Abstract:

Objectives:
Identify lessons learnt during the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of educational and well-being perspectives; many aspects of what Higher Education used to be, have been forcefully changed under the pressure of the current pandemic. Institutions were diversely ready for changing the way their students were taught and assessed. The perception is that there is no going back.

Background:
I believe with Plato, Socrates, and more recently John Dewey, that teaching is a social activity and the new ways of teaching have often challenged this basic tenet of pedagogy. The idea of universities as places where sociality is as important as the subject knowledge, can vanish if we are not careful. The ‘lesson’ is a social event, knowledge comes from questioning not from teaching; "from ancient times to modern times, from Plato to Dewey, the notion is this: “effective pedagogy involves dialogue, involves conversation, and by definition dialogue and conversation are social activities. Learning is a social process” (C Norris & E Soloway, 2011). I think that one of the risks of distance ‘learning’ is the belief that as subject material can be downloaded this is sufficient for learning, a conception of knowledge as something which can be transferred through videos, recordings into the head of someone else anytime one wants. Philosopher Yuval Harari bemoaned the loss of interaction between students taking classes on Zoom. “When I went to university,” he reminisced, “the most interesting and important things happened in the breaks [between lectures].”

Methods and results:
I will present data from my Neuroscience module for third Year Undergraduate students at King’s College London, Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine. Thematic analysis of collected students’ feedback data, shows that human connection is as important today as it was long ago and that when learning had to occur entirely through computer-mediated instruction, my instructor’s role was to ensure that the learning environment was “people focused” or humanized (Dupin-Bryant, 2005). I will emphasize that peer learning can be particularly useful when it comes to using online tools. “Whereas “pedagogy” has to do with “the transmission of knowledge from teachers to students, peeragogy describes the way peers produce and utilize knowledge together” (Rheingold et al., 2015, p. 9). In my module I have thus adopted the social learning view, which sees the ‘student as producer’ educational model, which contrasts with the usual view of ‘students as consumers of knowledge’. According to Neary (2014, p1), the student as producer approach emphasizes “the role of students as collaborators with academics in the production and representation of knowledge and meaning”. In so doing, it “aims to radically democratize the process of knowledge production” (Neary and Winn, 2009, p. 201).

Conclusions:
Feedback gained though discussions with students suggests that the main lessons learnt from having had to adapt to the Covid pandemic are: 1) Embed students’ interactions in whatever session you are delivering to build a community of knowledge rather than multiple islands of loneliness; 2) Be there for your students, do not hide behind the screens, recorded lectures, 3) Ensure students are not left behind and gauge their learning via low stakes assessments.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Covid pandemic, peer learning, social learning.