Kordts / Wagner / Sidler Cultivating a culture of experimentation in higher-education teaching and learning

Evaluation of recent experiences and transfer to the new-normal
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-7557-1957-1
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Deutsch, Band 3, 216 Seiten

Reihe: Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung Jg. 16

As indicated by the diversity of the authors' physical locations, COVID and emergency-remote teaching affected Higher-Education-Institutions at a nearly global scale. Authors in this issue come from European countries (Switzerland, Germany), North America (the USA) as well as the southern hemisphere (South Africa). Given the breadth of COVID-related (change) experiences, the insights presented in this issue can be relevant to many HEIs across the globe, notwithstanding their cultural and institutional specificities. In addition, and of high relevance to us, the articles collected here focus both on different positions or roles (students, faculty, management) as well as on different levels of teaching and learning in higher education. While most contributions focus on the student experience during COVID, others investigate faculty/instructors' perspectives including faculty development. Yet another group takes a more systemic, institutional point of view. It could be argued that higher-education research takes up a multi-level perspective when exploring change and the new normal.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kordts, Robert

Wagner, Dietrich

Sidler, Claudio

Tinsner-Fuchs, Karen

Dilger, Bernadette

Brahm, Taiga

Leseproben

Chaka CHAKA2 (Pretoria)
COVID-19 as a prime driver of rapid technological experimentation in higher-education teaching and learning: An overview of reviews Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a new era of rapid scholarly publications (e. g., peer-reviewed journal articles and non-peer-reviewed preprints). Included among such publications are reviews and reviews of reviews, both of which take longer to publish under normal circumstances. This is more so for overviews. Therefore, the current overview reviewed 18 review articles published between March 2020 and March 2021. It did so by investigating online technologies for teaching and learning used by higher education institutions (HEIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic, and by examining major themes, main fi ndings, key conclusions, and other characteristics of these 18 reviews. One of its fi ndings is that online pivoting tends to signal a necessary change and innovation embraced by HEIs during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a pandemic technological change and innovation that underpins their SoTL. Keywords
overview, COVID-19, higher education, online technologies, characteristics 1 Introduction When the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) broke out in Wuhan, in China, in December 2019, and was subsequently declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) early in 2020 (CHAKA, 2020; ROMLI et al., 2020; SOHRABI et al., 2020; WHO, 2020), it became an overnight game-changer in many spheres of human life. Among these several spheres affected by COVID-19 is higher education (HE). Within the HE sector, teaching and learning, scholarly research, and administration were among the most affected areas. In respect of teaching and learning, the concomitant campus closures in response to physical distancing were followed by a rapid transition from in-person classes to online classes, or in some cases, to emergency remote classes. This move was intended to ensure academic business continuity by universities world-wide, and varied both across countries and across universities (TADESSE & MULUYE, 2020; TALIB, BETTAYEB & OMER, 2021). As the paper focuses on technological experimentation in teaching and learning in the HE sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, both online and emergency teaching need briefly defining. Online teaching is a web-driven e-learning traditionally used for distance learning purposes. It is mostly deployed as an intentional and wellplanned strategy embedded in and operationalized as part of institutional curriculum and pedagogy. In this context, emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a rapid form of teaching implemented with bare minimum resources, often resulting in poor outcomes (BATES, 2015, 2020; CHAKA, 2020; HODGES et al., 2020). Both online and emergency remote teaching as adopted by most higher education institutions (HEIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic serve as an instance of technological experimentation that took place during this period. They, then, temporarily became modes of teaching and learning with which most HEIs experimented so as to maintain their academic business continuity during this period. In this regard, this paper sets out to investigate instances of technological experimentation related to online technologies for teaching and learning used by HEIs during the COVID-19 pandemic. It does so by providing an overview of 18 review articles published during the pandemic period, from March 2020 to March 2021. Primarily, it examines major themes, main findings, key conclusions, and other characteristics of these 18 review studies. 