In order to reflect on our assignment experience, we refer to Gibb’s Reflective Cycle, Figure 21 to help frame our reflection as shown in the following animation, Figure 22. Find out more about the advantages and disadvantage of our multimodal strategy in Figure 23.
Extent and the quality of teamwork in the group, drafts
We worked collaboratively as a team and everyone provided input and effort which alleviated all our concerns about past experiences of group work and preferences for working independently. We listened to each other and took any suggestions on board and welcomed input. We all have our individual strengths which helped to balance out the group and provide reassurance.
Initially we started with weekly calls and then switched to bi-weekly calls in the lead up to the submission of the draft. We took advantage of the feedback points received on our plan and draft and we also fed in and shared feedback we received on independent assignments. This helped us to ensure we were building on previous areas of development. This level of shared experience was extremely useful and an aspect which is easily overlooked when studying on online. We built a connection as peer-learners and this in turn boosted our confidence within our peer group on the course.
Educational or technological issues
Although there have been comparisons made with this pandemic and the Spanish flu, computers and the internet did not even exist in 1918. This has made it difficult to find relatable research around technology adoption during a pandemic of this scale and there is a lack of evidence.
Due to the currency of the topic there is a large amount of publications daily but not necessarily quality journal articles. As we are studying Digital Education programmes we were naturally interested in all the developments as for some members of the group they were directly related to their roles. This led to an element of scope creep during the construction of the content of the resource and this made it difficult to exclude references that were interesting.
Important issues that relate to technology security have been brought to the foreground during adoption of technology in the COVID-19 pandemic. One problem, often referred to as “Zoombombing”, has caused a great deal of concern for educators, particularly, who have been targeted by offensive messages or indecent images by unauthorised users who manage to access video sessions. Within some institutions this resulted in Zoom being banned. This led to the technology being swiftly abandoned by some, and it would be interesting to know if this poor experience will impact the educators or students’ perceptions and affect future adoption of virtual classroom systems or educational technology in general.
In our experience all virtual classrooms suffered outages whilst struggling to cope with the overnight change in demand and in some cases having to restrict functionality of platforms. It seems reasonable to conclude that this will have impacted the confidence in those technologies, and it will be difficult to earn that trust back.
Technology Adoption in HE 