IADIS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON WWW/INTERNET

19-33

Authors: Gerald E. Evans, Daniel C. Evans and Michael V. Harrington

This paper explores the impact on faculty and students of the forced transition to eLearning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. A review of the literature on eLearning modalities and the issues involved in transitioning from face-to-face instruction is followed by a series of reports on the experiences of 11 faculty and in making the change from traditional instruction to various modalities of eLearning. The impacts on students were assessed through a survey of students in classes during the pandemic. The methodology employed is an adaptation of the grounded theory approach used in sociology along with survey research. The results indicate that the primary advantages to the transition to eLearning were the flexibility afforded both faculty and students and the ability to continue delivering quality instruction during the pandemic. The primary negatives were the difficulty in engaging students in the new delivery modalities and the significant challenges involved in proctoring exams. Prior experience with online and blended learning on the part of the faculty and students made the transition smoother.

46-66

Authors: Rusudan Makhachashvili and Ivan Semenist

The global pandemic led the higher educational sphere worldwide to the amplified emergency digitalization measures, that sprang from the necessity to take quick comprehensive action to transform educational workflow and both standard and dynamic educational scenarios into digital, blended, and hybrid formats. As a result, there are identified several challenges that higher educational institutions had to face and overcome in a manner that was efficient and expedient: 1) to activate comprehensive complex skillsets, otherwise latent or underutilized in the educational process; 2) to boost ICT competence and digital literacy of all participants of the educational process, relocated to the computer realm. The study objective is informed by the research task to conduct a structured, case-based diagnostics of viral development of digital skills and their application to construe interdisciplinary competencies and professional linguistic competences of students of European and Oriental Languages major programs at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University (Ukraine), that took place over the span of 2020-2021 due to lockdown measures. The inquiry is founded on the identification of various soft and communicative competency principles and estimated digital literacy components that inform the meta-digital competence in Foreign Languages Education. The empirical study is derived from the comprehensive survey data that disclosed digital literacy components and e-skills implementation in various tiers of professional linguistic and FLE activities. The inquiry determines structural interoperability between different groups of applied e-skills, linguistic competence components and soft skills, necessary for the development of the interdisciplinary professional capacity of Foreign Languages students in Ukraine.