Leveraging Professor-Student Partnerships for Post-Pandemic Teaching and Learning - Full Text

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Sarah

Leveraging collaboration between a faculty professor and a student government president to investigate lessons from pandemic-era teaching and learning. The project uses a January 2021 university-wide student survey to address how modalities affect satisfaction, engagement, and performance; how instructors and students adapt face-to-face practices to online settings; and what should be retained, rejected, or revised as institutions transition to post-pandemic education. Findings emphasize stakeholder-centered governance dialogue, empathy, and practical policy decisions across students, instructors, and universities.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages33

Reading Time1 h 23 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction: A Professor and Student Team Up

The Research

Our Teaching and Learning Context

Our Conversation

Conclusion: Collaboration is Key

Appendix A: Question Data in Tabular Form

` 1 Leveraging Professor-Student Partnerships for Post-Pandemic Teaching and Learning Eric Loepp, Ph. D. Associate Professor of Politics, Government, and Law Director, Learning Technology Center University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Will Hi nz President, Whitewater Student Government (WSG) 2022-2023 Academic Year University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Contents Introduction: A Professor and Student Team Up 3 The Research 5 Our Teaching and Learning Context 6 Our Conversation 8 Conclusion: Collaboration is Key 28 Appendix A: Question Data in Tabular Form 29 Citation: Loepp, E. & Hinz, W. (2023) . Professor and student team up to identify lessons from pandemic teaching and learning. The Online Learning Consortium. The Online Learning Consortium Introduction: A Professor and Student Team Up While the semesters that followed Spring 2020’s emergency transition to remote services were less chaotic, they were hardly ordinary. For many of us, these terms constituted amore orderly version of the complicated spring 2020 semester, not a “return to normal.”Today, a few semesters removed from the most disruptive periods of t he pandemic, we are still adjusting, processing our experiences, and learning from them. In January 2021, we administered a survey to students at our university to answer big questions facing higher education during the fall 2020 semester. At the time, Eric was a faculty member in the department of Politics, Government, and Law, and Will was a member of the student government. Eric had the idea for a large-scale survey to build on research he had done at the class level during the spring 2020 semester. One limitation of the spring research was that it was restricted to students in Eric’s classes, and the authors wanted to develop a project that could gather feedback from the entire student body. Enter Will Hi nz, a sophomore student (at the time) studying Corporate Health Communications with a minor in Human Resource Management. Interestingly, we got to know each other through joint ventures and consultative discussions between the governance groups in which they are both active: the Faculty Senate for Eric, and the Whitewater Student Government for Will. These bodies worked together extensively in recent semesters to recommend policies and procedures related to pandemic teaching and learning. Like other institutions, ours is presently working through ideas about what a post-pandemic educational experience should look like. Indeed, this is fundamentally what motivated this project: our desire to help our institution navigate what the near-future of pandemic/ post-pandemic education should look like to best serve our students, instructors, and programs. Speciﬁcally, the following key questions guided our study: ● How did the student experience diﬀer across modalities in terms of satisfaction, engagement, and performance? ● How successful were we as students and instructors adapting conventionally face-to-face activities—like group work and certain types of assessments—into purely online activities? ● How can we best promote learning in a largely or exclusively online environment moving forward (e.g., investing in professional development for instructors vs. non-academic support centers vs. technical training)? ● Can we gain systemic insight into pandemic-speciﬁc questions—like why students do or do not use webcams—for which most of our current understanding is principally anecdotal? ● Ultimately, as we emerge from the pandemic, what aspects of teaching in 2020 and 2021 should we retain, reject, or revise? The Online Learning Consortium LOEPP AND HINZ 4 The questions above center principally on supporting students; however, in this project we also sought to support instructors and universities by identifying practices and policies that worked and did not work during the pandemic. For instance, many instructors adopted more generous standards temporarily, such as incre

FAQs

What motivated the professor-student partnership project?

The project was motivated by a need to understand what a post-pandemic educational experience should look like and how to best serve students, instructors, and programs.

What questions did the study focus on?

Key questions included differences across online and other modalities in satisfaction, engagement, and performance; how well face-to-face activities were adapted to online formats; and what teaching practices from 2020 and 2021 should be retained, rejected, or revised.

Why does the document emphasize collaboration among stakeholders?

It argues that productive progress requires open, good-faith discussions among campus governance groups and that partnership helps build empathy by revealing each side’s experiences and constraints.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Sarah