Recent announcements by governments emphasize that institutions of higher education should plan a familiar return to campuses over the next month.
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Their recommendations call for a return to normal with an eye on backup plans and transitions.
But the research my colleagues and I have done suggests that
faculty and students hope for better futures. They don’t want “a return to
normal”.
Over the last year and a half, my colleagues and I have
interviewed faculty and sifted through surveys gathering the opinions of nearly
150,000 students.
We have also surveyed faculty and administrators multiple
times about their experiences with teaching and learning during the
pandemic.
Most recently, we have returned to interviewing faculty to learn more about
their hopes and fears.
We heard that many students and colleagues are anxious,
tired, and disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
Students and faculty
recognize that the pre-pandemic “normal” wasn’t optimal. It was simply the
status quo, the default that students and faculty were living with.
What faculty and students hope for is that their colleges,
universities, and governments support them as they seek to carry forward what
they learned and experienced during the pandemic.
They are hoping the lessons
of the pandemic aren’t fleeting. Some of these lessons appear below.
1. Teaching and learning innovation
Regardless of how a course is delivered — online, in-person,
or in a hybrid fashion — faculty noted that they hoped to carry forward various
teaching and learning innovations.
Such innovations include things like the ability to invite
other experts to their courses for virtual appearances as lecturers or
discussions with students.
Others include continuing to develop new assessment
practices, in favor of more frequent and authentic evaluations of learning
rather than tests.
2. Greater support
Faculty and students want greater support from their
institutions and from government that will help them maintain physical and
mental health during and after the pandemic.
Both students and faculty noted that commitments for
predictable and consistent funding can alleviate concerns and anxieties about
the challenges that they foresee.
To put this into perspective, a survey of
approximately 100,000 students from May 2020 identified that 67 per cent of
respondents “were very or extremely concerned about having no job prospects in
the near future.”
Faculty expressed anxiety about workload, program cuts, and
precarious academic work, hoping that they can be involved in discussions about
these issues and about campus safety.
3. Flexibility
One idea that emerged consistently in both our work and the work
of other researchers is the value that flexibility affords students and
faculty.
Students, for instance, appreciated flexibility in deadlines, when
they were facing uncertainties in their lives outside their studies.
Faculty whose institutions supported them in working
remotely expressed gratefulness for such flexibility.
Some also appreciated
being able to approach their courses with flexible designs that supported
student learning (for example, shifting lectures to pre-recorded sessions and
using real-time meetings for workshops).
Flexible approaches to teaching and
learning will likely help colleges and universities grapple with future local
and global threats like climate change.
4. Trust and compassion
While education is an endeavor that involves establishing
standards of learning and evaluation, it is also one that involves humans, with
all of life’s unpredictability and variation.
In approaching education with a
humanizing lens, faculty and students hope that institutions and governments do
not lose sight of the trust and compassion that was extended to them during the
pandemic.
In practical terms, trust and compassion may translate to
rethinking assessment practices that are grounded on mistrust, such as using
surveillance technologies for online exams.
It may mean trusting faculty to
determine the best assessments for their courses. For example, a faculty member
told us they felt what’s needed is “culture shift” towards trusting students,
away from an “adversarial kind of relationship” that assumes everyone’s
cheating.
5. Focus on equity
The pandemic has brought to light the many gaps that
students of varied socio-economic and demographic backgrounds face, such as
inequitable access to technology and private study spaces, as well as inequities
in having their basic needs met.
Students and faculty are hopeful that institutions and
governments continue to take action on addressing inequities.
Some ideas
offered include the purposeful design of courses to accommodate different
people’s needs, and institutional supports to enable broader access to programs
and resources.
Rather than regressing “back to normal,” what our research
highlights is how students and faculty hope for a better future — better than
the one dominated by COVID-19, and better than the status quo that existed
prior.
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