Online teaching dexterity-implications for post-pandemic higher education online teaching competencies

ABSTRACT

Lecturers’ pandemic challenges with transitioning to online teaching indicate them needing better ‘online teaching dexterity’ or the ability to negotiate a range of online teaching situations. This kind of teaching competency needs to be better understood as institutions are seeking more educational flexibility through online learning beyond the pandemic. Using phenomenology, this study distils the meaning of online teaching dexterity from lecturers’ online teaching experiences during the pandemic. Semi-structured interviews with 19 lecturers from a university in New Zealand found that they manifested online teaching dexterity through continuously reshaping their seeing, communicating, juggling, and engagement strategies to changing circumstances. Lecturers established future practices through reconstructing teaching routines and practice-based learning. The study discusses how the lens of online teaching dexterity can be used to reframe post-pandemic online teaching competencies as different forms of adaptive expertise.

KEYWORDS:

• Online dexterity
• online teaching dexterity
• instructor teaching competencies
• COVID-19
• adaptive expertise

Introduction

Higher education lecturers’ online teaching practices have been changing since the COVID-19 pandemic (the pandemic) in early 2020. Even though lecturers may not be currently pressured by rapid shifts to emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al., 2020), post-pandemic demands for educational flexibility through online learning is a continuing challenge (EDUCAUSE, 2022). Lecturers still need to be dextrous – with their online teaching. Dexterity describes flexibility and nimbleness in movement (Latash et al., 1996). We apply the qualities of dexterity to the act of teaching by proposing the concept of ‘online teaching dexterity’, what we see as the ability to negotiate a range of online teaching situations effectively. This concept is not well-defined in current literature because of the prevailing interest in online teaching competency. The competency frameworks that were constructed before the pandemic outlined standardised online teaching skills but these did not include elements about how lecturers made situational adaptations during online teaching (e.g. Bigatel et al., 2012; Farmer & Ramsdale, 2016; Oanh et al., 2023). The dynamic post-pandemic environment confronting higher education institutions suggest the need to move beyond online competencies by considering how lecturers could use their competencies with dexterity. Lecturers’ pandemic experiences can serve as a valuable starting point for understanding what online teaching dexterity could mean in practice. This study, therefore, aims to characterise online teaching dexterity through a phenomenology of the teaching adjustments of higher education lecturers during the pandemic. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 higher education lecturers from a public university in New Zealand to understand online teaching dexterity from their lived experiences. The relevance of online teaching dexterity and its implications for teacher professional development in higher education beyond the pandemic are discussed.

Literature review

Latash et al. (1996) purport that dexterity is not just the ability to control movement but how one directs movement towards the demands of a psychomotor task with good fluency and control. If we project this notion of dexterity to the act of online teaching, it implies that online teaching dexterity concerns situational adaptation. This aspect of online teaching is not often mentioned in extant literature which tends to focus on the standardised competencies that teachers need to develop. Bigatel et al. (2012) defined online teaching competencies by adding technical competencies to generic classroom teaching competencies such as active teaching and learning, class administration, and communication. Goodyear et al. (2001) mapped online teaching competencies according to online teaching roles, proposing that teachers need to be Technologists who choose appropriate technology tools, Managers/Administrators who manage students’ online registration and data security, Designers who create practical online tasks, and Process Facilitators who manage online learning communities. More recent frameworks such as Farmer and Ramsdale (2016) and Oanh et al. (2023) espouse similar competencies with the addition of considerations for online assessment and netiquette. How teachers deploy their online teaching competencies from one situation to another is not adequately discussed in existing frameworks (Alvarez et al., 2009). In fact, dexterity for situational problem-solving is a kind of teacher competency that is related to how teachers use insights from enfolding classroom situations to create better teaching strategies (Männikkö & Husu, 2019; Parsons et al., 2017; Vaughn, 2019). Sporadic studies of exemplary online teachers attributed their success to factors such as course design, communication, relationship building, and deep learning activities (Baran et al., 2013; Martin et al., 2019). These practices were evident among higher education lecturers during the pandemic. Besides using different online learning tools to enhance learning engagement, they re-designed curriculum and learning activities to shift skill-based and clinical courses online, used multiple communication channels to keep in contact with students, and successfully modified on-site tests into online assessments (e.g. Yeung & Yau, 2022). However, lecturers struggled with how online teaching changed their familiar classroom teaching routines (Koh & Daniel, 2022).

