Pandemic pedagogies: the impact of ERT on part-time learners in Ireland

A wide range of literature has already emerged which assesses the sudden closure of Higher Education Institutions during the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020, when many academic institutions turned to ERT (emergency remote teaching) in order to maintain teaching and learning. The Faculty of Lifelong Learning at Institute of Technology Carlow, Ireland, one of the largest providers of part-time learning in the Irish sector, undertook a study of its learners in January 2021, to ascertain their experiences of the online pivot. This article takes a qualitative approach to the findings of this study and it highlights the importance of acknowledging the lived experiences of our learners. We acknowledge that it is necessary to engage with our learners’ opinions on the challenges and affordances of online and remote learning, and that the experiences of our learners are key to the future of our faculty and to part-time learning in Ireland. We focus on the normative expectations of learners, and their experiences of learning in the remote context, using a self-selected sample where N = 401 learners.