ABSTRACT
With the return to on-campus learning in progress, recalling how higher education responded to the COVID-19 pandemic poses a challenge. Back in March 2020, many university leaders thought returning "to normal" (now a phrase almost as maligned as "unprecedented") was a matter of weeks--not months or years. The short-sighted certainty of the initial response as a brief pivot soon morphed into a mixture of horror and uncertainty about how to respond to the larger public health crisis and its consequences for higher education. Collaborating at scale with 200 colleagues and via an iterative learning community conversations, the authors confronted anxieties, frustrations, and new ways of seeing course design and inclusive teaching and learning. The authors shared what this immersive process brought forth at a January 2021 Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) panel entitled "Threshold Concepts in Online and Hybrid Course Design" in the form of three insights about flexible course design: community is co-created with, between, and centered on the whole student;effective assessment is an ongoing conversation;and good teaching requires continuous reflection and recalibration to authentically enact values. Following a brief description of the summer 2020 workshops, this article elaborates on these insights and considers their implications for teaching and educational development in a postpandemic future.