Emergency remote teaching during COVID-19 lockdown: Al-Qalam University Katsina lecturers’ experience

Abstract

This paper reported lecturers’ experience in the synchronous and asynchronous Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) at Al-Qalam University Katsina (AUK), Nigeria during the Corona Virus (COVID-19) lockdown. In the asynchronous mode, recorded lectures and other learning materials were sent to students. In the synchronous mode, the lecturers met with the students, virtually, and explained the grey areas from the materials that were sent. After the ERT, an online questionnaire was designed to gather lecturers’ responses about their experiences. The findings have shown that most of the lecturers used mobile phone data for the ERT. Thus, designers of Learning Management Systems (LMS) should pay attention to user experience of mobile platforms. Lecturers who could afford more than 10 Gigabytes of data in a month conducted more synchronous sessions than those who could not. Interestingly, lecturers who indicated that they could not have considered remote teaching, willingly, conducted more synchronous sessions than those who indicated that they could have considered remote teaching. Overall, lecturers mostly rated their experiences very good and took the switch to ERT as a wake-up call despite poor internet service quality. The paper concluded that, desperate situation and persuasion may hasten the adoption e-learning technologies.