The Role of Reflective Practice during Emergency Online Teaching: Experiences from a Computer Science Course

The global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic posed unprecedented challenges to higher education institutions worldwide. As governments announced lockdown measures that placed restrictions and mandatory closures on establishments that traditionally required gatherings, universities worldwide cancelled face-to-face classes and adapted their mode of offering to online teaching and learning. Using an interpretive study based on a single case, this paper presents the author's most profound experiences with online teaching and learning of the Data Structures and Algorithms course at the University of Namibia (UNAM). Throughout the teaching of this course, the author kept an up-to-date reflective practice journal, and required her students to engage in reflective practice. The author also had an opportunity to engage and discuss her experiences with other lecturers in the School of Computing. The paper therefore presents a narrative of reflections on the meaning of teaching and learning as adapted to emergency online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings suggest that reflective practice during emergency online teaching presents an opportunity for educators to experiment with new delivery approaches, as well as to monitor how their interventions can impact the achievement of learning outcomes.