COVID-19 has had a profound influence on the conduct of teaching and learning in higher education. Almost everywhere a sudden shift occurred as educators transitioned courses from mainly face-to-face teaching and learning to emergency remote instruction, mostly conducted online. While details varied for individual faculty members, institutions, and countries, all confronted new challenges. We examine the immediate effects of COVID-19 on teaching and learning in higher education. Our results are based on a sample of 309 courses, and the academic staff who taught them, at eight colleges and universities varying in size and context across four continents. We document first how institutions, and their instructors, varied in their capacity for dealing with the rapidity of the COVID-19 teaching and learning pivot. We further demonstrate that the suddenness of the pandemic's onset, and the quick response this demanded of instructors, meant that there was little systematic patterning in how academic staff were able to adapt -save for nimbleness. Rapidity of response meant differences were far more idiosyncratic than they were systematic, at least with respect to how individual faculty responded.
This research project investigated how openness and sharing of knowledge are manifested through scholarly blogging. We aimed to identify the academics' and researchers' motivations for starting a blog; the contribution of blogging to their personal and professional development; and any challenges. Twenty-six participants were recruited. A pre-interview questionnaire was first emailed to the participants to collect background information. An initial unstructured interview was conducted by email, followed by a synchronous semi-structured interview. Textual and visual extracts of blog content were also collected. The datasets were analysed using different techniques. The findings revealed varied reasons for blogging. Some academics/researchers began a blog for its accessibility to self and others. Blogging aided the academics' and researchers' personal and professional development in several ways. Bloggers can quickly reach a wider audience compared to other forms of academic publishing. Among the challenges, there were concerns over validity of online content. Based on previous scholarship models and on our findings, we have derived an empirically grounded framework of blog use in academia and research. The framework describes how characteristics of digital scholarship such as openness and sharing are manifested through blogging. The framework can be used to guide academics and researchers who are interested in taking up blogging as a scholarly practice.
From a design perspective, this paper offers a response to the impact, value, and application of a manuscript published by Philipsen et al. (Improving teacher professional development for online and blended learning: A systematic meta-aggregative review. Educational Technology and Research Development, 67, 1145–1174. 10.1007/s11423-019-09645-8, 2019). Philipsen et al. (2019) reviewed what constitutes an effective teacher professional development program (TPD) for online and blended learning (OBL), with our response focusing on its value and application in light of an emergency shift to digital to address a global pandemic. This paper also proceeds to examine limitations in previous research into the subject and future research opportunities to investigate important components that inform the design of a resilient and scalable TPD for OBL.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.