Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education           ISSN: 1759-667X 

Special Issue 22: Compendium of Innovative Practice                                     October 2021 

 

Editorial: Innovations in teaching and course delivery 

 

Alicja Syska 
University of Plymouth 
 

 

How do you deliver a lecture when you can’t see your audience? How do you create 

enjoyable learning communities, connect with your students, and capture their 

imagination? How do you help your learners overcome the confined spaces of their rooms 

and the sense of containment and isolation felt when separated from others? How do you 

make literature matter when people around you are dying and news flashes about the 

pandemic induce desperation and panic? How do you motivate students, monitor their 

engagement, help them work in groups? How do you adapt to unprecedented increases in 

participants’ numbers on a course? How do you adjust your resources and cope with 

change? These are the questions our authors had to answer and innovate around to 

ensure not only smooth and effective but also compelling and inspiring delivery of their 

specialist courses in the face of the forced move to remote learning. 

 

This section brings together the reflections of academic tutors and lecturers who strove to 

identify and implement the most effective ways of delivering teaching in their disciplines. 

The range of specialisms among the authors is remarkable: here we have representatives 

of Arts and Humanities, English Literature and Psychology, Bioscience and Biology, 

Teacher Training and Marketing. Regardless of the discipline, they all display the same 

commitment, ingenuity and resilience in responding to the unwelcome disruption. A Fine 

Art lecturer decides to teach with short stories while an English Literature professor turns 

to the theme of the sixteenth century plague for its transformative possibilities and 

reassurance in a time of crisis. Reading together with students, seeking engagement 

through regular feedback, and watching lectures ‘live’ as a unified cohort prove to be as 

effective as carefully designing group work or motivating students to engage with course 

material by challenging them to ‘escape’ topical rooms by demonstrating and testing their 

knowledge. When participants’ number double due to the pivot to online delivery, teaching 

student centred learning can still be achieved by diversifying assignments, restructuring 



Editorial 

Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, Issue 22: Compendium                            October 2021 

cohorts to prevent depersonalised learning experience, and encouraging reflection to 

promote wellbeing and resilience. 

 

All the authors make insightful observations about the learning activities they tested and 

the experiences they gained by responding to their particular teaching challenges. Some 

reflected on their long held assumptions about what works well in education while others 

recognised the transformative potential of seemingly undesirable modifications and 

interventions. The recommendations they make for other practitioners will be invaluable in 

rethinking, redesigning, and changing the direction of future university practice.