One of the biggest challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic was ensuring the continuation of UBC’s teaching and learning whilst maintaining pre-pandemic benchmarks of excellence. UBC IT responded nimbly, providing convenient access to a wide range of tools and services to students, faculties, researchers and staff to enable them to stay connected, and continue to learn and work remotely.
The most widely adopted platforms during this time were the virtual meeting platform Zoom and media platform Kaltura. The combination of these two meant instructors could conduct both live streamed lectures and pre-recorded lessons, making them accessible to a large number of Canadian and international students studying remotely and across different time zones.
The widely-used polling platform, iClicker was also offered online as iClicker Cloud. And the introduction of Remote Labs ensured that students didn’t miss out on practical learning experience despite being unable to attend labs in person. Since August 2020, UBC Vancouver has seen over 2300 unique users of Remote Labs, with on average 50 daily users at UBC Okanagan.
Read more about UBC’s transition to remote teaching and learning by visiting the UBC IT website.
UBC IT’s extensive efforts in tackling the challenges of delivering quality remote education during the pandemic is an example of our unwavering commitment to ensuring effective teaching practices through Strategy 11: Education Renewal.