The UTEL Seeks to Streamline the Digitalization of Higher Education

The Unit for Teaching Excellence and Leadership (UTEL) in the University of Bahrain adopted a set of modern technologies and applications to ensure the digitalization of the teaching and learning process in an interactive manner. The Unit seeks to develop the technical capabilities of academics in the higher education sector, aiming to overcome all the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuring the quality of learning outcomes.

The Director of the UTEL Dr. Diana Al Jahromi said that the UTEL provided the academic faculty at the University with online access to the most significant applications and links – on its website, to enhance the faculty’s academic activities that contribute to refining knowledge, saving time, increasing organized communication between students and teachers in the virtual space.

Al Jahromi added that these applications include the Popplet tool that allows users to visualize ideas to encourage creative learning, create graphic organizers, timelines, and various other forms of visual organization. The Slack application keeps teams connected, as it makes communication easy, direct, and transparent. Moreover, the assessment tool Socrative, in which educators can assess the students’ progress and understanding in real-time using quizzes, quick question polls, and exit tickets, in a fun easy way. And Google Classroom, which facilitates the process of creating, distributing, and grading assignments and file sharing between teachers and students. As well as the web-based platform Extempore, designed for online oral assessments.

It also provided Hot Potatoes, a free software suite, which includes 6 applications; used in creating a variety of interactive learning activities and exercises such as multiple-choice, short answer, jumbled sentence, crossword, matching, and gap-filling exercises.

Padlet is another digital board that offers teachers and students a simple way to share ideas, review work, or post notes on a common page. It incorporates links, videos, and document files to help organize course material. Moreover, to generate, organize, and refine ideas to increase productivity, Stormboard is an online virtual whiteboard that allows students and teachers to interact effectively in a shared workspace in real-time. In addition, the Unit has provided links to several educational platforms such as the Blackboard educational platform, Microsoft Teams, and Moodle learning platform, which is designed to help educators and learners create an effective environment for teaching, learning, and collaborating online.

In addition to specialized educational platforms, LinkedIn Learning offers video courses taught by professionals and countless diverse instructional videos that encompass crucial business, technology, and creative skills. Whereas the Udemy platform targets adult experts and students, in which you can find reliable lessons on any topic and in any language. And ManageBac enables efficient curriculum design and assessment planning effortlessly and constructively.

The Digital Learning Academy offers a variety of courses taught by experienced instructors in over 65 languages. It provides an individualized learning environment and aims to help its learners gain relevant, marketable, and job-related skills. To improve team spirit, the Miro collaborative whiteboard provides an engaging learning experience, whether instant or asynchronous. The platform contains multiple learning activities such as meetings, workshops, brainstorming, mapping, and diagramming, and design thinking.

Concerning the interactive educational platforms that use ‘gamification in the learning experience, Kahoot allows its users to create a game or a trivia quiz in any language and on any topic. Another interactive quiz learning game is Gimkit, which provides a memorable and engaging learning experience and students can use their phones. The study application Quizlet enables students to learn via games, flashcards, and other learning tools, with 350 million study sets covering different subjects such as science, art and humanities, languages, math, history, and more.

As some programs are considered successful learning tools providing immediate feedback, the UTEL has provided links to the Mentimeter software which creates interactive presentations, designs creative formative assessments, quizzes, lectures, and workshops. In addition, Kognity, a digital publisher that offers curriculum-aligned textbooks in an interactive environment.

She stated that the UTEL has also provided links to free programs compatible with emails and messages, documents, and projects as well as social media. The writing assistance tool Grammarly, powered by artificial intelligence to compose clear writing without any grammar, spelling, style, or tone mistakes. MyU is an application designed for facilitating communication and sharing files between teachers and their students.

Dr. Diana noted that the Unit also provides links to the UK’s Advance HE website, which provides a wide range of educational resources that enhance and govern the educational process and leadership skills.

It is worth noting that the UTEL had previously conducted many training and interactive workshops to enhance the technical skills of higher education personnel, attended by more than 800 faculty members during the current academic year.