COVID-19 and digital disruption in UK universities: afflictions and affordances of emergency online migration

Abstract

COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey of n = 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respondents report an abundance of what we call 'afflictions' exacted upon their role as educators and in far fewer yet no less visible ways 'affordances' derived from their rapid transition to online provision and early 'entry-level' use of digital pedagogies. Overall, they suggest that online migration is engendering significant dysfunctionality and disturbance to their pedagogical roles and their personal lives. They also signpost online migration as a major challenge for student recruitment, market sustainability, an academic labour-market, and local economies.

The triple-edged sword of COVID-19: understanding the use of digital technologies and the impact of productive, disruptive, and destructive nature of the pandemic

“…From the viewpoint of Covid-19's disruptive nature, its impact has compelled rapid transformation in business processes and operational practices, e.g., the use of digital communication platforms (i.e. Zoom or MS Teams) and digital technologies for teaching and learning has now significantly grown in speed and scale, as compared to the glacial implementation during the pre-Covid-19 era (Bartik et al, 2020a;Watermeyer et al, 2020). According to Kamal and Choudrie (2020), prior to this pandemic, digitalization (or online collaboration) was being encouraged, but now, no more reinforcement is needed.…”

Italian University Museums at Time of Covid-19 Lockdown: How to Restore a “Sense of Normalcy”

“…Recent studies have examined the impact of the COVID-19 emergency in universities, particularly on teaching, which is the most affected by the precautionary measures imposed by the governments of the States most affected by the pandemic. Precisely, the research carried out by Watermeyer et al (2020) in the Universities of the United Kingdom showed a dual reaction to the online migration by the academic body: "a ictions" for the competitiveness, sustainability within a global student market and, to a lesser extent, "affordances" in terms of accelerated pedagogical modernization on the level of social connectivity and inclusivity. The same study suggests extending the observation to other university contexts at an international level, as well as enlarging the object of research on the pedagogical dimension of technology (Watermeyer et al, 2020).…”

“…Nevertheless, the resilience notion has been conjugated mainly at the individual level to explain students withdrawal or retention (Cotton et al, 2017;Walker et al, 2006;Wellington et al, 2005). At the same time, the current COVID-19 pandemic has been emerging as a serious external disturbance that has hit HE organizations for their whole set of services -encompassing the Third Mission -thus stimulating a forthcoming debate on their responses in this respect (Watermeyer et al, 2020).…”

“…Given the pandemic impact on universities and places of culture, addressing that literature gap is of great interest for both academics and practitioners. Scholars have been concerned on understanding of how the pandemic has impacted the models of Higher Education (HE henceforth) management and university engagement in the face of anti-COVID measures that have changed users' habits, imposing new forms of academic and cultural learning (Agostino et al, 2020;Watermeyer et al, 2020). Those contributions provide insights for extending knowledge on what happened during the lockdown in the various contexts to compare experiences of resilience and forecast scenarios.…”

When masses meet markets: credentialism and commodification in twenty-first century Higher Education

“…The intensification of performance demands on universities as players within an aggressively competitive, diversified and globally sprawling HE marketplacespecifically in relation to attracting and retaining students; in many sectors as high-paying customers has caused to reset the parameters of pedagogical praxis and alter expectations of academics as frontline educational providers. There is perhaps no greater evidence of the hold of consumer-demands over higher education pedagogy than what has been revealed through the COVID-19 pandemic, and widespread concerns that the physical closure of universities and a transition from face-to-face to online learning, teaching and assessment will discourage new applicants to universities and severely diminish revenue generated through tuition (Watermeyer, Crick, Knight, & Goodall, 2020).…”