Ten simple rules for supporting a temporary online pivot in higher education

Abstract

As continued COVID-19 disruption looks likely across the world, perhaps until 2021, contingency plans are evolving in case of further disruption in the 2020-2021 academic year. This includes delivering face-to-face programs fully online for at least part of the upcoming academic year for new and continuing cohorts. This temporary pivot will necessitate distance teaching and learning across almost every conceivable pedagogy, from fundamental degrees to professionally accredited ones. Each institution, program, and course will have its own myriad of individualized needs; however, there is a common question that unites us all: how do we provide teaching and assessment to students in a manner that is accessible, fair, equitable, and provides the best learning whilst acknowledging the temporary nature of the pivot? No "one size fits all" solution exists, and many of the choices that need to be made will be far from simple; however, this paper provides a starting point and basic principles to facilitate discussions taking place around the globe by balancing what we know from the pedagogy of online learning with the practicalities imposed by this crisis and any future crises.

‘Prescription’ for Purposeful Adaptation of Professionalism-and-Ethics Teaching Strategies for Remote Delivery

“…Timeliness of P&E activity completion, and the standard of student assignments submitted, are in line with previous cohorts. Notwithstanding that set-up time for activities delivered online can be time-consuming [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ] total teaching time did not increase for year 1 students, i.e., as teaching was to the full rather than half-class, this balanced the additional time the teacher was online prior to and after scheduled sessions. Additional teaching time for year 5 was necessitated by the need to support guest speakers, but not for the two workshops directly taught by the teacher.…”

“…Bearing in mind that the aim in 2020 was to support a ‘ temporary online pivot ’ [ 27 ] (p. 1), the literature highlights that temporary remote online teaching is not the same as a specialised online course and therefore evidence from online teaching literature might not directly apply [ 27 ]. Nonetheless, review of online teaching literature does ground thinking in an evidence base that underpins instructional strategies in the remote context, and reinforces commonly agreed elements of good teaching practice in all teaching environments.…”

“…The importance of planned sequencing of activities and of considering the layout of materials in a remote teaching context is prioritised in design for online delivery [ 28 ]. Linear date-order sequencing of resources and activities on a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), rather than arranging by Topic, has been identified as more learner-friendly in the adaptation of teaching to the remote online teaching environment [ 27 , 28 ]. Effective online teaching depends on appropriate communication strategies including multiple avenues for synchronous and asynchronous communication, clear sign-posting to content and activities, and monitoring and supporting engagement.…”

The Case for Pragmatic Evidence-Based Higher Education: A Useful Way Forward?

“…There is an abundant evidence-base regarding learning online and at a distance, but much of this was developed to optimize learning under planned circumstances where students could choose to learn online, or in a structured blended way, very different to the one we find ourselves in, late in 2020. A pragmatic application of the existing evidence to the new context can help us with this rapid change, and help us plan for what might become a "new normal" (Nordmann et al, 2020).…”

Lights, camera, active! Appreciation of active learning predicts positive attitudes towards lecture capture

“…Finally, this work, along with the vast majority of lecture capture literature, describes a prepandemic time in higher education. SARS-COV-19 (COVID) has impacted both society at large and the education sector specifically, and this will likely continue in the short term (Nordmann et al, 2020b). The current higher education model has survived many potential technological disruptions, including MOOCs (Dey et al, 2009;Dowell et al, 2017).…”