Digitising a Learning Activity: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

As the world faces the new landcape in teaching and learning due to COVID- 19, the pandemic, the strategies and approaches use for teaching and learning must ensure all students have access to digital resources. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities faced by the researcher and her students when a learning activity previously implemented in face-to-face sessions was transferred into an online learning environment. The learning activity, known as Work-the-Walk (WTW), is a transformative learning activity designed by the researcher, and the researcher owns the copyright of WTW. The objectives of this paper are to identify the challenges and opportunities raised by transferring WTW to a digital format, and ultimately to suggest the best ways to make the transition from a physical learning activity to a digital format effectively. Qualitative approach to research was used to obtain data for analysis and discussion. Preliminary findings suggest that the Digital WTW (D-WTW) present two main challenges and two main opportunities for both the researcher and students. Given this, the education providers must be willing to encourage the educators to provide various approaches to teaching and learning, as well as to promote experiments with various existing learning strategies used in face-to-face sessions, and to transfer them to be used in an online learning environment.