Reflections on UK higher education during the pandemic
Image by Macey11 from Pixabay
As we’re approaching two years since the UK entered the first national lockdown I wanted to reflect on this period in UK higher education. This was the point when the longstanding and predominant teaching and study model of universities was completely and utterly turned on its head and the consequences of this have been playing out ever since.
By the start of the 1st lockdown we entered a period of no more teaching conducted in university buildings for the foreseeable future and a time of uncertainty as to when or whether things might be able to go back to how they were before.
Since that time there’s been so many narratives about how that period has gone and what it means for the future. Some of these are accurate, some of them are simplistic and some of them are…shall we say, somewhat glossed up.
So how might we begin to reflect on the period…
Continuity was a great achievement
Well the first thing to say is that UK universities were able to provide continuity of teaching and study throughout the pandemic. It really is worth stating this clearly upfront as a very notable achievement - because it’s entirely reasonable to think that a major and catastrophic global event like the pandemic, might’ve resulted in a curtailment of teaching and study for a period of time.
In the UK though this wasn’t the case - the combination of the dedication of staff and the enabling technological infrastructure made this possible.
Quite rightly, we’ve heard lots about the efforts of staff to make this possible but one key factor that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves is that the technological infrastructure was largely already in place to enable this move.
Universities already had much of what was needed including virtual learning environments (VLEs), video conferencing software, digital assessment tools et al.
The quality of the teaching and study experience was hugely variable
One of the biggest narratives and debates both at the time and even now is around the quality of the teaching and study experience within universities during this period.
UK university leaders tend to have a very stock line when it comes to quality throughout this period which is essentially that universities provided high-quality teaching throughout which they gushingly attribute to their staff.
Given the government scrutiny around quality and value for money both now and around the time it’s understandable, and it’s worth saying that lots of students did in fact get a good teaching and study experience despite the prevailing circumstances.
However, it’s somewhat naive to suggest that institutions that offer hundreds of modules and programmes all of which were of varying quality pre-pandemic would suddenly offer a uniform high quality experience during a period of disruption and a switch to a form of educational experience so unfamiliar to many.
It shouldn’t be controversial to conclude that there was continuity but the teaching and study experience was hugely variable and in some cases problematic and suboptimal.
Not the right conditions to achieve a consistent high-quality experience
We shouldn’t be surprised about this because quite simply the conditions weren’t in place to offer a consistently high-quality experience. Even if we put aside the huge turmoil we were all individually experiencing - there were many factors meaning that this wouldn’t be achieved.
The biggest factor being that universities had to change from a hugely long standing model of campus-based in-person education which in most cases applied to well over 75% of their education portfolio - to a fundamentally different and evolving one.
There were huge numbers of people who had never done any distance or online teaching, who had never used video conferencing to conduct teaching and who were previously using key enabling technologies like a VLE in the most rudimentary of ways.
Add to this the well documented fact that we have a higher education sector that affords teaching a very low status and has no prerequisite of teacher training and requirement for continuous professional development - all of which are hardly the conditions for consistently high-quality teaching of any mode, never-mind a rapid shift to something unfamiliar.
Lack of time and support
Another two factors were time and support - there simply wasn’t the time for educators to redesign courses so that they were better suited to a different model of teaching and study. So we understandably saw a lot of lifting and shifting.
As well as the lack of time to redesign there was a lack of support. This was manifested in a number of different ways. The first of which is a simple numbers game, if you compare the number of staff members in relevant educational support roles versus the number of people who teach in most universities there’s a huge imbalance.
Whilst wide reach of some form of support was achieved via large synchronous sessions and accompanying web resources this isn’t the same as working closely with a proficient, experienced learning or instructional designer on a fundamental redesign of a course.
Education support professionals struggled too
Another aspect in relation to support which isn’t really spoken about, perhaps for fear of appearing to denigrate the hard work of educational support professionals and units - is that there were a good proportion of those in educational support roles who were as inexperienced when it came to online education as the majority of educators.
It shouldn’t be controversial to say this but it feels like it is. If we consider that the overwhelming majority of courses and programmes offered were centered around on-campus in-person education or what you might call a low-blend or digitally facilitated model then should it surprise us that educational support professionals' primary or perhaps only experience is supporting this model?
I certainly saw learning technologists, education developers etc struggle to get up to speed with online education having not inhabited that space before. This was a largely unspoken challenge of this period.
There was a lack of the right mix of education support role types
Alongside this in many universities the kind of roles that work alongside educators in partnership to design courses were severely lacking in the educational support mix. Learning design and instructional design roles may be more prominent in universities now, but (with the odd exception) they were few and far between before that.
UK higher education culture isn’t really that compatible with a close partnership approach to designing courses and programmes - which is something you only regularly and consistently see in online education.
There’s been too little reflection on the longstanding model of educational support
So you had a mixed picture in terms of support, and I do wonder why more serious questions aren’t being asked about what the educational support model in universities should look like going forward.
What has been hidden by the narrative of educational support staff and centre’s for learning and teaching being fulcrums during this period is any serious reflection on that model. A surge in demand and appreciation due to a unique set of circumstances shouldn’t necessarily be taken as validation but I fear it largely has.
In fact some have really doubled down on the centralised model and sought to swell the ranks, in some cases the lack of a change in culture and approach has simply led to new job roles and titles being created to do old work.
Whatever way you look at it, the pandemic hasn’t really led many UK universities to seriously engage with longstanding questions over the actual effectiveness of this centralised support model to effect change and improvement of the educational experience. We should consider this a missed opportunity to rethink things.