Online modalities are no longer a quick fix for a crisis (Hodges et al., 2020) but have gradually crept into the mainstay of higher education as institutions. Lecturers and students are expected to be more open about using online tools for active and flexible learning (Koh et al., 2023) and the rapid development of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT is also expected to challenge higher education teaching and assessment practices (Strzelecki, 2023). With some professional disciplines in higher education already emphasising task-related adaptiveness in their curriculum (Kua et al., 2021; Mylopoulos et al., 2018), online teaching dexterity is a concept that has relevance for higher education lecturers beyond the pandemic. Understanding their experiences of online teaching dexterity during the pandemic through phenomenology can potentially unravel new teaching competencies for sustaining student satisfaction and pedagogical innovation in a post-COVID world. Therefore, we examine the following research question in this study:

How did higher education lecturers experience online teaching dexterity when they taught online during the pandemic?

Materials & methods

Research design

We used phenomenology to focus on people’s subjective experiences and interpretations of the world around them (Daniel & Harland, 2017; Kuchinke, 2023). Using the conscious lived experience as a unit of analysis, the phenomenological analysis examines different facets of experiences, including feelings, emotions, perceptions, imagination, thoughts, desires, and actions. Drawing upon Edmund Husserl’s conception of descriptive/transcendental phenomenology (Moustakas, 1994), we seek to articulate the essence of online teaching dexterity through understanding higher education lecturers’ perceptions of their everyday experiences and practices during the pandemic. We have chosen to focus on the lecturers’ pandemic teaching experiences as the forced global migration to online learning is a common phenomenon experienced by all the study participants. This is also an event where the need to manifest online teaching dexterity could be more pronounced and evident, as compared to everyday circumstances.

Sampling and participants

The study participants were 19 teaching staff from a public university in New Zealand who taught online during the pandemic in the years of 2020 and 2021 and had to adjust their teaching according to the health advisories issued by the New Zealand government (Unite against COVID-19, 2022). Those teaching on-campus courses taught fully online learning in lockdown conditions from March to September 2020 and gradually adjusted their classes back to on-campus delivery after that. The university did not need to change its distance learning course arrangements. Even before the pandemic, the university has been providing all lecturers with access to learning management systems for day-to-day course management, Zoom™ for videoconferencing, technical support through the IT help desk, and regular professional development workshops about online teaching tools and methods via its teaching and learning centre and Office of Distance Learning. These support services continue to be offered during the pandemic albeit with greater intensity because of the institutional shift to online learning and teaching. Within the academic policies stipulated by the university and their departments, lecturers continue to have autonomy over the online tools they used and their online teaching approaches during the pandemic. As online teaching dexterity is a new concept, we chose to begin our exploration with teaching staff from one university who had similar institutional contexts.

The Human Ethics Committee of the University of Otago approved the study (Ref no: 20/104), following which volunteers were recruited for a one-hour semi-structured interview through emails sent out by the faculty offices of the university’s four divisions (Health Sciences, Sciences, Commerce, and Humanities) and the Office of Distance Learning. All volunteers were provided with a study information sheet, had their questions answered, and signed informed consent forms prior to the interviews.

