Towards a transition from emergency remote teaching to online learning in the new normal

The web has been slowly but gradually changing the Higher Education (HE) landscape ever since its inception. The Covid-19 pandemic has presented an opportunity to accelerate the pace of this change. Before the pandemic, the efforts towards leveraging the affordances of the web to transform HE were somewhat limited to specific spaces, with relatively low penetration in educational systems globally. The Covid crisis changed this rule by forcing the majority of education providers into remote teaching. Learning on the web used to be the interest of a minority of educators in the ‘old normal’, and the abrupt transition to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) has uncovered it for the majority. This has presented a set of challenges and opportunities for a further transition from ERT to educating in the ‘new normal’, where best practices in online learning can lead to a positive transformation. In this paper, a set of twenty university instructors across Europe were interviewed under the umbrella of the Erasmus+ BRIDGES project, which aims to support the transition from ERT to pedagogically sound and research-informed online learning in the European HE arena. The participants were asked about their remote teaching experiences during lockdown, and their views on their support needs for ideal online educational scenarios going forward. After conducting a thematic template analysis of their responses, it was found that current support structures are not adequate to foster the competencies required for this greatly expanded cohort of higher education instructors. The paper proposes a framework which supports development of novel pedagogical, technological and organisational competencies for this new cohort of online HE instructors