Observations in Learning Design Training During COVID-19 Restrictions: An Autoethnographic Approach

The spread of COVID-19 during 2020 caused universities across the world to adopt Emergency Remote Teaching. Lecturers and students had to stay home but targets still had to be met and grants secured. The problem for the Central University of Technology, Free State was that being a traditional face-to-face university employing a blended learning approach, many of its lecturers were unprepared to move their delivery online in such a short time. This paper documents the observation of a learning designer during the time of lockdown, between the beginning of April 2020 to end of March 2021. The paper takes an autoethnographic approach, retrospectively and selectively documenting the observations of the author. Five interventions were introduced to prepare lecturers for online delivery including an online asynchronous self-paced course, online synchronous short courses, face-to-face demonstrations using video conferencing software, a WhatsApp group, and short video tutorials. The observations showed that the WhatsApp group and video tutorials uploaded to YouTube provided the best support for lecturers as they created a sense of community, provided demonstrations, and were micro-lessons.