“Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT)” became the key term to describe a temporary technology led response to campus closures. (Hodges et al., 2020). South Africans assumed this would be over in 3 weeks. The shift online was supposed to be a short-term solution for an immediate crisis. But as the pandemic stretch from weeks into months, a critical consensus emerged, among practitioners. A distinction between the intentional design and evidence informed methods of orchestrating teaching with digital technologies and this temporary fix was necessary. ERT became a statement. These choices that were being advocated were not ideal or business as usual. The remote work that we were doing on Zoom (and elsewhere) was in response to an escalating crisis. ERT permitted learning technologists to distinguish between “emergent practices”, which are derived from a complicated situation and “best practice”. It allowed us to adapt to the new landscape, to mitigate risks and commit to working collaboratively on the adjustment of delivery modes, teaching methods and resources as needs became apparent.
The phrase ERT also permitted us to stand back. To set ourselves slightly apart from the rapid and massive move away from the campus and classrooms to PCs, phones and platforms. To remind ourselves that their is a significant body of knowledge about online or distance education that has both a history before the pandemic and would, in the future, be applicable when everything returned back to normal. The term was useful for me because it
- separated my ongoing work in the field of digital education (which includes including e-learning, online learning, blended learning etc) from the immediate crisis of continuity, that I was drawn into because of my professional role and assumed expertise.
- prevented the immediate procurement decisions and choices about providers, platforms and technologies, made to address the COVID related continuity crisis, from stretching further into the future (when we returned back to normal) than necessary
- pre-empted the negative associations generated from this urgent and unplanned use of the internet for continuity purposes in education from being conflated with future digital education decisions
For me, this distinction was important. I wasn’t up to this extraordinary challenge of ERT. This was a global migration, staff development, student support and an instant curricular shift on a scale never seen before. The mechanisms that were available to practitioners were limited. All my efforts were essentially assembled on the fly.
But as ERT dragged on, we found our roles becoming more vague and murky. We got caught up in doing urgent things, being reactive and not intentional. Although we were very busy, we also experienced a sense of limbo. Our usual place was to span boundaries, act as change agents. This rapid move to online platforms and education technology blew past any attempts at change. Without direction, ERT could change the way learning technologists functioned and their operating modes.
the institutional silos and forced its way across the organizational mission.
as we situated ourselves within the organizational response to the pandemic.
Institutions, equipped with network(s) that usually would be used for face-to-face, blended or hybrid classes, utilized their “campus solutions” to address classroom closures and lab lockups. Various platform led teaching strategies emerged. Academics selected tools and services and built a “bare-bones” curriculum using technologies that permitted connectivity, storage and data transfer. Learning technologists would normally play a key role in supporting this solution.
But because of the urgency and inadequate staffing, we all were inevitably drawn in, expected to “take more control of the course design, development, and implementation process” (Hodges et al). The pandemic sparked a flurry of abrupt migration activities. Internal resources and external practitioners, like myself, were called upon to support, what we all thought, would be a short transition. The context meant that there was no opportunity for innovation. The job was to transition and port existing course outlines across to this “campus solution”. We hauled out our skills, taught how to use the built in functionalities and demonstrated examples of platforms, populated with suitable media formats. Academics began to retrofit their class based teaching approach to a screen.
The considerable agility of academics, who mastered the “campus solution”, must be recognized. The non-stop support of learning technologists, who gathered, organized, and distributed resources, designed rapid course development workshops, provided technology advice, and advocated for students also deserves respect (Xie et al, 2021). Bond (2021) lists a number of other phrases that might be used instead of ERT, such as “online learning”; “distance learning”; “emergency remote online learning”; “digital higher education”; “home learning” etc. No matter what the preferred flavour of phrase is, they all have the common purpose of permitting practitioners, such as me, to draw a distinction between good, intentional instructional design or evidence informed methods of orchestrating teaching and what transpired during an emergency.
The pivot’s pace jolted many others in the HEI system. It forced other parties (not students, staff or learning technologists) within and beyond HEIs to absorb a range of unintended consequences. Rapid digitization (converting analog data into digital form) and digitalization (using digital technologies to change a business model) became indistinguishable from each other. A synchronous approach to teaching caught everyone’s attention. Scheduled classes offered a regular and familiar time tabled connection, perhaps a community, a means to encourage resilience (for those who had the means to access the net and the space to study). Information was primarily communicated by a talking head, accompanied by two-dimensional media and tools. A graphical user interface (GUI) mediated mutual conversations and interactions. Campus life became associated with a single modality, the screen, which we were all expected to peer at, usually at the same time.
