Creating an international COVID-19 pandemic learning community

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has influenced Higher Education decision-makers, educators, students, and stakeholders in an almost unique way for twenty-first century education (Crawford et al. 2020a; Thatcher et al., 2020). Higher Education institutions engaged in one of three key intra-period responses: rapid digitalisation, responding to minimum standards, and/or delayed commencement (Crawford et al., 2020b). Knowledge sharing across jurisdictions has been limited for Higher Education, despite some 138 manuscripts published on COVID-19 and Higher Education between January and June 2020 (see Butler-Henderson et al., 2020). That number will more than double between July and December 2020.

To support the Higher Education sector to share knowledge, we set out to form meaningful digital connections across geographic boundaries (Fernandez & Shaw, 2020; Spante et al., 2018). The aim of this presentation is to showcase the successes of the collaboration to date, and the opportunities for growth because of our growing collaborative network. We believe the rapid growth in our digital network relating to Higher Education research and COVID-19 may provide practical wisdom for other researchers seeking to engage in similar pursuits within their discipline context.

On successes, this learning project has connected 24 researchers across 14 countries to create meaningful and internationally contextualised research (as of 22 September 2020). This has included briefing papers to specific institutions, peer reviewed journal articles, keynote and conference presentations, and the development of an open access database. Time zone management, cold calling, digital literacy, and difficult conversations are among factors informing our learnings.