The health crisis brought by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may have weakened various sectors in the society, but it has also enabled people to be more creative in finding innovative solutions to cope with the challenges it brings.

Cebu Normal University (CNU) Professor Dr. Reynaldo Inocian recently joined the Teaching Model Competition on the Category: Best Innovative Instructional Design Concept (without the use of the Internet) organized by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) Regional Office VII in celebration of the 53rd Founding Anniversary of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Inocian hitched the 1st Prize with his paper design titled, “COVID-19 Instructional Design (CID): A Response to Flexible Learning”. 

“I just thought that why not make an instructional design that is named COVID,” he said about how he came up with his paper design.

The Teaching Model Competition targets student teachers and professional teachers in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to reinforce their dynamism, creativity, and commitment by creating flexible learning models that can be used in the new normal.

Inocian said that he thought about his outputs as the former Director of the Institute for Research in Innovative Instructional Delivery (IRIID) but realized the need to come up with something fitting to the call of the new normal in education and attributed his instructional design to COVID-19 itself. 

He reframed the meaning of COVID-19 to Conditioning, Organizing, Visualizing, Interacting, and Demonstrating with 19 teaching techniques which are clustered in the five steps of his model.

“Contextualizing COVID-19 to an instructional design is intentional, in order to eliminate fear of viral contamination; and accept it as a phenomenal aspect of our world history and culture,” Inocian said. 

“CID encourages educators, learners, parents, and other stakeholders to consider the challenges of the health crisis as opportunities to learn meaningfully and sustainably during school lockdowns and quarantines and embracing [sic] the paradigm of learning in education in the new normal,” he added.

Inocian was awarded last September 3, 2020, via the Zoom platform during the Awarding of Winners as a culminating activity of CHED’s 2020 ASEAN Month Celebration.

Inocian together with the other winners of the said competition will receive a plaque, cash prize, and will enter into an agreement with CHED RO VII to have their winning entry uploaded online as part of the PHL CHED Connect Project, an Open Educational Resources (OER) platform to promote flexible learning in the country. 

The other categories of the Teaching Model Competition also include Best Teaching Model Implementer (Synchronous Approach), Best Teaching Model Implementer (Asynchronous Approach), and Best Innovative Instructional Design Concept (through the use of the Internet).    

The CHED Regional Office VII also held an Essay Writing Competition, Digital Poster-Making Competition, and Digital Short Film Competition which were participated in by different HEI’s in Central Visayas as part of the 2020 ASEAN month celebration. (JDF)