Photo by Jess Vide from Pexels

Since we all must take vacations in our dreams this year, here is a drone’s eye view of a beach in Honolulu. Best wishes for the season!

Petar Jandric, a professor teaching at the University of Zagreb, in Croatia, decided to document how this strange interlude has had an impact on our lives as university teachers. In early March, he sent out a call to academics for testimonials. The resulting compilation was published in June in an issue of Post Digital Science and Education, as “Teaching in the Age of COVID.” These brief first-person accounts are both familiar and unfamiliar–the writers are working in different institutions in different cities and different disciplines, but the worries about standards, student engagement and anxiety and the true nature of institutions of higher learning are ones we already know intimately.

Needless to say, a common theme was adapting to change. For academics this has meant adjusting delivery modes to optimize learning and fulfillment. However, it wasn’t long after universities shut down that wholesale reimagining of course delivery and curricula emerged inside and outside the academy. As early as June 1 of this year, a report by RBC entitled The Future of Post-Secondary Education: On Campus, Online and On-Demand, ponders the opportunities for replacing the traditional classroom. Faculty and student responses to such visions of expanding virtualization were predictably negative, but it’s unlikely the drive for transformation will wane when the dust has finally settled. Grand schemes will always be on the horizon.

Still, it’s possible the Guardian’s Steven Jones’s early prediction of a more modest transformation of universities will become our new normal. He points out how the pandemic has helped the university community appreciate our mutually supportive roles, and he raises the possibility that we might do away with unnecessary practices, now that we’ve managed quite well without them.

Some of this futurism will look quaint no doubt, once we’ve laboured through to the other side.