Frivillig frånvaro – om den luddiga övergången till distansundervisning under covid-19-pandemin

Looking back, it might seem as if all higher education in Sweden switched to remote teaching on March 18, following a government decision the day before. Instead, higher education had started to change from within already a couple of weeks earlier, as teachers and students reacted to the pandemic. To document and to try and understand what was going on, I sent out questionnaires to the students in the second half of March 2020, followed by interviews with the teachers, at the Bachelor Programme in Digital Cultures at Lund University. The subject was if students and teachers had stayed home from or changed their teaching, already before March 18. The timeline proved fuzzier, and filled with individual actions and deliberations, than the simple historical assertion that from one day to the next a government decision was made to switch to remote teaching. In March 2020, the students acted first to adapt to the pandemic, followed by the teachers, and then the university management. The understanding of the events differed between teachers and students, and there seemed to be barriers to the communication between the two groups, when major external events affect the university. It appears that microcultures of different approaches to the pandemic formed early, presumably in the tension between the massively media-reported handling of the pandemic in the rest of the world, and the lack of clear guidance from the government and the University, in March 2020.