We are not launching "online learning" at colleges and universities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather, we are living through a period of temporary, remote teaching.
March 19, 2020. It's almost midnight, and I've still got work to do. My institution serves 34,000 students and 5,300 faculty who will have their world rocked like never before on Monday, March 23, when we "go online." Preparations to teach and learn in a new way are in full swing. At the same time, many of these students and faculty are wondering if they should leave the house to go to the market, because they might bring back the COVID-19 virus and infect the whole household. Oh, and daycare is closed. Faculty are worrying about how their students are going to cope on Monday and if this is all really going to work. Many faculty had never heard of Zoom before this week. ("Do I have to use that?") And has anyone thought about how many students won't have access to Wi-Fi or a decent computer? What about the homeless students who live on campus? Where will they live now? Both faculty and students are stressed. Yes, Monday we "go online" with all our classes.
I am, by nature, an optimist. You know, the glass is always half-full. I try to find the good in people. Look for the silver lining. So I believe we will get through this. The next weeks and months will be challenging. Our recovery will be long and hard, but we will get through it. And when we do, I hope that one of the things we learn is that what we did was not launch "online learning" at my institution—or any other institution in the country. Rather, we lived through a period of temporary, remote teaching. There is a huge difference.
As my staff work with the outstanding faculty at Pitt this week, they are not building online courses and designing online learning experiences. My staff are helping faculty to think about the goals of the course they have been teaching in an on-campus, face-to-face mode and figure out how they and their students can find alternative ways to connect around the content and make the most of the time that is left in the semester by using tools available to them. For some faculty, this may involve dumping more content into the learning management system. For others, it may consist of sending emails with assignments and replacing a multiple-choice final with a paper or with a group project that comes back via email. For still others, this may entail using Panopto to record lectures or using Zoom to hold small-group discussions. Most likely, faculty will utilize a combination of these tactics.
Contrast this with what many hope to see with the student experience in a well-designed online course. Typically, our team of designers, working with faculty members, take a full semester to design a new, 3-credit online course. That's a full 15-week semester. During that time our learning designers work in partnership with faculty to lay out the course goals and objectives, requirements, and overall structure. Designers and faculty also work together to develop assessment strategies, review the materials that will be used, and prepare individual lessons. During the time spent together, they discuss whether or not outside expertise should be brought in to help with the development of the course. Video production may be part of the process too. There are numerous levels of review—from the design and technical point of view as well as from that of the school or department. The result of all of this work is a well-designed course in which students are able to engage with the content and the instructor to meet the learning objectives, in an online format that meets their personal requirements for flexibility, remote access, and/or schedule limitations.
What we are doing right now is not the same thing at all. Our faculty have had about ten days to get ready for our Monday start. And this is happening for every course being offered this term, not just for our typical online programs. So while the headlines are talking about the move to "online learning," the experience for the students and faculty will not reflect what their experience would be when teaching or learning in one of our typical online courses.
What I hope the experience will do, however, is show us how resilient we are as a community. I hope faculty who may have been reluctant to use educational technologies will now see some new possibilities. I hope students will discover some things about themselves—about what it means to be flexible and what it means to learn.
Let's check back with each other at the end of the term. Let's see if my optimism has been well-placed.
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Cynthia Golden is Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director for the University Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Pittsburgh.
© 2020 Cynthia Golden. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.