A talk given at the Division of Biosciences Education series by Martin Compton, Associate professor, UCL ARENA. Date: 9th June 2022
Amidst a cacophony of competing narratives about what’s best for students, educators, employers, research and a lot more beside, we find ourselves (yet again) at a critical point in higher education as we seek to work out what we are for, who we serve and what the future holds. Central to these debates is what teaching and learning will look like in the near and medium term. What will we (at UCL and higher education more widely) be doing in 5, 10 or 20 years? Will it be pretty much the same as we were doing in lecture halls, labs and seminar rooms pre-pandemic or is the genie out of the bottle? Will the ‘return to normal’ actually happen? Are utopian/ dystopian (delete as applicable) visions of virtual learning in extended realities pie in the sky? Has too much changed? What are the threats? Are they existential? In this lecture recorded on 9th June 2022, Martin poses these and other questions, offers some predictions (not necessarily his own!) and serves up some provocations for discussions.
