Reviewing your response to lockdown? Our checklist can help
Supporting universities and colleges as they pause to reflect on early responses to COVID-19 and start to plan their next steps, we've created an organisational review checklist.
The story so far
Since early March, universities and colleges have made an unparalleled transition not just to the online delivery of teaching and learning, but to their entire business operations.
New platforms have been launched and existing ones reinvigorated. Creative processes and innovative ways of working have been put in place - many of which would have seemed unthinkable just a few months ago. And approaches to learning and teaching we imagined taking many years to come to fruition have rapidly become the norm.
To creatively re-invent a Churchill quote, never, in the field of e-learning has so much been put online, for so many, by so few.
Taking stock
Now, understandably, many institutions are taking stock: pausing (albeit while still running!) to reflect on this maelstrom of activity. Universities and colleges are asking:
- "Did we make the right decisions? "
- "Are the changes we made having the impact we hoped for?"
- "How can we be sure?"
- "Did we cut any corners along the way and, if so, do they need sticking back on?"
And, crucially, "are we comfortable that what we have put in place is both fit for purpose and sustainable for the next academic year?"
Review and reflection
With this need in mind, we have created a COVID-19 organisational review checklist that seeks to support members through this reflection.
This resource doesn’t provide any answers in terms of what an institution or education delivery ‘should’ look like, because we know that every organisation is different, with different benchmarks for success. Instead, the checklist prompts members to ask questions and look carefully at the measures they’ve taken, to consider whether they still work, and ask on what evidence that judgement is being made.
We hope this resource will provide a good starting point and invite members to use it – whether that’s by a central group or team that has been tasked with reviewing your institution’s response to COVID-19, or locally by individuals wishing to consider the effectiveness of the measures that they, or the teams they lead, have put into place.
It’s available as a downloadable spreadsheet so that members can adapt it as they see fit, to suit their circumstances.
I'd like to thank...
This has been – and will continue to be – a challenging time of rapid change, and we have created the checklist in line with feedback from members of our coronavirus community of practice. We’d like to thank everyone who volunteered to be a reviewer for us. They’ve indicated, overall, that this checklist would be useful to them and potentially beneficial for peers.
It could always be better, and we could always spend more time trying to make it so - but we believe this isn’t a time to make the long-term quest for perfection the enemy of the deliverable good. We hope you agree.
Looking towards a post-coronavirus future for the HE sector, Jisc is leading a research programme that will produce a roadmap to tech-enabled learning and teaching from 2021/22 and beyond. There’s a similar programme for the further education sector too.
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