Creating Socially Distanced Campuses and Education Project - Leadership Intelligence Report - Design and Delivery

The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic and instantaneous impact on the delivery of certified/approved course and programme delivery in March 2020 (earlier than this in some national contexts) when the crisis hit and in the case of the UK social lockdown was imposed. While we are still dealing with the ramifications this unprecedented disruption has caused, in particular to assessment, institutions are having to rapidly turn their attention to the design and delivery of learning and teaching for the next semester/academic year.

Given the major uncertainties associated with the progress of the virus locally, nationally and internationally, how we deliver teaching and assessment safely to meet both learning outcomes and student expectations, differentiated across courses and disciplines, is a major challenge. Radically reconfigured campuses will ‘welcome’ students virtually as well as physically, in all likelihood in small cohorts rather than en masse. Superimposed on this different, and potentially shifting and unstable foundation will be teaching programmes that have been restructured at short notice, and often built all or in part around unfamiliar online tools and techniques.

This report synthesises the discussions from the workshops series of the Socially Distanced Campuses and Education project.