Abstract
A significant step in the production of this special issue on some of the trends of digitalisation of higher education (HE) teaching & learning in the Nordic countries was a one-day workshop hosted and funded by the University of Agder’s Centre for Digital Transformation (CeDiT) and held in Kristiansand on 7 February 2020. When we first met to discuss most of the papers that ended up as the final selection, we certainly could not have imagined that, within weeks of our meeting, our main subject matter, the digitalisation of HE, which until then had been a relatively small but rapidly growing niche topic, would have become one of the most important areas, if not the most crucial one, in HE in the Nordics, as in the rest of the world. From March onwards, Nordic universities and other higher education institutions (HEIs) rushed to shift to online learning to continue their operations in the middle of lockdowns and other social distancing restrictions implemented by governments to curb the spread of Covid-19. As more blended forms have been used since the start of the 2020–21 academic year across the region – to allow for a mix of online and face-to-face delivery – digitalisation has now become a staple of all HE teaching & learning, and it looks like this will be the new normal in the foreseeable future, and certainly until a cure or a vaccine for Covid-19 is found.
Highlights
A significant step in the production of this special issue on some of the trends of digitalisation of higher education (HE) teaching & learning in the Nordic countries was a one-day workshop hosted and funded by the University of Agder’s Centre for Digital Transformation (CeDiT) and held in Kristiansand on 7 February 2020
Education institutions (HEIs) rushed to shift to online learning to continue their operations in the middle of lockdowns and other social distancing restrictions implemented by governments to curb the spread of Covid-19
The first is that perhaps authors and editors did not feel the need to reframe or adjust their work in view of the pandemic developments, largely because the topics touched upon here have all of a sudden taken centre stage in the delivery of HE teaching and learning: the growth of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) in Scandinavia (Tømte et al in this issue), the interpretation of Danish national government digitalisation strategies by HEIs (Buus & Haase in this issue), Norwegian school teachers’ perceptions of learning outcomes in online professional development programmes (Tømte & Gjerustad in this issue), and the development of digital open educational resources for a bioethics course by a consortium of Nordic HEIs (McGrath in this issue)
Summary
Speaking, the first key term to emphasise in this special issue pertains to the role that context, in its various manifestations (temporal, geographic, institutional, political), plays in the observed trends. We are interested in the role of the national contexts (the HE system and the key external actors and institutions interacting with that system) and organisational ones (e.g. how the digitalisation of the classroom brings about, or not, organisational changes and the scope and extent of such changes). McGrath’s (in this issue) reflections on the development of a bioethics course as a digital open educational resource (OER) by a consortium of five HEIs (in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) are useful. In light of the current travel disruptions, restrictions and risks, it is quite possible that the ideas of “virtual mobility” and “internationalisation at home” that McGrath focuses on (e.g. international exchange without physical travel) will gain more momentum than they might have prior to the Covid-19 pandemic
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