Edinburgh Napier University

  The pace of this so-called 'pivot' meant that careful online curriculum design and evidence-based approaches were often lost in the urgency to replicate face-to-face teaching. What are the longer term implications of so much of education operating within a theory- or evidence-free zone? Academic developers, learning technologists and academics with experience in digital education practices and research were faced with the impossible challenge of facilitating conceptual changes in teaching practices, normally a slow process, almost instantaneously. But has the emergency response of higher education educators radically reconfigured their understanding of learning and teaching? Drawing on multiple data sets across a single institution with themes of equity, leadership, wellbeing and nostalgia, this paper will present the preliminary findings of a large research project and investigate the longer-terms implications for how teaching and learning can move beyond ‘emergency’ teaching to slower, more theoretically-engaged and caring practices.