Moving MSc Software Development course online: adaptation of the large class module to a distance learning model

The Covid-19 pandemic brought dramatic changes to higher education settings, particularly for curriculum delivery, moving quickly to online learning in March 2020, which for many was the first experience of teaching and learning in the virtual environment.This paper discusses the experience of redesigning the MSc Computing Foundations module and adapting it to a distance learning model using both synchronous and asynchronous delivery at the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast in response to the challenges brought to higher education by the pandemic. The module is a fundamental compulsory module with an intake of 100+ students in the part-time class studying the conversional MSc course in Software Development.This paper focuses on the challenges and opportunities faced by large class students during this unprecedented move online, and changes made to the curriculum to facilitate the move to online teaching and learning using the conceptual framework for effective online courses. The paper reflects on student feedback to online educational activities including synchronous and asynchronous content delivery, discussion forums, ungraded formative quizzes, formative and summative assessments delivered online for a postgraduate cohort studying part-time. Sustained level of student engagement was evidenced through statistics collected from the virtual learning environment.This paper further discusses how the above has transformed teaching of the Computing Foundations module for the large cohort, focusing on the student experience only, and reflecting on how these online teaching practices contribute to provision of education with a view what developments became a success and could be turn to advantage and what was not effective and should be eliminated post-pandemic. Adaptation of the Computing Foundation module to the new model of online delivery has been successful in the 2020-2021 academic year, and the module has become a distance module delivered fully online in the 2021-2022 academic year. The transformation has helped to cope with a "new normal" in an increasingly hybrid higher education ecosystem as students’ and educators’ involvement into learning activities continued to be altered in the post-pandemic society.