Abstract:

The novel coronavirus that began to affect global health at the end of 2019 quickly became the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020, challenging almost every aspect of normal human life. One of the most affected institutions was higher education, which quickly needed to respond to facilitating instruction while ensuring that instructors and learners (as well as all other support personnel) did not come into contact with one another. This movement from face-to-face classroom instruction to digital and virtual platforms of learning occurred while the severity of the consequences of the pandemic evolved slowly and surely to a new model for most universities and colleges--complete digital learning for all students. Instructional continuity, the promise that instruction occurs no matter local conditions of any institution, leading up to COVID-19 was not conceived by most institutions of higher learning outside temporary closures due to weather events (even in those instances where more catastrophic conditions might have been imagined). The movement from instructional continuity plans, initially designed to prepare instructors and students for potential micro interruptions of normal coursework, to one of emergency response required quick reactions to the rapidly changing environment at the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic and pandemic. A protracted experience of digital instruction with an unprecedented unknown timeline (as became the situation in Spring and Summer of 2020) not only changed the landscape of education for the 2020 academic year, but more so changed assumptions about the role of digital learning in the life of an institution of higher learning.

Four phases of evolution span the lifecycle of the 2019-2020 academic year that we describe as Instructional Continuity Planning, Emergency Response, Shifting Reality to New Norms, and the Post-Episodic period of Reflection and Realignment. In these phases of the effect of COVID-19 on digital learning, we propose that while circumstances continued to change and evolve, the assumptions, organizational dynamics, and individual perceptions about identity and responsive character also changed for most engaged in teaching and learning during this crisis. The focus of our inquiry is those who are responsible for the delivery of instruction (instructors, technicians, designers, and administrators) whose core identity underwent a metamorphosis as they moved through the different phases of the 2019-2020 academic year lifecycle. The dependant factor in our analysis is time and the shifting realities that caused changes in the organizational, team, and individual self-awareness. In this approach, time affects all instructional stakeholders as it redefined the notions of adaptability, resilience, creativity, and confluence in the delivery of continuous instruction. In this paper, we use as a case the study of one institution and how its assumptions about digital learning evolved amidst COVID-19. We specifically focus on the intervening variables of adaptability, resiliency, creativity, and confluence to describe how shifts in outlook translate into changes in the role of individuals, their relationships, their changing resilient state, and the confluences that change and occur as stakeholders cope with the varying responses to how digital learning reshapes institutions of higher learning.

Keywords:

COVID-19, digital learning, adaptability, resilience, creativity, confluence.