Academic discourse on education during the early part of the pandemic

As the global COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden transition to emergency online education in early 2020, academic discourse quickly shifted to focus on the new situation and what could be learned from it. The present study gives an overview of the discourse on education during the pandemic in publications that appeared in the top-50 journals on the Clarivate Education list in the period April 2020–May 2021. Based on a final selection of 63 articles and 12 editorials, mostly on higher education, five main themes were identified: affect, teaching practice, teaching context, achievement and assessment, and equity. The academic discourse in these publications indicates that the emergency situation exacerbated previously existing issues: mental distress was observed to rise sharply for all stakeholders and gaps in access to education between different social groups widened. In response, teachers revisited the core values of education to guide them in approaching online teaching. Management focused less on procedures and communicated in a more human and empathic way. We argue that the acute interconnectedness experienced during the pandemic can be used to develop a pedagogy of care in which support is explicitly organized on both socio-emotional and academic levels.

Design considerations in emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic: a human-centered approach

This paper is in response to the article entitled "The process of designing for learning: understanding university teachers' design work" (Bennett et al., Educ Tech Res Dev 65:125-145, 2017). Bennett et al. (Educ Tech Res Dev 65:125-145) present a descriptive model of the design process that reports findings from a qualitative study investigating the design processes of 30 instructors from 16 Australian universities through semi-structured interviews. This exploratory study provides rich, contextualized descriptions about university teachers' design process and pinpoints key design characteristics as top-down, breadth-first, iterative, responsive, and reflective. These key design characteristics revealed by the rich contextual descriptions could provide applicable insights into the design process especially for new instructors. The findings of the study could inform how learning design could be adapted during an emergency remote teaching (ERT) as it is dynamic and open to revision. A noteworthy limitation of the study is that complementary data such as design artifacts could be utilized to ensure data triangulation in addition to self-reported data obtained via interviews. The study found that university instructors' design process did not appear to draw on instructional design models. Therefore, future studies could focus on to what extent and how such models could be used by university instructors. Lastly, future studies may explore how technology is used in ERT design to support their needs. In this article, I share how design can be informed by humanizing pedagogy and pedagogy of care during ERT.