The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought online education to the forefront of pedagogical discussions. To make this increased interest sustainable in a post-pandemic era, online courses must be built on strong pedagogical foundations. With a long history of pedagogic research, there are many principles, frameworks, and models available to help teachers in doing so. These models cover different teaching perspectives, such as constructive alignment, feedback, and the learning environment. In this paper, we discuss how we designed and implemented our online Natural Language Processing (NLP) course following constructive alignment and adhering to the pedagogical principles of LTU. By examining our course and analyzing student evaluation forms, we show that we have met our goal and successfully delivered the course. Furthermore, we discuss the additional benefits resulting from the current mode of delivery, including the increased reusability of course content and increased potential for collaboration between universities. Lastly, we also discuss where we can and will further improve the current course design.

Hate speech detection on social media platforms is crucial as it helps to avoid severe situations, and severe harm to marginalized people and groups. The application of Natural Language Processing(NLP) and Deep Learning has garnered encouraging results in the task of hate speech detection. The expression of hate, however is varied and ever evolving. Thus, it is important for better detection systems to adapt to this variance. Because of this, researchers keep on collecting data and regularly come up with hate speech detection competitions. In this paper, we discuss our entry to one such competition, namely the English version of sub-task A for the OffensEval competition. Our contribution can be perceived through our results, which were first a F1-score of 0.9089, and with further refinements described here climb up to0.9166. It serves to give more support to our hypothesis that one of the variants of BERT (Devlin et al., 2018), namely RoBERTa can successfully differentiate between offensive and not-offensive tweets, given some preprocessing steps (also outlined here).