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INTED2022 Proceedings, 16th International Technology, Education and Development Conference,
2022: 2632-2641, ISBN: 978-84-09-37758-9, ISSN: 2340-1079, doi: 10.21125/inted.2022.0775
LIFELONG LEARNING THROUGH CONTEXT COLLAPSE: HIGHER
EDUCATION TEACHERS’ NARRATIVES ABOUT ONLINE
EDUCATION DURING THE PANDEMIC
C. Bjursell, H. Ahl, S. Almgren, P. Berglez, J. Bergström, K. Bertills, J.
Bäcklund, A. Dybelius, R. Florin Sädbom, M. Gustafsson, M. Hammarsten, J.
Heuman, M. Segolsson, C. Öhman
Jönköping University (SWEDEN)
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has elicited a shift from campus classrooms to distance education in higher
education worldwide, shaping not only students’ experiences, but also those of teachers, especially
those who never have taught online. In addition, the pandemic created a meta-context that has
positioned distance education as something different from previous efforts. This study aimed to
investigate higher education teachers’ experiences during the transition from classroom to online
teaching by using a collective auto-ethnography method based on 13 personal stories from Swedish
faculty. For the abductive approach in the analysis, a framework that combines lifelong learning theory
with the context collapse concept has been applied. The disjuncture that the pandemic has elicited
created a situation in which teachers had to make sense of the fact that their previous experiences did
not completely fit the new situation. Context collapse, a term used to describe encounters with many
audiences in social media, has been introduced to highlight the clash between professional and private
contexts in online educational platforms. Based on lifelong learning theories, we suggest that context
collapse should be examined in terms of how it can help improve higher education, as it holds the
potential to include the entire person – body and mind – in education.
Keywords: Lifelong learning; context collapse; higher education; narratives; online education
1 INTRODUCTION
The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly led to the closure of universities and colleges, necessitating an
aggressive digital transition. This created other circumstances for learning, shaping new experiences in
online education for teachers and students worldwide. In the emergency declarations concerning e-
learning at U.S. universities, face-to-face schooling was presented as a threat (Murphy 2020). Within
higher education, responses to COVID-19 across 20 countries ranged from none to social isolation
strategies on campus and rapid curriculum redevelopment to construct fully online offerings (Crawford
et al. 2020). However, the rapid shift to online teaching risks reducing the pedagogical praxis to the
fulfilment of rudimentary technical functions, and the pedagogical role to being “purely didactic,
transmissional, and, therefore, regressive” (Watermeyer et al. 2020, p. 9). Critical voices highlight the
connection to wider digital trends and transformations in academia, as well as possible implementations
of massified and depersonalized models (Williams & Gabe 2020). Amplified gaps and inequities
between learners, institutions, and countries are expected (Altbach & de Wit 2020); therefore, it is crucial
to document the pandemic’s impact on the educational system continuously, as it will provide knowledge
on how to deal with future development. This paper contributes to the growing body of literature
addressing COVID-19’s effects on higher education in particular, and online learning in general. The
paper aims to examine teachers’ experiences right after the transition from classroom to online teaching,
to make sense of what was going on in the spring 2020.
1.1 The pandemic and its effect on higher education
The rapid substitution of campus teaching with online teaching has been subjected to scientific
investigations, with several published papers addressing this unique situation. The pandemic’s impact
has been noted in Nigerian higher education through identified reductions in international education,
disruptions in academic calendars, cancellation of local and international conferences, teaching and
learning gaps, loss of manpower, and higher education budget cuts (Jacob et al. 2020). Higher
education institutions have been viewed as being better able to address students’ learning needs outside
of conventional classrooms (Toquero 2020), e.g., providing adequate support from faculty and teaching
assistants to students through online education (Bao 2020). This is necessary considering that students
INTED2022 Proceedings, 16th International Technology, Education and Development Conference,
2022: 2632-2641, ISBN: 978-84-09-37758-9, ISSN: 2340-1079, doi: 10.21125/inted.2022.0775
are expected to become disengaged from their studies and learning communities when moving online
(Watermeyer et al. 2020). In developing countries and in marginalized areas of societies, lack of Internet
access and/or unfavourable study environments at home present challenges for students (Adnan &
Anwar 2020; Kapasia et al. 2020). For example, Ghanaian international online students in China face
obstacles such as the high cost of Internet data and differences in time zones (Demuyakor 2020).