As online teaching dexterity has not been clearly defined in current literature, a maximum variation sampling strategy (Creswell, 1998) was used to reach lecturers teaching different subject areas and those teaching in distance learning programmes. Through this process, we recruited 19 volunteers, satisfying Creswell’s recommendation of 10–15 participants for phenomenological studies. Table 1 shows the profile of the study participants. Two-thirds of the participants are females, with about 80% from the faculty of Health Sciences or Humanities and 70% are lecturers or professors. Close to 60% had more than ten years of teaching experience in the current institution. Only about a third of the participants taught distance learning courses before the pandemic.

Table 1. Profile of study participants

	N	%
Faculty
Humanities	5	25%
Sciences	2	11%
Health Sciences	10	53%
Commerce	2	11%
Total	19	100%
Gender
Female	13	68%
Male	6	32%
Total	19	100%
Teaching experience in the current institution
5 years or less	6	32%
6-10 years	2	11%
11-15 years	5	25%
16 years or more	6	32%
Total	19	100%
Teaching role
Professional Practice Fellow/Teaching Fellow Foundation Course Teacher Lecturer/Senior Lecturer Associate Professor/Professor Clinical Associate Professor Total	4 2 6 6 1 19	21% 11% 32% 32% 4% 100%
Taught distance learning courses prior to the pandemic
Yes No	7 12	37% 63%
Total	19	100%

Data collection and analysis

Data was collected through semi-structured interviews conducted during the first half of the year 2021 either through Zoom™ or face-to-face, depending on the prevailing social distancing guidelines set by the university. During the interview, the participants were asked demographical questions, such as the courses they taught. They were then invited to share how they shifted online during 2020 and 2021 in response to the following questions:

1. Describe your teaching experiences during and after the COVID-19 lockdown. What was positive and what was challenging?

2. Describe the teaching strategies you used during and after the COVID-19 lockdown. Which were more or less successful? Why?

3. Is there anything you would have done differently to make your online teaching more effective?

4. What support structures and tools would have helped you to teach more effectively online during the COVID-19 pandemic?

5. What support structures and tools would help you teach more effectively online beyond COVID-19?

6. From your experiences, what does online teaching dexterity mean to you?

The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed to text. A descriptive or transcendental phenomenological design was used to answer the research question. This was guided by epoché or suspension of shared understandings, reduction of each expression for how it constituted a sufficient moment of the experience to be labelled as a ‘lived experience’, and creation of textural descriptions capturing dimensional variations that were synthesised as structural descriptions of contexts, conditions, and inter-relationships to reveal the essence of the phenomenon as it was experienced (Moustakas, 1994). Adapting the guidelines of Hycner (1985) for phenomenological analysis, the researchers read and re-read the transcripts and had weekly meetings where we pinpointed the similarities and differences among our perspectives of online teaching dexterity and those expressed by participants. This process helped the researchers to ‘bracket’ our presuppositions and assumptions. The phenomenological reduction was made through line-by-line coding of the transcripts (Charmaz, 2006) to identify each expression of lived experiences as units of analysis. Each unit of analysis was first assigned to categories according to its literal meaning. Several strategies were used to ensure reliability and trustworthiness of coding. During weekly research meetings, category labels were preserved, re-labelled, merged or reconstructed to remove redundances, capture dimensional variations, and sharpen alignment with research question. A weekly audit trial was also used to document the modifications and rationale. Through this process, 1,480 discrete units were coded into 24 categories. Categories were clustered according to lecturers’ online teaching strategies, perceived successes, perceived challenges, and textural descriptions of lecturers’ experiences in these aspects were created as reports consolidating the pandemic experiences of lecturers in the university’s Health Sciences, Sciences, Commerce and Humanities divisions. Each participant was sent their divisional report for feedback and review. After this member-checking process, the first author developed common themes by synthesising the divisional reports. Critical peer review was carried out among the research team members and through university-wide presentations to management, lecturers, and teaching support units to further validate the construction of the phenomenon of online teaching dexterity.

