Access to Resources for Learning and Assessment in the Time of Pandemic—What Happens When Things Misalign and When the Teacher Is not There?

Abstract

This chapter considers the experience of Undergraduate Laws assessments in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced summative assessment to move from invigilated face-to-face pen-and-paper examinations in local examination centres around the world to online delivery. The first section provides, first, by way of context, a brief overview of the University of London and Undergraduate Laws (UG Laws) explaining how this distance and flexible learning program is delivered to around 16,000 students and providing a cameo of the very diverse student body. It then describes and reflects on the alternative assessments in 2020 outlining the attempt to replicate online the face-to-face invigilated examinations using ‘record and review’ software and considers why the absence of one resource for learning—the teacher—adversely impacted this endeavor. In the second section it explores how the resources for learning for many UG Laws students converge in ‘the teacher’. It considers how distance learning materials created around the learner and an outcomes-based model of learning can be layered not only by additional support established in the outcomes-based model but also in a teacher-centered paradigm of learning. It suggests that the pandemic has revealed a fissure created by misalignment between these two models of learning and that ‘the teacher’ many students had looked to for direction in the past was diminished in the melee of the pandemic.