Wow, March seemed to fly by! Although the group has existed only a couple of months, it feels it has been around longer. First, we established the group website, and also communicated everyone we actually exist, connecting with likeminded colleagues around the world. Then COVID-19 came and changed our lives and all the projects and teachings of our group member. It also had an effect to our focus and immediate activities.
Several accounts of COVID-19 pandemic began emerging in March (e.g. Andrejevic & Selwyn 2020; Selwyn 2020; Jandrić 2020). Naturally our group felt it would be important both to document and comment COVID-19 and push to online learning also from the Finnish perspective. For this, have initiated one commentary paper together with our colleagues from our institution, and how they experienced the push to fully online learning.
All of our group members have taught online and blended for 10-20 years, which makes these quite normal to us. That said, we have colleagues who possess different levels of experience with online learning. Therefore, we thought it would be important to hear from them how they experienced this situation, how it has gone for them, and what could we learn for the future. The first preliminary findings show that teachers are full of imagination and resources and determined even during such an event. They are not as apprehensive of adopting new tools and procedures as they are sometimes portrayed, if they fit with good pedagogy and learning. One could even say educators have shown very high levels of social responsibility during a very stressful situation.
We are also doing another study with Finnish teachers from different levels of education (from primary school to higher education), and how they experienced the leap to online learning. It will be interesting to hear from them how it might differ between different levels, or what similarities emerge.
In addition to this, we have another study on educator identities, and especially how educators who have been teaching 15-20 years experience digitalization (Brennen & Kreiss, 2016) in their work.
Two of the mentioned studies will be narrative studies to understand the educators’ experience, and to connect it to the wider discussion on how digitalization and Ed-Tech impacts education.
These have kept us busy, in addition to engaging with students who might be interested in becoming involved with CARDE activities to examine digitalization in education through critical applied research. More about these developments, our forthcoming conference presentation and how our research develops next month.
References:
Andrejevic, M., & Selwyn, N. (2020). The new transparency: smartphones, data tracking, and COVID-1. Retrieved April 17, 2020, from https://lens.monash.edu/@education/2020/03/09/1379796/the-new-transparency-smartphones-data-tracking-and-covid-19
Brennen, J. S., & Kreiss, D. (2016). Digitalization. The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect111
Jandrić, P. (2020). Postdigital Research in the Time of Covid-19. Postdigital Science and Education, 2, 233–238. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00113-8
Selwyn, N. (2020). After COVID-19: The Longer-Term Impacts of the Coronavirus Crisis on Education. Retrieved April 17, 2020, from https://educationfutures.monash.edu/all—present/after-covid-19