Autoethnographies from international higher education students in China provide snapshots of the
tumultuous experiences during the spring of 2020, addressing issues such as self-isolation, travel bans,
and quarantines, as well as factors such as cultural setting and class (Peters et al. 2020).
Mobile learning provides one way to enable teaching during lockdowns, as it allows for learning anytime,
anywhere (Naciri et al. 2020), but it requires substantial changes to work situations among teaching
staff. Among the academic community of frontline providers of higher education in the United Kingdom,
most take a negative view of online migration and the digital transition, while fewer reported a positive
view (Watermeyer et al. 2020). Even though there has been resistance to technological solutions in
education among the teaching fraternity before the pandemic, the lockdowns have necessitated
technological adoption and innovation in higher education institutions (Shenoy et al. 2020).
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a context characterized by stress, fear, and uncertainty. Acting in
this context, leading to education settings shifting from campus classrooms to distance education,
means that teachers and students must engage in learning beyond curricula. To raise awareness about
the learning that is taking place, this study focused on the micro-level of individual teachers’ experiences
and reflections. For the analysis, we applied a theoretical framework built on lifelong learning and
communication theories, with an emphasis on the contextual aspect.
1.2 Lifelong learning in new contexts
The transition from classroom to online teaching represents a situation that will impact individuals’
lifelong learning. Lifelong learning is a broad concept highlighting that: (1) Learning is not only about
child development, but continues throughout adult life; and (2) learning takes place in every context, not
just within the confines of the school classroom. Talking about learning, rather than education, entails a
shift in focus from formal education to how an individual transforms experiences into knowledge, skills,
attitudes, and values at every age throughout life (Jarvis 2014). To understand learning as the mere
acquisition of knowledge is insufficient, as learning in this sense entails an acceptance of fluidity and
dynamic movement as one strives to grasp one’s manner of existence (Su 2011). It is an endeavour
that involves the whole human on an existential level (Jarvis 2012a). The process of continued
development of a new understanding of “the self” means that the individual is in focus, but learning often
is triggered through a gap between the individual’s expectations and the experience arising in a
particular situation (Jarvis 2012b). This disjuncture between expectations and experience prompts the
individual to understand and deal with a particular situation.
The perspective taken in this paper is that the individual is recognized as the core of lifelong learning,
but also that this learning takes place in relation to the situation that the individual faces. Learning occurs
while reflecting in practice to gain new practical knowledge for everyday life (Jarvis 2016). Each
situation, framed in a cultural context and by a particular society, enables learning to take place (Jarvis
2007). Including context, as well as interactions, with our physical and social surroundings is a central
theoretical idea in adult learning (e.g., Hansman 2001) and in adult education practice (e.g., Imel 2000).
As education activities have moved online because of the pandemic, this can be viewed as a substantial
change in context, giving rise to questions concerning the individual’s perception of one’s self and
professional performance. Although teaching may be performed in a similar manner as before, the shift
from the campus classroom to a digital environment is not just a practical issue – it also entails a shift
from one state of existence to another. Online meetings provide a new context with some similarities to
the classroom, but also some characteristics that are unique to the digital meeting room. These
characteristics concern more than mere technical issues, as there seems to be a spillover effect from
other online forums on how to behave and act in these online meeting rooms. In media research, this
has been conceptualized as context collapse.
Context collapse refers to how people, information, and norms seep from one context into another (e.g.,
Davis & Jurgenson 2014; Marwick & boyd 2011). Most studies using the concept are concerned with
questions of identity when multiple social groups come together in social media networks, in which the
individual may face many different “audiences” during communication. Context collapse can occur with
all individuals, such as on Facebook, in which your “friends” may be your parents, children, co-workers,
training buddies, among others, i.e., it might be difficult to speak to all of them at once because you must
decide what role you are acting in and which part of the self to display. On Facebook, this congregation
INTED2022 Proceedings, 16th International Technology, Education and Development Conference,
2022: 2632-2641, ISBN: 978-84-09-37758-9, ISSN: 2340-1079, doi: 10.21125/inted.2022.0775
of friends may be intentional, a kind of context collapse that Davis and Jurgenson (2014) call context
collusion. The opposite is context collision, an unintentional context collapse (Davis & Jurgenson 2014).
