Until now, I stilll remembered clearly how anxious I was in the spring of 2020, when the dean of our school asked whether I could change the on-campus exam to online exam three days before the scheduled exam date for my course due to the deterioration of the covid-19 situation in Sweden. And from then, all the teaching activities suddenly had to be offered online according to the new guidelines of the school, which was refered as emergency remote teaching in Hodges et al., (2020).

Although including online elements into courses are quite common in higher education teaching, most of the university teachers were not ready for a sudden complete change into completely online teaching. We need time and effort to develop our skills in teaching remotely. The same applies to the students.The students also were forced to adapt to the new teaching and learning mode. After two years’ experience, both the teachers and students have developed online teaching and learning.

Pandemic is of course a disaster to the world, but it did provide us an opportunity to experience the shift from on campus teaching and learning to online teaching and learning. Hence, nowadays, we have learnt a lot on the pros and cons of the two teaching methods, on how to make most use of these two methods for pedagogical practices,  and on how to choose from these two teaching methods for a specific teaching or learning activities. Clearly, on campus teaching and online teaching complement each other. The integration of these two is referred to as blended learning.

As the pandemic restrictions in Sweden were lifted in spring 2022, a new challenge arised. Now we are allowed to offer on campus teaching, but should we really switch back completely to the practices which were conducted pre pandemic or should we continue with online teaching?

This question was very actively discussed in our PBL group, and each of us presented an example why on campus teaching is still needed although we had managed to do complete online teaching during the pandemic. We think that the blended learning would be the main stream in the future higher education practice. Now that both the teachers and the students are equipped with skills in both online and on campus teaching and learning, teachers should always keep this in their minds that “Pedogogy comes first”: the choice of teaching methods should be pedagogically well motivated when we design and plan our course teaching activities.

Reference

Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T. and Bond, A. (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. EDUCAUSE review.