COLLEGIAL LEARNING DURING THE PANDEMIC: REALIZED ACTIVITIES AND LESSONS LEARNT

The CDIO initiative, through its twelve standards, provides a well-structured platform for creating optimal teaching and learning opportunities. While most of the standards focus on students and their learning process, two standards focus on the teachers. While standard centers on enhancing faculty competence in personal and interpersonal skills, product, process, system, and service building skills, as well as disciplinary fundamentals, standard 10 centers on enhancing faculty competence through integrated learning experiences, in using active and experiential learning methods, and in assessing student learning. Recent CDIO papers have indicated that standard 10 is one of the least researched standards. This paper addresses a challenge that many universities have faced during the pandemic outbreak in the spring of 2020; how to identify and share positive and negative experiences acquired by teachers during the rapid transition from campus to digital education. The paper outlines how standard 10 has been applied on a group level among the teachers at the School of Engineering at Jönköping University. The objective is to demonstrate how a scientifically founded group and collegial learning perspective could increase the focus on standard 10 and its importance to the CDIO platform. The Covid-19 outbreak led to a transition of pertinent teaching forms and the teachers' pedagogical mindset. The urgent question to many higher education teachers was how to swiftly adapt teaching and learning to the new situation. Hence, the pandemic forced an abrupt transition from campus to online activities, something that affected most teachers. To support this transition, the role of the pedagogical development group (PED) changed from inviting experts to share knowledge, to the group members themselves becoming experts through building competence within digital education. The barriers and difficulties in the transition from campus to online education were identified, and best practices, as well as pedagogical experiences, were shared among the teachers through learning activities, such as online seminars with a particular focus on online teaching and assessment. This also led to the identification of new topics for competence development. Student engagement and online examination forms were identified as primary areas for further competence development, and a team activity was initiated based on previous pedagogical research. This resulted in a increase in the awareness of choosing adequate examination forms to optimize student engagement within a course. Future possible directions within collegial learning at the School of Engineering are also outlined.