Reflections on a Global Pandemic: Capturing the Impact of COVID-19 on the UK Computer Science Education Community

Abstract

From March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed “emergency remote teaching” across education globally, leading to the closure of institutions across all settings. The resulting shift to online learning, teaching and assessment (LT&A) has placed significant challenges on practitioners – both professionally and logistically, as well as more personally, especially on their health and wellbeing. Building on a wider corpus of work, specifically focusing on computer science (CS) education in the UK, this poster presents the high-level outcomes of five major empirical studies conducted over the past two years with many thousands of practitioners. We highlight widespread disciplinary concerns relating to transitioning to online working and a return to face-to-face; potential future trends for LT deprioritisation of research; and wider impact on marginalised communities within CS. These collected results offer valuable insight into the longer-term impact of COVID-19 on UK CS practitioners, especially as we start to emerge from “pandemia”, into a new post-COVID (ab)normal.