As was the case in most higher education institutions, the University of Limerick (UL) moved to emergency remote teaching overnight in March 2020. As an academic who specialises in online education and runs professional development workshops in that area, I wanted to help colleagues who were unprepared for online teaching. As UL is predominantly an on-campus institution, anyone who was not already teaching online was faced with a steep learning curve, while also dealing with health concerns, working from home, and possibly home schooling. In addition to not being ready, some staff were not enthusiastic about teaching online (Cutri et al., 2020).
About a year before the pandemic, UL established an informal community of practice called the Learning Technology Forum (LTF), of which I am a member. Once the pandemic started, we (the LTF) started planning professional development (PD) initiatives that would help staff transition from face-to-face delivery to remote teaching, in a matter of days. Some members of the LTF offered to run workshops on specific tools, whereas others focussed on the pedagogy of teaching online. While our first challenge was to help staff become comfortable with remote teaching in spring 2020, our second challenge was to help them develop better quality online courses (Hodges et al., 2020), for the 2020/21 academic year.