Editorial

As is almost impossible to ignore, in Spring 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic forced many educational institutions around the globe to suspend face-to-face classes and hastily replace them with online activities. Although disruption of educational provision is not a new phenomenon, this has been the largest in history, affecting 94% of the world's student population (Crompton, Burke, Jordan, & Wilson, 2021). The shift from face-to-face to online teaching, however, was not the culmination of a well-considered instructional design process inspired by the affordances of online education and rooted in a thorough needs analysis. Rather, it was an expediency mandated by a public health emergency whose spread was unexpected, exceptionally fast and poorly understood. The pressing haste with which many educational institutions moved to online education meant that they were not ready to harness the strengths of online learning nor deal with its limitations. In the new circumstances created by the pandemic, it was immediately clear that online learning was simply a quick fix adopted in “less-than-ideal circumstances” (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, & Bond, 2020).