A decade on from the Canterbury earthquake sequence - What we have learnt

 The week, marks 10 years since the first Canterbury earthquake (Sept. 4th 2010) woke us up with sustained shaking and noise. The local paper remembers the event with a 7 part series of videos.

I blogged on this first event with some sense of optimism as although damage was widespread, there was no lose of lives. However, worse was to come, with the Sept. event triggering the deadly February earthquake sequence :(  This led to significant infrastructural and land damage across Christchurch city. The institute lost access to out city campus for all of the first semester.

Martin Jenkins (then the manager of the Centre for Educational Development) and I were invited by Ako Aotearoa to study the effects of the earthquake on teaching and learning. Our report concentrated on the learning design aspects and how some programmes retained the innovations made during the lost of campus access and others, returned to the 'tried and true'. 

This year, as the pandemic began to affect life in NZ, Ako Aotearoa launched their series of Ako talks with videos of two Christchurch 'earthquake' projects. The above project and another completed by our Nursing department were featured. The learnings from these projects, inform some of the strategies in coping and dealing with the present situation.

Of note is 'being prepared'. One outcome of the Canterbury earthquakes was not only our institute's but the population's ability to cope with sudden challenges to established 'ways of doing'. The word resilience is used regularly but it is more than that. It is also a mindset about not taking for granted various amenities (water, power, electricity) and the knowing that the community is there to support everyone. These intangibles, help people cope and not be wound up in the negatives. Being kind is not just something promoted by the NZ prime minister and government, but practiced on a day by day basis by Cantabrians. 

However, although the Canterbury region and Ara may have been more prepared to cope with the challenges of the pandemic. There are always many things still to be addressed. One is, as summarised in last weeks #8 kick off workshop with student perspectives, the need to continually ensure the institute has information on students' device ownership and prepareness for shifting to distance learning. Every cohort of learners require preparation this semester and into the coming year. The institute needs to also be cognisant of the digital equity divide. Many students do not own laptops or have access to PCs at home. Moving to distance learning needs to acknowledge this and learning design for distance learning must include options of mblend. This is the blended learning using mobile devices and requires careful development, sourcing of relevant resources/tools/apps which are 'vanilla' and will run on the range of mobile devices owned by students.