Technology Enhanced Learning under the New Normal in the Post Pandemic Era

Globally, the teaching-learning process is evolving rapidly from a traditional classroom environment to a mixture of traditional plus online learning. Cheap and widespread availability of devices such as smartphones and laptops, together with various applications like YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. is changing the way people live, communicate with each other, and even their educational habits. Although the concept of online learning is not new, especially after the popularity and widespread success of the MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses) like Coursera, EdX, and Udemy among others, yet they have never been used as the primary mode of teaching. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has seriously affected all types of learning institutes globally starting from kindergartens, schools, colleges to the centers of higher education. To curb the spread of the virus by flattening the “growth curve” strict measures of social distancing are in place globally, which has in turn resulted in the physical closure of all types of learning institutes. This has forced the educational institutes worldwide to resort to an “online only” exclusivity model for the purpose of teaching and learning.
The concept of online learning or e-learning is not new. Availability of cheap and high-speed Internet access, together with the advances made in cloud technologies have helped to promote the flexibility of the learning procedure and supplement it well to the conventional learning methods. Results from extant literatures show that the primary objective of online learning is not only to improve the reach and access of education to the general mass, but also improve the quality of learning along with reducing the cost of education delivery. Overall, online learning can be beneficial for the students, as they can learn from anywhere and anytime and at their own pace. The perception of the students towards online learning is mostly positive, as evident from the existing works. However, before the onset of COVID-19, the use of various online learning platforms and resources were mainly supplemental in nature, over and above the regular classroom teaching imparted at the schools and universities. Therefore, the COVID-19 scenario has brought forward an unprecedented situation, where there has been a radical change in the mode of education delivery to be strictly “online only”. Teachers have been compelled to deliver lectures online using some form of an online delivery platform. This digital disruption in the education sector has been sudden, untimely and somewhat unorthodox as there has been absolutely no strategic planning or preparation with regards to its implementation worldwide. Therefore, in this chaotic situation with the closure of the educational institutes, one of the very basic necessities is to ensure a decent perceived usability of the online delivery platforms that are being used for the purpose of education delivery, particularly from the students’ perspective. Perceived usability is one of the fundamental components of user experience (UX). It is reasonable to anticipate that a good UX will lead to greater satisfaction levels, which in turn can guarantee success of the online education delivery platforms. In this work, Microsoft Teams is taken as the reference platform for online education delivery.
As evident from above, the requirements of the post pandemic period i.e. the new normal are unique. The scenario of online learning is not the same anymore. The focus of this research proposal is to identify the special requirements of online learning under the new normal and see how it affects the students learning objectives and performances. For this, we propose to build up a MOOC infrastructure from ground zero covering all aspects of the needed infrastructure and including the course design aspects too. The proposed research will include human factors as well as technical factors for the entire MOOC design. The full details of the proposal along with the objectives and the methodology are given in the following section.

​​​​​​​