When it comes to the passing academic year, you can’t find a more important topic than how the university solved the imminent problem of remote teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic. As a matter of fact, it’s already a part of our school’s history because the online exam period is being live-tested as I am writing this article. Literally overnight, the Internet became the carrier of educational materials for vets and biologists this March. There has been a logistic change which, despite all its road bumps, has achieved the ultimate goal: a continuous training. On the other hand, Director of IT and Security Dezső Bella explains to us that just because you uploaded a slide show or a Word document to a website, it doesn’t mean you have a real distance learning project yet. However, such interactive remote communication tools as webinars or web conferences are not beyond reach anymore, while the development of e-learning materials is in full swing. The University aims to be able to switch from conventional to distance learning at the push of a button if necessary. Here’s an excerpt from the interview.

– To ensure training continuity this March, you had to deploy a new “corps” overnight. How do you remember the first moments of this extraordinary spring?

– To prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the government ordered students to stay away from their higher education institutions as of 12 March. Most colleges brought the spring break ahead to 16 March, thinking they would gain a week for preparations. Even while our Rector Dr Péter Sótonyi was in Vietnam on a visit, he tasked us to start the preparations for remote teaching and he assigned military-like short deadlines after his return on 10 March. We had to create the necessary and sufficient conditions for the University of Veterinary Medicine to take a “running start” and begin distance teaching as early as 16 March.

– What did you need to do?

– The job was not restricted to IT or other technical matters. In fact, most of the tasks required the mobilization of our education organizer colleagues. The change needed the teachers and the assistants to shoulder a huge burden as they had to use new educational and communication methods; they had to keep in touch with their students in a different way. On the other hand, students also had to prepare for being able to feel as if they were at the university for the most part of the days, even when they are at home. In other words, they had to learn how to separate their studies from their private lives. Neither side was completely alien to home office work, though.

To be honest, the technocratic IT departments of educational institutions sometimes tend to set high requirements that users find hard to meet. That’s why it was such a great help for us that the academic sphere fully supported our work. Vice-Rector for Education Dr László Ózsvári and Director for Education Dr Gábor Mátis took their fair share of the confrontations and helped us to harmonize the expectations and opportunities of the two sides.

– What platforms did you use to start distance teaching?

Despite the initial difficulties, everyone soon got accustomed to this kind of work. Some people experienced technical difficulties but they cleverly bridged the problem by using other software such as Google Hangouts or other online communication platforms. The official line is still NMS and O365 Teams, though.

The hotline between the institutions and the Ministry for Innovation and Technology was really on fire. We had constantly ongoing discussions on which higher education institution had been using which solution for years perhaps. On 30 April, state secretary for higher education, innovation and vocational education Dr József Bódis gave us an overview of the good experience with distance learning so far and it was great to see ourselves at the top of the list.

In his input submitted for the Ministry’s overview, Dr László Ózsvári described how the University started the distance learning project with the essential and sufficient materials on 16 March.  Students can access the course materials through their own Neptun account. He thanked the IT Department for its professional and technical support. To broadcast demonstrations, we obtained some sport cameras which the teachers could freely move around to zoom on the particular tissues they wanted to focus on during a dissection or an operation, for example.

– What else did you need to solve beside the immediate challenges?

– As we wrote in the report for the Ministry, we set out on two paths. The first one was to provide the necessary conditions since the University does not exist unless it teaches. In the meantime, we started developing a procedure in order to help us to continue distance teaching in the long run, in a professional and secure way. We chose Moodle, the open source code E-learning platform for that.

We contacted Óbuda University which has its own distance learning centre for quite a while. In my opinion, just because you upload a slide show or a Word document to a website, it doesn’t mean you’re doing distance education. You also need to insert some progress tests for each course or maybe even for each chapter, which allows you to assess if your students understood the lessons. You need interactive charts with perhaps some animation, too.

Besides developing e-learning course materials, we also want to set up a webinar, i.e., web conference system which allows for an interactive communication between teachers and students. For instance, we want to enable students to ask their questions in a certain format when they are logged in to a lecture or practical class via their computers. The purpose of these projects is to enable the University to switch from conventional to distance learning at the push of a button if necessary.

 

Interview by Gusztáv Balázs.