ISRRT_COVID-19_book

data, they need to register their mobile number on the digital system and provide their
updated personal information.
Academic staff working remotely from home need data and access to the internet, however
not all staff have internet access at home (e.g. fibre internet). Hence the university furnished
all staff with USB Wi-Fi dongles to enable staff accessibility to the internet and conduct online
teaching and learning activities. The primary platforms used for online teaching and learning
activities are Blackboard and Microsoft (MS) Teams.
Constructive alignment and assessment
The four BSc programmes all have a large clinical component. We faced challenges in how we
were going to achieve constructive alignment between teaching, learning and assessment of
clinical outcomes. We needed to ensure that methods used would be an authentic reflection
of the world of work. The typical (pre-pandemic) methods of teaching and assessing clinical
competence are small group tutorials/demonstrations in clinical skills laboratories and on the
clinical platforms. Assessment methods would then be a combination of simulated patients
and an objective structured clinical exam (OSCE) using standardized ‘patients’ and actual
patient examinations on the clinical platforms. The department of MITS at CPUT decided to
prioritise clinical teaching and assessment for the senior students, namely the final year 4 th
year students. As lockdown levels eased, we then extended the clinical teaching to 3 rd years
and more junior students (1 st and 2 nd years).
When we re-visited the learning outcomes and associated assessment criteria for clinical
subjects, we had to firstly see how we would adapt T&L and secondly what impact that would
have on the assessment of our students. As academics, we had to rapidly learn all the
capabilities of the university online Learning Management System which up till then, was
mostly used as a repository for teaching materials. Furthermore, we also had to consider what
resources (both hardware and software) the students had access to. A survey was conducted
with 62 second year students to determine what resources they had available to access online
T,L&A (computers, mobile phones, internet access, mobile data, internet and WhatsApp
data). The results of the survey indicated that 60 out of 61 students had WhatsApp access,
11(18%) did not have computer access, whilst 23 (37.7%) did not have internet access.
Additionally, we had to consider the computer literacy skills of our students.
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