Findings

From the participants’ experiences, online teaching dexterity is characterised by what Participant 10 (Health Sciences) describes as the ‘capacity to switch effortlessly between a variety of teaching situations [including] … synchronous and asynchronous … to reshuffle and shift around so that it’s … better for the students [and] better for you as a teacher’. It is manifested through how participants continually orchestrated and reorchestrated teaching as follows:

Seeing better

With the pandemic being many of the lecturers’ first foray into online teaching, making this on par with face-to-face teaching consumed their efforts. For example, Participant 12 (Health Sciences) fondly reminisced how she used to ‘see clearly when [students are] starting to get tired and lose interest’ and could ‘modify my way of teaching [accordingly]’ whereas she is now ‘lecturing to a bunch of black screens’. To improve this, lecturers started creating proxies for ‘seeing’ by starting from analytics of students’ lecture recording access patterns. Participant 15 (Humanities) realised that ‘ … there were many students who didn’t watch [during] the semester, and at that point [of exams], they tried to binge watch’. Lecturers then used ‘seeing’ to help students sustain learning consistency. They emailed students who missed their live sessions on Zoom™, set up discussion boards for students to post questions, and established regular virtual office hours for students to drop in. Participant 9 (Health Sciences) adjusted lesson schedules to ‘ … finish in two-thirds [of the time]. And I’d stay online at least one-third of the time, in case [students] have any questions … like open office hours’.

Communicating better

Lecturers who taught distance learning courses before the pandemic were already adapting their delivery styles for online communication. For example, Participant 2 (Sciences) ‘continuously remind myself that I speak and engage differently [on Zoom™]’. This involved ‘slow[ing] down my speech … speaking clearly [and] … speaking loud enough’ such that the recording remained comprehensible to students even when played at ‘1.5 times’. Those who were new to online learning sought to grow community through a non-judgemental atmosphere. For example, Participant 18 (Commerce) continually assured students that there is ‘no such a thing as a stupid question’. When classes progressively shifted on-campus, Participant 11 (Health Sciences) started experimenting with hybrid synchronous teaching so that students who were isolating or could not make it to class could join in online. She shifted classroom furniture and repositioned webcams so that both online and on-site students could have a ‘normal’ roundtable discussion.

Lecturers also had to adjust how they managed student communication during online collaborative work. Participant 8 (Commerce) and Participant 14 (Humanities) taught postgraduates and found them to be ‘self-supportive’ and capable of managing online collaboration independently where ‘they [the group] had a Google Doc™ … each of them would work on it and then leave notes [for the team]’. On the other hand, Participant 16 (Humanities) and Participant 18 (Commerce) had to ease their undergraduates into online collaborative work by ‘ … [putting] them into the same group each time so they actually got to know their group’. This strategy continued to work for Participant 18 when lessons shifted back to campus but she found that students may not follow her collaboration structures. For example, they did not use the group spaces she created for them on Blackboard™ because ‘they just use Facebook™ Messenger’.

Engaging better

The difficulty of ‘seeing’ and ‘communicating’ naturally online made lecturers doubtful if they had successfully engaged their students. For example, Participant 7 (Health Sciences) had nagging suspicions that ‘it’s easy [for students] to sit back and not be involved when you’ve got a camera and your microphones off on Zoom™’. All lecturers fought hard to enthuse students online. Many enforced class engagement rules. For example, in Participant 17’s language class, ‘all students are expected to attend with cameras on, sound off except when they’re interacting’. There was also a need to cater for screen fatigue so Participant 6 (Health Sciences) shared, ‘ … we started about ten in the morning instead of nine’. As they made these adjustments, lecturers realised that they needed to design interactive activities to encourage participation and learning enthusiasm. This spurred lecturers to start experimenting with learning tools such as online whiteboards, polling apps, and gamified activities on Kahoot™ which they found could improve attendance and student enjoyment. Lecturers continued using these activities to enhance interactivity when classes shifted back on-site but they also learnt not to be overly optimistic about students’ technical competency. As Participant 2 (Sciences) and Participant 3 (Health Sciences) observed, ‘all they [students] know is what they can do on their phone’. Participant 6 (Health Sciences) added that students may not all have sufficient technical dexterity where ‘they can actually join the Zoom™ session … they can figure out how to jump into a Kahoot™’. In fact, Participant 13 (Health Sciences) noted that part of teacher dexterity is how lecturers ‘support our students to understand how to engage in [the online] space’.

