In the year or so after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, History teaching in UK higher education was transformed, as lectures and seminar were shifted online, fieldtrips became impossible, and examination halls were closed. We – history lecturers – had to shift our teaching online and our students were forced to work remotely, foregoing much that is vital to the ‘student experience’ – social contact with peers, on-campus learning facilities and interaction with academic staff.

While positives came out of the experience, for most it was extremely difficult, professionally and personally. Yet before the pandemic had ended, institutions and regulatory bodies trumpeted the sector’s resilience and creativity in meeting the unprecedented challenges posted by the pandemic, articulating a vision of future HE in which online learning played an ever-more vital role. While this vision has not (yet) been realised, it was what we saw as an overly rosy take on the pandemic and its aftermath that inspired the research on which we report in our paper, “Post-pandemic pedagogy: experiences of learning and teaching history before, during and after Covid-19”.

In particular, we were concerned that little consideration was being given to how academic staff had experienced teaching under pandemic conditions. Subject teaching expertise – in our case in History, but we believed more broadly – was virtually absent from discussions about what had happened during the pandemic and how that should inform that might happen next (with the notable exception of History UK’s Pandemic Pedagogy Handbook: https://www.history-uk.ac.uk/the-pandemic-pedagogy-handbook/). Thanks to funding from the Royal Historical Society (https://royalhistsoc.org/), History UK (https://www.history-uk.ac.uk/) and the East Midlands Centre for History Learning and Teaching (https://eastmidlandscentreforhistorylearningandteaching.education/), we were able to conduct a survey of History lecturers and students in UK higher education.

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 and the bright new digital world to come, our respondents adjudged the pandemic to have worsened teaching and learning in almost every respect. Students and staff felt the loss of social connection strongly. ‘I missed the interaction with others, the lunch cafes and generally seeing people. Would be great to get back to that – even if masks required,’ one student mused.

Much less uniform were respondents’ favoured teaching practices after the pandemic. Most respondents assessed pandemic teaching in history for what it lacked, especially in comparison to the ‘normal’, in-person experience. For example, one student testified that ‘Zoom seminars were very interactive and gave a classroom feel but not as good as an actual seminar.’ 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.

Before the pandemic, closed-book exams were typically experienced by 57% of staff and advanced students, compared with the 5% who experienced open-book exams. Almost no one had closed-book exams during the pandemic. Instead, open-book exams were set or taken by 54%, and the proportion dispensing entirely with exams increased from 24% to 37%. Across the board, students repeatedly stated that exams were unfair, and references to them being little more than a ‘memory test’ were so frequent as to be almost ubiquitous. Many – though by no means all – academic respondents were also very positive about the diversification of assessment during the pandemic on the grounds that exams only ‘do well at assessing people who do well on exams’. Other staff made a sustained critique of open-book exams on the grounds that they lacked rigour and led to increased plagiarism, consequently arguing for the return of closed-book, timed examinations in future (for a bit more on the student perspective on the matter of assessment, check out this blog post from two students from the University of Lincoln who contributed to our research: https://makingdigitalhistory.co.uk/2022/09/12/perspectives-on-assessment-from-the-post-pandemic-pedagogy-project/).

Our research was carried out prior to the launch of Chat GPT in late 2022 and the subsequent widespread uptake (ubiquity?) of Generative AI, which has posed significant challenges for lecturers in History and other disciplines and which may lead some to question the currency of our results. We disagree. Our project offers a valuable snapshot of pandemic and post-pandemic pedagogies and preferences that should inform how we think about teaching and learning now. Our call to take disciplinary teaching expertise seriously is as relevant now as it was in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, as institutions and sector bodies make policy for the age of Chat GPT.

Post-pandemic pedagogy: experiences of learning and teaching history before, during and after Covid-19 by Marcus Collins (Loughborough University, UK) and Jamie Wood (University of Lincoln, UK) is published in History Education Research Journal, volume 22.

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