The idea of concept collapse is well known in social media research as a way to examine contexts in
digital media, but few studies have addressed context collapse in education.
In higher education, faculty and student interactions are a natural part of education and often are
necessary for learning to take place. In an educational setting, both faculty and students have a
professional identity, but the introduction of social media and social networking has blurred the
boundaries between professional and personal personas (Sugimoto et al. 2014). Sugimoto and
colleagues (2014) focused on social networking sites in higher education, to inform institutional policy
development regarding behaviour on social media. From the student perspective, practices such as
adjusting privacy settings and self-censoring may be strategies to avoid context collapse between their
social and classroom identities (Dennen & Burner 2017). To manage self-presentation when faced with
context collapse in social media networks, one strategy is to make disclosures that are only appropriate
for all audience members, but to gain access to resources, new perspectives, and novel information,
Jessica Vitak (2012) shows that individuals must be willing to disclose their resource requests to their
networks. In discussions about context collapse in higher education, we have noted that studies usually
are oriented toward social media, but in this paper, we included online learning platforms in which
distance education takes place during the pandemic to examine experiences with blurred boundaries
as part of faculty’s lifelong learning.
2 METHODOLOGY
This paper reports a study that examines a specific cultural element - the experience of teaching online
during a pandemic, and therefore, a method for examining experience was called for. Ethnography is
research that describes and analyzes personal experience to examine culture and often is defined by
its writing practices (Ellis et al. 2011; Van Maanen 1988; Van Maanen 2011). Ideas about how to
approach and present research differ even within ethnography, and the present study follows an open,
explorative method to work with texts. Thus, to indicate that the researcher is a subject in the research
process, “I” (and in our case “we”) is used to indicate that the researcher and the research subject are
one and the same (Davies 2012). An exploration of the researcher’s real-life experience often is referred
to as an auto-ethnography – a way to reveal otherwise inaccessible aspects of a phenomenon (Holt
2003) and work with insider knowledge (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis 2013). In ethnography, as well
as in auto-ethnography, context is viewed as part of lived experience and, therefore, should be included
to provide a rich description of a phenomenon. The study reported on in this paper is performed as a
collective auto-ethnography, i.e., the starting point is individuals’ stories that we have woven together
into a narrative representing the collective to examine teachers’ experiences of shifting to online
teaching during the pandemic. In the result section, descriptive text is merged with quotes from the
stories to remain close to the individual experiences, but at the same time work with a collective voice.
2.1 Approach and participants
The rapid shift from teaching on campus to distance education during the spring of 2020 was
unprecedented in higher education. In Sweden, the government recommended a shift to online meetings
as of mid-March. This was a unique situation, and the first author asked colleagues teaching at the
institution to share stories about their individual experiences. The question was open to all faculty, and
13 members (seven women and six men) participated by writing a story and sent it to the first author in
June 2020. The first author then analyzed the material according to the analytical process detailed
below. All academic levels (doctoral student, assistant professor, senior lecturer, and full professor) are
represented, and they come from different disciplines, with an emphasis on teacher educators. Some
of them already had planned for distance education, although most spring-term courses were planned
for campus delivery. There were four people (two women, two men) who stated that they were
accustomed to distance learning and digital tools, and that they felt comfortable with the technology.
The rest had not worked with e-learning or distance courses but had participated in online meetings with
colleagues working at other institutions. These meetings focused on discussing research projects or
network coordination, not teaching. Among those who had no previous experience with distance
education, a few stated that they actively avoided digital tools and instead put their efforts toward trying
to capture students’ attention through their lectures’ content.
