How the ecology and evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic changed learning

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic introduced an abrupt change in human behavior globally. Here, we discuss unique insights the pandemic has provided into the eco-evolutionary role of pathogens in ecosystems and present data that indicates the pandemic may have fundamentally changed our learning choices. COVID-19 has indirectly affected many organisms and processes by changing the behavior of humans to avoid being infected. The pandemic also changed our learning behavior by affecting the relative importance of information and forcing teaching and learning into a framework that accommodates human behavioral measures to avoid disease transmission. Not only are these indirect effects on the environment occurring through a unique mechanistic pathway in ecology, the pandemic along with its effects on us provides a profound example of the role risk can play in the transmission of information between the at risk. Ultimately, these changes in our learning behavior led to this special issue "Taking learning online in Ecology and Evolution." The special issue was a call to the community to take learning in new directions, including online and distributed experiences. The topics examined include a significant component of DIY ecology and evolution that is experiential but done individually, opportunities to use online tools and apps to be more inclusive, student-focused strategies for teaching online, how to reinvent conferences, strategies to retain experiential learning safely, emerging forms of teaching such as citizen science, apps and podcasting, and ideas on how to accommodate ever changing constraints in the college classroom, to name a few. The collective consensus in our fields is that these times are challenging but we can continue to improve and innovate on existing developments, and more broadly and importantly, this situation may provide an opportunity to reset some of the existing practices that fail to promote an effective and inclusive learning environment.

Figure 1

The figure shows how the relative frequency of Google searches on global topics related to money, death, and love changed over time. The panel on the left shows data from 1 January to 30 June 2019 (no COVID‐19), while the panel on the right shows data from 1 January to 30 June 2020 (during the COVID‐19 pandemic). Google Trends does not provide the total number of searchers for a term (Burivalova et al., 2018). They provide an adjusted proportion of searches. The thicker lines correspond to daily values, while the smaller line in the front corresponds to detrended weekly averages. In 2019, Google searches on love were the most common followed by death and then by money. Users' interests remained stable through time except for a spike in searches on love around February 14, which corresponds to Saint Valentine's day. In 2020, the pattern is similar until mid‐March, with the exception of a spike in searches on topics related to death around January 26, which corresponds to increased interest in the death of basketball player Kobe Bryant who died in a helicopter accident. Gray bars represent the global number of confirmed COVID‐19 cases (Dong et al., 2020). Note that as the number of COVID‐19 cases increases, there is a shift in the relative interest in Google searches. There is a small relative increase in searches related to money. Death becomes the top category, switching places with love. Data used in the figure are available at https://github.com/maacevedo/covid19gtrends

Figure 2

The figure shows how interest in online learning, measured as relative number Google searches for “online learning” beginning January 2019 up to June 30 2020 in the USA, increased exponentially in parallel to the cumulative number of confirmed COVID‐19 infections. Data used in the figure are available at https://github.com/maacevedo/covid19gtrends