Will COVID-19 be a catalyst for changing how we schedule and deliver our bioscience curricula?

Widening participation has encouraged students from a range of backgrounds into university with many now living at home, who under normal circumstances would have been facing quite significant commutes to university. Changes preceding COVID-19 had already placed significant challenges in developing inclusive learning strategies; especially, in countering a student population that has become increasingly more strategic in judging their own learning needs and perceived value in making the journey to campus. Our own internal surveys prior to COVID-19 of life science students have identified a series of barriers that inhibit student on-campus attendance and from which student-driven enablers were identified. We found many of the enablers to be overarching independent of whether students were commuters or not and therefore suggestive of being amenable to the development of all-inclusive learning and teaching strategies. Nonetheless, the implementation of such approaches pre-COVID-19 would have required bold modifications to learning and teaching and a move away from the traditional perceptions of a brick-and-mortar university model. Therefore, applying a new balance between the physical campus university, identified student priorities and newly realised alternative teaching practices is paramount moving forward. Here, we look at the potential new balance between virtual and physical worlds, curriculum design and assessment and what the holistic impact may be for the future