About

In April through June of 2020 nine institutional partners came together to design and implement a higher education research study focused on teaching and learning responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The following brief summary provides an overview of the project.

Partner Institutions	Country
Ateneo de Manila University	Phillipines
Deakin University	Australia
Eindhoven University of Technology	The Netherlands
Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning	Canada
Université de Liège	Belgium
University of British Columbia	Canada
University of Manitoba	Canada
University of New South Wales	Australia
University of North Texas	United States

On March 25, 2020 an email circulated through several global higher education networks, mainly in the teaching and learning domain (e.g., International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) inviting colleagues to join a “multi-institutional and multi-national study on the COVID-19 related transition to online instruction.” Eligible institutions had to offer university-level credit-bearing courses of instruction and self-fund their portion of the research. Ethics approval was granted by all institutional ethics review boards (or equivalent).

The project design and the data collection were implemented in the midst of the pandemic’s onset. This context seriously impacted sampling and data collection. Some institutions were able to use random samples while in others we had to rely on broadcast email invitations to potential respondents. In some institutions we were able to conduct interviews, while in others we had to rely solely on self-administered questionnaires. Restrictions on funding and staff support also meant that in some institutions we were able to use lengthier questionnaires and in two institutions we had to rely solely on questionnaires. The design and testing of our procedures were conducted through May and June of 2020, with several virtual meetings of the full team and sub-teams. Data collection commenced in May of 2020 at most institutions and was completed by the fall of 2020 in all institutions.

In all cases our unit of analysis began with a specific course of instruction. We selected courses and then invited the course instructor to participate. Likewise, we invited students in those selected courses to participate. The focus of data collection was on a specific course so that we would know exactly what had happened.  This was done because we felt that a variety of factors might influence how the transition occurred in different courses (e.g., year level, prior online components). More methodological details can be found in the following two papers:

Bartolic, S. K., Boud, D., Agapito, J., Verpoorten, D., Williams, S., Lutze-Mann, L., Matzat, U., Moreno, M., Polly, P., Tai, J., Marsh, H. L., Lin, L., Burgess, J. L., Habtu, S., Rodrigo, M. M., Roth, M., Heap, T. & Guppy, N. (2021). A Multi-Institutional Assessment of Changes in Higher Education Teaching and Learning in the Face of COVID-19. Educational Review, DOI: 10.1080/00131911.2021.1955830.

Guppy. N., Boud, D., Heap, T., Verpoorten, D., Matzat, U., Tai, J., Lutze-Mann, L., Roth, M., Polly, P., Burgess, J. L., Agapito, J., & Bartolic, S. K. (in press: HIGH-D-21-00615R2) Teaching and learning under COVID-19 public health edicts: The role of household lockdowns and prior technology usage. Higher Education

The following text provides the initial project description that was used as partner institutions were invited to join the international partnership.

Lessons for Higher Education from the COVID-19 Transition to Online Teaching and Learning

We are proposing a multi-institutional, multi-national study of the consequences from the COVID-19 related transition to emergency remote teaching.  By comparing across institutions and nations we hope to glean lessons of the SWOT variety – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – resulting from rapidly transitioning to teaching under social distancing.  Speculation already suggests that this disruptive event will trigger long-lasting consequences for online teaching and learning, both positive and negative, just as it will have broader enduring effects for working remotely, supply chain logistics, and health care organization.

We believe the multi-national, COVID-19 necessitated, transition to emergency remote teaching provides a unique opportunity to assess the impacts of a mass-scaled attempt at using virtual platforms as learning environments.  Institutional online responses will vary substantially, from the simple dumping of lecture notes and PowerPoint slides onto a digital platform through to richer interactive engagements among professors and student peers with more sophisticated, refined assessment methods, both formative and summative.  Further, the availability of institution-wide learning analytics provides a rich source of data (e.g., learning management tool usage, peer-to-peer interactions) although this will differ by institutional readiness.”