Building resilience in education systems post-COVID-19

Few developments in recent memory have rattled the zeitgeist of contemporary educational systems as has the COVID-19 pandemic. From early childhood education to postgraduate study, the resilience of education systems all over the world is being tested. Primarily, this has to do with the adequacy of conventional campus-based learning and teaching operations, as well as the reskilling and upskilling of learners and teachers for a dramatically altered and nontraditional learning and teaching scenario.

The conventional campus-based experience that was once the pride of many educational institutions is losing its attraction and value as students and staff move to learning and teaching online. Increasingly larger numbers of senior managers across the sector are considering online and blended learning as critical to their long-term strategy, and indeed their survival. Many have already announced a full-scale transition to online learning and teaching, while others have begun tinkering at the edges of conventional campus-based operations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic for survival in the short term. This is also a good time to plan for the long term. However, for long-term survival and resilience against the current and any future catastrophe, a systemic rethink and reengineering of educational and institutional choreographies is required, and along various critical dimensions.

What those dimensions are and how one gets started pose serious challenges for senior managers. There is no need for despair, however, as there is plenty of sound advice in journals like these. Start with a copy of the book The 60-Year Curriculum: New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy, just published by Christopher Dede and John Richards, both of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and reviewed in this issue by Robert Bromber, learning engineer at Corps Solutions, United States Marine Corps Training and Education Command.

Several articles in this issue of the journal also highlight many of the key dimensions that should be the target of our attention immediately. The article “Community and Connectedness in Online Higher Education: A Scoping Review of the Literature” by Jesús Trespalacios for instance, offers a pretty comprehensive list. These are notable considerations like course design and development, including assessment of learning outcomes, tools and technologies for learning and teaching online, the professional development of faculty and other staff, as well as learner support in information dense and technology-rich learning environments. The articles “Temporal Flexibility, Gender, and Online Learning Completion” by George Veletsianos and “Preservice Teachers’ Motivation Profiles, Self-Regulation, and Affective Outcomes in Online Learning” by Moon-Heum Cho offer a more nuanced list of topics. These include learners’ time management skills in open and flexible learning environments, and how these vary according to the gender and gender-based roles and responsibilities of learners. The other crucial attribute has to do with self-regulation, and the article by Cho highlights the importance of understanding the relationships between motivation and self-regulation of learning and their implications for the achievement of affective learning outcomes especially.

Another important consideration is policy redesign and development around the needs of a very different educational environment from the conventional campus-based setting and its acculturation among stakeholders, including senior academic administrators, faculty members, support staff, and students. Educational institutions are finding that many of their policies governing learning and teaching have been developed for a conventional campus-based learning and teaching context. The article “Student Privacy Issues in Online Learning Environments” by Bo Chang discovered that many of these policies are inadequate for an increasingly open and flexible learning and teaching environment that encourages a culture of sharing, cooperation, and collaboration. Issues around student work, teacher- as well as peer-feedback, and transparency of student contributions in open and flexible learning environments require a new set of rules and regulations, and these need to be developed.

The main target of this kind of reengineering is academic support. The role of learning and teaching support units is crucial in this regard, more than ever before. This comprises support with learning experience design and the integration of media and technology in learning and teaching for an unfamiliar scenario. Educational institutions with a history of open and flexible learning that have had access to this kind of infrastructure and resources are notably ahead of the game and coping well with the pandemic, while those without access to this kind of infrastructure are struggling.

However, access to resources and the necessary infrastructure isn’t enough, as pointed out by Jingrong Xie, Gulinna A, and Mary Rice in their article “Instructional Designers’ Roles in Emergency Remote Teaching During COVID-19.” In educational institutions globally, the design and development of courses and student learning experiences has traditionally been the responsibility of the subject matter expert. This works well on campus, where the academic is the subject matter expert and is able to present the content and explain it to a captive audience in laboratories or small-group tutorial sessions. The online learning environment clearly requires a rethink and reengineering of teaching and learning strategies. Along with subject matter knowledge, this kind of work requires an additional skillset that includes technological and pedagogical knowledge, which is often not the forte of most academic staff (see Mishra & Koehler, 2006). For effective and efficient practices in this space, specialist staff with education and training in learning experience design and development, and in the integration of technology in learning and teaching, are required.

Effective and efficient learning and teaching has to do with the design, development, and orchestration of productive student learning experiences. This is a complex process which requires also, and along with, subject matter knowledge, a deep understanding of learners and learning, their motivations, and resilience. In one of the first studies to explore how learners are coping with the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Kyungmee Lee, Mik Fanguy, Xuefei Sophie Lu, and Brett Bligh found that, despite the disruption caused by COVID-19, the pandemic has not been as bad for learners as one might have feared. Their observations, which are based on a preliminary dataset and a small-scale study from institutions in the United Kingdom and South Korea, give us hope that our students are probably more resilient than we feared they might be. This is not discounting that there are likely to be as many learners among us who are indeed struggling with the challenges posed by COVID-19. But it does suggest that we have the capacity for being more resilient than we might have thought.

