Reflection on pandemic practice and crowdsourcing our learning

The phrase a ‘new normal’ is something we are all too familiar with now, the pandemic shone a spotlight on new ways of working in many sectors.  The Higher Education community was no different, suddenly launched into home working, students working alone sat behind a computer screen and academics needing to reimagine their entire face to face learning plan practically overnight.  

In our latest Talis Insight workshop we asked academics to reflect on their pandemic practice and tell us what challenges they faced and what has worked for them as we look to the future of a new way of teaching and learning. 

Challenges faced:

• How do we measure student engagement when using online learning?
• How do we support 1st year students with their onboarding into university when we can’t see them face to face?
• How do we recreate face to face learning to be valuable in an online learning setting?
• Technology barriers:
  • How do we work with poor Wifi?
  • Unfamiliar with video/recording tools and inadequate training on how to use them
  • How do we encourage students to turn the camera on and engage using technology 

Things that worked

• Encouraging Academics to produce shorter videos for pre learning so students can receive information in bitesize chunks 
• Using tools that allow us to measure student engagement such as Talis Elevate – allowing us to understand how long students are spending in resources and given them a community to discuss topics relating to the resource they are viewing helped them have a voice
• Using synchronous sessions for discussion and application
• Creating a community in the institution for academics to share best practice and support each other
• Icebreakers – getting students to engage in small ice breakers every lecture so they could get to know their fellow students and feel more comfortable turning cameras on and engaging

Have you got a story to share with the community on your reflection of pandemic practice and how you used Talis Elevate? Please contact kayleigh.jane@talis.com, and we may feature you in a blog post.