Blended and (not so) splendid teaching and learning: Higher education insights from university teachers during the Covid-19 pandemic

This paper provides deep insights and reflections by a group of teachers on the redesign of three postgraduate university courses in tourism management to a blended format during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like many others, we faced the common struggle of ‘what’ and ‘how’ to blend in uncommon circumstances whilst staying committed to maintaining excellent teaching and own wellbeing. To account for crucial nuances that normally are discarded in debates on higher education teaching and learning, our paper incorporates the author-teachers’ emic, insider perspectives on extant realities. Through snippets of our shared, reflective logbook, we reveal the cognitive, affective and conative dimensions of teachers’ experiences, while our findings point to the collaborative opportunities that come with managerial challenges during a transition to blended teaching. Based on our findings, we argue that collaborative redesign with, not for others is of paramount importance when transitioning higher education to blended and splendid teaching and learning.