INTED2022 Proceedings, 16th International Technology, Education and Development Conference,
2022: 2632-2641, ISBN: 978-84-09-37758-9, ISSN: 2340-1079, doi: 10.21125/inted.2022.0775
2.2 Analysis
A first reading of the stories raised thoughts about the relationship to technology, technical tools, how
to communicate in this new arena, and notions about how turbulent the spring of 2020 had been. In the
field of lifelong learning, the idea that learning starts with the individual, but in relation to an environment,
is central, and this came through in the stories, which described how individuals view and relate to a
changing context and its consequences, such as changes in social interactions. This became the
starting point for the first deductive analysis. Based on the conceptualization of adult learning as an
interplay between context and individual, the stories’ content (the individual voice) was sorted into the
categories ‘context’ and ‘interaction.’ These concepts are furthermore an operationalization of context
collapse in the empirical setting. As is often the case in qualitative analysis, it was not always obvious
how a text should be coded, but the guiding principle was to find the best fit according to a statement’s
dominant meaning. In the subsequent inductive analysis, thematic coding according to inherent meaning
was conducted, after which, statements with similar content were collected into a category. An overall
illustration of the analytical process is presented in Table 1.
Table 1. Analytical process and categories in the analysis
Empirical material
Deductive first analysis
Inductive second analysis
13 personal stories about
teaching online in higher
education during the COVID-
19 pandemic.
Context
A state of emergency
Technological competence
Changed didactics online
Interaction
From public to private
Digital norms and rituals
Increased anonymity
Care and comfort
To present the material, quotes from the stories have been used to build up a collective narrative in each
category. The authors discussed the analysis on several occasions, and we feel comfortable with the
present text. Quotes have been marked with the number of the story (numbering was made in random
order), followed by gender (“w” for woman and “m” for man).
3 RESULTS
The results are structured in the two main sections ‘context’ and ‘interaction’, and in each section, the
inductively coded categories are accounted for.
3.1 Context
When the empirical material categorized as ‘context’ was analyzed inductively, three categories
emerged: state of emergency; technological competence; and changed didactics online
3.1.1 State of emergency
This study was conducted over a particular period of time: the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In our workplace, a new digital learning platform and digital examination were introduced in the autumn
of 2019. Despite this, most were not prepared for the next “digitization challenge” (10w) that came in the
spring of 2020, when the pandemic turned the world upside down. In mid-March 2020, the government
decided that all colleges, adult education institutions, and universities should introduce distance
education: “Although it was written as a recommendation, it was perceived as a direct call because the
spread of COVID-19 escalated and was difficult to handle” (11m). A reflection that emerged in several
stories is that this should not be viewed as a transition to distance education, but rather as crisis
management to solve acute problems. The situation could instead be equated with war:
“The feeling of crisis was strengthened when the prime minister gave his speech to the nation where he
talked about that there will be a few crucial moments in life when everyone must make sacrifices for
each other and that that moment was now. I do not think I will ever forget that speech because it
somehow felt like we were at war now, and in a way, we were.” (4w)
There were worries among staff, students, and the community: “Due to recommendations from different
home countries, some international students prioritized getting home in the first, best possible way”
(12w). The staff took responsibility for the safety of other colleagues and students regarding both the
work situation and viral spread. Along with this came the stress of not keeping up with the digital rush
(9m). At the same time, there was no choice but to switch from campus education to distance education,
INTED2022 Proceedings, 16th International Technology, Education and Development Conference,
2022: 2632-2641, ISBN: 978-84-09-37758-9, ISSN: 2340-1079, doi: 10.21125/inted.2022.0775
i.e., moving from the campus classroom to a digital meeting place. The first threshold that emerged was
to master the digital tools required. The second threshold was realizing that changing working methods
may be required when looking at a digital meeting place. A significant change was that instead of the
students coming to campus, both teachers and students were in their home environments, which was a
new teaching context for most people involved.
3.1.2 Technological competence
Aside from those of us who already had knowledge of digital tools and distance learning, we were
unfamiliar or even uninterested in digital tools. Nevertheless, the pandemic forced us to learn new skills,
and many of us needed to be forced to switch to digital teaching, one reason being that we were
unfamiliar with the tools:
“I remembered once getting a pair of headphones with a microphone, but where was this now? In a
desperate attempt to find some technical material, I went through some cupboards. In one of them, I
found the headset and began to look at the cords, a pink and a green socket, but there was no color
code for the laptop. After asking a colleague, it turned out that these color cables dated back to the time
of computer modems. So, instead of finding something that could be useful for the current teaching
situation, it became an archaeological excavation.” (10w)
Once we actually started working with digital tools, we discovered that it was not that complicated.