Commercial platform providers were drawn in, supporting the pivot. Despite our attempts to distance ourselves from commercial technology and corporate platforms, many ended up addressing ERT need with this technology stack (Teras, 2020). I don’t think corporate’s saw their work as an emergency and temporary response. Rather, this was a market opportunity for their proprietary products and services. Under normal circumstances, we would have been aware of access barriers, the notice the voids in student data, and acknowledge that there were a multitude of on the ground realities that we were unaware of. Stuck at home behind a computer, we were less able to address persistent rural-urban divides or how harms were being exacerbated by technology in COVID-disrupted homes across the country. As the pandemic wore on, their position in ERT became entrenched. We failed to listen to those who had concerns about our technology choices, its use in practice, the many ethical questions and risks associated with the rapid and widespread application.
Its impossible to evaluate the effects of ERT and its disruption to everyone’s lives. We all found ourselves unexpectedly struggling to stay afloat in the delivery deep end. It is however possible to ask, how well I, as a practitioner, was able to maintain the intended education continuity.
I have collected my observations and experiences into a narrative written after Zoom became the platform of the pandemic. My piece is about conference platforms, webinars and online practice within in the time of ERT. I’m going to confine my writing to a post-graduate setting where I was working. I’d like to question my own digital education practices. To engage in some form of inner dialogue. To understand how “instructional designers” or “learning technologists” like me could be both trauma aware within the current moment, and contribute towards equity, so that the work does not only benefit the “ideal student”. I’m intending to take a critical gaze as my own practices will also courageous in challenging the ‘solutionism’ that accompanied ERT. I’m hoping that my reflections on the experience will allow me to find ways to feed forward methods or approaches that might assist with the design of future technology mediated experiences. And perhaps offer a commentary about the capacity of practitioners, like myself, to address change at scale and to design (at least hypothetically) an alternative that is not just instrumental and led by a pandemic pedagogy.
During the pandemic, I’ve witnessed ingenuity, co-operation and resolve from teachers, academics, students and pupils, who have rapidly shifted their tried and tested face to face teaching and learning practices across to a remote environment . And I’ve also seen how utterly unprepared a HEI can be for any online education. How intuitions often pay lip service to efforts to address inequalities and how a mindset shift is necessary to support digital education. On the one hand, this is the old story about helping academics to become familiar with the affordances of conferencing platforms and comfortable with its use. On the other hand, this is also my thoughts about the ongoing anxiety, stress and trauma of rapid and unexpected change. With many stumbling about, doing herculean work in complex conditions that felt unpredictable and emergent.
Teaching was reengineered during ERT. But the campus solutions also paradoxically exacerbated uncertainty. As time passed, ignored or buried inequalities became more visible with the dearth of meaningful interactions or fruitful engagements. As digitialization continued, a distinctive “pandemic pedagogy” emerged (Williamson, 2021) This pedagogy often had a didactic format, where the lecturer decides on content, organizes it and delivers it to the student, via technology (Bates, 2022). Classes, on these platforms, were described as “exhausting “ or “alienating” for both academics and students.
I do not want to romanticize digital education, prior to 2020. Before the pandemic, classroom interactions (on campus) were interpersonal, visible, facilitated and managed by tutors, academics, peers – those who were assigned particular roles . Devices, networked services and technology infrastructure within HEIs offered a hidden layer of connections. Platforms were concealed, acting as an alternative library, a repository for storing content or deployed as an electronic notice board, delivering pertinent information. Software seemed a neutral tool, available to be used if needed. Students were assumed to be familiar with the in and out of the digital medium, their skill sets presumed to be innate. Commercial providers were called in, where necessary, to pull these parts together.
Under ERT, the campus’s digital layer emerged, far more visible than ever before. Platforms, at one time an unfamiliar space, with occasional visits, were foreground. Students and teachers interactions could only be mediated. The most prominent tools teaching students were those which supported real time interactions during live online classes. Technology had already begun to shape both the ways in which campus is structured and engagement (in and out of classes) is managed, but misplaced sedentarist practices migrated online during ERT. With ERT, campus became the complimentary or imagined space and the digital layer was dominant, with the screen becoming infused into everyday academic activity .
Pre-pandemic, HEI were often called upon to integrate digital technologies, to develop ICT competencies, collaborate online and offer students flexibility or expanded opportunity. Those who used technology, no matter what shape or format, were depicted as “innovative”, for contributing towards extending educational practices.
