Developing and teaching a postgraduate module to research students: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 represented a major break from the education world as we knew it. This was particularly true for the higher education sector, with lecturers around the world having to move their traditionally in-person activities to a virtual setting - in general without any previous experience or training. While many of the experiences have been widely reported at college- and undergraduate-level, not much has been said about teaching at postgraduate level, particularly at research-level degrees such as doctorates. In this presentation, we will share our practitioner experience in designing a postgraduate research module in one of our areas of expertise, which is marine biogeochemistry modelling, and subsequently re-developing and delivering it under the constraints of the pandemic. We will discuss the challenges we faced, as well as the many of the opportunities that emerged from them, some of which led to innovative approaches that created a more authentic research experience to the students.