Creativity in a COVID-19 Virtual Learning Space

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world, and education too has been affected in many ways. In particular, much learning in higher education has moved to synchronous virtual spaces. Regardless of context, the principles of learning and teaching remain at the foreground, and the importance of developing active and creative learning spaces has never been greater. We are a group of one faculty member, six graduate students, and one teaching assistant who came together to write this paper so that we could share our online experiences in a clinical education course during the summer of 2020. We used a variety of active-learning and creative-teaching approaches. In this paper, we share our virtual use of video-based learning, gaming/crosswords, speed dating, blowing bubbles as a way to learn how to teach a psychomotor skill, image-based art, forum theatre, and found poetry. We share a crossword designed specifically for readers with which to grapple and our summary is presented as a found poem. Student author quotes are interspersed throughout the paper.