Amidst the development of a lifestyle tainted with situations of unrest and disruption, students as well as faculty members at AUB have found it increasingly difficult to keep up and maintain a consistent grip on their academic, social and personal pursuits. In retrospect to AUB’s mission statement which promotes the virtues of adaptability, diligence and assiduity, the faculty did not flinch in the face of adversity and sought to instead tackle the situation at hand through the undertaking of pioneering initiatives. To elaborate, a prominent solution stipulates the drastic shift in the archetypal procedure of learning, whereas many students have abandoned traditional means such as copybooks for more compliant alternatives such as tablets and computers. This strategy indeed reinforces the pivotal role that the internet, and by extension, technology possesses as the core tool in adapting to unforeseeable circumstances.

The university has been actively working on addressing the challenges posed by the disruption of the unprecedented COVID-19 emergency, this quick move to technology-assisted teaching instead of in-person classes allow faculty and students to concentrate their efforts on successfully achieving the learning outcomes of spring semester courses. Subsequently, the quasi-totality of the faculty has chosen to employ software which emulates the experience of the typical classroom through the intervention of a virtual environment, namely through the foremost applications of Microsoft Teams, WebEx and Zoom. There are several highly effective alternatives for in-class evaluations, outlined by the AUB Office of Information Technology, which include virtual in-class presentations, group assignments, non-proctored Moodle exams, and discussion forums. In cases where a proctored, timed online exam is deemed necessary, the Office of IT has evaluated and the university has approved the use of a third-party remote proctoring tool, Respondus, which is a secure system safeguarding against privacy invasion, that simulates in-person exams online by verifying identities and detecting unusual activity via video analysis and by securing exam takers’ web browsers.

The university has been actively working on addressing the challenges posed by the disruption of the unprecedented COVID-19 emergency, this quick move to technology-assisted teaching instead of in-person classes allow faculty and students to concentrate their efforts on successfully achieving the learning outcomes of spring semester courses.

Having said that, the lack of accessibility to equipment caused laboratory or experiment-driven courses to lose their intrinsic value as an opportunity for the student to replicate a fulfilling hands-on experience in their respective fields. While this issue is somewhat circumvented by the introduction of the virtual lab software which grants students the plausibility of accessing SRB (Science Research Building)-centric applications, it is incapable of accounting for all tools and instruments which would otherwise be available in a regular setting. Moreover, one technology adopted by the IT team at AUB sparked a substantial amount of controversy. The latter is the infamous Respondus software which would track one’s movements upon examination and therefore place the student in an uncomfortable, nerve-wracking position. The criticism stemmed from students’ fears of losing privacy. 

Nevertheless, credit is to be given to the efforts of the faculty in expertly adapting to the situation, as some professors are genuinely trying their best in delivering the most authentic learning experience that can be attained in such disparaging times, through the adaptation of groundbreaking learning strategies and the technological modification of their respective course’s outcomes.