Resilience is not an uncommon commodity. It is the product of grit, which is the sum of passion and perseverance (Duckworth, 2016). And there is plenty of evidence of this kind of resilience among institutions as well as students studying part time and in the distance learning mode in open universities throughout the world. The article “Combining and Managing Work-Family-Study Roles and Perceptions of Institutional Support” by Rajvinder Samra, Philippa Waterhouse, and Mathijs Lucassen reports on one such study of perseverance among part-time distance learners from the United Kingdom Open University. When asked about their key coping mechanisms in the face of multiple roles, students in this study listed building rituals and developing habits around their online learning activities and their paid employment, and their other caring roles at home as useful strategies.

Resilience is also a product of design. Students choosing to study part time and in the distance learning mode are obviously attracted to the flexibility that the mode offers and its affordances for being able to support formal study along with other roles, such as paid employment and family care. As such, distance learners can be expected to be naturally more motivated and resilient than other students. However, although resilience may seem like an innate or personality trait, it can be developed and enhanced through direct action. These actions can take the form of proactive support from the educational organization around the acts of teaching and learning. The articles in this issue of the journal offer insights along several critical dimensions of resilience. One of these is the design, development, and execution of student learning activities. When carefully designed and orchestrated, course learning activities have been found to promote and support student engagement and in turn student learning achievement.

There are various types of student learning activities of course, and some have been found to be a lot more powerful than others (see Bernard et al., 2009). Chia-Lin Tsai, Heng-Yu Ku, and Ashlea Campbell in their article “Impacts of Course Activities on Student Perceptions of Engagement and Learning Online” report most favorable student perceptions of their engagement especially in the presence of high student-student and student-instructor interaction and learning activities. This study also reports that group-based learning activities such as discussion forums—a highly rated and common feature of online courses—are most effective with higher levels of instructor presence and instructor-student interactions in them. As educational institutions dive into teaching online, it is important that online courses are more than mere repositories of lectures, lecture notes, and course content. They should have ample opportunities for student-student, student-instructor, as well as student interaction with the content, for without these kinds of learning activities, online courses will be just as bad as large face-to-face lecture rooms with the possibility of little to no such interaction.

A good lecture is a powerful teaching tool. Foremost, it serves to present and explain the subject matter. It can also comprise opportunities for discussion and debate about the subject matter with peers and the subject matter expert. When this is the case, lectures need to be carefully orchestrated, so that such interaction within the lecture is useful for all the learners. In the article “Can Lecture Capture Contribute to the Development of a Community of Inquiry in Online Learning,” Anna Wood, Kate Symons, Jean-Benoit Falisse, Hazel Gray, and Albert Mkony report on their investigations into the role of recorded lectures in building a sense of community in online learning environments. Although their study did not reveal any significant impacts of lecture recordings, in themselves, on the development of a community of inquiry in online learning, they do report that online learners are enthusiastic about the opportunity to learn vicariously from a recording of the live lecture. This is known to be especially useful in areas such as online language learning, where conversation among peers is a key part of the learning process (see also Pleines, 2020).

Other than lectures, these kinds of learning resources can include recordings of in-class discussions among student peers, peer-feedback, and question-and-answer sessions with guest speakers. Although all such resources have the potential to give the online distance learner a greater sense of being a part of a learning community, they are most helpful when they are carefully planned and prepared for consumption out of their natural setting. The article “Students’ Perceptions of the Peer-Feedback Experience in MOOCs” by Julia Kasch, Peter van Rosmalen, Ansje Löhr, Roland Klemke, Alessandra Antonaci, and Marco Kalz underscores this point in relation to the use of peer-feedback. Much is made of the value of peer-feedback and collaborative knowledge building especially in large classes such as MOOCs, where it is not practical or even possible for teachers to provide feedback to large groups of learners. There is evidence that learners’ perceptions of peer-feedback and willingness to engage with it improves with growing experience of peer-feedback. However, peer-feedback can be rather cumbersome to orchestrate without adequate preparation and training. It is advisable in such settings to provide participants with training and assistance, so that they can provide meaningful feedback to their peers. This can include the provision of rubrics that learners can use to provide feedback, models of feedback to emulate, and examples of best, as well as poor practices.

We hope that you find these articles, and many others where they come from, offer quick insights into where and how to begin to build resilience in education systems in preparation for the current as well as future disruptions of this type. Enjoy!