The state of digital education during covid-19 – curriculum politics and the student experience

COVID-19 triggered a quick transition in higher education to online environments, with consequences for academic staff as well as students, many of whom have never experienced online education before. This switch has impacted many student groups, none more than international students whose plans of studying abroad were unexpectedly curbed by physical and social restrictions. The transition of on-campus universities to online environments was meant to be an instant solution to a global health crisis. Yet, what started as a quick win became the norm as the pandemic did not subside as fast as expected. This has had serious implications to students’ learning as well as their overall academic experience. The study under discussion draws on empirical data collected through a qualitative, narrative inquiry study with 28 international students who started their university degrees in UK on campus had to move online during the pandemic. This paper explores the experiences of international students during the pandemic in the UK and the implications of emergency online learning to the future of digital education in higher education. We posit that during the pandemic, digital education has often been misconstrued as a traditional form of distance education where the delivery of content is interpreted as the means of fulfilling the purpose of teaching and learning. In so doing, it positions students as knowledge consumers and staff as mere knowledge providers, characterising student learning with a trait of passivity and their relationship with teaching staff and colleagues as an impersonal transaction. Additionally, it points to institutions’ resistance to localising their curricular offering to the new context, instead choosing to transfer practices that have been taken for granted on-campus. This raises two crucial points of discussion: 1) Firstly, it highlights the lamentable crisis of curriculum research: unable to align research with practice, this has led to the separation of the educational questions ‘what is taught’ from ‘how it is taught’, thus encouraging a rather functionalist view of education, which in the context of the digital, also needs to consider the ‘where’ of teaching relationally. 2) Secondly, it raises the question regarding the meaning universities attach to ‘student experience’, a concept western universities have been quick to commodify as a key element of the hidden curriculum. Yet, during the pandemic it was not only forgotten but practically obliterated through the choices – or lack of it – universities made to keep afloat. We conclude that universities’ disregard for curricular adaptation is damaging to the state of higher education with serious future consequences to how online education is interpreted and valued in relation to on-campus education. There is a real danger that digital education will achieve an even lower status than before, with on-campus education gaining a renewed form of distinction. This has implications to the inclusive and sustainable future of education worldwide.