The CyberCampus system has consistently improved for better use by educators, regarding its enhanced value as a teaching method due to the pandemic.
CyberCampus is a service provided by Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL) where students can receive online education services. Professors and students are able to access the service through a mobile application or an online website.
As offline classes became impossible due to the ongoing pandemic, professors have attempted to adjust to CyberCampus to give students online lectures of equal quality as offline lectures.
Professor Park Hee-kyu from the Department of Christian Studies had successfully progressed her class ‘Death, Trauma, and Counseling’ to be selected as the best e-class in Ewha for this spring semester. Despite this, she pointed out that she could not fully interact with her students in online classes.
“It is hard for lecturers to give online lectures if we cannot visibly interact with students,” Park said. “For better communication in class, I encouraged students to show their faces on the Zoom program during class, set online rooms for their communication, and gave reflective assignments they can discuss as a team.”
Responsibility for managing the overall CyberCampus service particularly belongs to an administration team from ITL. Cheon Yun-pil, the chief administrator of CyberCampus, explained how they help professors adjust to the service.
“All the professors are basically enrolled in a course that instructs them to make full use of the service,” Cheon said.
Additionally, CyberCampus provides a manual book to professors. It contains specific guidelines for arranging online classes such as uploading learning materials and quizzes. Also, ITL offered workshops for adapting to hybrid modeled courses, and held seminars for improving teaching methods.
“If I face difficulty even after looking at the manual, I can contact the administration team through the helpline to get a detailed guideline,” Park said. “I’ve heard that many professors received help directly from the administration team whenever their online classes had problems.”
Yu Ye-hyun, a freshman of the Department of Economics, shared her opinion about the progress in improving online education.
“In the early days, I felt the quality of uploaded videos and materials on CyberCampus was not the greatest,” Yu said. “But I saw professors worked hard to improve it based on the manual that the school provided, and I admire all the efforts of professors and the administration team.”
Users of the CyberCampus service have unexpectedly increased since online classes were mandatory owing to the spread of the coronavirus. This sudden change caused strong network issues on CyberCampus for a few days, but most of them were soon resolved with the administration team’s efforts, in collaboration with the Office of Information and Communications which controls the network, server, and storage of CyberCampus.
However, professor Hae Chin-moon from HOKMA College of General Education mentioned an ongoing network problem. She explained that the CyberCampus system still turns sluggish when there is high traffic volume.
“It can be a great problem when professors and students have to access the site for time-sensitive reasons such as posting video lessons and assignments and submitting class assignments,” Moon said.
Considering the problem, the administration team utilizes an external service that can afford the amount of network usage and video streaming.
“Now, CyberCampus also deals with non-subject areas as most of them take place online,” Cheon said. “We will do our best to improve the system to make sure that it serves as a means of education without a problem.”
Professor Park and Moon expressed their appreciation on the CyberCampus administration team.
“Overall, I’ve been quite satisfied with our school’s Cyber Campus system in how it provides convenient ways to manage the class as well as to communicate with students,” Moon said.
“I greatly appreciate that the administration team has put excessive efforts to make a settled education system while also immediately reflecting professors’ feedback,” Park said.