Online communities during a pandemic: a new lecturer's perspective

Hi. I’m Sarah and I am a new lecturer at the University of Greenwich in the School of Sciences. When I say new, I mean it in both the sense of I am new to Greenwich and this is also my first proper full time teaching position so even without a pandemic, 2020 was always going to be an interesting year. I moved down to Kent from up North back in February knowing exactly 2 people in the area and with oh so much to learn about my new job…and then 4 weeks later the country went into lockdown.

Brilliant.

I’m no stranger to upping sticks and starting a new life somewhere where I don’t know anybody – in my late teens/early 20s I did it approximately every 2 years because experiences! working my way up the career ladder! I wanted to! Sometimes it was amazing and the best thing in the world, others I was beyond homesick and hated everything about it. A key factor in my happiness was how quickly I built up a new local support network of friends and colleagues so when lockdown was announced, my stomach dropped. I had only been here 4 weeks, my friends in the area lived far enough away that I would still need to use public transport to see them. I hadn’t had time to set up my network yet and I was very much aware of this fact.

Then the strangest thing happened. I realised that whilst I hadn’t set up a local network, the evolution of technology over the past 20 years meant I’d unwittingly built my life around online communication and there was almost no difference in how often I spoke to people. The academic lifestyle of moving to new institutes for the next degree or research placement meant that I mostly spoke to everyone through email, messenger, video calls and text anyway because we were all spread across the globe even before I moved. If anything, I was talking more with my friends and family than I ever did when we were all physically close together.

This abundance of communication wasn’t limited just to my old networks though. All of my new colleagues were online too and what surprised me the most was the level of friendliness there was. At this stage, I was mostly still a stranger to them yet every person I spoke to wanted to make sure I was doing OK. It went beyond that wave of compassion that swept the nation where we were all checking in with each other and outlasted it too. I didn’t need to worry about lockdown stopping me from building a local community, I’d developed one anyway.

Now, I know I speak from a position of privilege that I don’t have to worry about things like not having access to electronic devices or the internet during this pandemic. Back in the dark ages before WiFi and smart phones, I lived through various levels of access to my online communities but nothing that came close to the concept of digital poverty. Since the start of lockdown, I’ve been able to mostly shut myself away from the outside world and live an online bubbled existence and it’s been great. Then the new academic year began, and I had to rethink pretty much everything.

We have been using a blended learning approach this year which means that whilst there are some bits of face to face teaching, a lot is completed online. All you need is a crappy internet connection or a computer that is just that bit too old to be able to cope with the software you need and your learning experience is going to be awful. So not only was I learning how to teach full stop, I also needed to learn how to accommodate all these other variables too that wouldn’t have popped up on my radar under “normal” circumstances. It was a tough learning curve to scale!

But as happened with the staff, I found, even with the fairly diverse range of tech access across the students, an online community was still able to form. Sure, it is primarily over things like WhatsApp and Instagram which seem to be the common access points rather than the official University systems, but does that even matter? No. The students help each other with tech support or answer each other’s questions about the material they are studying. They ask for help in online spaces we staff have access to so that everyone can see the answers or send messages on behalf of each other when someone’s internet is down or there is a blue screen of death.

I’ve been adapting too. Right at the start, the students all got the “this is how you communicate and write an email to a lecturer” talk which is a standard beginning of term thing to do, but is it really necessary to be that formal when we’re in the middle of a pandemic? I’m of the msn generation so I have encouraged use of the Teams chat function. There’s so much less pressure and it’s infinitely easier for me, not just the students, to ping an answer back, especially in group chats where they will all join in once someone has been brave enough to ask a question.

Would the same level of cooperation and community exist if this were a normal semester and we were doing 100% face to face teaching? I don’t know. It definitely would have been a different type of community, and I think that knowledge will only become apparent to me once I have shaken off my new lecturer cape and emerged as a seasoned pro. A few colleagues have mentioned how they don’t envy the fact I’m going through my first proper year and probation at the same time as having to go through a pandemic, but actually, it’s really not been that bad. Maybe it’s simply because I don’t know what it would be like to be in this situation without a pandemic, or, more likely, it’s because of the online communities that have formed around me.