Use of Vclass in Mathematics Education Delivery: The UEW Experience

The advent of the Coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) has rapidly influenced
every domain of human existence and drifted human undertakings to a new normal in
which social distancing becomes the norm. With the emergence of the new normal,
educational institutions worldwide are beset with teaching, assessment and learning
sustainability crises. These crises compelled many educational managers and lecturers
to rethink about educational access and delivery while students strive to adjust to new
learning systems external to the orthodox face-to-face mode. The questions of which
and how learning platforms can be used for educational delivery remain unsettled.
In spite of this, institutions of higher learning are quickly adapting to the crises. In
developing countries like Ghana, new and emerging digital learning platforms,
assessment modalities and delivery modes are being experimented in schools without
prior evidences of their effectiveness, successes and shortfalls. For the past one
and half years for example, there has been unprecedented push to online teaching,
learning and assessment with commercial digital learning platform providers also on
the rush to provide support and solutions to educational delivery, sometimes for free.
The University of Education Winneba (UEW) trains competent professional teachers
for all levels of education in Ghana and the West African sub-region. When Ghana
recorded its first case of the Covid-19 in March 12, 2020, culminating to lockdowns
and closure of all institutions, the academic calendar was disrupted. UEW was then
compelled to device innovative ways of using Learning Management Systems (LMS)
called vclass to enable students learn amidst the pandemic to bring the 2019/2020
academic year to a successful close. Following this, the struggle to sustain the new
innovation of using the UEWvclass for educational delivery in UEW comes with new
dilemmas and contextual issues of ICT infrastructures, faculty capacity and students’
support and welfare. This paper mirrors students and their lecturers’ experiences in
the use of UEWvclass platform to learn various courses in mathematics education
in UEW. Notwithstanding a number of exciting experiences conveyed as first time
users of vclass, users are challenges with online course creation, online lesson delivery,
e-assessment, digital skills and network connectivity. As a result of the covid-19
pandemic and digital experiences, UEW plans to emphasize, consolidate and serve
as a pace setter of hybrid/blended instructional delivery for its regular, sandwich and
distance modes beyond the Covid-19 era.