Did UK universities turn to private edtech companies for help?
One really strong narrative which is a little lost now but was prominent at the time, was that universities had some leeway to muddle through to the end of the 19-20s academic year but 20-21s academic year would need to resemble a high-quality online learning experience.
Some commentators at the time reckoned that only 20 UK universities were in a position to do that based mainly on the ratio of online education they were providing relative to on-campus courses and programmes.
So there was a period when discussion turned to the idea that universities might turn to online programme management (OPMs) companies to help them achieve this. In the UK this coincided with a completely calamitous story involving Durham University and the OPM - CEG Digital in which there was much lost in translation that damaged both parties.
This story somewhat contributed to a large amount of noise for a time about OPMs and the dichotomy between external and internal investment. Nevertheless, the biggest lesson of this period was probably that there are a lot of people in UK higher education that don’t seem to know much about what OPMs are and what they do, even in the digital education fraternity.
Needless to say universities didn’t establish agreements with OPMs en masse to get them to help them and in any case this isn’t what OPMs really do, and if I can extend this a little further it shows the kind of unsubstantiated hysteria that exists in the UK in relation to universities and private edtech.
The pandemic probably exacerbated this predilection amongst the UK digital education research community and it was clear to witness a sort of weird paradox of unsubstantiated claims of private edtech pandemic opportunism manifested in the emboldened opportunism of motivated scholars - now able to push pre-baked narratives of edtech infiltration to a more captive audience. Given the unsubstantiated or unempirical nature of this, it also resulted in erroneous and inaccurate claims being made by researchers.
There was a lot of sharing and great community spirit
On a more positive note, there was a great deal of sharing of knowledge and support in the higher education community and as a result I think we come out of this period with a much greater number of people having a greater baseline of knowledge about online teaching.
At one point, this did get to the stage where there was so much out there it arguably became more overwhelming than helpful but nevertheless there were courses and resources being created and shared generously.
This has waned a little now as you might expect but it has been interesting to see organisations who have evidently thought that this presents a opportunity and we’ve seen THE Campus be established as resource hub for higher education and other moves such as OneHE developing a suite or microlearning fronted by some well-known global names in higher education teaching.
It will be interesting to observe what we see in this space going forward and whether there is a growing role for organisations within the wider sphere of higher education to play a key role in academic development. The challenge for anyone in this space is that it might be easy to aggregate an abundance but harder to ensure editorial and quality standards of what’s presented.
Endless debates over the efficacy of online education became tiresome
One thing that I simply can’t fail to mention is the seemingly endless debates about the efficacy of online education that have gone on and on and on and on over this period.
This has been a debate that I think has suffered from both sides not really properly listening to each other and a whole chunk of nuance lost.
I don’t think it’s always been about a pure debate as to the efficacy of online learning in higher education or online learning more generally. I think the debate has been more about what the university experience should be, what people want, what people feel comfortable with and what people don’t want to do or have to change than it is about efficacy.
The roots of the core university experience as something centred around a campus based, in-person experience are incredibly deep. So I think a lot of this debate was about two sides being defensive. One the one hand you had online education advocates staunchly defending fresh attacks against its efficacy and on the other side you had at its heart a defence of what the university experience is and always should be, sometimes borne out of sincerity, sometimes out of vested self interest.
I’m of course an advocate of the efficacy of online education and I quickly grew tired of these debates, in any case there are so many people and organisations investing in online learning in one way or another that to engage with a minority of people still battling over the efficacy of online learning is just a huge waste of time - a serious debate on that has been lost to time for so many people now.
Eradication of lectures and exams
Another debate that I think is or was at risk of growing equally tiresome is one that has rumbled on over the past two years around lectures and exams.
Both have become somewhat narrow caricature strawmen that have been beaten up like a journeyman boxer in the past two years.
Now of course, the lifting and shifting of a lecture as characterised by long, unpunctuated one-way dialogue from an academic to a group of students on to Zoom was no doubt egregious.
However, there’s a difference between a lecture as a clearly and narrowly defined type of teaching and the lecture as interpreted as a live period of time that an educator spends with students. Again there is so much nuance missing in the debate here but undoubtedly the term lecture doesn’t help.
Lectures and exams have become such objects of discontent and ire in parts of the higher education fraternity that in simply seeking the eradication of them as narrow caricatures we risk a strangulation of any nuance and clear headed and productive debate.
What about the future….
There’s obviously so much more that could be said about this period and it no doubt will, these are just some of the things that stick in the memory for me.
So what about the future? What does and will this period mean for the future trajectory of higher education. Well there’s much talk of blended learning being the future model for universities certainly externally, but on the ground and less publicly there’s also lots of talk of lessons not being learnt and things slowly returning to something resembling how they were before.
I think it’s not unreasonable to say that many universities haven’t entirely got a grip on what the experiences of the past two years mean for their future and the more fundamental ways that they should or could change.
The campus and all of the physical assets in and around the university experience are a strong and powerful force & anchor and these still prevail. As does the picture of what a university educational experience looks like in the wider UK psyche.
These are forces that would lead me to believe that change won’t be quite as transformational as some might like. In any case, wholesale changes to things like the teaching and study model are very difficult to enact in universities as there is such individualism baked into the system.
As more time elapses the long-lasting impacts that the past two years have wrought on the sector will become more and more evident, and we’ll be able to better match up what we hear with what we actually see.
