Knowledge Café’s, informal conversations, sharing teaching best practice

Since March 2020, the pandemic has changed the way teaching within Higher Education in the UK and indeed the world, is conducted. A sudden shift to online teaching necessitated a rethink of the best teaching approaches and methods to engage students and support good student experience while using the digital teaching platform as a sole means for teaching. This sudden shift in teaching methods required academics to transfer their teaching and learning materials to an online platform without any formal training in best practices. Academics needed to quickly understand and develop different ways of teaching, using this new digital platform, in the absence of face to face teaching, and ways in which to accommodate the challenges and opportunities the new platform presented. Research suggests that sharing of experiences and best practices would be a way to tackle challenges and contentious issues. An online Knowledge Café was used to bring together academics to share experiences and best practices. This research explores the role of Knowledge Cafes, introduced over a 3-month period within the School of Management at Swansea University