Reflections on the impact of COVID-19 on teaching and learning in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham

It is widely believed that digitally-driven changes are not welcomed amongst academic staff in higher education. However, when in March 2020, the University of Nottingham went online in response to the UK government’s COVID-19 lockdown, a different picture started to emerge. This contribution reflects on the initial steps taken to respond to the COVID-19 emergency measures, including the support required to implement these steps and ensuing staff feedback. It also reflects on the process of moving forward from a state of emergency to a more thought-through digital pedagogical approach. In this scenario, the ultimate goal of this reflection is to argue that, as a consequence of the educational turbulence caused by COVID-19, the portrait of academics prone to resisting digitally-driven changes needs to be replaced by one that emphasises the significance of making the pedagogical values of these changes meaningful to the staff who eventually implement them.

Locked down, but not isolated: Twitter collaboration among teachers in response to COVID-19

This piece looks at the use of Twitter to share good practice among education professionals responding to the so-called ‘pivot online’: the sudden shift to online learning necessitated by the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic. It presents a general overview on how Twitter provided a source of advice, ideas, and resources and how teachers shared their expertise at this time of need, focusing on my own experience as a Twitter user and online pedagogy expert.

Digital transformation in education: from vision to practice during the pandemic

This contribution addresses the challenges brought on by the pandemic and argues that a forced acceleration in online teaching and assessment practices can become a sustainable model for the post-COVID-19 world. Technology is a great asset that provides learning opportunities for the whole community and the education sector should seek to adopt an innovative approach that firmly integrates face-to-face with virtual interaction. The effort to make the most of an unforeseen and challenging situation has brought Jisc’s prediction for future learning forward: our publication Education 4.0 Transforming the future of education through advanced technology, offers suggestions on how this can be achieved in the current climate.

Exploring the pandemic through language learning and multicultural studies

This piece offers a reflection on how language learning and multicultural studies during the pandemic have highlighted the potential to help communities draw parallels with, and face wider issues concerning, minorities within a challenged society. Through storytelling, a novel approach to teaching and learning helps students find their voice and become active agents of change. A review of teaching and learning methods may bring about improvements both in academia and individual circumstances to help bridge the gap between loneliness and the need to be part of a wider social community. This article reiterates the importance of language learning, cultural understanding, and identity as useful employability skills for the new global graduates to support, rebuild, and unite communities especially in challenging times.

The 'go digital' Bristol experience

This article describes the move to digital teaching and learning for the language team in the School of Modern Languages (SML) at the University of Bristol as a consequence of COVID-19 in March 2020. Topics discussed here include the educational guidelines the university put in place; how these were followed and implemented by colleagues in Modern Languages; the new digital teaching and assessment practices; how decisions were reached across languages; technologies that people used and the support available; challenges in delivering teaching; and, lastly, the opportunities created for staff and students. In describing our practice during the pandemic, I will also offer my personal take and observations as the person responsible for digital education in the Arts Faculty who assisted the language team in this transition. I will reflect on how this pandemic has accelerated our digital education agenda and how having a background in language teaching has helped and informed some of the – sometimes difficult – conversations I had with my language colleagues during these fast-moving and uncertain times. The article will end with a brief description of some of our remaining challenges and lessons learnt while the university has announced that next academic year will be delivered largely digitally. The work done so far will inform our planning.

Moving the year abroad online: ready, steady, go!

Exeter students who had their 2019-2020 Year Abroad (YA) cut short by the COVID-19 health crisis were offered alternative online language provision to support their learning. This contribution discusses the students and staff’s experience in the light of ‘learning is a journey’ metaphor.

Teaching and learning post pandemic

This article aims to offer one perspective on ways that Lancaster University supported its staff in the rapid shift to online teaching and learning in the midst of a global pandemic. The approach centred around the upskilling of staff, with mixed engagement across the suite of support tools and resources, which can be compared to similar situations in the wider Higher Education (HE) sector. A focus on the future of curriculum design and the associated requirements at an institutional- and sector-wide level is addressed in relation to the opportunities and challenges with which we are faced.

How to flip it… never again? Towards agile models of work

This paper explores the way in which the Modern Languages team at the Oxford University Language Centre (OULC) sought to embrace the challenges of switching to a remote mode of teaching in the third term of 2019-20 as an opportunity to develop new ways of designing and delivering language courses for a flexible and hybrid future. It seeks to make note of agile recommendations towards further challenges to come.

Studying languages in the times of COVID-19: reflections on the delivery of teaching and learning activities and the year abroad

This contribution reflects on some of the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced for languages in Higher Education (HE). In particular, two areas are discussed: the delivery of teaching and learning activities, including assessments, and the year abroad. These two areas, on which the enforced move to online provision has had a significant impact, are central to many UK languages degrees. The piece discusses challenges, responses, and unresolved issues. All in all, it aims to offer a positive view for the future of the sector by highlighting particularly the spirit of collegiality that has developed during the pandemic across different HE institutions and national organisations.

Complexity and simplicity during COVID-19: reflections on moving pre-sessional programmes online at pace

This article describes how a complex and large Pre-Sessional (PS) programme at the University of Southampton (UoS) moved online at pace during the COVID-19 pandemic. It outlines the scale of the challenge and the ideas that informed our approach. It gives an overview of the technical and learning design used to deliver the programme, and makes observations on how this was achieved using Blackboard, MS Teams, and Padlet. It indicates how a mix of whole-cohort content and smaller, online group spaces within one site were used to recreate a personalised, small-group teaching experience. It closes with some comments on lessons learned from the experience.