University staff received support and training that were put in place quickly to be able to implement the
shift in education: “I took the opportunity to participate in a workshop about a tool used for video
conferencing that was part of the university’s IT services” (6m). Courses and workshops also were
conducted at the national level to meet this need: “At a national digital meeting, I met over 300
colleagues at the same time. It was both strange and cool, and I realized the real potential of the tool
then and there.” (1w)
Our stories contain descriptions of technical limitations that we faced, from the need to combine
technical tools from different suppliers to participants in an online meeting not seeing everything that
was shared, or the lecturer not seeing the group during presentations (12w). Other technical limitations
concerned default settings that reduce teachers’ maneuvering space (3w), but the largest technical
limitation in teaching did not actually concern teachers’ predicament, but that of students.
“The digital infrastructure in Sweden has been stressed – an example is that universities have
completely different resources in terms of technical support, connection speed, and hardware
performance than the students have.” (11m)
The pandemic thus placed higher demands on students. First and foremost, higher demands were made
concerning independence, but also on being able to handle time frames, adapt to new technology, and
install software. Due to this, there was much concern among students about the technical conditions. It
also became clear that the IT support unit was not ready for the onslaught of support needs that arose.
Therefore, teachers had to take over many of the tasks that the IT department normally handled. In the
next section, we discuss working practice that characterized teaching through digital meetings.
3.1.3 Changed didactics online
Lectures are a basic element of university courses, and when they took place online, several
adjustments had to be made: “A first reflection is that there is a lot that needs to be changed. It is not
possible to directly translate what you do on campus from the physical meeting with people to the
meeting with avatars or people sitting at home in their kitchen or living room” (8m). The lecture “must be
transformed into a format that fits the digital space in terms of content, length of the lecture, distance
fatigue, lack of social contacts, and the possibility of interaction” (11m). Usually, higher education
teachers work with synchronous lectures in which some interaction can take place, but during the
pandemic some of us chose to record our lectures:
“After a number of online meetings in other contexts, I realized that I would not be able to cope with a
three-hour lecture via (the digital tool) in real time. One gets really square in the head, the eyes get full
of gravel, and the brain dizzy! So, I decided to record the lectures in advance. Then I could record a little
bit at a time. It’s easy to get self-critical when you hear and see yourself lecturing, so I re-did quite a
few. All in all, it took about three days to record. But the technology was pretty easy to use.” (7w)
The actual recording of lectures was easy to learn. Thoughts also arose of reusing these films in the
future, as part of a flipped classroom, “so that the extra effort that the recordings actually entailed could
be used to improve teaching in the coming years” (6m). However, to reuse lectures, the material must
INTED2022 Proceedings, 16th International Technology, Education and Development Conference,
2022: 2632-2641, ISBN: 978-84-09-37758-9, ISSN: 2340-1079, doi: 10.21125/inted.2022.0775
be designed so that it is not dated or tied to the past: “I cannot use references such as ‘that we talked
about last time,’ ‘as you heard from that teacher last week’ and so on” (8m). From the student
perspective, the feedback was that recorded lectures became a bit boring, so one of us made a learning
kit for students, while another tried to record a PowerPoint presentation with comments instead of
lecturing in the traditional way. The content also had to be adapted in some cases if it was not possible
to transfer the way of working to the digital tool. For example, a study visit became a reflective seminar,
and for students located in other countries, part of the experience was lost since “The point of studying
abroad is being in that country and experiencing the country’s atmosphere, festivals, traditions, and its
student culture” (12w).
Despite the pandemic, some activities were not suitable for distance work. Some of us want to read
paper prints, and to avoid people, we visited the office on several occasions at odd times to print texts.
Others came to the office to work in an ergonomically designed environment. The move to the digital
arena also raised concerns about legal and ethical issues:
“How would the examinations be performed via digital tools when it comes to being sure that it is the
right student, that the student does not just read from a paper, etc.? There is also an ethical dimension
in that digital tools affect all students’ opportunities for good performance.” (4w)
Another challenge with distance education is that as teachers, we “come home” to students. In addition
to the question of technical performance mentioned above, many everyday circumstances make it
difficult for students to participate in distance learning. For example, many students live in
socioeconomically vulnerable areas in which living space is limited, so many share rooms with siblings,
and the only computer in the family is the student’s school computer, which is on loan during the study
period: “I have had conversations with several of these young people, and it is clear to me that distance
education in these circumstances can contribute to increased segregation” (11m). The relocation of
teaching from campus to the digital meeting place also affected interactions between people, which is a
central aspect of teaching.
