Making Sense of the Response to COVID-19 in Higher Education: A Case Study of Crisis Communication in Two Universities

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought extreme challenges and disruption to higher education, resulting in hurried adoption of online teaching. From the point of view of crisis communication, the COVID-19 pandemic as experienced in HE institutions represents an interesting case, because crisis management and communication were primarily, if not exclusively, directed at internal stakeholders (essentially, students and staff ). We present a case study that compares and contrasts the COVID-related responses of two different universities: the University of Minnesota, in the U.S., and the University of Trieste, in Italy. In particular, we look at the sets of documents issued by the leadership of these universities over a period of 23 months between February 2020 (the start of the health crisis) and December 2021. The analysis of the documents revealed that unexpected spaces of freedom empowered instructors. We identify four discursive traits associated with these spaces: definitional change, code glossing, and the use of engagement markers and permissives. However, this empowerment changed over time, as universities became eager to go back to “normal” and reinstate restrictions from pre-pandemic times.

Emergency Remote Teaching Student Responses to Intensive versus Extensive Course Modalities during the Pandemic

“…The switch to "emergency remote teaching and learning" (e.g., Fragai et al 2020;Gacs, Goertler, and Spasova 2020;Murphy 2020;Celentin et al 2021;Palumbo and Duin 2022) effective from 15 March 2020 at UNIBZ therefore provided an opportunity to experiment with new methodologies and technologies and to explore students' and teachers' attitudes and behaviors toward fully online courses. Our context also provided a unique opportunity to compare online teaching in "intensive" versus "extensive" modalities, which is of particular importance due to the known gap in research on their comparative efficacies for language learning (Gass 2019).…”