Lessons Learnt From The Home Office: An Autoethnographic Case Study

Abstract

The Corona pandemic has certainly acted as a catalyst for technology enabled and technology enhanced learning. In this paper technology enabled learning is defined as learning activities that are supported and made possible by technology, while technology enhanced learning refers to learning activities where technology has improved the quality. To what degree, and how teaching and learning activities and meetings have been transformed depends on the actual educational orchestration before the pandemic. This case story is based on experiences from courses and collaborations at a department of computer and system science. The question that guided this study was: "What are the lessons learnt from online activities at the home office during the pandemic?". This study was carried out as an autoethnographic case study with five case units: 1) A programming course 2) A course for Bachelor's thesis writing, 3) A course for system development by internship, and 4) Staff meetings and 5) Research collaborations. Results indicate that at a department where technology enabled blended synchronous learning was the standard mode already before the pandemic, the forced changes have not been that drastic. However, the course with internship and workplace learning has really suffered. The course where students have their Bachelor's thesis supervision has been much alike, while the other units show improvements that could be classified as technology enhancement. Ensemble programming online has worked very well, staff meetings have been more focused than in face-to-face mode, and the research collaborations have been efficient and with a high number of publications. Research methods seems to have changed with more literature reviews, more of email interviews and more of focus group interviews in video conference systems. The part of research that has suffered is the one with conferences, and as an example, networking at a virtual conference has been rather poor. Finally, many home offices seem to survive the pandemic due to the high and high-quality delivery from home, with the known risk of distance workers becoming workaholics.