3.2 Interaction
When the empirical material categorized as ‘interaction’ was analyzed inductively, four categories
emerged: moving from public to private; digital norms and rituals; increased anonymity; and care and
comfort.
3.2.1 From public to private
We have let each other into our lives through digital channels, through which we can see other people’s
homes, and they can see ours. Students meet with us in training clothes, unvarnished, hair in a messy
tassel on the head, a cup of coffee in hand, a cat jumping up on the keyboard, a child who wants to be
on screen, or a husband who absolutely does not want to be on screen. Teachers also may show other
sides than we usually do in the classroom. At one point, a large bumblebee came into the living room
during class: “I had to apologize because I went crazy and tried to catch it to release it. This caused a
lot of laughter” (1w).
“The digital lecture can offer startling elements that no campus lecture would include. Given that the
video is turned on, of course. On the screen, dogs or cats can be part of the show, to the enjoyment of
the participants. Family members enter without knowing that they are in the picture.” (2m)
Bumblebees, pets, and clothing of various sorts, and clothes on the upper body only or not worn at all,
are not just funny (or uncomfortable) details. This eclectic private environment surrounding the person
stands in contrast with the formalized interaction that usually characterizes teaching on campus,
challenging ideas about how interactions between teachers and students in higher education should
take place.
3.2.2 Digital norms and rituals
This changed teaching context creates a space in which other norms apply and is especially true of
synchronous classes in digital meeting rooms, in which a significant difference is that everyone is equally
visible. In a campus classroom or lecture hall, it is possible to situate oneself a bit more anonymously,
but it is difficult to ignore anyone during a digital synchronous meeting. We experienced that small talk
occurs before the lecture starts (to avoid uncomfortable silence) and new rituals have developed, such
as metacommunication on how to behave and that meetings end with “the royal wave” (2m).
INTED2022 Proceedings, 16th International Technology, Education and Development Conference,
2022: 2632-2641, ISBN: 978-84-09-37758-9, ISSN: 2340-1079, doi: 10.21125/inted.2022.0775
During the spring, all meetings started with rules of conduct, and one of the most prominent ones was
that you should mute your microphone to avoid making disturbing noises. Having the camera on usually
is recommended, except when bandwidth is limited. As online teachers, we sometimes suspected that
even though students were connected, they might actually be doing something else: “Sure, it is not
possible in a lecture hall to check who is listening attentively or who is doing something else, but I still
think it is something you at least have to reflect on” (8m). Technology can be used to increase interaction,
but in lectures in which many students attend, interactions must be guided. For example, raising your
hand can take place in various ways, such as raising your hand on video, pressing the “blue hand”
button, or writing a question in the chat text field. To keep up with all the interactions, we may need a
moderator to maintain order and relay questions to us.
3.2.3 Increased anonymity
In our stories, it was noted that “distance education tends to have a more instrumental character
because contacts between students and teachers are minimized” (13m). “It feels like talking out in
space, when there is no opportunity to see and ‘read’ the participants’ reactions” (12w). It is extra difficult
to communicate when the participants turn off their video. Many students choose to participate only via
audio, so body signals that enable smooth turn-taking in communication between participants are lost:
“This means that quite a lot of meta-communication is required in the digital space about who should
speak when and in what way” (3w). This is an obvious difference compared with the classroom, in which
the lecturer sees both the individual and the three-dimensional context.
Distance teaching places higher demands on students to take personal responsibility for learning, and
it may be easier for students who are at a later stage in their studies and who already know each other:
“On the whole, I am positively surprised at how well it has worked, but I think an important reason for
this may be that it was the students’ last course in their education. At this point, they are good at studying,
and everyone knows each other well from before. Everyone was also anxious to finish their education
on time. It would probably have been another cup of tea with a group of beginners.” (7w)
If there was an established study group before the pandemic, this seems to have facilitated the studies,
while for beginners, there is a risk of ending up in limbo.
