Marcus Collins (Loughborough) and I just published some of the findings of the Post-Pandemic Pedagogy project. We investigated what history students and lecturers thought about teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic and their preferences for how teaching and learning should be delivered afterwards.

The paper was published a couple of weeks ago in the History Education Research Journal as “Post-pandemic pedagogy: experiences of learning and teaching history before, during and after Covid-19” (full text here). Here is the abstract:

“This article presents and analyses the findings of a nationwide survey of history staff and students conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic. More than five hundred respondents from nearly fifty universities provided qualitative and quantitative responses which compared their experience of teaching and learning before and during the pandemic, and their preferences once the pandemic abated. In contrast to the upbeat assessments by regulatory bodies of the ‘emergency pivot’ to online learning, the most significant finding of this survey was that respondents adjudged the pandemic to have worsened teaching and learning in almost every respect. Much less uniform were respondents’ favoured teaching practices after the pandemic. While most missed face-to-face seminars, only half advocated reinstating traditional in-person lectures and supervisions and fewer still wished to return to pen-and-paper exams. Further differences emerged between respondents at different types of institution, between staff and students, and between male and female academics. The overwhelmingly negative experiences of online teaching during the pandemic, and the variegated attitudes towards its continuation afterwards, indicate that higher education institutions should develop a post-pandemic pedagogy that has been evaluated rigorously under non-emergency conditions, and which is sensitive to the needs of different groups of learners and teachers working in different disciplines.”

Another blog post that summarises some of the findings on the HERJ blog here.

Our work was funded by History UK, the Royal Historical Society and the East Midlands Centre for History Learning and Teaching, who we thank for their support.

You can find out more about the overall project here, including links to resources and dissemination activities.