Keep Learning in a pandemic: podcasts for learning development conversations and informal learning

The challenge The Learning Development (LD) team at the University of Plymouth comprises three LD advisors who support student learning across three respective faculties. As such, we form a constellation of separate entities with similar aims but individual approaches to what we do. Before March 2020, informal exchanges across our desks sufficed to maintain a sense of continuity in what we do as a team, but the Covid-19 pandemic induced move to working from home limited our ability to talk to each other. Initially, we ameliorated this situation by holding regular team meetings on Zoom. We discussed the pleasures and pains of online teaching, its challenges and frustrations, our accomplishments and discoveries, and all the observations we made in our workshops and tutorials with students. We soon realised that LD is more than what we teach, but students rarely get access to this informal aspect of our work. Indeed, those areas that could be particularly beneficial to students often fell outside the learning aims of our taught sessions or might only be touched upon in passing. A few questions thus presented themselves: how do we communicate these aspects of our practice? How do we continue the conversation of LD outside our teaching sessions in ways that are not bound by prescriptive or intentional approaches?