“While Ateneo de Davao has had, for now, to abstain from face to face classes, and face to face mass gatherings of students, it has not metamorphosed into a faceless, feelingless, automaton functioning mechanistically. On the contrary, it continues to be a community of administrators, staff, teachers, students, and learners, still smiling, laughing, weeping, and feeling for one another.”

University President Fr. Joel Tabora, SJ assured the University community during the Orientation of Online Learning this morning that amid the transition to online learning, the University would remain faithful to its pursuit and delivery of truth through online “Pakighinabi sessions, webinars, discussion, and debates and solid academic research.”

“If the Ateneo de Davao wants to be faithful to its University mission to educate in the levels of higher and basic education, it would have to do so online… It was a commitment also motivated by the need to survive in a year of unprecedented disruption institutionally but also personally,” he said.

Admittedly, Fr. Tabora also stated that this commitment had a lot of costs that compel teachers to transcend beyond the traditional face to face medium of instruction.

“It meant relearning how to teach not from the lecture’s podium but from a more empowering role of a mentor, a coach, a learning enabler using a well-thought-out strategy to enable the student or learner to become an independent and self-disciplined learner,” he added.

He also mentioned the University’s efforts to provide enrollees home prepaid wi-fi and publish University primers to clarify challenges and methods of online education.

The University orientation also announced the soon launching of AdDU InfoPro, the official mobile application of the Ateneo de Davao University. It is also the first mobile application officially developed and launched by a higher education unit in Davao.

To strengthen holistic formation, the University will also provide online retreats and recollections, online mass, online social formation services, virtual volunteering, and social advocacy webisodes and promote the habit of meditation for social and spiritual formation.

The orientation ended with the first University mass for this school year.