Towards a Post-Covid-19 ‘New Normality?’: Physical and Social Distancing,the Move to Online and Higher Education

Recently, I had an interesting meeting with a long-known colleague. What would have been an unusual meeting a couple of months ago, for two colleagues who work at the same institution, has now become the ‘new normality’ – we met over a scheduled Zoom meeting. In the meeting, she shared her observation that while Covid-19 has taken education by storm, its impact on higher education planning and policies was an inherent disaster. This sudden act and immediate change to the way higher education composes itself was claiming the space for staff and students and changing the way we were existing and being. In this, however, she argued, that in some ways Covid-19 was a mere accelerator of the processes that were put into motion some time ago, rather than a radical changemaker. That is, that something that was inevitable to occur, has suddenly, without consultation, formed a clear, easiest and most logical path forward in a time of crises. The question that my colleague asked, as we talked on Zoom, was will we ever be able to return the genie back into the bottle? In a world heading towards ‘post-Covid-19’ realities, I will try to model my colleague’s thought towards a couple of scenarios that higher education has experienced. The first one is related to the sudden shift to online teaching and learning, including webinars as a way to disseminate research. The second idea relates to the thinking around international students and student mobility, which had been heralded, up to Covid-19, as a victory of globalization and an essential revenue stream for tertiary institutions.

In the world pre-Covid-19, academics had received a clear nod from University administration that their programmes and courses should start being translated and slowly become part of online offerings. This policy push in higher education was sometimes a direct request, but often, as someone described to me, a ‘playful wink’ that was supposed to push online teaching and learning to the forefront of curriculum offerings in Academia. The arguments for this shift were quite clear: both enhancing the democratic nature of teaching and learning and providing accessibility of tertiary studies to those who cannot attend classes in person – for personal reasons or decisions, because of geography or economic necessity. The other idea was portraying the line of thought that online teaching and learning is equally as effective as face to face offering but is far more cost-effective.

Critique to these ideas was very vocal. The problem was that online teaching and learning was not really thought through; the ideas of digital literacy and digital pedagogies were mostly unexplored, and rarely prompted any in-depth thought from the course directors or lecturing staff, who received minimal support. Online teaching and learning masqueraded as a verbatim ‘lift’ of the content from face to face classes, and simply ‘dropping’ them into an online space where anybody could access them. As the call for greater accessibility of online teaching and learning grew, and more and more thinking went into how to make online teaching and learning work, more and more academics were protesting and calling for a return to face to face offerings. They argued that there was minimal meaningful investment in online teaching and learning; there were no necessary adjustments of assessments or to the volume of work required of them (and students); or of the way the content was delivered without any further pedagogical considerations.

When Covid-19 forced all academics to move online, literally overnight – and the whole world plugged in – it highlighted the state of academic community. Everything in academia, within a couple of days’ notice, moved online, and the results have demonstrated both the creativity, but also the instrumental nature of academics. It has showcased how higher education lacks meaningful research into digital pedagogies and teaching and learning, that can be translated to academic colleagues, but also passed on to schools. A colleague of mine at a public university in the USA has described the inherent shock of moving to the online space, the heightened sense of unequal and undemocratic practices, the unfairness of the online system and the way the white, the male, the middle class are again privileged in the space of Covid-19 – something that we were warned about but did not necessarily listen to before the pandemic took place (Littlejohn & Hood, 2018).

Slow changes to education and curriculum in higher education were not able to withstand or to provide meaningful thought to this sudden change. Overnight, we have shattered the overall structure of our degrees and programs and units, our plans, our academic rules and processes. We have no longer debated whether online teaching and learning was the future of education. The answer was here. There's been more and more questions about why things are happening; rather than answers; and no one has protested as there are no other policy or other answers to the condition we have found ourselves in (Peters et al., 2020).

Firstly, there were some academics who have argued that online was the very idea of an outward thinking and reaching university, liberating education from vast sandstone campuses. It facilitated opportunities for spreading and issuing education to a much broader audience and to students who traditionally would maybe be studying by correspondence, or at a distance, or in this current situation were not able to come to campus due to requirements of physical distancing (sometimes referred to as a social distancing). Students have become very much part of the everyday, mundane culture through being connected online; where more and more courses required a blended model; and where education was considered somewhat relevant to the idea that if the courses are online, they are more progressive, more democratic, facilitating wider engagement and equity. Furthermore, trickling down from the educational administration was also an increasingly prevalent economic argument. Online teaching and learning requires fewer resources and less expenditure, enabling more students to be enrolled in the online platform compared to the physical classroom. Collective tasks and peer assessment have become standard to reduce academic workload and thus to make some contracts to expire. What was once considered to be exciting and innovative, now has become pedestrian and directly affecting academic jobs (Peter & Tesar, 2017).

The academic thinking of pre-Covid-19 times, of the online as not here to change the world but as complementary to the traditional face to face offerings, somewhat testifies to the idea of teaching and learning that had been occurring over many decades and remained more or less the same before the pandemic. This has been demonstrated by universities’ investment into campus facilities. Similarly, a lot of these Universities’ capital investment was relying on the idea that they will offer different fee structures for students coming from overseas, and the discourse and KPIs around mobility and international students who can create additional revenue streams were part of debates of Universities at all tiers – from the top ranked to the provincial.

Covid-19 has diminished the premise that online is just for some students and not for others; as well as the premise of an ever-increasing pipeline of international students that should be subsidizing and offsetting costs for Universities, enabling them to offer high quality teaching, learning, research, and service. Both of these ideas – ‘uncertain online futures’ and ‘an endless pipeline of international students’ have turned out to be false.

So, we are moving to a ‘post-Covid-19’ world. ‘Post’ is an interesting predicament because it is clear that we cannot be – anytime soon - post Covid-19. It is likely that we will carry Covid-19 with us for a very long time, and not necessarily in a linear progression. As such, it may mean a very long, unclear and messy transformation. For years, we’ve been exposed to various thinkers and writers reflecting and writing up the histories and futures of educational thought (Tesar & Arndt, 2019). We have in this Covid-19 world perhaps become even greater strangers to ourselves in the educational world, as our otherness is enhanced through the physical distancing and social isolation policies (Arndt, 2015).

There is no doubt that we are currently living in a time that our generation will remember forever. We have already started to use the language of ‘new normality’, which has taken over the novelty, the fear, the temporality of such an engagement. What is ‘new’ about this ‘new normality’, and what is ‘normality’ in this ‘new normality’, are some of the questions that we will have to address. And most importantly, can we put this online genie back into its bottle?

And while we ponder these questions, I suggest that looking back and re-reading Camus’ The Plague may provide some solace in our search for physical distancing, as we keep on engaging in the online space in higher education:

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four (Camus, 1991, p. 78).