Institutions around the world have adapted to offer their courses online since the pandemic began, especially the higher education courses. Institutions, along with the students, have embraced the benefits of distance learning and worked through the challenges with a hope that they would experience the normality of in-person offerings soon. While some parts of the world have started to open face-to-face courses, many higher education institutions are still facing an increased pressure to offer more online or, at the least, hybrid courses. Therefore, it’s likely that instructors will be expected to continue with online teaching for a few more years to come.

Everyone takes time to adapt to a new environment and instructors are no exception. During the challenging months of the pandemic, instructors have coped with a lot of changes and are continuing to experiment with how to best engage and build a positive rapport with their students in the online classroom.

As many countries globally are seeking to find a path out of the impact of the pandemic, others are seeing spikes in cases, despite vaccination efforts. This poses the much-asked question: will things ever return to the same state as they were pre-COVID?

Similarly, education faces the same questions. As students return to their learning settings for face-to-face time, the question of how in-person learning will last lingers. Additionally, as it has been well noted, there were a suite of positives in switching to a remote learning model. We’ve heard anecdotally of nervous students coming out of their shells and we’ve also seen successes where attainment has remained constant—a testament to the hard work of both teachers and their students.