Example of Best Practice

By Associate Prof. Ayse Collins Keens

June 2020

Since the beginning of the covid-19 spread around the world, business leaders and experts in each and every sector have urged to analyze the immediate effects in order to adopt to the post-crisis world as quickly as possible.  Borrowing from the economist Milton Friedman “Only a crisis — actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” When we take what Friedman says in the context of higher education, we, educators know that “picking up ideas and creating challenges” need necessary changes and active leadership as for the three aspects of universities namely teaching, international collaborative research and encouraging a better world in terms of equality. When we look at those three aspects of universities, covid-19 pushed every university to shift to online teaching/learning environment, though “online learning” was not a new idea.

We, as Bilkent University, have experienced this change through the above three aspects. What I will share with you here is the experience of the “Senior Project” course. It was the beginning of February when we started our spring semester. Senior students chose their topics for research to work with their instructors. This was when covid-19 was only in China and Turkey did not have a single case. However, a group of students came to my office for Senior Project and we started talking about China and covid-19. They wanted to conduct a study on the “relationship with China during covid-19”. However, they changed their topic to a more exciting direction, which is “the effects of covid-19 in the hospitality industry” once Turkey started to have cases.

They completed their studies with difficulties; however, they admitted that they learned more than they expected since they were researching the real case as junior researches. That was the best practice for us.

Here, I want to list some of the experiences we had:

1.      Students improved their personal and professional skills. They experienced the covid-19 first hand in that they saw how difficult it was to cope with the everyday consequences of the crisis personally and also to conduct a study and finish it professionally during crisis.

2.      They saw the limitations of a study for example, reaching the participants and interviewing on the phone

3.      They experienced completing the study with only on-line meetings

4.      They had the chance to put their own suggestions in the study from their lived experiences

 

They were nervous before the final zoom presentation meeting since the recording would be watched by more people than their poster presentation at the department. After all, they have done a great job. We are happy to share our modest video with you and I am proud of my students. This might even be the first “student conducted” covid-19 study in Turkey and may be in the world.