COVID-19 – a catalyst for change?
By Rob Shaw and Richard Walker
Almost five years to the day after the start of the UK’s second national lockdown which returned all Universities to a second period of fully remote teaching and learning, a paper by Rob Shaw and Richard Walker has recently been published reporting on the longer term impact of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) on learning, teaching and assessment in two Science departments – Biology and Psychology – at the University of York.
In this blog post, Rob and Richard answer some key questions about the research and its findings. You can find out more by reading the paper on the Technology, Pedagogy and Education journal website:
Shaw, R., & Walker, R. (2025). COVID-19 – a catalyst for change? A comparative study of learning technology usage in two university science departments during and after the pandemic. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1475939X.2025.2580325
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What were your aims for the research?
Through our research we wanted to gain some ‘what happened next’ insights into the longer-term impact on learning, teaching and assessment of experiences during the pandemic. The pandemic made engaging with online learning tools and techniques everybody’s business and, as with a lot of teams dealing with technology-enhanced learning, the Digital Education Team at York had to provide rapid support for staff and students at an eye-watering scale. Sometimes this resulted in pragmatic decisions being made to prioritise technical ‘how to’s’ at the expense of learning design and pedagogy (Larner, 2024). We wanted to explore in more detail how our supported tools had been used in practice during the pandemic, and if/how these practices had evolved since then.
Why did you think that was important?
We hoped this would help us to understand the perspectives of students and staff in departments and that this would inform our support for digital education at York. We perceived a re-emphasis on the importance of active engagement, community and inclusion, as reflected in University expectations that departments would return to face-to-face teaching. However, each department was free to determine how best to use their timetabled slots with students on campus, and we noted some contrasts between a renewed interest in flipped and blended learning in some departments, and a desire to ‘get back into the lecture hall’ again as soon as possible in others. We wanted to talk to staff and students about their experiences during and after the pandemic to explore this more.
We also hoped that our findings might be useful to other HE institutions. There had been a lot of debate about how the pandemic might change learning and teaching across the sector – ranging in expectation from a ‘snapback’ to pre-pandemic norms for large group on-campus teaching and invigilated and timed assessment in exam halls (Bryant, 2021), to a ‘fast-track’ future in which the on-campus learning experience is extended through a longer-term normalisation of online and blended learning (Kerres and Buchner, 2022).
Although over 1000 studies investigating approaches to the pandemic within HE were published between January 2020 and August 2021 (Zhang et al., 2022), far less empirical research has since emerged to test these ‘snapback’ or ‘fast track’ expectations. Specifically, we were interested in the legacy of Emergency Remote Teaching and what this might add to collective sector knowledge on how best to support the effective use of learning technologies in course delivery. We hoped that our research would contribute some useful insights into learning design and delivery approaches not only in times of emergency, but also in the longer term.
How did you go about the research?
We employed a qualitative case study approach. This involved semi-structured interviews and focus groups with staff and students in the Biology and Psychology departments, comparing their experiences during (2020–2021) and after (2021-22) the pandemic. We chose to focus on two Science departments in order to draw attention to the context in which decisions were made and practices were shaped. We were aware of possible differences in the approaches taken by the two departments during and after the pandemic. We felt that an exploratory inquiry might help to reveal the underlying motivations and influences shaping their differing use of learning technologies.
What were the headline results?
During the pandemic, approaches in both departments converged with increases in:
- Standardisation and consistency in teaching approaches within and between the departments.
- Programme-level planning and management.
- The range of digital tools used and the extent of use across taught programmes.
- Open assessment.
Students reported that they appreciated the ways in which academic staff implemented a clear structure to weekly content release and activities, but that they found the flexibility of online learning approaches and open exams to be both a ‘blessing and a curse’, challenging their academic skills and approaches to study.
After the pandemic approaches diverged, with Psychology immediately returning to standard two-hour lectures for cross-cohort modules in years one and two, and Biology pressing ahead with increased use of flipped classroom approaches – providing asynchronous content in advance of large on-campus workshop sessions focused on group work and application tasks. It wasn’t a simple case of ‘snapback’ vs. ‘fast-track’ though, and the paper describes the longer-term influences and pedagogical cultures that had a major impact, including:
- the importance of holistic approaches to learning technology integration, aiming to align institutional goals, learning design, teaching approaches, and staff and student skills development.
- the need to provide flexibility but to balance this with guidance and scaffolding.
- the importance of feedback, interaction and connections within learning design and delivery, regardless of the overall approach taken.
What’s next?
We are following up this research with a wider qualitative study looking across a greater number of academic departments and subject areas, interviewing teaching leaders in thirteen departments across the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences Faculties at the University.
Unsurprisingly, the picture already seems to be changing quickly with the need to respond to a series of new challenges, including: the impact of Generative AI, the unprecedented financial stress on the sector, and the challenges of maintaining student engagement within increasingly diverse cohorts. For example, as we highlight in the paper, approaches to open assessment – which seemed to be one of the most secure and long-lasting outcomes of the pandemic – are already being further reviewed in light of the challenges of engaging with Gen AI capabilities.
What was the process of getting the paper published like? Any advice?
Our best advice when getting ready to submit a paper would be to be prepared to be patient and to make the most of the peer feedback process. We chose the journal as we believed it would be a good fit with our research, but were aware that turnaround times might be relatively long. The peer review feedback we received was excellent and really helped us to improve the paper – but there was still a wait of over a year for the first peer review and three months for the second review. After this however, the paper moved very rapidly to online publication – which was great. Overall, it took almost a year and a half from first submission to publication which is a bit of a challenge with time-sensitive research like this project. To mitigate some of that delay we shared initial findings at ALT-C and Future Teacher 2003.
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As a small reward for anyone who has made it to the bottom of this page and who does not have access provided through their institution, the first 50 hits on the following link will provide free access to the full paper:
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List of references
Bryant, P. (2021, January 12). The snapback. Peter Bryant: Post digital learning blog. https://peterbryant.smegradio.com/the-snapback/
Kerres, M., & Buchner, J. (2022). Education after the pandemic: What we have (not) learned about learning. Education Science, 12(5), 315. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12050315
Larner, A. (2024, August 6). How the Pandemic Changed Your Job: Academic Perceptions of E-Learning after COVID-19 (and How to Change Them). ALTC Blog. https://altc.alt.ac.uk/blog/2024/08/how-the-pandemic-changed-your-job-academic-perceptions-of-e-learning-after-covid-19-and-how-to-change-them/
Zhang, L., Carter, R. A., Jr, Qian, X., Yang, S., Rujimora, J., & Wen, S. (2022). Academia’s responses to crisis: A bibliometric analysis of literature on online learning in higher education during COVID-19. British Journal of Educational Technology, 53(3), 620–646. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13191