Designing for Transition: Supporting Teachers and Students Cope with Emergency Remote Education

The global pandemic reached New Zealand in the middle of a teaching semester, calling educators to rapidly transition into a fully online teaching mode. Covid-19 brought fears for the unknown and required an abrupt shift, creating anxiety for academic staff, students and parents. Amidst this transition, educators had to quickly reconfigure their designs, as specific pedagogical strategies set for in-class arrangements would no longer be appropriate for the new scenario. A whiplash redirect to the online mode introduced new tools and added uncertainties about Internet access and connectivity. People had to deal with remoteness and isolation and with changes to virtual learning. This paper theorizes about what it means to design for transition during an emergency. Drawing on the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework, we discuss implications for educational design, detailing how tools, social arrangements and tasks can be carefully orchestrated to support learning activity in emergency remote education. We situate the discussion within the transitioning experiences of students and staff at a Bachelor of Nursing programme, within a three-phased educational design which involved Virtual Happy Hours (VHH). The VHH sessions were run with two cohort groups of first- and second-year students in the Bachelor programme—and included their teaching staff. The intent of the VHH was to allow participants to familiarize themselves with tools, tasks and social elements that could be (re)used to facilitate engagement in a new online space—in preparation to the upcoming course sessions in the lockdown period.