Today the educational community as a whole faces a universal challenge: to ensure equitable and quality education as well as effective and efficient evaluation of student learning in hybrid, flexible or 100% distance modalities for their students while also planning for the post-COVID-19 pandemic era. Centres for Teaching and Learning and equivalent services and their teams of instructional designers, teaching and learning experts and multimedia developers play a pivotal function in addressing and overcoming this challenge.
We begin by presenting an overview of the traditional role the CTLs and equivalent entities have played since their inception in educational institutions. We then describe how this role evolved into academic first responders in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper continues with a thorough discussion about the challenges the centres faced since the eruption of the pandemic in March 2020 and the ones they anticipate in the coming semesters. It also lists concrete examples of actions they took to face these challenges. In addition, we provide detailed information on one major action taken by all; that is, publicly sharing an abundance of resources to support faculty and students during the online transition. This discussion spotlights resources relevant to equity. The last section of this paper shares lessons learned and recommendations from the centres to the centres in addition to commentaries by experts and researchers from the field with ideas and approaches geared to the current mandate of the centres to help them better face what is coming.
