A close colleague of mine recently gave me some feedback on a talk I gave, entitled, “Challenges to Student Engagement in 2024”, they quipped, “Tom, isn’t it time you stopped talking about COVID-19?”. While it was delivered with an air of a good-natured ribbing, this has made me think more deeply about this question in the weeks since, particularly as my research and work requires me to hold discussions daily about how we can improve student engagement within the modern university. During and since the global pandemic, I have tried to make sense of how engagement patterns were changing, due to extreme measures taken to ‘stop the spread’ of the virus in the pre-vaccine years of 2020-2022. For many of us who worked in education during this period, it was both the most innovative and stressful time we will likely experience in our careers – especially when considering the pace and scale of change. But following my last blog on student attendance, in which I highlighted the COVID-19 pandemic as a major factor in leading students to engage less physically through attendance in our universities, I think this question posed by my colleague is worth exploring a little more. Why is the effect of the pandemic still worth thinking and talking about?
The COVID-19 pandemic which particularly impacted society at a global scale during the years of 2020 and 2021 had an immense disruption on any pathway of engagement or exchange that relied on in-person interaction, which, I think it is fair to say, is the vast majority of our human experiences. The lockdown, social distancing, and personal protective equipment (better known by its acronym, PPE) requirements changed nature of social experiences for the majority of people in most nations, such as how we interacted with our work, our education, and even our loved ones. In the UK, we experienced two major lockdowns with mass closures, and limitations placed on education, services and social engagements, where the future was completely unpredictable beyond the next press briefing from government ministers. For an entire generation of learners, from early-years, primary, secondary, further and higher education, the majority of students were forced into distance learning – in a sector built on the reliance of presenteeism and all that could be understood, guaranteed, and inferred from this (as I have explored previously).
For some, the pandemic presented as many opportunities as it did challenges, some families were brought closer together, some got more exercise, and others enjoyed, perhaps even thrived, at not having to go out as much. For others, the pandemic was the worst possible experience, where there were fears of becoming unwell, for many mental health decreased, and the economic hardship may have seen one’s employment impacted or even removed entirely. There were clear extremes between these two different experiences of the pandemic, where celebrities posted about renting villas with swimming pools for the summer to ‘isolate’, while on the other end of the spectrum, students who caught the virus had to isolate in their bedrooms in student accommodation for days on end – in spaces often smaller than some European prison cell - and families of learners had to share one computer and take it in turns between work and schooling. That’s not to mention those who may not have had access to such technology at all. In line with this, the pandemic has often been referred to as a magnifier of societal privilege, where it wasn’t just financial poverty/wealth which was apparent, but also technology poverty/wealth, space (how many rooms in your home or if you had access to a garden), as well as access to support networks (who lived nearby, or in your ‘tier’). For our students, some would return home in the first lockdown to a nice study space and a personal computer to complete their studies, while others would be engaging with their learning on their smartphone in a shared bedroom, if they were lucky enough to have a smartphone and bedroom at all. For children at earlier levels of education, some had their parents and additional tutors to support their education, whereas others had no support at all.
The pandemic has also been referred to as a catalyst, where many engagement trends were sped up in the direction that they were already travelling. Perhaps certain high street stores were going to close by the end of the 2020s anyway due to the increase in online retail patterns, but because of the pandemic, they did much sooner. The way we now communicate online more, through quick chat messengers rather than emails, was a trend heading towards most professions, but this functionality in internal communications was certainly accelerated by the pandemic. Indeed, the working from home culture may have already had its sights set on many organisations, but this was mandated by the lockdown restrictions which insisted upon its introduction with immediate effect. Due to the rapid acceleration of these working patterns, in HE they came as something as a shock to the system, some were welcome, others not too much. In some areas this quick pace and scale of change has been hard to adapt to, especially in organisations where the culture tends towards slow movement or progress.
