Dr Steve McKinlay has over 12 years experience working in the IT industry throughout the 1990s in a variety of roles including programming in various languages, database analysis, design and administration and as a consultant. Steve began teaching at Weltec in the early 2000s and has taught across a wide variety of topics from Analysis and Design, Database, and Information Management. Most recently Steve developed the Digital Ethics course, a first in an IT Bachelor degree in New Zealand. Steve’s research sits at the intersection of technology and computing ethics, and the impacts of emerging technology on society, work and democracy. He has spoken as a guest and presented at conferences at many Universities around the world, he regularly publishes in international journals and has several chapters in various texts. Steve completed a PhD with Charles Sturt University in 2014, winning the Litwin award (2013) for research in the Philosophy of Information for his work. Steve also teaches at Regensburg University, Bavaria, Germany and chairs the Open Polytechnic’s Ethics Committee. Steve is currently the Executive Director of the International Association of Computing and Philosophy.
The emergence of Coronavirus and the subsequent national lockdown abruptly forced us out of the classroom and, for many, into the unchartered territory of the virtual classroom. Many students and educators were forced to very rapidly adapt to this strange new digital classroom.
An examination of some of the literature regarding online, blended and various forms of virtual learning shows a cleavage beginning to emerge between the pre-Covid orthodoxy and the empirical post-Covid lived experience.
For some, the forced pivot to online education offered opportunities to not only re-imagine alternative methods of teaching but to critically examine the traditional physical classroom model. A year into the global pandemic what lessons have been learned?