The Covid-19 pandemic has raised significant challenges for the higher education community worldwide. A particular challenge has been the urgent and unexpected request for previously face-to-face university courses to be taught online. Online teaching and learning imply a certain pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), mainly related to designing and organising for better learning experiences and creating distinctive learning environments, with the help of digital technologies. With this article, we provide some expert insights into this online-learning-related PCK, with the goal of helping non-expert university teachers (i.e. those who have little experience with online learning) to navigate in these challenging times. Our findings point at the design of learning activities with certain characteristics, the combination of three types of presence (social, cognitive and facilitatory) and the need for adapting assessment to the new learning requirements. We end with a reflection on how responding to a crisis (as best we can) may precipitate enhanced teaching and learning practices in the postdigital era.

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There is a growing demand for advice about effective, time efficient ways of using ICT to support student learning in higher education. This paper uses one such area of activity -networked learning -as a context in which to outline a novel approach to educational design. The paper makes two main contributions. It provides a high level view of the educational design problem space. It then introduces the patterns based approach to educational design. While other professional communities, particularly in software engineering, have been developing patterns based approaches to sharing and re-using design experience, this paper goes back to the original conceptions of participatory design that informed Christopher Alexander's early work on patterns and pattern languages. In particular, it makes connections between the technicalities of design and the central place of values. A patterns based approach can help with encoding, sharing and using knowledge for educational design. But it is also a powerful way of connecting educational values and vision to the details of the tasks, tools and resources we offer our students.

Learning through inquiry is a widely advocated pedagogical approach. However, there is currently little systematic knowledge about the practice of inquiry-based learning (IBL) in higher education. This study examined descriptions of learning tasks that were put forward as examples of IBL by 224 university teachers from various disciplines in three Australian universities. Data analysis uncovered the principal forms of IBL, the features of each form, their characteristic educational objectives, and possible disciplinary variations. The findings show that underlying the diversity of language and tasks regarded as IBL there is a limited number of distinct task forms and a broad conception of inquiry that is shared by university teachers. The findings also indicate that IBL is practiced in a wide range of disciplines, in both undergraduate and postgraduate coursework programs, in smaller and larger classes, and in universities which are more and less research intensive.

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