2 Situating issues Overviews of reviews are conducted to investigate issues raised by or related to reviews of primary studies. In this case, they can examine reviews; literature reviews; scoping reviews; rapid reviews; narrative reviews; synthesis reviews; critical reviews; systematic reviews; systematic literature reviews; or meta-analyses. As overviews focus on second-order publications, publications that investigated primary studies, their primary units of analysis are aspects or characteristics of those secondary publications (KIM et al., 2018; PARÉ et al., 2015; ROMLI et al., 2020). However, PIEPER et al. (2012) maintain that there is no standard definition of overviews and that as a genre, overviews are often not definitively defined whenever they are employed. Some of the benefits of conducting overviews include: formulating research problems of different reviews in broader terms; harnessing, integrating, or aggregating findings of several review studies; delineating trends emerging from multiple reviews; identifying gaps in current reviews; and broadening the knowledge base of existing reviews. Nevertheless, overviews have shortcomings. Among these shortcomings are a lack of methodological credibility, bias, out-datedness, and a lack of uniform reporting guidelines (PIEPER et al., 2012; POLANIN, MAYNARD & DELL, 2016). 3 Methods As a relatively emerging genre for investigating characteristics of second-order studies, overviews do not yet have universally established guidelines undergirding them as is the case with established genres such as synthesis reviews, systematic reviews, systematic literature reviews, or meta-analyses. As such, they utilize the research protocols and some of the reporting guidelines applied by systematic reviews and systematic literature reviews (KIM et al., 2018; PARÉ et al., 2015; ROMLI et al., 2020). They also employ the search procedures recommended by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement (MOHER et al., 2009; ROMLI et al., 2020). One tool used to assess the quality of systematic reviews is A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews 2 (AMSTAR 2) tool (GATES et al., 2018; SHEA et al., 2017). Based on the foregoing points, the current overview utilized PRISMA, and adapted and used some of the elements of AMSTAR 2. Additionally, it employed variations of search and identification strategies commonly used by systematic literature reviews. It, then, followed four phases in its data search and data collection process: planning; selection; extraction; and execution (OKOLI, 2015). 3.1 Planning
This phase consisted of three stages: establishing the purpose of the current over-view, identifying the characteristics of the 18 review studies, and formulating research questions. The purpose of the present overview was: to identify online technologies for teaching and learning and the major themes (characteristics) related to HE in the 18 selected review articles; and to integrate and synthesize the main findings and the key conclusions of these reviews (see Table 1). Table 1: Characteristics of the eighteen review studies Eleven key characteristics investigated in each review study Author(s) and year of publication Discipline(s)/Subject area(s) Country Online/digital technologies used for teaching and learning in HE during COVID-19 Review type Major themes Databases Main findings Research design Key conclusions) Sample size(s) The overview, then, formulated the following research questions (RQs). RQ 1: What are research designs and sample sizes employed by 18 review studies? RQ 2: What types of online technologies are used as part of technological experimentation for teaching and learning during COVID-19 in the HE sector as reported by these review studies? RQ 3: Do the major themes, main findings, and key conclusions of these review studies reflect any change and innovation for HE teaching and learning? 3.2 Selection
Four stages comprised this phase of the overview: identifying keywords; identifying databases; inclusion/exclusion criteria; and searching for and selecting studies. Search keywords were selected according to the title, the focus, and the purpose of the overview. To this end, strings of keywords were created and queried in keeping with the respective databases used as exemplified below: Google search engine: review AND Covid-19 AND higher education AND online technologies AND teaching and learning Microsoft Academic: (review) AND (Covid-19) AND (higher education) AND (online technologies) AND (teaching and learning) Scopus: “review” OR “Covid-19” OR “higher education” OR “online” OR “digital” OR “virtual” OR “e-Learning” OR “e-learning” OR “technologies” These keyword strings were combined with the three Boolean search commands, AND, OR and NOT. Where applicable, keywords were enclosed in parentheses and double quotations marks. In addition, different iterations of these keywords were used, and in other instances, these keywords were replaced with their equivalents. Fourteen databases, which comprised an online search engine and an academic social networking platform, were identified and used for purposes of searching for review articles. These were: Google; Google Scholar; Microsoft Academic; Semantic Scholar; ERIC; IEEE Xplore; JSTOR; ProQuest; ScienceDirect; Scopus; Springer-Link; Taylor & Francis Online; Wiley Online Library; and ResearchGate. Table 2: Inclusion/Exclusion...