Back to what? What STEM and Health teaching academics learnt from COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about an era of innovation in higher education that was extraordinary both in its scale and suddenness. Our study, carried out in STEM and Health disciplines of a multicampus Victorian university, asked the teaching academics in the eye of this storm to reflect on what they had learnt from this experience. In particular, we asked what had worked, what had not worked, what they planned to retain in their teaching post-COVID-19, and what they would be relieved to discard. Above all, we found the experience of COVID-19 learning and teaching to be highly variegated. Academics reported some online activities which were predominantly successful, others which were predominantly unsuccessful, and still others for which the experience was quite different, depending on the context. Our data suggest that future learning and teaching policy should allow for discipline and cohort nuances and cannot be one-size-fits-all.

Who wants to be a teaching innovator?

“…2. Recognise that one size does not fit all when it comes to teaching innovation, and that there may be valid discipline-specific reasons for varying levels of adoption (Bridge et al, 2021;Tierney & Lanford, 2016). 3.…”

‘There’s a pandemic coming, get yourselves some tablets’: Lessons from the pandemic on a community of practice approach to learning technology diffusion

“…The above quote from one of the interviewees for this study underscores the serendipity of the decision in our faculty to invest in a large library of tablet computers mid-2019. For many academics these devices considerably eased the difficulty of the sudden transition to online teaching brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic (Bridge et al, 2021).…”