Takavarasha [11] asserts that technology is now an integral part of everyone’s lives. The 21st-century consumer is a digitally ‘savvy’ choice maker [12] whose expectations, motives, and experiences are socially constructed [13]. This is evident in higher education, where we witness innovative technology-enhanced teaching and learning models, often driven by student demands for bespoke learning [14]. Technology can positively impact student learning by offering a personalized and interactive experience, thereby enabling students to take a deeper responsibility for their educational journey [15]. Clearly, successful teaching strategies can minimize any resulting learning anxiety [16]. Furthermore, these creative approaches can be adopted by higher education institutions in an attempt to build synergy with the latest trends in educational technologies [17]. The authors acknowledge that shifts in education, and the introduction of technology-enhanced learning, were ongoing before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the campus closures due the pandemic acted as a catalyst for demanding rapid change which might otherwise have taken a decade or more to achieve.

As a sector, we have therefore seen a shift from didactic teaching approaches in higher education to embracing creative pedagogies centred upon enhancing the student learning experience [18], with tactics such as flipped classroom (students receive teaching materials beforehand so that subsequent lecture time can be used to reinforce learning) and gamification (the use of game mechanics, such as points scoring and league tables within teaching to increase student engagement) now more commonly applied. This approach complements the characteristics of the modern-day student, who demands speed, nonlinear processing and social learning [19], collaboration [20], and multitasking [21].

With the ever-increasing costs of higher education tuition fees [22,23,24], and an opposition to student loan funding support [25], the value of higher education is often questioned by students [26,27] and there is growing pressure to ensure the availability of relevant metrics to support the ongoing marketization agenda [6]. As a result, educators must consider the value and impact of their own teaching [28,29,30,31], whether it is delivered face-to-face, online, or as a hybrid of both.

The landscape of higher education has therefore experienced a shift which has seen more measurement and assessment of student learning outcomes. This reliance upon metrics forms part of a performativity agenda [32]. Within such a metric-driven environment, the learning gains of students are now considered to be key indicators of teaching and learning excellence [33], and whilst other metrics may only feed into the cynicism discourse (moving to a consumerist model), and the pragmatism discourse (demonstrating value to stakeholders) of teaching excellence, evaluating student learning gain both supports these, and also supports the aspirationalism discourse relating to the integrity of teaching enhancement undertaken [34].

A recent office for students study concluded that existing methods for determining student learning gain need more development to enable them to account for contextual and subject factors [35,36]. Andrade [37] proposes that the actual definition of learning gain should be for individual higher education institutions to determine, but Arico et al. assert that ‘learning gain is now prominent when considering the effectiveness of higher education’ [38] (p. 249). As such, our understanding of student learning gain should help us to understand how we can maximize the effectiveness of our own teaching [29], and how the value of our teaching may have changed with the transition from face-to-face to online teaching.

Taking these considerations into account, research has been undertaken which used an alternative learning gain model first proposed by Polkinghorne et al. [39], and subsequently detailed by Polkinghorne et al. [40], which integrates both student explicit knowledge (subject learning that can be codified and verbalized as theory) and tacit understanding (experience and practical application of knowledge) to create a unique two-dimensional evaluation of student learning. Therefore, the model is suited perfectly for holistically assessing learning outcomes, and for informing the continuous improvement process [41] to ensure that the quality of teaching being delivered, and the resulting student learning experience, can be understood, and then improved upon year on year.

The learning gain model was applied to cohort of business studies students at a UK university who received in-person teaching, and the following year (during the pandemic) the same learning gain model was applied to the next cohort of business studies students on the identical course, but this time the students were receiving online teaching. Overall, the perceived learning reported by the students who received online teaching was lower.

From the results of this study, it was of particular interest that the learning gain model used enabled the academic team to appreciate, for the first time, that in the case of the female students, the practical side of their education was perceived to be more affected by the change to online teaching, whereas the male students reported that the more theoretical side of their learning was perceived to be more affected. Such gender variations need now to be confirmed by further studies, but if true, this may have significant implications for how we teach online to ensure equity and inclusion. Such a potential differentiation in learning based upon gender needs to be accounted for in the online and hybrid models of university teaching currently being used across the global higher education sector.