| |JULY 20248By Richard Walker, Assistant Director (Digital Education), University of YorkNAVIGATING THE LANDSCAPE OF ONLINE LEARNING: INSIGHTS AND STRATEGIES FOR EFFECTIVE STUDENT ENGAGEMENTIn the past couple of years, there has been a lively debate about the lasting impact of the emergency remote teaching (ERT) phase on the student experience within higher education. This has opened up a discussion about how learning might be best supported through the use of educational technologies. The shift to online teaching served as a crash course for many instructors in the use of unfamiliar tools and techniques. Teaching staff were expected to become familiar with new skills as online learning designers and tutors with unprecedented speed, and many faced a steep learning curve in doing so.What has been overlooked in the discussion is the student experience of having to quickly develop the skills to engage as fully online learners. Particularly for new undergraduates enrolling in programmes during the ERT phase, the transition to online learning was a challenging experience without the necessary support provision being put in place for them. There are still a lot of assumptions about Gen Z and their perceived level of digital skills and intuition to navigate university learning platforms effortlessly, without a formal induction process being offered to them. The generalisation of digital aptitudes for Gen Z and the whole digital native mythology has largely been debunked, but it appears that the harmful consequences of this way of thinking persist in some institutional practices, with students not receiving the support that they need to engage effectively with online systems. Richard WalkerIN MY OPINION
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