UWC Adriatic successfully organised the transition to an online platform in just a few days from the outbreak of Covid-19 in Italy in order to enable the college faculty to hold their lessons in Duino with students attending in remote.
UWC Adriatic is using the Zoom (zoom.us) video conferencing platform. This system enables classes to be interactive, with multiple lessons taking place every day at the usual time. Classes are held in the morning in live streaming and individual follow-ups are arranged in the afternoon for students who are time zones away. The technical challenge for the College was ensuring a sufficiently stable connection and thanks to the optic fiber provided by the Friuli Venezia Giulia regional authorities (Download/Upload 100/100 Mbps), this has been possible in the college school building.
Our teaching staff have responded very positively to this new situation. Teachers were trained by the IT staff in small groups and no one has encountered any major difficulty in taking their lessons online. All have risen to the challenge and have proved to be very enterprising and committed to providing the best lessons they can to their students at this difficult time. Naturally, teachers need to adapt to a new teaching style but the main challenge is actually keeping up with students in different time zones. A few days into the transition we are proud to say that it has been completely successful.
Students have reacted very positively even though being away from their regular life at the College is far from easy. They show up for their online classes enthusiastically, logging in to all their lessons and showing great appreciation for all that has been done to keep the classes going and minimise the disruption to their academic work. Attendance is very high in spite of the fact that the students are scattered in so many different places, both at home and with host families.
Should the College be unable to reopen soon UWC Adriatic is making plans to buy more Zoom licences and some professional graphic tablets and bluetooth headsets for its teachers. In a time of difficulty students, parents and staff alike are determined to rise to the challenge and are cooperating to the best of their ability. We may not be side by side physically but we certainly are metaphorically as we try and minimise the impact of this emergency at least on our students’ academic life. Nayiri Kalayjian, who teaches English B and Arabic A comments: “I am so proud of the quick transition we were able to make to online learning. The first week has been challenging, exciting and rewarding at the same time. Through our online classes, we have been able to create the same stimulating learning space that is a characteristic of our teaching at UWC Adriatic and that allows our students to share, learn and grow. I am also impressed by how well our students have been able to deal with this change and how they are capable of making the best of this experience.”