Juggling better

Online delivery was described as an act of ‘juggling’. As exemplified by Participant 13 (Health Sciences), ‘I am trying to deliver content and trying to make … sure that everybody is online and has got their sound’ on top of ‘having to manage the Zoom™ and chat window’. Classroom teaching before the pandemic felt more placid as Participant 14 (Humanities) observes, ‘if you’ve been teaching the same paper for five years … the day before you bring [up] your slides … you just rock up and do it … whereas you can’t do that online’. To ‘juggle’ well online, much more detailed planning was needed, even if it was to replicate something as basic as sharing computer sound over Zoom™ while playing video clips. Participant 19 (Health Sciences) experimented with annotating while screen sharing on an iPad™ in order to simulate writing on a physical whiteboard in class. Lecturers teaching subjects like Mathematics also suspended their phones ‘between two piles of books’ to record themselves writing on paper. The pressure of ‘juggling’ was not as intense among participants who had administrators to help with setting up and disseminating Zoom™ meeting links to students and monitoring their breakout room sessions.

Learning to change

Lecturers felt that their ability to orchestrate and reorchestrate seeing, sending, communicating, engaging, and juggling depended on what Participant 4 (Humanities) and Participant 6 (Health Sciences) describe as the ability to ‘learn quickly on the fly’ and ‘pick up a new tool and run with it’. Participant 7 (Health Sciences) added that lecturers had to evaluate new technology because ‘if I want them [the students] to use a tool, then it’s my responsibility to ensure that [it] is easy for [them]’. Lecturers learnt to change through different ways. All of them watched Youtube™ videos, read online instruction guides, and tinkered with different tools until they found the one that fitted their instructional goals. Besides attending workshops conducted by the university teaching and learning centre, some became more active in connecting with colleagues to learn better strategies. Others joined communities of practice within the university over Yammer™ and Slack™. Tech-savvy ones and those with distance learning experiences helped colleagues to conquer technology by producing and sharing technical guides. Learning to change is challenging as many, like Participant 10 (Health Sciences), admitted having to ‘work quite hard’. Yet, many shared the sentiments of Participant 6 (Health Sciences) that ‘I wasn’t necessarily comfortable, but I was very quick to learn’.

Constructing future practices

Instead of finding relief from returning to business as usual when the COVID-19 lockdown ended, lecturers’ pandemic experiences made them start envisioning future teaching practices. For example, Participant 2 (Sciences) saw her future students as those ‘going home on the bus and listening to a couple of lecture segments with their headphones on their phone … and they’re listening during their lunch hour or while they’re cooking their dinner’. Lecturers of clinical or field-based courses were forced to teach in new ways during the pandemic which also helped them to see beyond their established teaching practices. For example, Participant 10 (Health Sciences) realised that without physical access to patients, it was still possible to ‘[take] some of the details of previous patients and turn that into case scenarios’. The pandemic also helped these lecturers develop more refined appreciation of online learning boundaries in their future teaching practices. As Participant 1 and Participant 7 from the Health Sciences observe, ‘you can demonstrate how to use a speculum … but it is certainly no replacement for people doing it either on a model or on a real person’. The lecturers observed that by encouraging themselves not to be ‘dead scared of doing things that are new’, they were able ‘to embrace and be flexible’, and to have ‘the desire to incorporate these [tools] into your teaching’.

Discussion

This phenomenology of 19 lecturers’ lived experiences during the pandemic suggests that online teaching dexterity is about how they continually take action to improve different aspects of students’ online learning experiences. It is manifested through their iterative attempts to envision, construct, experiment, learn from success, reconstruct from failure, and reimagine their future teaching practices.