During the pandemic, online learning and ERT have been conflated. Educators efforts to teach on platforms were described as “thin pedagogical gruel” (Laporte, C. 2020). In other institutions, online learning was labelled as a threat to the entire residential learning model. Digital had already played a part in making the “university” “simultaneously real and imagined, absent and present. Online offered a ‘constancy’ which was knowingly ambiguous, but nonetheless deeply significant” (Bayne et al.2014, quoted by Gourlay, 2021). As the pandemic word on, educators had to chose between
- isomorphism – conform and comply to centralized expectations and create a comparable educational equivalent where you teach from behind the screen.
- compromise – decentralize common norms, prioritize dialogue and wellness during the traumatic experience, offer choices and teach through screen or
- defiance – subvert institutional expectations and platform norms and work in parallel, teach beyond the screen
ERT and my instance on using it had another unanticipated side effect. My insistence on the term meant that painted myself into opposite corners. Was ERT an easy and obvious cop-out to anticipate a problematic future when campus was hollowed out. ERT fails to acknowledge is that practitioners cannot do it all. Did we remove ourselves from those at the coalface, showing courage, resourcefulness and resilience. Could we have marshalled our capabilities and become embedded among decision makers at all levels? I’ve been wondering if anything was accomplished by attempting to avoid a conflation of these two concepts “Emergency Remote Teach” and “Digital Education”. Wondering if our insistence on the designation ERT has also been used to draw a distinction between “us” and “them”. Us – the critical users who labelled this time ERT. Them – those from within and without HEI’s who developed pandemic pedagogies on top of the campus solution.
Its also easy to over-generalize about institutional unreadiness for digital education during the pandemic. To complain and lay the blame on a range of different parties for poor choices about digital teaching. Yes, campus shutdowns were a catastrophe. ERT wasn’t the ideal. But I don’t only want to limit negative experiences with Zoom or uncertainty about how to how to address the common challenges with digital as a peculiar feature of the pandemic. Despite what the hype says, “doing” things online can’t be separated from the ongoing and historical stagnation in education quality and systemic decline, and how these circumstances have affected institutional readiness.
I want to take hope from the people who did heroic work in keeping the academic project alive for the past two years. Despite all the stress and trauma, the capabilities (no matter how uneven) of lecturers to shift their practices to another medium when circumstances demanded change is to be celebrated. Despite all the stress and trauma, the inexperience with digital networked media, the ability to shift teaching practices from one modality to another (working in exceptionally difficult circumstances) should be be recognized.
I’d like to take a step back from these hasty measures and the unreal moments that followed. To go beyond the obvious pain points that accompanied the pivot and were amplified by the many gaps and shortcomings when physical and in-person, face-to-face teaching became impossible. My approach will be to interweave my personal experience as an ed techie with critical scrutiny of my practice. I’ll attempt to act as a reflective practitioner, willing to examine my assumptions and approaches. By doing so, I hope to turn my own tacit experiences and iterative processes into practical knowledge that might contribute towards conversations with other third-space professionals.[GU1] Ultimately, I also remain a pragmatic ed techie, and so while the chapter contains my critiques of pandemic pedagogies, it also catalogues the small manageable possibilities for improving webinar pedagogy. So while recognizing the complex daily challenges facing lecturers and being cogniscent and aware of the inequalities that affect student choices, I would also like to share these resources openly in an attempt to share my practices and perhaps to prompt small changes. And look at the workload ramifications for me, as a practitioner who works professionally in this space. I’m hoping that this will be helpful for those who identify with my position and find themselves burdened by the knowledge of appropriate use and the required ongoing labour and effort that was necessary to achieve these ends.
Up Next: The Webinar
This is a living document. It is an open excerpt from a incomplete chapter that I am writing entitled “Designing the Webinar”.
I’m exploring how conferencing technology, that became ubiquitous during ERT, has shaped our provision. It’s about how (with hindsight) might we take on the challenge of instructional design and enacting a suitable teaching methodology.
Bond et al. (2021) Emergency remote teaching in higher education. Int J Educ Technol High Educ https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-021-00282-x
Hodges et al. (2020). The difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning, Educause Review, 27
Teräs et al. (2020) Post-Covid-19 Education and Education Technology ‘Solutionism’: a Seller’s Market. Postdigital Science and Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00164-x
Xie, J., A, G., & Rice, M. F. (2021). Instructional designers’ roles in emergency remote teaching during COVID-19. Distance Education, 42(1), 70–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1869526