Editorial: Educating in a pandemic and beyond

On 11th March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, just over 2 months after information had emerged from China regarding a viral pneumonia of unknown cause. We had been following the news and developments, not knowing what to expect but hoping for the best. Yet, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 spread swiftly across the globe. In light of healthcare services being stretched beyond capacity and the need to maintain delivery of essential health services, hard decisions had to be made, and would affect everyone. Governments asked citizens to stay at home and to socially distance in order to be protected. We also had to protect the future of our next generations, and thus made every effort to continue education. Educators were committed to ensure students could continue to learn and achieve. It has not been easy, and we did not imagine the extent of the disruptions and that it would take quite as long. And we still do not know for how much longer. Back in Spring 2020, as a crisis response with barely any notice, we moved our activities online to support students in their learning, to assess learning and provide pastoral care during anxious times for our students (and for us). We swiftly found ways to offer learning activities remotely from the kitchen table or spare bedroom instead of in person, may be with temperamental WiFi, alongside children in need of home schooling and with pets randomly appearing in view of the camera. While pets can be a welcome ice breaker, the opportunity to blur the background or upload a background image limited intrusion and potential embarrassment. As we were successfully bringing the academic year 2019–2020 to a close, it became clear that it was necessary to strategically plan for a 2020–2021 with continued restrictions and disruptions. And changing our practice more permanently to offer an excellent learning experience during the ongoing pandemic posed different challenges than the initial move online. Not only did we have to redesign session plans, material and assessments at scale, we were facing the challenge to successfully engage and motivate students with very diverse needs and varied access to technology, potentially sitting on their own in a small room for many months. And what about the challenge of supporting the development of skills that usually require access to specialist facilities such as laboratories, and are crucial for future careers? Implementing active and authentic learning approaches, ideally collaboratively, offered solutions, and fortunately we could draw on a substantial body of literature.

Meanwhile, we also completed the academic year 2020–2021, and students progressed or graduated. Driven by a public health crisis, we engaged with new tools and platforms and developed innovative approaches to education, which we would have been far more hesitant to try or consider otherwise. Now that students and educators have experienced positive sides of the change (and the examples that did not work the way we intended), there is no going back. And we do not want to. Therefore, it is timely to reflect on the lessons we learnt and how we could shape future education for the benefit of learners, in their preparation for an uncertain and complex world. The Section Professional Development of FEMS Microbiology Letters engages the community in this debate by launching its latest virtual Thematic Issue ‘Educating in a pandemic and beyond' (https://academic.oup.com/femsle/pages/educating-pandemic-beyond). The issue covers some online approaches that enabled the emergency response, ways to engage learners and blending in-person and online elements to benefit from a more flexible and accessible delivery going forward. Furthermore, educator CPD is considered, and how general science and microbiology literacy could be improved. ‘Educating in a pandemic and beyond' follows our three previous Thematic Issues, that reflected on keeping education current, and already cover underpinning pedagogy relevant to this issue.

Going forward, to benefit from the synergies of blended learning, our choices need to be evidence-based, and we need to be mindful of the potential impact on learner and educator experience. We are expecting a future of lifelong and lifewide learning, with more informality, personalization, application and authentic activities. As we are connected 24/7, education can become accessible by everyone at all times, by any means and everywhere, and learners decide on their engagement with it. We have now taken a big step closer to this future, and will drive this change of education more permanently. Thanks to determined learners and dedicated educators, education continued and even evolved during the pandemic, leading us into the future.

The Thematic Issue ‘Educating in a pandemic and beyond' (https://academic.oup.com/femsle/pages/educating-pandemic-beyond) features contributions from 17 authors/author teams from Belgium, Brazil, Finland, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the US, and one review discussing the papers.

I hope you enjoy the read and that you will share your own practice with us soon.

Beatrix Fahnert, Section Editor Professional Development, FEMS Microbiology Letters.

Conflict of interest

None declared.