What is online teaching dexterity?

The study findings show that lecturers’ online teaching dexterity comprised actions directed at improving how they were seeing, sending, communicating, engaging, and juggling. These encompassed lecturers’ responses to contextual challenges. When teaching in lockdown conditions, lecturers’ actions were mainly targeted at addressing students’ challenges with learning consistency and engagement that were commonly reported during the pandemic (e.g. Marshalsey & Sclater, 2020; Swanson et al., 2021). From the lecturers’ experiences, online teaching dexterity is not merely standardised online teaching competencies such as class administration, relationship building and online learning facilitation (Baran et al., 2013; Bigatel et al., 2012; Martin et al., 2019). They also did not just play standardised online teaching roles such as Designer, Technologist, and Learning Facilitator (see Goodyear et al., 2001). Their initial unfamiliarity with online teaching made them experience ‘juggling’ and ‘seeing’ more intensely. Students’ learning responses during the pandemic made actions for improving ‘communicating’ and ‘engaging’ more and more pertinent. Online teaching dexterity is, therefore, continual adaptation for improvement. In the initial stages, lecturers mostly tried to replicate their tried-and-tested face-to-face teaching strategies in the new online context, just as routine experts would (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986). When they were less successful with ‘seeing’, ‘communicating’, and ‘engaging’ through using typical social cues from classroom interaction, they began to tinker and change. The lecturers started to de-emphasise ‘seeing’ students physically through webcams and switched to alternative communication channels. Redefining their conceptions of ‘seeing’ improved progress monitoring whereas efforts to design and integrate new interactive online activities brought them better success with enhancing learning interest. Adaptiveness in teaching involves being open to creating new ways of responding to students through observing and learning from classroom situations (Männikkö & Husu, 2019). Online teaching dexterity captures how lecturers take adaptive action to improve teaching and learning versus replicating existing strategies. It is how lecturers use adaptive expertise to sustain effective online teaching amidst novel situations, such as the pandemic (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986).

While adaptive expertise is the ability to change task actions according to a situation (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986), online teaching dexterity is the ability to build practice through adaptiveness. We observe that lecturers’ online teaching persona (Baran et al., 2013) emerged as they learnt and experimented. Their initial frustrations with ‘seeing’, ‘communicating’, and ‘engaging’ compelled them to put considerable effort into learning new technologies. Their willingness to change practice helped them to gradually move away from replicating the classroom online. As they started to reconstruct their teaching strategies around the unique affordances of online environments, learning from their successes and failures, and confronting new challenges, they slowly began teaching as online teachers (Baran et al., 2013; Martin et al., 2019). Through practice, they gained domain knowledge that gave them confidence for the post-pandemic adaptations that may be needed (Bohle Carbonell et al., 2014). Even though current literature tends to describe routine expertise as being inferior to adaptive expertise (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986; Männikkö & Husu, 2019), lecturers’ routine expertise in classroom teaching served as a starting point for their development of online teaching dexterity. Their willingness to learn and experiment helped them to accumulate a repository of online teaching practices that became the raw materials for creating future practices.

Implications for higher education

The study findings suggest the need to move beyond standardised online teaching competencies as lecturers’ pandemic teaching experiences show that online teaching dexterity enabled them to adapt and improve their competencies as new challenges arise. There are several implications for higher education institutions. Firstly, the post-pandemic era is expected to be characterised by rapid digital transformation in higher education that needs to be synergised with existing classroom-based systems (Naidu, 2022). Clarity about the role of online learning can help institutions to demarcate appropriate online teaching standards (Martin et al., 2019), guiding lecturers’ enactment of online teaching dexterity. Secondly, institutions need to look beyond fostering online teaching dexterity through teacher professional development workshops that just cover domain skills for online teaching (Bohle Carbonell et al., 2014). The lecturers in this study boosted adaptability through more ‘socially-situated’ ways (Alvarez et al., 2009) during the pandemic by learning from communities of practice. Besides encouraging communities of practice for online teaching, institutions could also curate and share best practices that have succeeded within the institution’s technologies, pedagogies, and practices (Koh et al., 2021). These other channels of teacher professional development are sources of institutional knowledge that can help lecturers to solve teaching problems more effectively. Thirdly, lecturers used a variety of online learning modalities, including synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid synchronous during the pandemic. However, not all students are capable of managing different multiple online learning modalities (Koh & Daniel, 2022). This study shows that students’ proficiency with learning technologies could constrain lecturers’ pedagogical intents for more active and interactive forms of online learning. Institutional visions for online learning could be curtailed unless efforts are made to develop lecturers’ online teaching dexterity in tandem with students’ online learning dexterity (Koh et al., 2023).

