Virtually the same?: Online higher education in the post Covid‐19 era

For this special section for the British Journal of Education Technology on the future of online higher education in the postcovid19 era, we called for research papers to analyse and reflect on the lessons and experiences universities, East and West, have gained over the period of the ongoing pandemic. We intended that the special section would also explore the implications for the future of online university education. The research is, therefore, particularly timely, and provides a good complement to a previous BJET special section: online and blended learning: contexts and conditions for education in an emergency (Greenhow & Lewin, 2021), which emphasizes the ‘transition into’ and ‘transition through’ experiences. Since it was issued in June 2021, the call for the special section attracted great interest. Of those published here, seven are original research papers and two are review papers (bibliometric analysis and systematic review). There is a wide range of fascinating and important research from the global north and global south represented, but in trying to draw out the implications of the pandemic for future higher education policy, it would be tempting to say that although everything has changed, everything has stayed much the same: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the French say. Is this fair? Digital transformation in learning and teaching has for many years been high on the agenda in higher education. However, prepandemic, many regarded eLearning as an optional supplement to facetoface teaching, and educational software and systems were mainly used as productivity tools, without being integrated into pedagogies. The pandemic triggered an unexpected growth in eLearning and there was, worldwide, a speeding up of universities' digital transformation. And the pandemic changed the ways university students were supported since studying entirely online became the only option for the majority of the subjects during the lockdown period. Consequently, universities were forced to invest in new technologies and update their existing IT infrastructure to support the change. Students and academic staff were forced to learn new technologies and to adjust quickly to the new approaches to learning and teaching. The digital disruption generated many unforeseen technical and pedagogical challenges and difficulties, as well as wellbeing and mental health issues for academic staff and students. Whilst these challenges were already being documented in recent research, we argue that the pandemicimposed online learning was a unique opportunity for moving teaching and learning practices forward. Since online learning has enabled universities to experiment with different technologyenriched pedagogical approaches on a large scale, for different subject areas, for different levels of education, and for a prolonged period of time, it has been a timely opportunity to engage with innovative pedagogy. We were interested in whether the experience of and response to pandemicrelated online learning varied between eastern and western, Global North and Global South, countries, and between domestic and international students.