.