Guest Professor from Rajasthan Technical University in India Rakesh Dubey continues to work in the European Social Fund project No. 8.2.2.0/18/I/003 “The perfection of academic staff of Liepaja University in the areas of strategic specialization – speech therapy, preschool education and primary education”. In this academic semester he lectures two study courses “Sports Psychology” to bachelor level “Teacher” study program’s students and “Orientation and Tourism” – for bachelor level “Tourism and Recreation Management” students.
Due to the COVID-19 restriction professor could not come to Liepaja University, but he is organizing and giving classes to both study programs’ students remotely. Remote teaching carries on several challenges that teacher has to face. Rakesh Dubey adds: “As soon as the Indian government decided in March 2020 to close borders and ban free movement of people, it was impossible to use the Internet in India because people were sitting at home, resulting in networks being overloaded.”
In spite of the problems and challenges, teacher has found a way to work – he is in intensive contact with students on the WhatsApp platform, also sending created presentations with recorded voice comments. The teacher is pleased that students are sending their filled tasks on the second day after they have been asked. This shows that students have been interested in the proposed topics. Professor already had an experience in teaching remotely, such an approach he used in a work with students in Ethiopia; but everything was settled by the Internet, which has failed this time. But it forced him to be even more flexible and creative to assure to students to learn their courses qualitatively. Rakesh Dubay also mentions that there are many topics to be learned (for example, in the “Orientation and Tourism” study course needs to be learned about compass, reading the map, etc.), so it may take longer to complete the course. Teacher also regrets that, unfortunately, we will not be able to carry out the practical classes in a nature that had previously been scheduled for LiepU students.
One of the project’s objective is to attract foreign academic staff in academic work and scientific research in the areas of strategic specialization – speech therapy, preschool education and primary education in order to ensure the quality of the content in these areas and to expand of the partnership networks.