Table Of ContentAgile Learning
Environments amid
Disruption
Evaluating Academic Innovations
in Higher Education during COVID-19
Edited by Md Golam Jamil · Dawn A. Morley
Agile Learning Environments amid Disruption
Md Golam Jamil • Dawn A. Morley
Editors
Agile Learning
Environments amid
Disruption
Evaluating Academic Innovations
in Higher Education during COVID-19
Editors
Md Golam Jamil Dawn A. Morley
Centre for Excellence in Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Learning and Teaching Bournemouth University
Leeds Trinity University Bournemouth, UK
Leeds, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-92978-7 ISBN 978-3-030-92979-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92979-4
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For Md Golam Mostafa, Md Imamul Haque,
and Julian David Morley
Foreword 1
Higher education faced unprecedented challenges and opportunities dur-
ing the COVID-19 pandemic. Many lecturers were forced by circum-
stances to adapt to new ways of teaching, particularly those who were
new to online, hybrid and blended pedagogies. This edited collection is a
welcome reflection on research undertaken at the coal-face of technology-
mediated teaching practice across a range of international institutions of
higher education. Its core aim is to systematically evaluate academic
innovations in teaching and learning.
So, what have we learnt? My feeling is that the most important lesson
is we have been able to keep the centrality of the student experience at the
core of our pedagogical practice. This has not been easy and has required
highly reflective (and perhaps self-critical) appraisals by lecturers to con-
tinuously drive forward the development of their practice. The role of
students should not be underestimated here either. Without their sup-
port, inquisitiveness and collaboration, successful new pedagogies would
not be possible. In this regard, a real asset of this collection is its global
perspective, reflecting a wide range of practices and challenges within and
across higher education institutions worldwide.
One key lesson for the university has been learning how to develop
systematic approaches to online and hybrid learning, while allowing for
bottom-up innovation. In some ways, this has been challenging, particu-
larly for the hybrid context. Before the pandemic, a great deal of research
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viii Foreword 1
had been done on pedagogical practice in the physical teaching space.
Much of this was practitioner-led and by early adopters, but it was also a
central part of many lecturer training programmes. In the same vain, the
research base for approaches to online learning is vast. It was clear that
these bodies of research would be fundamental to developing teaching
practice during the pandemic. However, as much less was known about
hybrid learning pedagogies, this prior knowledge could only take us so
far. In this sense, practitioner-informed research on hybrid teaching and
learning was critical not only for informing, in a realist sense, what
worked, for whom and in what context but also for highlighting the clear
systematic weaknesses that remained.
Teaching and learning during the pandemic made clear the critical
importance of pedagogic design in order to address the challenges of
hybrid learning. Simply put, a strong design focus that draws, in a multi-
disciplinary manner, on research from learning space design, pedagogical
practice and student engagement is required. This is especially true for
remote students: lecturers must have designed their sessions to cater to
their needs in real time, and ideally to be as interactive as possible, includ-
ing designing for collaborations between in-person and remote students.
An absolutely key issue to keep in mind is that any new practice must be
able to support students with diverse learning needs.
The challenge of teaching and learning during the pandemic was clear.
We are now continually building our knowledge to provide high-quality
education in hybrid settings. The academic innovation detailed in this
book is a very positive step in this direction.
Department of Education Niall Winters
University of Oxford,
Oxford, UK
Foreword 2
I am delighted to provide a foreword for this important book, which
offers a timely, principled evaluation of educational innovations that
those working in higher education have developed in response to the
global COVID-19 pandemic.
The global pandemic has tragically resulted in many deaths and wide-
spread human suffering. People’s lives across the planet have been hugely
disrupted, and it is not clear that life will ever return to what was consid-
ered normal prior to March 2020. The impact on the education offered
by higher education institutions has been profound. Globally students
have been studying in much more diverse settings than before, with a
huge increase in the number of students predominately studying online
(Farnell et al. 2021). Inequalities between students have increased with
poorer students having less access to spaces in which to study and the
technology they now need to access their education (Farnell et al. 2021).
For students who are graduating, there have been falling rates of graduate
employment (International Labour Organization 2020, 2021). For
higher education institutions there has been increased pressure on the
public funding they receive as government spending has increased to
respond to multiple societal challenges related to the pandemic.
In the face of these challenges, many higher education programmes
have been forced to rapidly and radically rethink the educational envi-
ronment that they offer to students. If we understand this education in
ix
x Foreword 2
terms of bringing particular students in relation to particular bodies of
knowledge in particular settings (Ashwin 2020), it is clear that both the
students and the settings in which they study have been hugely disrupted.
This volume provides an insight into the institutional, curricular, peda-
gogic, assessment and pastoral innovations that have occurred in a broad
range of national, cross-national and disciplinary and professional set-
tings. It provides a very important insight into which of these innovations
have worked well, so that we do not lose the lessons learned from these
experiences, as well as an evaluation of the sustainability of these aca-
demic innovations.
A longer term question is how the particular bodies of knowledge that
students engage with will change as a result of the global pandemic. This
requires those who work in higher education to reflect on evidence about
how the world they are preparing students for has changed and then to
consider the re-design of their curricula based on these reflections. Whilst
this question is beyond the scope of this book, the record of innovation
that this volume offers will provide an invaluable tool for those who wish
to consider their options in redesigning their curricula in the light of the
changed world that students will graduate into in the future.
Department of Educational Research Paul Ashwin
Lancaster University,
Lancaster, UK
References
Ashwin, P. (2020). Transforming University Education: A manifesto. Bloomsbury.
Farnell, T., Skledar Matijević, A., & Šćukanec Schmidt, N. (2021). The impact
of COVID-19 on higher education: A review of emerging evidence. NESET
report. Publications Office of the European Union.
International Labour Organization. (2020). Youth & COVID-19: Impacts on jobs,
education, rights and mental well-being. International Labour Organization.
International Labour Organization. (2021, June). An update on the youth labour
market impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Statistical Brief. International Labour
Organization.
Contents
1 Introduction: Academic Innovations in Disruptive
Learning Environments and the Power of Research-
informed Case Studies 1
Md Golam Jamil
Part I T aking an Institutional Perspective to Learning amid
Disruption 17
2 Interrogating the Established Knowledge and Practice
Base of COVID- 19 Higher Education Learning 19
Dawn A. Morley and Debbie Holley
3 Exploding Hierarchies for Educational Change:
Leveraging ‘Third Spaces’ within Solent University’s
Transformation Academy 35
Karen Heard-Lauréote and Carina Buckley
xi
