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The outbreak of coronavirus (COVID 19) has been a major interference to quality teaching and learning into Universities/ colleges. COVID 19 has significantly altered almost all aspect of college life, teaching and learning, research and community outreach.

The University of Rwanda like many other Higher Learning Institutions switched it face to face teaching mode to online instruction in order to keep students’ learning mood while enhancing their IT Literacy. The College of Agriculture, Animal Sciences and Veterinary Medicine embarked on the online teaching and learning as a solution to continuing its activities while ensuring that staff and students remain free from COVID 19 infection. The activities included training staff on the effective use of teaching learning platforms such as WebEx, Microsoft teams, zoom and many others.

This was further strengthened by the harmonization of teaching materials so that they can be well tailored shifting from full time to online. Emphasis was put on quality and ensuring that they are user friendly, too engaging and facilitating students through group and self-learning, so far the college uploads represent 98,9 % of the modules expected to be uploaded. The modules that are presently not yet uploaded represent 1.1% of the total number of modules expected to be uploaded for the trimester II in CAVM. Efforts are being invested to ensure that all modules are full uploaded and establish measure to follow up on students learning.
College staff have been successfully trained on different themes such as : setting up and structuring a course with Moodle, using Moodle for discussions, quiz and assignments, zoom for absolute beginners, conducting interactive lectures and planning a blended learning course ; while students got trained and facilitated on “Zoom for students”. University emails for students, enabling them to access Microsoft team students’ packages have been created and students started benefiting from the MINEDUC prepaid Microsoft team services. The aim is to ensure that once schools reopen, we will have set a blended teaching and learning offering mode which is mainly driven by ICT. Through this phase, the university is ensuring that both students and staff become very literate in the use of available ICT teaching aids which will enable the college to revolutionize its teaching and learning activities.

Story by
Jacqueline UMUPFASONI
In charge of Communication &Community Engagement
Busogo Campus