The COVID-19 has resulted in schools shut all across the world. Globally, over 1.2 billion students are out of the classroom. As a result, education has changed dramatically, with the distinctive rise of e-learning, whereby teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms.
“I believe that the integration of information technology in education will be further accelerated and that online education will eventually become an integral component of school education,“ says Wang Tao, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Vice President of Tencent Education.
Being ahead of the curve is a legacy of COTHM, we adopted supplemented online learning and engagement by launching our online portal ecothm.com three years ago. This helped COTHM in creating an online learning environment for the students, which has played a pivotal role in minimizing the impact of COVID-19 lockdown in the present times.
COVID-19 Lockdown Challenge
The biggest challenge for us was to keep our students engaged as well as maintain their learning momentum as close as possible to regular on-campus studies. For this purpose, we were challenged with the following:
- How to make secure online availability of classroom study material
- How to digitally assign and receive course work and assignments
- How to deliver planned classroom curriculum online
- How to conduct planned examinations online
COTHM Response to COVID-19 Lockdown Challenge
Thanks to our COTHM Dubai Team, due to their timely and aggressive approach, at COTHM we were able to roll out various integrated distance learning solutions to keep our students engaged to maintain their un-interrupted learning momentum. To achieve all this we implemented the following distance learning tools and strategies:
Availability of Online Study Material
The lecture notes and transparencies were made available online via our Learning Management System (LMS). This helped our students to prepare for their upcoming online lectures.
Assigning Planned Course Work and Assignments
The onboarding of the COTHM faculty members was completed on a fast track so they can assign planned course work and assignments via Learning Management System (LMS)
Online Delivery Planned Curriculum
Live eClassrooms for our students were implemented within 1st week of lockdown. eClassroom solution was implemented on ecothm.com portal in partnership with Onvimeet Australia. To ensure the maximum level of engagement, our purpose-built eClassroom solution is fully equipped with tools like:
- Whiteboard: With the whiteboard, the teachers can educate our students through real-time illustrations.
- Screen Sharing: Teachers can share their class noted and slides from any device. It doesn’t matter if the teacher is taking a class on a PC, Mac, or Smart Phone.
- YouTube & Vimeo Players Inside eClassroom: The teachers can play training video from within eClassroom
- Presence Manager: The teachers power-up the level of engagement during sessions using the Presence Manager to grab the undivided attention of students.
- eClassroom Controls: The full control remains with the teacher, no students can switch on the Mic or camera unless he is allowed by the instructor. The chat is also moderated to ensure un-Intruppted learning
Conducting Online Examinations
A secure online examination system is already in place on ecothm.com, where students can take their scheduled examinations securely and confidently. Our online examination system is fully compliant with international examination standards like:
- Cheating prevention via copy/paste/print restrictions
- Scheduled availability, test only becomes available for students on ecothm.com on a predefined date and time for a predefined period of time.
- Limit of attempts
- Review answers
- Save progress in case of internet interruption or browser re-load
- Random Questions from a question bank
Moving Forward
Research suggests that online learning has been shown to increase retention of information, and take less time, meaning the changes coronavirus have caused might be here to stay. As research suggests, we believe the same and keeping our focus on innovating and improving the distance learning experience for our students.
The Future is Now (COTHM Online Hospitality & Management School)
We are already very close to the launch of our dedicated Online Qualifications Portal (COTHM Online Hospitality & Management School) to offer UK accredited qualifications via online/distance/blended learning. We will soon reveal more details about this project in another blog post.
To learn more about our upcoming initiative of COTHM Online Hospitality & Management School) please get in touch with us: