Interpersonal Communication Instruction During COVID-19: Challenges and Opportunities

[Introduction]: "The outbreak and spread of COVID-19 have disrupted higher education worldwide. On March 11,  2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic. In Canada, the declaration expedited the introduction of preventive measures by governments at different levels to curb the spread of the virus, including the closure of universities. Consequently, in-person courses were frantically switched to “emergency remote teaching” (ERT). At the time of writing (January 2021), countries across the northern hemisphere are undergoing the second wave of climbing COVID-19 cases. Accordingly, ERT is expected to continue at many postsecondary institutions over the next few months. 

With ERT becoming the new norm of higher education, there are growing concerns among educators about its impacts on instructors and students. On Facebook, for instance, relevant conversations have taken place in groups like “pandemic pedagogy.” As summarized by Schwartzman (2020), the “pandemic pedagogy” group’s founder and lead moderator, such conversations shed light on several challenges novice online instructors have encountered, notably the erosion of autonomous time and space, the relative merits of synchronous and asynchronous content, and the balance between rigor and accommodation. Echoing the educator concerns expressed on Facebook, recently published case studies on education during COVID-19 have explicated the limits of ERT. For example, Barton (2020) survey of 117 U.S. postsecondary instructors whose courses including field activities found that the abrupt shift to ERT has presented unique challenges for achieving learning outcomes typically associated with face-toface field activities. For disciplines such as ecology, environmental studies, and geography, instructors were forced to either substantially reduce field-related learning outcomes or substitute them with instructor-centered remote activities."