The coronavirus pandemic has radically reshaped established teaching practices in higher education.
We have had to draw on our expertise as academics to teach in unfamiliar ways, rapidly develop our expertise in online and blended learning, and develop new ways of harnessing expertise in our institutions to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Recent educational development research has attempted to describe the nature of expertise in higher education.
For example, King (2020) considers expertise to be the product of how to teach in our disciplines, the ‘artistry’ of teaching, and the constant evolution of our practices through purposeful professional development. Van Dijk et al. (2020) suggest six tasks can be used to describe expertise in higher education teaching: teaching and supporting learning, educational design, assessment and feedback, leadership and management, scholarship and research and professional development.
Our practices across all dimensions of expertise have been disrupted by the pandemic, and critically reflecting on our response to these changes is itself a valuable part of our professional development.
The pandemic has also provided an opportunity to think about the expertise that our graduates need to contribute positively to a complex and interconnected world, and the effective teaching practices that support their development.
Our graduates will spend many decades as citizens addressing complex societal issues that have yet to emerge, and futureproofing them to engage proactively with these challenges requires new forms of expertise. Our students are experts in their own right - in what works in online and blended learning, in learning from home and how to design flexible learning: how can this expertise be integrated into our approaches to learning and teaching?
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