Covid-19 confronted university leaders, professors and staff globally with a threat: transition online with immediate effect, or else cease business. A swift, spirited and collectively coordinated transition after, and with the pandemic in recession, we have returned to campuses asking: has education delivery changed permanently? Has remote working become the norm? Or was the pandemic only an interruption with no sustainable impact on how we teach and learn?
Instead of understanding the transformation universities underwent as wholly unforeseen and unplanned, I see a continuity between pre-pandemic expectations and universities' response to the demands of the pandemic. If understood thus, pre and post-pandemic challenges and strategies become less disjunct, and the more important question becomes: how do we move forward with an eye on teaching excellence?
While few, if anyone, saw Covid-19 coming, in a 2017 survey, leaders from 25 universities revealed their expectations for the decade of 2017-27, and these surprisingly converge with the demands that shortly followed:
- Developing a response to technological advances
- Executing reforms at the interface of education delivery and technology
- Revising human resource practices to recognise and reward teaching excellence.
