Learning and teaching @York in the Coronavirus Pandemic: Continuing the conversation

Attendees were asked to give their views on the following question as part of the sign up form:

What is your number one 'covid keep' related to learning and teaching?

Responses were as follows:

• Keep it simple (but this also doesn't mean your lessons have to be uninteresting!)

• That face to face contact is a really important part of the higher education experience but that the (often forecast) demise of the traditional one or two hour lecture has become closer.

• Using online lectures to clear space for different face-to-face teaching and learning activities when we return to 'normal'

• Jamboards!

• 24 h exams

• Some revision type events are better delivered via zoom

• Online/open exams

• Making a 'connection' with students through various means is important in distance learning.

• The 'can-do' attitude exhibited across the department over the year and diversification of our teaching and learning approaches

• Online recorded content to be used to support future f2f sessions

• Share and experiment new ideas/technology with colleagues

• Online conferences

• A recognition of the fact staff involved in facilitating learning require support and development that is not simply professional programmes, such as PGCAP.

• better structured student activities outside synchronous sessions

• Communicate very regularly, much more than normally

• That non-contact learning in the humanities can be much more than merely reading in advance of a seminar discussion, preparing a seminar presentation. Ongoing asynchronous peer conversation is really valuable and can be activated beyond the informal setting of friendship groups.

• Freedom of choice, particularly whether students prefer to engage with lecture content online or in-person.

• Flexibility to set your own schedule

• Distance learning/teaching has potentially huge accessibility benefits for disabled students and staff in enabling them to participate. I hope this can be carried forward.

• Checking in with students a regular intervals

• Recorded lectures are more popular than expected. Apparently students can't (don't/won't?) concentrate for a 50 minute lecture so they like "chunked" videos.

• VLE contents

• Opportunities for online learning for additional/optional courses to support learning

• Well-structured VLE sites.

• Attractive, structured VLE sites. Use of tools such as Jamboard or Padlet for engagement prior to live sessions.

• Supervisorials online - far more student engagement for those rather than in person where they’d have to turn up for a 15min meeting in my office.

• That HE teaching colleagues have started to ask the same questions that those in earlier phases of education ask, specifically: How do I facilitate learning in every student? Why am I teaching this way? What understanding and skills development should this learning activity promote? How can I enable a more effective learning experience? I am not saying nobody did this before, but it is pretty clear that PGCAP and similar programmes do not promote enough of this when one looks at how a lot of teaching and learning both in York and elsewhere is done.