Limitations and future directions

Several limitations of the study point to possible future research directions. Our research focused on the lecturers of one university. Since the study was based on voluntary participation, most participating lecturers were teaching courses related to Health Sciences or Humanities. Given that online teaching dexterity is contextualised action, the conceptualisations reported in this study need to be validated by lecturers’ experiences in different universities, subject disciplines, and in different post-pandemic online teaching contexts. This study also focused on extracting the essence of online teaching dexterity through phenomenology. Since this research methodology emphasised lecturers’ personal experiences, no attempt was made to judge or characterise their practices as better or worse forms of online teaching dexterity. In future studies, the quality of lecturers’ online teaching dexterity could be examined by observing and rating their online teaching through expert review or teaching evaluations. These kinds of studies can contribute to the development of online teaching dexterity assessment instruments for guiding teacher professional development. Given the study scope, we did not examine student perspectives. Since online learning experiences are constituted from lecturer and student actions, future studies could examine the interplay between lecturers and students to derive a more comprehensive picture of online dexterity.

Conclusion

Our interest in examining the phenomenon of online teaching dexterity stemmed from the drastic measures that governments and universities took to curb the spread of the pandemic. The seemingly temporary transition to online teaching and learning from home stimulated lecturers to demonstrate resilience and pedagogical innovation. This unprecedented situation drove them to display online teaching dexterity as they adapted to evolving teaching and learning situations. The long-term effects of the pandemic on education are still unfolding as societies adapt to the new normal and strive to recover from the disruptions caused by the global health crisis. As institutions transition back to a post-pandemic world, a critical question arises: how can they preserve the essential competency of fostering ongoing pedagogical innovation? This study suggests that online teaching dexterity is a critical element in lecturers’ ongoing exploration and sense-making regarding the possibilities and limitations of online learning modalities for their disciplines. As lecturers engage in the quest for more balanced and eclectic approaches, they also become more adaptable lifelong learners. Looking ahead, online learning is likely to continue evolving and playing a significant role in higher education’s quest towards more flexible and personalised forms of learning. The future of pedagogic innovation may rest on how institutions support lecturers to optimise their pandemic experiences towards improving online teaching dexterity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Otago Research Grant under the project ‘Triumphs and trepidations in online learning and teaching - Understanding what constitutes online dexterity for students and teaching staff beyond COVID-19’.

Notes on contributors

Joyce Hwee Ling Koh

Joyce Hwee Ling Koh is Associate Professor at the Higher Education Development Centre of the University of Otago. Her research interests are in design thinking, TPACK and higher education educational technology practices.

Ben Kei Daniel

Ben Kei Daniel, PhD, SMIEEE, is Professor of Research Methodologies and Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). His research focuses on the design, development, and effectiveness of advanced learning technologies using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. Ben also studies effective approaches to teaching postgraduate students and faculty research methods.

Angela C. Greenman

Angela C. Greenman is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate and American Heart Association Fellow at the University of Arizona under the mentorship of Professor Samantha Harris. Dr. Greenman’s research interests include how sarcomere proteins regulate heart function and how to implement active learning pedagogies in the undergraduate physiology classroom.