so called contribution of the students is observed as well distorted internet connectivity is experienced.

Thank you Hermann although your answer left me hanging. Are the lecturers' experiences good. Do all students respond positive on their online learning?

A friend of mine who is a PhD candidate (Mathematics) told me about his experience, which was unpleasant. He preferred a face to face class to online learning.

However, some enjoyed it and some struggled with it including professors.

Thank you very much Abiodum Ajayi. Me too, my experiences are very challenging. Most of the students were taken off guards. They were never prepared to learn online same applies with some of the lectures.

My teaching was forced online, but I found students were unable to focus or concentrate. I too lost interest as the human encounter is important in education. I think online learning is overrated and not as useful as many have argued.

I teach at a technical college (age 16 and up) and being able to continue learning was inherent for my students. Many of them had to stop the vocational part of their learning but since we stuck to the timetable many of them expressed gratitude to have some structure and meaning to the day. As Iceland was able to open the schools for smaller groups in May we then managed to get the student the vocational class hours they needed by concluding the academic courses earlier.

I found that some of the students thrived in the online environment and had a bigger voice while others felt lost and uncertain. One of the problems as mentioned above was that they were unprepared and many did not have proper computer equipment at home nor the learning space needed. But my school's IT department worked hard and created all classes on Microsoft Teams so students did not have to adjust to the whims of each teacher. We had started preparation sometime before the schools closed so I think we had an advantage compared to many other schools here in Iceland who were not prepared and had no focused approach to which platform to use and so on.

One of the complaints I had from students' was that they were overwhelmed with the amount of information bombarding their inboxes from the school's administration, teachers and so on.

I believe this to have been a positive experience with a steep learning curve but not without difficulties. I am an expert in online learning/teaching and I think it can be used more than we already do but alongside traditional f2f interaction. We need that human encounter as well.

The faculty and lecturers are having a good experience with online teaching. They have all gone through training to improve their courses and have spent time learning new technology to accomplish the task.

Thank you very much for your responses. They are all eye opening to me. One of the comment mentioned above is the shortage of resources like laptopes. That is the main challenge with my students adn my institution is in the rural area adn most of the students do not have interne. Thus, they are unable to register in Moodle.

Thank you Herman for sharing your experience. It seems as if we have teh same experience. It is really too expensive to teach on line. I prefer to use Moodle adn not Zoom.

We had our dry run/pilot testing of online class here in our school (a public elementary school) just this week through utilizing Google meet, Quizizz, Kahoot and Google classroom. As per observations, most parents do not know the technicalities of these applications which gave learners a hard time in participating the online classes every day. Complicating this picture even are the slow internet connections and lack of learning tools/gadgets.

It was difficult to get the students participation and you can't get the 100 % perfect net connection, but hopefully as it becomes the the norm for everyone to will get better.

Yes, I understand and respect all these views. However, I teach graduate students only (late 20s through 60s and 70s), not young teenagers, and I found that for my cohort the human encounter was central to the learning experience. If we look up published research on online learning, we find that mature students often dislike it, and sometimes drop out of classes that have gone online. It's no panacea.

A good question. I think a lecturer needs many experiences to implement online-teaching:

* an ability to motivate his students to learn online.

* an experience to re-design curricula to be suitable with online aspects.

* an experience to assess his students' learning according to the new standards.

* an experience to use relevant platforms and learning managment systems.

* finally, have an internal motivation to apply this type of learning.

I think also, universities should be modify their programs either in content or in teaching strategies to qualify their graduates to future where no place to the typical teaching and learning.

For many faculty, part of the fails encountered in on-line learning were due to tt colleges, universities, and other schools simply having "techies" explain the various tools available (Moodle, BlackBoard, Zoom, etc.) without providing guidance on which tools, techniques, and activities produce greatest student retention. I had an unfair advantage in this respect; I have been teaching on-line for global courses since 2005 and my spouse was a specialist in on-line instruction for the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Homeland Security. I did not even try to maintain synchronous instruction after we switched to on-line in March, in part because GWU's students dispersed to homes throughout the country and in part because living at home places severe pressures on students' time in terms of outside work, errands, and family responsibilities that did not occur in a residential campus. However, I closely monitored student participation in the on-line activities and made myself available by e-mail and telephone to assist students who reached out. As a result, I "lost" only two of 78 students (one in Northern Ireland) and found that students generally scored well on the on-line evaluations (well, they all passed and a significant number scored A's). Several students commented in their evaluations of me that they appreciated the "seamless" transition. I believe that it is critical to be familiar with the ideas in Brookfield's Discussion as a Form of Teaching, Sarason's Teaching as Performance Art, and Phillips' great YouTube video on avoiding death by PowerPoint. More than face-to-face instruction, on-line teaching requires attention to students as an audience who must choose to be involved despite alternative demands on their time and the inconvenience of accessing content through devices. Hope this helps.

The faculty and lecturers are having a good experience with online teaching, and other schools simply having "techies" explain the various tools available (google classroom, googlemeet, webinar, Zoom, etc.) without providing guidance on which tools, techniques, and activities produce greatest student retention.

many institutions in developing countries are facing challenges of online learning due to insufficient media instructions and lack of preparation of students, some urban and many rural areas that lack internet facilities are the casualties.

Diversification in giving lectures, such as audio, video, reports, workshops and activities.

Poor students' participation. Interrupted network.

Good discussion Gugu Mkhasibe to get to know other experiences and meet other people expanding our networks. I agree that the more diversified the stimuli for students, we can reduce the problems related to the students' distinct learning styles, the specificities of the contents of each subject, respecting the differences between the educational levels and age groups of the students, but also the problems caused by economic and social inequality, the quality of the internet connection, which often makes it difficult for students to attend synchronous video sessions, but being able to explore the contents in audio format, digitized texts, in an attempt to reach the largest number of students and reduce stress and inequality between them.