Abstract
COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey of n = 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respondents report an abundance of what we call ‘afflictions’ exacted upon their role as educators and in far fewer yet no less visible ways ‘affordances’ derived from their rapid transition to online provision and early ‘entry-level’ use of digital pedagogies. Overall, they suggest that online migration is engendering significant dysfunctionality and disturbance to their pedagogical roles and their personal lives. They also signpost online migration as a major challenge for student recruitment, market sustainability, an academic labour-market, and local economies.
Highlights
The societal impact of COVID-19 is almost incalculable
This is relevant to scrutinising their educational provision and pedagogical investment too frequently confounded by the performative subsumptions of higher education as a prestige economy (Blackmore 2015; Blackmore and Kandiko 2011), a veneration of rankings (Peters 2019), and complicity with crude and inexact indicators of what counts
While the vast majority of respondents tend towards a negative view of online migration, which are represented in the following discussion as ‘afflictions’, there were some, albeit a minority, who spoke of its ‘affordances’ and who adopted a far more positive and optimistic tone in deliberating the impact of COVID-19 on higher education
Summary
The societal impact of COVID-19 is almost incalculable. It has affected, and continues to affect, profound social suffering and deep economic hardship. To do nothing would be falling prey to the languidness that has dogged many universities and caused their arrest in rethinking their role and relevance—and how they support their communities—in what is incontrovertibly a digital age and what others have described as the era of the fourth industrial revolution (Schwab 2017) For such reasons, we undertook a consultation of UK academics and their perspectives as individuals in the very mix of online transitioning in the wake of COVID-19, and what they are identifying and forecasting respectively as its immediate and prospective impacts. While the vast majority of respondents tend towards a negative view of online migration, which are represented in the following discussion as ‘afflictions’, there were some, albeit a minority, who spoke of its ‘affordances’ and who adopted a far more positive and optimistic tone in deliberating the impact of COVID-19 on higher education
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
