By Rosemary Pearce

In writing a contribution to the brand-new edited volume, Teaching and Learning with Innovative Technologies in Higher Education (Eds. Roushan, Pilkinghorne, Patel, 2025), we’ve taken time to reflect on the practice we’ve observed and supported that may have only come about because of necessity in a difficult situation, but has continued to live on and benefit staff and students. In fact, it’s also possible to trace many of the ongoing developments in our team’s thinking and ways of working to how we responded at the time to the sudden shift to remote learning.

One of the main challenges, as we saw it, was trying to identify and bridge gaps left in learning and teaching when students and tutors could no longer gather on campus. For us, a big part of what was missing is captured by Dave White’s conceptualisation of “presence” (see our original 2020 post on this) and so a focus for us has been supporting staff to enhance presence as mediated through digital technology. In the case study we contributed to the book we outline some different interventions we’ve supported by our colleagues Shialing Kwa, Daniel Cordle, and David Mann, and how these practices are innovations in providing a sense of presence. Many colleagues have found that since resuming on-campus teaching and learning that there are still benefits to retaining these kinds of innovations. In some cases, they are used to support new online and flexible learning initiatives, and in others, enhancing on-campus modules by providing new ways to engage between sessions. In our team we don’t talk explicitly about “presence” so much anymore, but the concept has become permanently embedded in our approach.

If you haven’t yet seen our original blog post series on presence, this link will show you the collection which includes some case studies of practice between 2020 and 2023. We also now have new “Practice Spotlight” page where the blog is filtered for all of the practice case studies we gather.

Teaching and Learning with Innovative Technologies in Higher Education, as well as containing our case study contribution, is an edited volume full of other case studies that sound highly relevant and intriguing – we’re looking forward to a closer look.

Roushan, G., Polkinghorne, M., & Patel, U. (Eds.). (2025). Teaching and Learning with Innovative Technologies in Higher Education: Real-World Case Studies (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032635248