The year 2020 was anything but predictable. We began it choking on the thick haze, terror and disenchantment produced by one of the worst bushfire seasons on record. Nobody could have imagined that once the smoke began to clear, an even deadlier foe would appear on the horizon: a virus, equally as intent on squeezing the air from our lungs.

Margaret Van Heekeren was at home on the evening of Sunday 15 March when an email from the then vice-chancellor and principal, Michael Spence, arrived in her inbox declaring the first confirmed case of COVID-19 on campus. Despite all our precautions, hopes and wishes, it seemed that the virus had finally begun its mutation from international news story to something far closer to home.

“It was like a bomb had gone off. We all scattered and made sure that we were all safe, that we could function,” Van Heekeren said.

Her memory of that turning point brought back to life the uncertainty that we all experienced in early 2020. We watched as international flights were cancelled without warning. Deadlines were set for Australians to return home from overseas. The health crisis began to dominate headlines as analysts attempted to calculate the impact on our economy. From every screen and front page, depictions of the virus, barbed, red and ominous, served as a constant reminder of how deadly this thing could be. We watched and waited.

As infection rates in Australia began to rise, it became apparent that teaching would be affected. In early March, Van Heekeren was the course coordinator in charge of MECO1001: Introduction to Media Studies, a core first year unit with an enrolment of 400 students. Speaking of how MECO responded to national headlines, she remembered it as an interesting atmosphere: “We knew it was coming … we weren’t sure when or how we’d go into lockdown … it was such an uncertain time.”

The first few weeks of the new semester had already begun, albeit with the usual start-of-semester rollout disrupted due to delays in getting international students safely into the country and onto campus. She described the initial “juggle” required to deliver courses face-to-face, as well as learning how to record lectures so students who were trapped overseas did not miss out. Initially, she said, “that wasn’t too much of an issue”.

On 15 March, the same day that Spence confirmed the first on-campus COVID-19 case, the NSW government ordered the immediate cancellation of major events with more than 500 people. Three days later, further government restrictions were announced, including a ban on indoor gatherings of over 100 people. No longer able to safely deliver on-campus classes, the vice-chancellor announced that face-to-face teaching would be suspended, with all learning moved online by Monday 23 March. The reality of the new situation quickly became apparent.

Van Heekeren told us: “It was crazy. The beginning of semester is already a really hectic time, and there wasn’t time for us to regroup. We just needed to get these students taught in whatever way we could.”

By now, we are used to hearing the phrase “the new normal”, but Van Heekeren said that during the first lockdown, nothing ever felt “normal”. Nor did she feel “comfortable”. It was only once everyone “felt secure” that conversations between the teaching staff began. Even that was strange; where previously everyone could simply stop to chat and compare notes in the corridor, now those conversations could only happen online. “We just made contact any way we could,” she told us.

Fiona Martin was working as a faculty academic advisor when sudden restrictions were placed on international arrivals into Australia in February, just as many students were due to arrive in Sydney for the start of semester. She was in direct contact with students from the beginning of the lockdown period, carrying out hundreds of pastoral care consultations and advising students across the faculty on how to manage their study progression. It was a deeply worrying time for everyone, particularly for international students who were scattered across the globe, trying to make their way to Australia before the gates slammed shut. Some were paying rent on unoccupied flats in Sydney while they waited to see if they could enter the country.

Martin remembered that one of the biggest hurdles in the beginning was establishing everybody’s location. Many students were travelling from China, which faced the toughest restrictions, meaning direct flights were cancelled. These students had to resort to unusual travel routes: “Some of them went to Abu Dhabi. Others went to Thailand or Malaysia. They were going to intermediary third countries to try to get here.”

Martin told us about the extraordinary time it took to work out the whereabouts of each student. Lecturers sent out surveys to collect information about where students were located, as well as what their online access was like. They then cross-referenced this information with their enrolment lists to make sure everybody was accounted for.

Additionally, Martin was concerned about a large cohort of international students who had arrived in Australia for pre-semester language training. When the lockdowns began, those students found themselves stuck in Sydney, with mounting financial pressure and no support network. They reported feeling isolated, depressed and stranded. Undergraduates and postgraduates alike were prevented from socialising or enjoying the campus lifestyle that had drawn them here in the first place.

Yue (Lynette) Mao had just finished her undergraduate studies in Brisbane and was due to travel to Sydney to begin her Master of Media Practice when the lockdown began. Originally from Nianging in Southern China, Mao intended to travel home for the end of year celebrations, but because the virus had already been identified in China she chose to stay and work in Brisbane over the holiday period instead. That meant that by the time Australia’s first lockdown had been announced, Mao had not seen her family for over 18 months. She told us: “My mother cried a lot because she really wanted me to go back to China … I really wanted to go back because I could see her anxiety. She felt so nervous. She was so worried about my safety, my wellbeing.”

The 23-year-old was placed in the unenviable position of being separated from all her loved ones overseas, while having no friends or close contacts left in Australia. She knew that if she left the country to travel home even temporarily, she would struggle to return, which would impact her studies.

