Online University Teaching During and After the Covid-19 Crisis: Refocusing Teacher Presence and Learning Activity
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Online University Teaching During and After the Covid-19 Crisis: Refocusing Teacher Presence and Learning Activity Chrysi Rapanta 1 & Luca Botturi 2 & Peter Goodyear 3 & Lourdes Guàrdia 4 & Marguerite Koole 5
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic has raised significant challenges for the higher education community worldwide. A particular challenge has been the urgent and unexpected request for previously face-to-face university courses to be taught online. Online teaching and learning imply a certain pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), mainly related to designing and organising for better learning experiences and creating distinctive learning environments, with the help of digital technologies. With this article, we provide some expert insights into this online-learning-related PCK, with the goal of helping non-expert university teachers (i.e. those who have little experience with online learning) to navigate in these challenging times. Our findings point at the design of learning activities with certain characteristics, the combination of three types of presence (social, cognitive and facilitatory) and the need for adapting assessment to the new learning requirements. We end with a reflection on how responding to a crisis (as best we can) may precipitate enhanced teaching and learning practices in the postdigital era. Keywords Online teaching . Emergency situation . Covid-19 . Higher education .
Pedagogical content knowledge . Instructional design
* Chrysi Rapanta [email protected]
1
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Avenida de Berna 26, 1069 061 Lisbon, Portugal
2
University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, Lugano, Switzerland
3
The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
4
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
5
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Postdigital Science and Education
Introduction The urgent imperative to ‘move online’, caused by the recent Covid-19 pandemic (World Health Organization, n.d.), has added to the stresses and workloads experienced by university faculty and staff who were already struggling to balance teaching, research and service obligations, not to mention the work-life balance (Houston, Meyer and Paewai 2006; Houlden and Veletsianos 2020). Teaching staff of all backgrounds and ages have had to prepare and deliver their classes from home, with all the practical and technical challenges this entails, and often without proper technical support (Hodges et al. 2020). On top of that, a significant challenge for university teachers has been their lack of the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) (Shulman 1987) needed for teaching online (Angeli and Valanides 2005; Kali, Goodyear and Markauskaite 2011; Ching, Hsu and Baldwin 2018). Such PCK includes technical and administrative aspects of teaching online (e.g. respectively, using platforms and tools and organizing workflows). More significantly, it includes the pedagogical foundations and knowledge of principles
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