The effects of Covid-19 on teaching and learning activities in tertiary education.

Research conducted in 2021 indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption in education in human history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners all over the world. This has far-reaching impacts on many aspects of tertiary education, education quality and assessment .

Firstly, education quality is greatly affected by the pandemic. The Covid 19 pandemic has caused a great change in learning and teaching methods of higher education. The pandemic lockdown leads to closures of universities and institutions, causing them to resort to digital learning platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and similar applications. Learning online deprives students of lecturers’ direct instructions and makes them feel less involved in collaborative activities. Plus, some students are reluctant to react to lecturers or actively join in learning activities in online classes and use technical problems as an excuse. As a result, lessons could not be fully delivered and students’ understanding is limited.

Secondly, the outbreak of the pandemic also poses challenges to the process of assessment. The closure of universities and colleges could coincide with a key assessment period so exams are not allowed to be organised on site. Consequently, institutes had no choice but to hold them via online platforms or use various combinations of assessment methods, such as portfolios, essays or projects instead. This results in concerns about the reliability of outcomes due to inequality in facilitating conditions and the likelihood of cheating in exams.

Tertiary teaching and learning methods, process of assessment and education quality have been greatly influenced by the outbreak of Covid 19 pandemic. Along with making adaptation to Covid 19 impact, people are trying to stamp out the pandemic, getting back to normal education to avoid its shortcoming.