“I really needed to rely on myself,” she said. “I went through a really dark time. I saw the breaking news every day. In that period, I cried a lot.”

Mao eventually found a new roommate and together they adopted a kitten, which she says helped them both to get through lockdown. Technology was another lifeline; being able to video call her family every day to report on what they were all eating and where supplies were coming from was a real help.

Times were hard. Yet despite the sudden upheaval, the mounting sense of panic and the urgency of the situation, the department’s attention was firmly focused on the wellbeing of its students, often at great personal cost to the staff. Martin said: “We didn’t sleep, and weekends disappeared. No one had weekends. We worked weekends. We worked days. We worked nights … it was tough.”

It didn’t take long before an action plan for delivering all Semester 1 classes online had been put in place. Martin attributes that speed to the fact that staff within the department are intrinsically “tech savvy”. She remembers “a really strong group response with lots of collegial support”.

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences put together an educational innovation team and created a new program, Online by Our Design. This ensured that all the best teaching strategies were assessed, collated and then published, so that everyone in the faculty had access to the most current and effective teaching protocols. MECO staff were prominent in the faculty response to the changing environment. Following Online by Our Design guidelines, departmental teaching strategies were immediately re-evaluated, alongside an assessment of student enrolments, to establish a pathway through lockdown and beyond. Once it was established how many students intended to continue their studies and how many were located overseas, the task of identifying the correct mix of technologies needed to deliver course content quickly began.

Martin said that in some units up to 75 percent of the cohort were international students, with the majority situated on mainland China. This presented its own set of challenges. It wasn’t just a case of altering class content to allow for the new teaching modality, which was time-consuming in itself, but technology proved to be an ongoing complication for offshore students and the department. The most significant problems were caused by China’s censorship laws and poor internet access in regional areas, which meant that students often had difficulty accessing University materials online.

Thankfully, this challenge was solved by the Information Technology department, which swiftly acquired additional server space in China to set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) on behalf of the University. This welcome development was critical to course delivery, enabling students to access course materials outside the Great Firewall of China – a phrase coined by former Australian National University academic Geremie Barmé in his book of the same name, referring to the Chinese Communist Party’s policy of internet censorship, blocking access to some foreign websites within its borders.1 Without the additional server capacity and VPN, it would have been impossible for thousands of students in mainland China to continue their studies.

Within two weeks of the border closures and restrictions being instituted within New South Wales, MECO was able to offer a fully functioning online education environment for domestic and international students, with all tutorials hosted on Zoom. The department also relied on other online tools to deliver the student experience. Martin remembers, “We used so many different platforms aside from the Canvas suite. People would be using Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Padlet, Socratic, Miro, YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud. We used every available online technology.”

As far as memories of 2020 go, the now ubiquitous video conferencing platform Zoom would likely top the list for many. Learning how to use the platform was a baptism of fire for most, with the majority developing a love–hate relationship. With the extra barriers of the unmute button, audio lag and unreliable microphones, in-class discussion (especially small breakout group work) was less likely than when sharing a physical space.

Asked how she felt about online lessons, Mao responded: “I can understand why my Chinese friends didn't turn on the video … because often they just [woke] up … If I can’t see anyone, I choose to be silent. I don’t know why … It’s just so weird to talk to the camera.”

Between technology issues and student reluctance to switch on their webcams, it became impossible for educators to “read the room” and spot which students were struggling. It also highlighted the educational differences between Socratic teaching practices used in Australia, which encourage open dialogue and critical thinking, and the Chinese Confucian method, which is more concerned with listening than discussion-based education. This new atmosphere was not what was expected by many local students, used to vigorous classroom debates, but many positives were also noted. For instance, some students who previously felt too shy to speak up in class were happy to take advantage of the text-based chat function in Zoom.

For Sydney-based students, the ability to study from home and avoid time-consuming commutes into campus were widely reported as the greatest benefits. This was also advantageous for many overseas students. As Mao told us, “Some of my friends said it’s okay to study in China because they can save the living fee … it’s a really good way for those people who just want to finish the degree as soon as possible. They can save more money and they can work. They can have a full-time job and do full-time study.”

The department’s production-based units were hit particularly hard by COVID-19 restrictions, facing additional challenges and demonstrating the limits to what could be delivered remotely. Staff and students alike had a steep learning curve adapting to online learning, relying on what students had on hand rather than the department’s on-campus resources. We personally experienced the difficulties of learning practical, technology-based skills without on-campus resources. Courses teaching hands-on skills had previously run with access to purpose-built studios and classrooms on campus, making use of professional equipment and multiple large screens. For instance, the Digital Media Unit (see Chapter 6) enabled students to gain experience with professional audiovisual equipment, whether using the state-of-the-art recording studio in the Education Building or borrowing portable microphones and sound device kits. Now, most students would be relying on their laptops, toggling between Zoom in one window and programs such as Adobe InDesign and Audition in another.

