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Online Teaching in Universities in Developing Countries
Published in Kaushik Kumar, Engineering Pedagogy Towards Outcome-Based Education, 2023
During the Covid-19 lockdown, teaching at DeKUT was 100% online for the May–August semester. In this section, the implementation of two courses in mechanical engineering field/laboratory/coursework and project-based is described as a case study for online teaching in developing countries. The teaching was conducted through the BigBlueButton(BBB) and Moodle platforms. For each course, the following general procedure (Figure 5.4) for preparation and handling of the online classes was followed. As shown, the lectures involved three main tasks, namely scheduling, live lecture and after-lecture activities. The first task is to schedule the lecture on the online platform and provide students with details for accessing the lecture. The lecture should be created 24 hours prior to the live meeting and shared to all the students in advance. During the scheduling the lecturer/instructor uploads all the necessary materials on the online platforms. The second task involves the live lecture, in which the virtual interaction between the instructor and students takes place. The most important aspects of this task are to ensure that students join the lecture with their official names and that the lecture is recorded from the beginning. Students should also write their names and identification numbers in the attendance list created by the lecturer on the platform. During the lecture, the students' microphones remain mute to avoid disruption of the class, and students can ask questions only via the chat function of the platform. Finally, after the meeting the lecturer should download all the chats and attendance list and share it with the quality assurance office. The lecturer should also download the lecture link and share it with all the students for future reference. The lecturer may also provide assignments or quizzes to the students via the Moodle platform to assess their understanding of the lecture concepts.
We build this city on rocks and (feminist) code: hacking corporate computational designs of cities to come
Published in Digital Creativity, 2023
Countering the sudden ‘Zoom-Boom’ of the COVID-19-pandemic in 2020, for example, the hackfeminists of f.u.c.k. cologne set up a BigBlueButton server for their neighbourhood and other groups nearby. BigBlueButton is an open-source web-conferencing tool based on open software and specifically designed for educational purposes (BigBlueButton 2022). Along with information material about privacy and data abuse as well as community outreach initiatives, this software and server infrastructure was made openly accessible to and usable by all without having to share personal data with tech corporations like Zoom. Moreover, offering a public alternative infrastructure to the city’s quickly set-up tech-fixes powered by private companies raised awareness for and ideally encouraged to participate in the choosing and shaping of everyday technological use. As one of the members explains, tech is never apolitical. [It is important to reflect] that we’re not only consumers of software, but can actively participate and understand that we’re able to co-create software. [To realize and be able to share that], for me, is an incredibly political act.8Through consciously intervening and initiating a more generally accessible public discourse about technologies, f.u.c.k. cologne—in a broader sense—also hacks the urban code (see Figure 1). Gaining even more importance in the digitalized urban life during the pandemic, they undercut the municipal, makeshift commercial software communication infrastructures with freely provided open-source solutions as well as workshops on encryption.