In higher education institutions, the majority turned to distance learning to adhere to restrictions, where the technology innovations of the modern times allowed this to happen more easily (imagine trying to adapt to COVID-19 pre-1990). For engagement, students experienced learning and knowledge exchange online in streamed classes and seminars. The prevailing line from higher education institutions was that this was the same learning experience in all except format of delivery and, importantly, therefore worth the same cost (value for money during this time was a widespread concern noted by students and the media). This had a number of consequences. This meant that students internalised the understanding that they did not need to be in the physical room to engage with the course. In addition, when the sessions were recorded, students could go further and watch (and re-watch) their contact time at a time that worked best for them. Flexibility, adaptability, and personalisation in their learning experience became the norm. This unveiled fantastic accessibility opportunities for neurodiverse students, who could slow down recorded content, re-watch to revise, and have audio elements enhanced from transcriptions. It also made learning convenient, where sessions could be engaged with on individual terms, strategically, even at double speed, or whole modules/units of study could be boxed set across a weekend. Furthermore, with regards to their assessment experience, many education levels provided ‘safety nets’ where students were supported with further resits, given third or fourth attempts to pass, to rightly support those learners in the extreme circumstances referred to in this blog.
It is therefore completely understandable that engagement behaviours in and expectations of the university have therefore changed, often causing frustration with staff leading many to feel that, in the phrase I’d often hear in the staff development workshops I delivered in 2023, “we just need to get these COVID-19 students through – then it will go back to normal”. In response to this view, I’m sorry to say that if you are waiting to just “get these COVID-19 students through”, you will have to wait until 2038 for a student who has not been directly impacted by the pandemic. The experiences of higher education students were parallelled by much younger learners in the changes to engagement and social experiences and these prospective students who experienced such changes are still on their way to us. From conversations with educators at early, primary and secondary education, they will tell you that their student engagement has changed due to the pandemic, and unfortunately, the impact of 16 months of social distancing, online learning, and supportive assessment packages will be felt for some time.
So, you may be asking, what does this mean and what can I do? I would take time to speak with educators at prior education levels about the post-pandemic impact on engagement with their learners. What are they observing, what has changed, and how have their practices shifted as a result. We can learn so much from joining these educational journey conversations up and understanding the generations about to join us in higher education. The change we experienced in the pandemic is not likely to come at such chaotic pace and scale again, at least we hope, but the continuous change and enhancement in the engagement space is likely to continue. Being empathetic with our learners about the journeys they have been on and how this has affected their expectations of learning is valuable, as well as remaining curious to see how you might adapt your practice to improve the overall learning and teaching experience. As I often endorse, engaging students themselves in discussions about their education is always worth the time – to speak to those who are living through it, so we may respond to, match and appropriately manage expectations moving forward.
About the author:
Tom Lowe has researched and innovated in student engagement across diverse settings for over ten years, in areas such as student voice, retention, employability and student-staff partnership. Tom works at the University of Westminster as Assistant Head of School (Student Experience) in Finance and Accounting where he leads on student experience, outcomes and belonging. Tom is also the Chair of RAISE, a network for all stakeholders in higher education for researching, innovating and sharing best practice in student engagement. Prior to Westminster, Tom was a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Portsmouth, and previously held leadership positions for engagement and employability at the University of Winchester. Tom has published two books on student engagement with Routledge; ‘A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theory into Practice’ in 2020 and ‘Advancing Student Engagement in Higher Education: Reflection, Critique and Challenge’ in 2023, and has supported over 40 institutions in consultancy and advisory roles internationally.
Recommended further readings on student engagement during COVID-19:
Jackson,. A and Blake, S. 2022. Building students’ sense of belonging needs time and energy [online] Wonkhe. Available at: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/staff-perceptions-of-belonging-and-inclusion-in-higher-education/
Kalaichelvi, R. and Sankar, J.P., 2021. Pedagogy in post-COVID-19: Effectiveness of blended learning in higher education. Asian EFL Journal, 28(3.1), pp.86–109.
Singh, J., Steele, K. and Singh, L., 2021. Combining the best of online and face-to-face learning: Hybrid and blended learning approach for COVID-19, post vaccine, and post-pandemic world. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 50(2), pp.140–171. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472395211047865