The Digital Media Unit equipment was central to the undergraduate and postgraduate podcasting units coordinated by Lea Redfern. When first asked if these units could be taught remotely, she initially said no, “because students won’t have access to the things we teach”. Luckily for students, she reconsidered. MECO2601: Media Production: Radio and Podcasting was a Semester 1 core unit for many undergraduate students. “It would be really terrible for students to have a second-year compulsory subject interrupted in that way,” Redfern explained. “So, I really needed to find a way to make it work.” She turned to the media industry for inspiration to see how traditional practices were diversifying in response to the crisis.

Redfern found that parts of the industry that relied on audio technology, such as radio and podcasting, were facing the same challenges as the education sector. Professional podcasters and radio journalists had to adapt to work under these unprecedented conditions. The industry response provided something of a blueprint for how students could be taught using the technology they had at hand, with smartphones acting as recording devices and Zoom enabling remote interviews (like the ones conducted for this chapter).

“Things that weren’t central to the course, to do with remote recording and making do with what you’ve got, became central to the course,” Redfern says. “That wasn’t just happening within our course, it was happening in industry. I started to feel really confident that what we were teaching wasn’t just a Mickey Mouse version. This is the version that you will need to know if you’re going out into industry as well.”

Radio and podcast listeners had also demonstrated they were willing to adapt, with domestic sounds and interruptions becoming an accepted part of the audio space. Redfern says this adaptability is “part of the COVID story too”. Embracing this mindset allowed students to “solve problems in a real-world kind of way … One of the things we tried to emphasise in audio is that all the stuff they were learning has practical applications for the real world, and it will help them no matter where they go with audio.”

While remote learning posed significant challenges for students, many performed exceptionally in the new learning environment. Redfern remembers podcasting students who went “all out”, adding sound effects to basic exercises designed to assess writing skills, and producing amazing and often very personal audio pieces. In other units and throughout the department, grades went up during the first semester of 2020, with more high marks awarded and fewer students failing units than in previous years. According to Van Heekeren, the reason for this is obvious: “You’re at home, you’re in lockdown. What are you going to do but study?”

Possibly for related reasons, enrolment rates for 2020’s second semester were better than expected. During the turbulent first semester, amid warnings that university enrolments were going down, Redfern remembers checking the numbers for her second semester postgraduate podcasting unit. She was surprised to see 250 students were due to take the course: around 60 more students than the previous year, continuing the year-on-year growth trend for that unit. The situation was similar throughout the department. When the pandemic first took effect, Van Heekeren watched the enrolment numbers for MECO1001: Introduction to Media Studies drop from around 400 students to 299. But the 2021 cohort for the same unit boomed, with 684 students, making it the unit’s biggest enrolment ever. Around 500 of these students were studying online from mainland China. The numbers were a promising sign of the health of MECO, at odds with the pessimistic view of the state of the university sector prevalent in national media.

Martin points to the unique problems in ensuring the MECO curriculum could openly and comprehensively cover global media issues when many students were subject to China’s controls on political expression. The week her ARIN2610: Internet Transformations lecture was due to explore the Hong Kong protestors’ use of digital technologies, many Chinese students didn’t attend. One student told her they would not show up because the topic was “too sensitive”. Those students, located in China, were possibly concerned about online surveillance in ways they would not be in an on-campus lecture in Australia. Another industry-based unit, FASS4903: ABC Innovation Research Project Unit, could not be delivered in China, because students could not access the ABC’s services. Considered alongside student difficulties accessing reliable internet connections, and unwillingness to participate in discussions online, challenges like these make Martin doubtful the department can fully “deliver the level of critical, analytical education that the University of Sydney is known for” to students studying at home from China.

While online has opened up new possibilities, there are many aspects of on-campus learning that can’t be replicated in the virtual environment. As time passed, many students and staff seemed eager to return to campus. In September 2020, Redfern organised a Saturday workshop in response to emails from postgraduate podcasting students begging for the opportunity to experience the on-campus facilities. Asked whether MECO’s future would be increasingly remote and online, Martin was unconvinced: “We don’t want to get rid of the face-to-face experience … people obviously do value it, and we enjoy it. So, no, we’re not going to go and become a distance education provider.”

Even so, the success of MECO in adapting its teaching to a COVID-safe context has shown what is possible to achieve remotely. “We will certainly be retaining some online elements in the future,” said Van Heekeren.

The ways in which the 2020 experience will shape the department are yet to be seen. Questions remain on whether students will continue to enrol in greater numbers, and whether they will study remotely or on-campus. These outcomes will have ramifications for the balance between domestic and international students, and to what extent new technologies adopted during the pandemic will remain in place as in-person teaching returns.

When we look back on the height of the pandemic years, it is easy to recall the devastating effects of COVID-19: the mainstream story that has been spun of human suffering, financial devastation and fear for the future. There are, however, positives to be found, and the story of MECO is one of them. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, maybe one day we will come to see the pandemic as a serendipitous turning point, not just for MECO, but for all humanity. As Van Heekeren puts it: “I think when we look back in another decade or so, we will see that 2020 was more like a reset year. Looking back, there is a feeling of satisfaction … relief that we actually managed to keep this thing afloat. There is something enjoyable about that.”

​Works cited