By Urooj Kamran Azmi

Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar cancelled classes on November 17 and 18 to test their virtual learning systems for emergency situations, said VCU-Q Dean Allyson Vanstone.

“Our main work here is our classes – teaching our students,” Vanstone said. “If anything happens (where) people can’t come to work, or school, how can you keep your main operations going?”

The virtual learning system is part of the “business continuity” initiative that the school has established to ensure that students will be able to continue their classes, even if they can’t physically be on campus due to severe weather conditions or any other emergency situation.

This was the first time that this system was implemented within Education City. Most students from other campuses said that their schools were not adopting similar methods.

Robert Vance, director of information technology at Northwestern University in Qatar, said there has never really been a need to implement such a system. He said that NU-Q has the necessary tools that could be used if a crisis situation ever occurred.

“There are no plans to test such a system in the near future,” he said.

For this school-wide initiative, VCU-Q has been using the Google+ platform, a social networking service, since August and “Google hangouts” in classes. Google hangouts allows students to sign in together to one ‘virtual classroom’ where they can exchange documents, share their work and watch their professors conduct lectures through webcam.

According to Vanstone, over the course of the semester, the VCU-Q faculty were given training in “Teaching with Technology” sessions to help them understand how to use different blogs, chats and other ways of communicating with students in case of an emergency situation.

The VCU-Q faculty were told in the beginning of the training sessions that a two-day test would take place in order to check the practicality of this alternative system.

In order to ensure validity of the experiment, the students were informed on the 16th of November, at around 5:30 pm, that the VCU-Q building would be closed for the next two days for all students and teaching faculty, and that classes would be conducted through virtual teaching.

The official message was circulated among the student body via e-mails and text messages. Vanstone also said that social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Viber also played a role in spreading the message unofficially.

The online classes taking place were synchronized with the actual class timings and attendance was also taken based on which students had signed in to the classroom and at what time. Asma Hosna, an interior design Junior at VCU-Q, was very pleased with the experience.

“I always thought it wouldn’t be possible to do something like this,” she said. “(But) technology proved me wrong. It went really well and I really enjoyed doing class from my room under my blanket with a cup of tea.”

On the other hand, VCUQ Sophomore Ayaz Rauf, a major in painting and printmaking, was not as satisfied with the experiment.

“On the first day, the classes seemed very haphazard and I felt as though the English class was only conducted for the sake of having a class,” he said.

His second day of virtual classes wasn’t productive either. The class was only conducted via email and it was difficult to manage a painting class over the Internet because it was a practical class that could only be taken in the university studio, he said.

He also reported that the attendance was very low on the first day and that it declined even further on the second day.