It's hard to believe March 11th marks the third anniversary of the COVID-19 global pandemic. As most restrictions have now been lifted and in-person learning has fully resumed, I'd like to take a moment to rewind to revisit the November 2020 - a time when the pandemic had drastically altered our lives, campus was closed, and we had just conducted a survey to understand UVic student and instructor experiences with emergency online teaching.
That month, 5242 students and 217 instructors at UVic responded to the survey. In November 2020, two things struck me about the findings. First was the convergence in themes between instructors and students. The second was how the pandemic context provided a pervasive backdrop underlying all other experiences.
Looking back now I notice how many of these themes have persisted and evolved. To name a few, students' concerns about accessibility and flexibility, faculty concerns about workload and the need to do more with less, mental and physical well being, and again underlying these themes are the aftershocks of the pandemic that will continue to shape the world in new ways in the years to come.
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