3.2.4 Care and comfort
In addition to meeting in a digital space, e-mail contact with students is common, but this also has
changed. One of our male colleagues said that hardly any students have contacted him via e-mail during
the pandemic, while several female colleagues report that they have received many personal e-mails
from students. Given that the pandemic has affected all aspects of life, not just study patterns, several
things have disrupted the normal course of studying. One of us “regularly sent out encouraging
messages, information on where to turn if they need help, support, or care, and urged students to take
care of each other” (12w).
This supportive approach also was part of synchronous meetings/classes with students, according to
some of our female colleagues: “The interpersonal dimension became clearer, which probably also had
to do with the fact that some students needed to talk about the ongoing pandemic, the feeling of being
trapped in one’s home and other aspects” (1w); “I decided that at every opportunity we met, I would start
by asking how the students were doing during the current situation. It became important for me to show
compassion in those situations” (4w); “I spent extra time keeping in touch, encouraging and pep-talking
this time more than I usually do when I tutor essays” (5w). One recurring pattern in our stories is
comparisons between teaching at a distance before and during the pandemic, and one difference is that
the pandemic has created a special situation that puts us all in a vulnerable position. Therefore, in some
cases, caring also extended to colleagues: “When it comes to colleagues, the isolation has contributed
to the creation of a virtual group for coffee breaks, where we could discuss teaching challenges, corona,
and everything between heaven and earth. We have also been able to keep track of how we feel and if
anyone seems to need a bit of extra encouragement” (1w).
To sum up, we can say that our stories revealed that we learned new technology by taking courses and
talking to more experienced colleagues, while learning that concerns interaction with students in a new
context was not addressed explicitly in courses or by specialists.
INTED2022 Proceedings, 16th International Technology, Education and Development Conference,
2022: 2632-2641, ISBN: 978-84-09-37758-9, ISSN: 2340-1079, doi: 10.21125/inted.2022.0775
4 CONCLUSIONS
This paper presented teachers’ experiences that emerged during the rapid shift from campus
classrooms to distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the analysis of the
empirical material, a shared, thematized story was co-constructed from individual stories to illustrate the
findings. The online education context was characterized by an atmosphere of crisis and a state of
emergency, and it demanded new technological competence, as well as an understanding of online
didactics. In this context, interaction changed as private life became visible on screen, new norms and
rituals emerged, anonymity increased, and we engaged in care and comfort in addition to teaching. It is
interesting to note that distance education during the pandemic became anything but distant as bodies,
home decoration, and pets filled the education space, while simultaneously, anonymity increased, and
people used the screen as a barrier to communication (e.g., muting, not using video, etc.). We also
aimed to understand the meaning of this context shift, and for that purpose, we applied a framework
that combines lifelong learning theory with the context-collapse concept. This framework highlights that
the individuals experience is a starting point for lifelong learning, but always in relation to the context in
question, and although we had offered distance education before the pandemic, the collapse (collision)
of contexts came as a surprise.
Context collapse (Davis & Jurgenson 2014; Marwick & boyd 2011) has been applied mainly in
understanding social media networks, but in this study, we found that the same phenomenon occurred
in online education platforms in which faculty and students had face-to-face meetings for lectures,
seminars, and tutoring. Furthermore, it was not a collapse of “audiences,” considering that teachers met
with a group comprising only students. However, when working from home, the private setting provided
information about the person in front of you, which stretched beyond the person’s identity in the
professional setting. A professional identity is easy to maintain in a physical space dedicated to
professional performance, but when contexts collapse, confusion emerges. When cats, husbands, and
bumblebees appeared on screen, it was more difficult to act within the frames of a professional role.
Maybe the situation with the same “audience” made it more difficult to detect that this shift had taken
place, as the collapse was not between audiences, but between professional and personal contexts,
i.e., between the education milieu and people’s homes.
