ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unexpected dimensions to the process of teaching and learning. Ensuring learning in the online classroom is possible only by giving students immediate feedback on the applicationoriented tasks they have completed. Constructivist learning-based courses like Service-Learning Programs face intense challenges during the pandemic since direct interaction with communities is hindered. In the post-pandemic global environment, resorting to flexible online education with hybrid models is the easiest and the simplest way to gain an undisrupted constructivist learning experience. Constructivist learning demands learners’ active engagement in making meaningful connections between prior knowledge and new knowledge. Flexible online education includes adapting a flexible pedagogy on the online platform by providing the teachers and learners with choices of time, location, resources, instructional approaches, and 182learning activities. The customized online teaching and learning experiences suit the learners’ needs, abilities, and interests in the post-pandemic learning and development scenario. Various strategies like tutorials, discussions, seminars, debates, independent study, and educational gamification enhance the learning activities. Open educational resources (OER) provide flexibility in using learning resources since they permit the educator to use and adapt a given OER content that caters to the particular learning context. As an educational technology, a learning management system (LMS) functions as a vast repository of e-content, and it also tracks the information regarding the teaching and learning activities. Flexible modes of continuous assessment give the students some control over their learning process since they can submit their content as video presentations, group assignments, and animations. But in the context of online classes and service-learning programs during a pandemic, the want of face-to-face peer learning and direct community interactions pause a difficult challenge – ensuring that real learning is happening. A flexible online, hybrid model customized for individual learning environments will promote continuous constructivist learning and develop the participants’ social, collaborative, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills that are of paramount significance in the postpandemic global environment.
