The pandemic has transformed how we approach teaching and learning
Avoidance of COVID-19 infection has led to a wide-spread change in the way we approach teaching and learning. Psychological stressors affecting cognition in animals can be similar in humans (Clinchy et al. 2013). While there is less information on how fear affects how or what animals teach each other, COVID-19 has certainly changed human behavior in this capacity. The pandemic has caused an abrupt shift in content delivery across disciplines and globally, an alignment in interest among educators that is unprecedented (e.g., Bao 2020, Basilaia and Kvavadze 2020, Crawford et al 2020, Zhang et al. 2020). This alignment may have been predicted from ecological theory as risk (e.g., risk of predation, risk of infection) tends to constrain decisions to what is safe for the at-risk (Hutchinson and Gigerenzer 2005, Kemp 2005, Winnie et al. 2006). Afterall, the fitness consequence of being eaten (or fatally infected in this case) are more severe than missing an opportunity to learn, or procure resources or reproduce for that matter. Because the pandemic forced the abrupt shutdown of universities for safety reasons, in effect it forced all disciplines to move online (Crawford et al. 2020) for “emergency remote instruction” (Hodges et al. 2020). Thus, among educators, COVID-19 has simplified how we approach learning in a sense by giving us all a common goal of moving to emergency remote instruction.
Although measures may have been similarly applied across disciplines, the effects of moving online across disciplines are asymmetrical. Disciplines that require human contact such as medicine (Ahmed et al. 2020a, Rose 2020) are perhaps most severely affected. However, field-based disciplines such as ecology, evolution, and conservation biology are also dramatically affected (Corlett et al. 2020). Although the pandemic has affected us all, different institutionalized and individual strategies to accommodate the threat and burden on education have emerged (e.g., Bao 2020, Basilaia and Kvavadze 2020, Crawford et al 2020, Zhang et al. 2020). The unifying theme is that education has transitioned, rapidly and without time for much preparation, to online delivery, regardless of other nuances in responses or the discipline being affected. Interestingly, like the famous hockey stick graph in climate change literature (i.e., Mann et al. 1999), this unification of interest in online learning is reflected in an abrupt upturn in google search interest–one which nearly perfectly parallels that of new COVID-19 infections per week, at least up until mid-May when classes end for the academic year in many parts of the world (Figure 2). This correlation suggests that interest in strategies for effective remote instruction increased as risk from COVID-19 increased; again, we used google search interest and number of new infections as proxies for interest in the topic overall and perceived risk of infection.
Although aspects of our response have been unified, the pandemic has also highlighted inequities in many aspects of our daily experiences (Ahmed et al. 2020b), such as access to healthcare (Hooper et al 2020), and job and housing security (Yancy 2020; Raifman and Raifman 2020). COVID-19 has also magnified some educational inequities, whereby those previously disadvantaged or at risk of attrition find themselves even more disadvantaged and at greater risk. Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to face challenges from e.g., unreliable internet, added demands of child- and elder-care, job loss, or the need to work as “essential” employees–furthering their risk of contracting COVID-19 (Winter 2020, CDC 2020) . In many places where we work, low socioeconomic status overlaps strongly with ethnic and racial categories; consequently, the students we most need to retain are also the most likely to be at greatest risk, including from an educational standpoint with inclusion and retention, during the pandemic. Thus, an added challenge for educators is to not only teach using novel delivery modalities, but also to redouble our efforts at inclusive teaching.