Redesigning Digital Delivery of Postgraduate Programmes in the Post-Pandemic Era: A Sri Lankan Experience

This paper presents the results of a new teaching approach applied to a postgraduate programme conducted at a state university in Sri Lanka. The study reviews the change of teaching approaches from the onsite delivery to virtual learning during the pandemic and how it evolved in the post-pandemic era. Albeit remote learning was imperative during the pandemic, the universities were given the flexibility to decide on the mode of delivery and redesign their teaching approaches once the world returned to new normal. With the novel experience gained through virtual teaching and learning during Covid-19, higher education institutions across the world did not fully return to analogue teaching as before. The numerous advantages of virtual delivery resulted in the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes continuing with the online teaching or adopting the blended mode. This study presents the results of conducting Master of Arts in Linguistics programme in different modes, how the teaching approaches changed over the years during pre-pandemic, pandemic as well as post-pandemic eras. The research design contained mixed method approach which included a survey and recorded feedback obtained during the sessions. The new learner centred approach adopted during the post-pandemic times yielded more benefits and positive feedback when analysing the survey results and the comments given by the students.