As previous research has suggested, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought implications for different fields, in which higher education is not an exception (Blankenberger & Williams, 2020; Bidwell et al., 2020; Dhawan, 2020). The social distancing restrictions adopted by several governments including the Swedish one to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have implied that most higher education institutions temporarily closed and/or transitioned face-to-face designed courses into online environments in a matter of weeks, or even days, forcing the teaching staff to increasingly adopt digital technologies to continue the course delivery (Rad et al., 2021; Bidwell et al., 2020; Hodges et al., 2020; Dhawan, 2020). Through collecting data at a Swedish university, this inductive and pragmatic study utilized a convergent mixed methods approach to study teachers ́ lived experiences during the COVID- 19 period, and explore the implications of change brought on by the pandemic to the design of courses at the higher education level, with the aim of contributing to future action in the field. The temporal component (Sweeting, 2014) was utilized as a unit of comparison for analyzing the results of the interview and questionnaire data to deepen the understanding of the COVID-19 implications of change on course design through time, especially looking towards the future. The study’s findings suggest that the main changes brought on by the pandemic to higher education course design relate to the alteration of teaching format, the increased presence of course design as a topic in the teaching agenda, and the increased digitalization of course design, with associated challenges such as the technical and the communication, interaction, and engagement aspects of course design, and opportunities such as the highlighted digital possibilities for course design. Furthermore, the main implication brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic to the future of course design is expected to be associated with the advanced digitalization of higher education course design. This future implication has been problematized by the study through utilizing the conceptual framework provided by Selwyn’s (2011) understanding of the relationship between education and digital technologies, inviting higher education teachers and institutions to question the role of digital technologies in the present and future moments of higher education course design, and learn from the present for improving the future.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-199752 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Rodriguez Hernandez, Sara Ines |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för pedagogik och didaktik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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