A common reaction to the context collapse described in our stories was to try to maintain working just
like before the shift to teaching online. In our stories, we found an aversion to the digital medium, but
questions arise whether this rejection stems from convenience and conservatism, or from perceived
risks concerning quality shortcomings as a result of digitalized education. In some stories, there was a
hint of irritation over the “irrelevant” personal information present during online meetings/classes, while
others joked around to deal with such situations. Humour creates a common language for all of us who
are in the same boat. The “settler spirit” of moving our practice online also holds creative pedagogical
potential. Despite this, on some level we expect things to go back to some kind of “normal,” more or
less, but it is highly probable that distance education will play a bigger part in future higher education,
so it is relevant to discuss what we have learned from this spring term. If irritation and “old school”
behaviour come to dominate distance education, it is possible that efforts will be directed toward
managing online behaviour. We observed that norms and rituals developed, e.g., how to ask questions
online. Previous research has illustrated how both institutions and students may have a desire to
regulate and control openness and disclosure (Sugimoto et al. 2014; Dennen & Burner 2017).
Developing new norms for online behaviour is a question not only of self-presentation, but also of ethics
and legal certainty. However, overly strict rules may limit learning potential.
As stated previously, context is a central theoretical dimension of adult learning (Jarvis 2007; Hansman
2001; Imel 2000). The interplay between expectations and experience, framed in a cultural context and
by a particular society, enables learning to take place (Jarvis 2012b). In online contexts, it has been
suggested that interaction in a network provides the most benefits if individuals are willing to disclose
their resource requests and contribute to the network (Vitas 2012). As experienced teachers, we know
that the same principle works to support high-quality teaching in higher education: When students share
their thoughts, knowledge, and experiences, an engine for learning is created; therefore, we suggest
that context collapse should not be avoided or stifled by rules, but managed, as it holds potential for
learning. We also must recognize that it is not only students who learn. In our stories, our conscious
learning mainly concerned “the outer world”, such as practical skills to deal with new digital tools. The
learning, or non-learning, taking place in relation to social interaction was not reflected upon until we
made the analysis. One aspect that should be examined in future work, beyond teachers’ lifelong
learning in collapsed contexts, is the possible renegotiations of hierarchies between teachers and
students in the digital world and how this impacts learning.
INTED2022 Proceedings, 16th International Technology, Education and Development Conference,
2022: 2632-2641, ISBN: 978-84-09-37758-9, ISSN: 2340-1079, doi: 10.21125/inted.2022.0775
Several stories brought up the issue of feelings of disconnect in online forums, and this was explained
as a drawback of the situation, rather than a lack of competence in online communication. A parallel can
be drawn to the work of Jacques Derrida, who problematized the relationship between speech and
writing in the 1970s, in which the former (according to Derrida) has acquired an unjustified status as
présence in Western culture because the latter is assumed to create distance between writers and
readers. In our stories, some comments expressed how communication in the classroom has présence,
whereas communication online does not. There is a longing to meet in a physical room, but in terms of
communication, such a présence is illusory because no form of communication guarantees total mutual
understanding. This raises the question of what it is that we get out of being in the same room.
A final comment concerns this study’s meta-context. The experiences accounted for in our stories were
written during a very special historical period, i.e., during the first half of the COVID-19 pandemic; thus,
it is a documentation of a moment in time that was extraordinary for humans worldwide. The abrupt
change that has taken place in society created an awareness of the crisis and an understanding between
humans, which came across in education as well. Some of us, mainly women, stated that we cared for
the students in a way that we had not before to provide support during these difficult times. We all agreed
that the special conditions during the spring of 2020 have shown that technology cannot completely
replace physical encounters between humans in education. An explanation of this might be found in
lifelong-learning theories, i.e., if learning starts with the individual, but in relation to the physical and
social context, we need full-bodied encounters to get the experience of belonging to a social group.
Thus, we must learn together if we are to live together.
So to conclude, the pandemic turned our everyday lives upside down. Within higher education, the
obvious shift was that nearly all education moved online. Some of us had experience with distance
education, but it seems that this societal crisis created a different atmosphere with digital meetings. We
conceptualized this as context collapse, a term used to describe encounters with many audiences in
social media. In education, the crux turned out to be meetings situated in different contexts (professional
and private) that influenced interactions. Based on lifelong learning theories, we suggest that context
collapse should be examined as to how it can contribute to improving higher education, as it holds the
potential to include the whole human being – body and mind – in education.
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