The Immediate Impact of COVID-19 on Postsecondary Teaching and Learning

Abstract

and colleges worldwide have quickly moved campus-based classes to virtual spaces due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This article explores the impact of this sudden transition of learning and teaching based on experiences and evidence from six institutions across three countries. Our findings suggest that although online and remote learning was a satisfactory experience for some students, various inequities were involved. Many students lacked appropriate devices for practical work and encountered difficulties in securing suitable housing and workspace. Students were stressed, and faculty were, too, especially those in precarious employment. The lack of fieldwork and access to laboratories created special challenges. We are concerned that the lack of hands-on experience could cause a decline in enrollments and the number of majors in geography over the next few years. This issue must be addressed by making introductory courses as engaging as possible. It is too early to determine the extent to which online and remote learning can replace campus-based, face-toface geography education once the pandemic ends, but the new academic year of 2020-2021 will be revealing. Nevertheless, the COVID-19 crisis has revealed preexisting problems and inequalities that will need our collective effort to address, regardless of the pandemic's trajectory.

Evaluation of Service-Learning in Project WeCan under COVID-19 in a Chinese Context

“…This transition meant taking lectures and student activities from face-to-face mode to online teaching and learning. This acculturation of pedagogical modalities at such a large-scale “might have produced the largest unplanned educational experiment ever undertaken” [ 33 ].…”

“…Third, we only sought the views of university and secondary school students who were involved in the Project through self-report. While the use of self-report is widely supported in social science and evaluation research [ 50 ], Day and colleagues [ 33 ] suggested that “well-designed, multi-institutional, quantitative studies with large samples” (p. 10) can shed light on the impacts of remote teaching and learning. As such, future investigations may benefit from a larger, more heterogeneous sample, to include students from a wider range of academic disciplines taking various SL courses and to gather the perceptions of different stakeholders, including principals, teachers, social workers, or parents, regarding participants’ gains and their views for a more holistic picture of e-SL.…”

New norms and opportunities from the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in a higher education setting: perspectives from Universiti Brunei Darussalam

“…There are a few courses that have already provided online lectures, but its ratio to face-to-face learning is still considered low. Nonetheless, moving all the existing courses online in a matter of days is a disruptive shift, in which posed as challenges faced by most faculty members due to the lack of online teaching experience, early preparation or support from educational technology teams (Bao, 2020;Bryson and Andres, 2020;Day et al, 2020;Mseleku, 2020).…”

Four-Year-Old's Online Versus Face-to-Face Word Learning via eBooks

“…This is due to the increased availability of broadband technology and remote learning devices such as iPads or laptops for families of diverse socio-economic status, for whom travel to a university laboratory or access to paid, private pre-schooling is not possible (cf. Day et al, 2021).…”