Personas Yvonne

Education and experience

Degree-educated with a Master's degree in Slavic languages and literature from Moscow State Linguistic University and University of Constance, Germany and an Executive MBA from University of St. Gallen in 2010.

Takes occasional short courses as opportunities arise. Recent courses include LMS "Designing your course" and new HR Tools.

25 years teaching Slavic languages with emphasis on Russian, with the first 5 years at Moscow State Linguistic University as a Teaching Assistant. After that for 5 years at the Volkshochschule Konstanz, Germany (Community College) as a tutor and at the University of Constance Slavic language department as a lecturer. The past 10 years as a senior lecturer and currently Executive Director at the University of St. Gallen Language Centre. He is also a visiting lecturer at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UK.

He speaks six languages fluently: Russian, Polish, Czech, German, English and French.

Education and experience

Currently is in her 2nd year LLB (4th semester), plans to finish her Bachelor and then to do an internship at a law firm for a year, later her Master's degree. In her family, education is valued highly and Weiya had to learn instruments or ballet dancing from a young age. The pressure is that she will later pursue a legal career in Switzerland. With an Asian background, it is not easy to be accepted in these very traditional professions with old-established structures and networks.

Role and responsibilities

Designs and delivers Slavic language courses at University of St.Gallen. Overall running of the Language Centre and responsible for all language staff. Also holds open lectures during the semester on Russian history and contemporary literature. He is a government advisor and writes articles for national broadsheets and opinion pieces on Russian affairs. He has not delivered yet online teaching, only face-to-face modus. His new responsibilities, according to the university's response to Covid-19, include to deliver his teaching via Zoom or Canvas Conferences, both web conferencing tools, also set-up assignments and quizzes via Canvas and accept and grade online submissions, and offer virtual Q&A and drop-in sessions to his students.

Role and responsibilities

Full-time student at the University of St. Gallen. She also works at the Salsa-Club some evenings and weekends. She looks after a horse for a friend 2-3x a week. She also is a student advisor in the Students' Union Team. She feels the pressure of getting into the legal profession and needs to work double hard than her fellow students to be at the top of class. To get internships is highly selective and even her Swiss grandfather is a highly-esteemed member of the Swiss Federal Council is helpful, but as a woman and mixed race, she knows she needs to fight hard to get up to the top.

Technical skills

Aleksander has used exam software in the past, but usually his approach is face-to-face teaching and using tangible resources for his courses, like articles from print journals and books. He is doing okay with office and general university applications. He is not into web 2.0 technologies such as blogging and social networking and eyes smartphones with suspicion, still has a Nokia 3310 TA-1036 'button' phone, although he uses his office computer for work and to access current news websites and owns an iPad.

The new learning management system gave him some headache, when he had to start using it in a blended learning approach and needed to design new learning activities, assignments and quizzes online.

He is quite lost now, having used Zoom in the past, but now to set-up and deliver his lectures via the web conferencing tools and also make sure the students are informed about it and later that the recordings are accessible to all in the course, is a different matter. He knows the people from the eLearning helpdesk well and can rely on their expertise, but some aspects of his course he cannot replicate online. He has to adapt those, was their advice. He finds it incredulous that these state-of-the-art tools are not able to do what he thinks is a crucial part of his course, tried and tested for many years.

Technical skills

As most of her age, Weiya is good with using technology. She regularly posts her photos on her Instagram account. She currently has 20'000 followers.

She likes to keep up to date what is happening through social media and online news sites. She has state-of-the-art smart phone, iPad, laptop and uses Zoom, Discord, Whatsapp and other apps to keep in touch with her groups and friends. Using the new LMS, she found accessible and easy to use. Some of her lecturers though are not tech-savvy and their course designs were very hard to follow, because they either said they had put it up, but forgot to publish or they just dumped everything under Modules without any structure or meaningful labelling/file names. It took a lot of time to figure out which file they were referring to. She sat on the LMS focus group and gave the SU's feedback and it was used to provide better training workshops to the tutors.

Motivation and desires

Aleksander is aware that his dismay of new educational technologies is falling short of the expectations of his students and his staff at the Language Centre. He knows that he needs to make himself familiar with new tools and make use of technology to move on with times, but he is apprehensive about it. He decides for now to upload all weekly material on the LMS and sets-up a discussion forum, but has not yet started to set-up his online lectures. He needs to move faster, as also colleagues come to him and ask for advice how to set-up their own courses and are clearly frustrated that he cannot advise them.

Motivation and desires

Weiya feels the university is getting better by introducing a new LMS, but usually teaching is on-campus, which she enjoys as she sees her friends. Sometimes she misses classes, when she worked all weekend and would love if recordings of the lectures were provided online to watch it when she has time. She is happy to submit her papers online, but online exams are different matter and she prefers to write them on-campus. She is actively campaigning online for on-campus exams.

Some university programmes used a lockdown browser and monitoring tools (Respondus) in the home setting, this was done in a pilot study to see if they could roll-it out for all students. Students needed to use their own devices and set it up. They felt the responsibility that comes with it, lays too much pressure on the students' side. Also they felt that the monitoring tool (it records the student during the exam) can be undermined, so savvy students can cheat. So in their view, it is not an equal and fair examination process.

She campaigns online by using the sit-in strategy, however, as it is lockdown, she set up an online campaign that everyone uses their home to sit-in and posts pictures with slogans, all students can join via Zoom. They also distributed it via their SU-homepage, Jodel (an anonymous chat platform that is used by a lot of students and closely followed by the university for picking up on issues and trends amongst students), and other social media channels. For this semester, they campaign for the university to let students write their exams as usual on-campus with social distancing in place. If not possible, to give students an overall report that consists of an average grade for the past year's coursework without exams. This happened to A-level students in secondary schools. They get an overall report and the universities need to accept it. Something similar she hopes could help them to still get the internship.

Goals and expectations

Short-term: With Covid-19 scenario, he needs to make himself familiar in using new technology with little or no prior knowledge/experience. He needs to lead the way for his staff and students.

Long-term: To professionalise his practice around educational technology and to understand and integrate its possibilities better into his teaching practices.

Goals and expections

Short-term: With Covid-19 scenario, she is concerned that the university can't deliver teaching online. She is happy to use web conferencing or anything to help her continuing her studies. Now can't work in her part-time job and has plenty of time to work on her studies.

Long-term: She definitely wants to finish her studies as planned and no delay. However, the situation makes it difficult to plan for her internship. She is happy to stay in touch with prospective law firms through email. Also she hopes with the online campaigning she can get still her internship.

Obstacles to their success

Can be impatient if he doesn't understand something quickly and expects other people to sort problems with the technology out for him. In that scenario, he needs a lot of individual support and advice from support staff. Especially, in a time where support is inundated by support requests, this can be challenging for him and for the support. Will he overcome this challenge and deliver his teaching online?

Obstacles to their success

She has no trust that the university can implement a fair process for online exams, as the university has always maintained a face-to-face teaching stance and lecturers are not encouraged to using lockdown browser and proctoring tools for their exams. Therefore, there is a great insecurity amongst teaching staff to implement online exam and a great distrust amongst students that it will be a fair process. The Swiss Federal Council has not yet made any decision to ease lockdown and it the window of opportunity is closing.

Unique assets

He is persistent if he wants to achieve and is convinced of the value of something, even if it is hard work and it does not come easy to him. He has humour.

Unique assets

She is good at getting other people convinced of causes that are important to her. This helps her in her role as student advisor at the Students' Union Team.