The response to COVID-19 has been swift and reaching across all aspects of our work and home lives. As the goal posts moved from supporting students overseas, to supporting those in self-isolation, then to everyone working, teaching and learning from home, it has been a scramble to teach remotely.

A never-ending stream of tweets, articles, blogs, and news has provided inspiration and shared experiences for responding to an unprecedented situation. Through this I have marvelled at the flexibility of our staff and students to wrangle new technologies and shift our on-campus learning to the online space – all achieved with little preparation time and a myriad of conflicting priorities. Moving online hasn’t been seamless and, as the cause of much reflection on content, delivery and student engagement, it has been the catalyst for many opinion pieces. 

Rapid prototyping

One such piece, The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning by Charles Hodges, Stephanie Moore, Barb Lockee, Torrey Trust, and Aaron Bond for the Educause Review, looks at the distinction needed between how we are responding to this crisis compared with the planned and time intensive nature of developing a wholly online subject. The authors propose that we refer to this rapid ideation of online education as ‘emergency remote teaching’ because they believe effective online education can be a wonderful, engaging and formative experience. It can combine flexibility of study, rich collaboration and critical analysis to provide a meaningful, deep engagement with content and peers.

Panic pedagogy

What we are doing right now though is emergency remote teaching. We are not carrying out well planned and crafted educational experiences, and even when we are, we are doing so in the midst of a global pandemic. As Natalie B. Millman argues, this is ‘panic pedagogy’. Milman has taught online through numerous emergencies, even posting to the LMS from her smartphone in her car during a snowstorm blackout, and yet she believes this current crisis is unprecedented in education. Dr Nikki Dabner from Canterbury University also speaks of her experience continuing teaching through the Christchurch earthquake. She shares similar emergency remote teaching advice – which is consistent with what we have seen in the current zeitgeist – and includes the following tips:

  • be flexible with deadlines 
  • communicate often and honestly with your students
  • be considerate of each other’s mental health

The above authors’ advice suggest we need to be clear both with ourselves and with students about the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. Not least because this is, for many students at UTS, their first foray into studying entirely online.

Lessons learned

For every heartwarming narrative of students helping to troubleshoot Zoom issues or being understanding of technical challenges and rapid prototyping of content, there is a disheartening story of Zoom-bombing or students feeling isolated. We need to be honest with our students and ourselves. While we are doing the best we can and often finding creative solutions for difficult problems, this situation is less than ideal, if only due to the uncertain and stressful times we now find ourselves in. 

Once we’re through to the other side, we need students and teachers alike to be able to look back and learn from this period: to reflect on what worked well, where we struggled, and how we can better integrate some of the more effective collaborative technologies into our ongoing teaching. We need to ask what lessons will we take away from this experience to enhance our online learning when we are back to a calmer kind of normal? Through this we can be better prepared for disruptions in the future, whether they be pandemic, fire, weather, or other as yet unknown emergencies.

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