Kendra Haines
Author
Kendra A. Haines
Affiliation
Cape Breton University
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic forced postsecondary institutions across the world to abruptly transition into emergency remote teaching March 2020. Cut off from their on-campus learning communities, many turned to social media to ‘fill the void’. Overnight, faculty were tasked with addressing the challenges of engaging and teaching a student body that is also suddenly online, and teaching in a delivery modality that they had not agreed to at the start of the semester. As campuses across the world closed temporarily to slow the spread of COVID-19, faculty lost their in-person academic communities. The purpose of this literature review is to explore the use of social network sites as an online community of practice amongst faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic regarding pandemic pedagogy.
Keywords
COVID-19, Community of Practice, Online Community of Practice, Social Network Sites, Pandemic Pedagogy, Higher Education, Faculty
Overview
Filling the Void: Online Community of Practices in Higher Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic (08:14).
Introduction
“The university is transitioning to provide only essential services as directed by Public Health. Over the next 48 hours, we will be scaling down operations to only those essential to the delivery of courses by alternative methods and business continuity processes. All in-person classes are suspended from March 16-20, 2020. This time is to be used for faculty and staff to prepare for the transition from in-person instruction to “distributed” or “fully online” instruction from March 23, 2020 until further notice.”
This announcement to faculty at an Atlantic Canadian university was echoed at institutions across Canada and around the world as the coronavirus pandemic rendered classroom gatherings unsafe.
During the spring semester of 2020, postsecondary institutions around the world suddenly found themselves in uncharted territory. A novel coronavirus, COVID-19, first identified in China in December 2019 began to rapidly spread across the globe. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The sudden shift to remote teaching and learning in the spring of 2020 was rapid and dramatic. In the following days, as part of a move to reduce the spread of COVID-19 infections, postsecondary institutions were shuttered. Dorms closed and students were sent home. Faculty were informed not to return to campus, and in some cases locked out of buildings. Instruction abruptly shifted from in-person to online forcing postsecondary faculty to quickly pivot, learn, and adapt to new-to-them instructional and pedagogical methods. Social media was alight with the frustrations, confusion, and eventual resignation that was to be the new reality of higher education.
Many postsecondary institutions extended spring breaks to allow faculty to prepare for moving their courses online. Most classes were drastically altered as