UG lecturer gets Elsevier ATLAS Award for COVID-inspired article

Mar 18, 2021 News

Lecturer at the University of Guyana’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty of Education and Humanities, Mrs. Temitayo Deborah Oyedotun.

Kaieteur News – Mrs. Temitayo Deborah Oyedotun, a lecturer attached to the University of Guyana (UG), has surfaced among 1,000 other individuals, winning the Elsevier ATLAS award for her article ‘Sudden change of pedagogy in education driven by COVID-19 perspectives and evaluation from a developing country.’ Elsevier is an analytics and information company based in the Netherlands that also specializes in scientific, technical, and medical content.
Her article sought to highlight the methods of teaching undertaken as a result of COVID-19, with the perspectives from Guyana, a developing country. Oyedotun, who lectures at UG’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty of Education and Humanities, is the second person in South America, and the first person in Guyana, to have won the award since it began in 2015.
In a press statement released by UG, the lecturer was quoted as saying, “I am happy to have been considered for this award. I only thought of documenting what I observed, and I am happy that most of what I wrote as challenges when we were migrating online have been addressed by the University.”
She went on to say that in writing the article she hoped Guyana’s experience as documented and recognized would serve as a guide to other developing countries. The press statement further stated that in December 2020, Oyedotun’s article was nominated among the 10 shortlisted and following that she was selected as the winner of the award. Her win was determined by an external Advisory Board comprising individuals from international non-profit organizations (NGOs). These organizations include the Ban Ki-Moon Centre for Global Citizens; Bioversity International, Epicentre (MSF); Health and Global Policy Institute; International Training and Outreach Centre in Africa (ITOCA); University of California, Berkeley (Centre for Effective Global Action) and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP).
The NGOs selected a single ATLAS article based on one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals from published research from Elsevier’s 3,800 journals on “ScienceDirect.” The panellists reviewed the article’s contribution to science and society and analysed the societal impacts. Oyedotun’s article was selected around the “Sustainable Developmental Goal 4,” which is Quality Education.
Atlas’ Associate Publisher and Programme Manager, V. Prade López congratulated Oyedotun and thanked her for her contribution to education. He also revealed that Elsevier would like to hold a virtual ceremony of the award in the near future instead of the usual in-person ceremony due to the COVID-19 restrictions. Elsevier has also commissioned a journalist to interview the lecturer and explain the article to wider audiences.
UG’s statement noted that the interview of Oyedotun and Lucy Goodchild van Hilten was recently conducted and will be published in Elsevier ATLAS soon.
“This is a great achievement, not only for Mrs. Temitayo Oyedotun, but also for the Faculty of Education and Humanities, the University of Guyana and the leadership of the University who proactively took some radical actions that ensured the successful transition from traditional teaching to virtual classroom engagement suddenly,” UG noted in its release.
UG further stated that the article documented the sudden change COVID-19 brought, the actions that were taken by the University, the challenges of the change as well as the benefits derived from that transition.
UG’s Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Paloma Mohamed, and the senior administration have also extended congratulations to the lecturer and have encouraged her to continue her excellence in academic writing amongst its faculty.

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