Staying on Guard for Teaching Excellence: Managing In-Person Education at Polish HEIs During COVID-19

Remote teaching became one of the key topics in educational research due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our article looks at the other side of the story, i.e., in-person education during the pandemic. This aspect of teaching excellence has been overlooked because it seemed to be thoroughly studied. However, COVID-19 has profoundly changed in-person teaching. In our study, we focus on the Polish medical and technical universities as the studies they offer include solid practical components (labs or clinical classes). Our article examines how in-person classes were administered and organised during three consecutive semesters, starting in the Spring of 2020, when teaching at Polish HEIs was mostly conducted remotely. We build our analysis on internal legal acts issued by rectors and interviews with university staff who oversaw the teaching process. The legal documents describe the procedures related to in-person teaching or frontline teaching in person. The interviews complement this image by providing the rationale behind the regulations, their reception by the students and the faculty, or the backstage of in-person teaching. The LogFrame was applied to provide a conceptual framework to understand how universities could continue providing their services.