Using Pearson Digital Courseware to support your students online
The outbreak of Covid-19 has significantly impacted teaching and learning, with universities having to rapidly bring their curriculum online in order to support students and maintain continuity of delivery.
We have learned from our academics that while this has been a challenging time, they, as well as students, have been able to adapt well through the affordances of technology.
More importantly, they also recognise that technology will play a larger part in the future of HE with greater emphasis on blended delivery and learning beyond the classroom.
At Pearson, we strongly advocate the use of technology and world leading content to deliver successful outcomes for students. Our portfolio of digital courseware helps to facilitate independent learning, assessment and foster higher order thinking skills.
Our MyLabs support a wide range of quantitative disciplines including Maths, Economics, Accounting, Finance, Operations Management and many more. It is a powerful assessment and tutorial platform that leverages our world-class authored content to help you provide target practice and assessment for students.
"It has been a lifesaver"
In recent weeks since the outbreak, this has shown to be invaluable to academics who are having to teach and assess students remotely. Dr Agnieszka Herdan from the University of Greenwich explains:
“It has been a lifesaver because I could replace my normal exam with different activities in MyLab Accounting. They’re (students) scattered all over the world.
"You can’t just run an exam at 9 o’clock in London, when some of your students are still asleep. So being able to reshape and redesign the exam task to be placed online in MyLab Accounting helped me, and helped them with the supporting tools to build their knowledge."
Steve Astbury, a lecturer in Accounting and Finance at INTO University of Exeter, reinforces Agnieszka’s view on MyLabs:
“My students have disappeared to all four corners of the globe at the moment but all of them have been able to do the last summative test.
"They’ve all done pretty well. They’ve been able to get on wherever they are in the world and do their final test.”
Within MyLabs there are useful tools to help students understand complex numerical methods, that include:
- Help me solve this - breaking down questions in to methodical steps to help coach students
- View an example - see a fully worked example similar to the questions to help students understand the approach
- Ask an instructor - submit a question to the lecturer for support.
The value of MyLab Accounting for students
Professor Emel Atkas, at Cranfield University explains how these features have been helpful to her students on postgraduate supply chain management programmes:
“Not everybody (students) is well versed in calculations or working with large tables (in Excel) or sometimes want to polish off some of the terminology they haven’t heard of before. They have already started using MyLabs and have follow up MyLab sessions.
"I find it really useful as it’s also possible to use the ‘Help me solve this’, people really appreciate this functionality. I let them use the ‘Ask my instructor’ as it helps me to understand what they don’t know. I can then reply to them as a group through our Virtual Learning Environment on common areas of misunderstanding."
Steve Astbury also explains the value of MyLab Accounting to his students:
“All the students are saying how much they value MyLab Accounting. Because they get their first test after 2 weeks, it gives me the ability to work out if I have any real strugglers who need special support early on. Had this disruption happened earlier I would have tried to increase the percentage of online work (summative) because they are comfortable with it.”
All three academics use our digital courseware as part of a blended approach to help students develop skills and knowledge to succeed on their modules. Moreover, it has robust tools for assessment which allows students to complete tests online remotely and help academics to formatively track student engagement and performance.
MyLabs can be used as part of a blended approach to help students grasp key concepts so you can utilise class time more effectively for working through problems and cases.
With current uncertainties over the timing, nature and mode of delivery for next academic year, our digital courseware can help you develop an online curriculum that can help you deliver assessment at distance and provide students with great content to help develop their knowledge and skills.
To find out more about how our digital courseware portfolio can help support your students click on one the links below:
- MyLab and Mastering (Quantitative disciplines and STEM)
- Revel (Management, Strategy, Marketing, Psychology and Accounting)
- Learning Catalytics
For further ideas on how you can use our digital courseware in your teaching, please also read our educator stories click here