Learning and teaching during COVID-19

Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) has almost 70 years of experience in providing health care education and 20 years of experience in teaching social sciences. RSU has more than 9,000 students, 26% of whom are international. Until ‘COVID-19’ had reached a global pandemic, RSU practised mainly campus-based intensive learning and teaching, offering a few blended learning courses. Therefore, RSU administration and academic staff faced an unprecedented situation when all face-to-face teaching had to be transformed into remote learning in only a couple of days. In order to monitor the quality of this transition, identify areas of improvement now and in future, and, most importantly, learn the concerns of students, one month after commencing remote learning, RSU worked out a questionnaire. The results highlighted the dimensions of benefits and challenges, clearly indicating the need to adjust the amount of time needed for studies, the need to strengthen self-paced learning skills and provide an effective feedback. In order to gather the experience and vision of the academic staff regarding the processes of remote learning, seven webinars were organized. The feedback from academic staff highlighted the need for organizational, technological, and pedagogical improvements in order to develop high-quality technology-enhanced learning and teaching process. The analysis of the gathered data and conclusions based on them have allowed us to reach our goal – to describe the experience and lessons learned of RSU in moving all learning and teaching online during the ‘COVID-19’ pandemic.