Observations and strategies from higher education in the face of challenges from COVID-19.
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Authors:
Bryan Alexander
President
Bryan Alexander Consulting
Amy Collier
Associate Provost for Digital Learning
Middlebury College
Beth McMurtrie
Sr. Writer
Chronicle of Higher Education
Gerry Bayne: Welcome to the EDUCAUSE podcast. I'm Gerry Bane. The Coronavirus is preventing students and staff from meeting face to face, so learning institutions are developing alternative educational delivery methods to move the classroom online. In all of our years of strategic planning, probably few of us have asked what do we do with our courses if there's a pandemic in the middle of the semester. Yet here we are, experiencing one of the most all-encompassing shifts in higher education's history. In this podcast will feature comments from some observers and some leaders around what faculty and students are facing and how they're coping with this new paradigm.
Beth McMurtrie: I normally cover teaching and learning at The Chronicle, so I have been talking during this past few weeks to a lot of folks on the front lines.
Gerry Bayne: That's Beth McMurtrie, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Beth McMurtrie: There's a wide variety of challenges there. It's fair to say that most faculty members and the folks supporting them feel underprepared or unprepared in this environment, and they're really stressed out. We know a few things. We know that most courses these days do use an LMS, but many professors only know the basics, like how to post an assignment, how to take attendance, how to post grades. And now they're having to learn how to create videos and find online content for students who don't have their textbooks with them. They have to create discussion threads or find out how to proctor exams securely, and figure out how to grade their students.
I saw one survey that showed that only about 15% of courses use video or audio files as is, so there's a really steep learning curve. And instructors have to do all of these things while they're managing childcare on their own or family issues and things like that.
Gerry Bayne: McMurtrie says that faculty is learning on the fly about many of the challenges their students are facing.
Beth McMurtrie: Low income students or students in remote areas may not have access to reliable wifi. They may have to do their schoolwork on their phones. There are some students who don't even have phones and they're having to have their schoolwork mailed to them. They may be sharing living spaces with family members or sharing laptops with siblings having to do their work, and they may be in different time zones.
So one basic thing everyone is trying to figure out right now is when do they teach their students and how. I'm hearing that a lot of instructors are opting for asynchronous learning to deal with a lot of these access challenges. But in the last couple of days I've also been seeing on places like Facebook that students are craving real face to face time online of course, with their classmates and their instructors. So I think that's a balance that people are working out now. And teaching and learning experts having to do a lot of just-in-time training sessions. What do you need to know to move online quickly? What are the basics?
Through all of that they're talking to instructors about not forgetting students with learning disabilities. One piece of advice I heard a lot is to offer instructional materials on a lot of different formats to help in that regard. People are also not sure yet what to do about trickier challenges like how do you teach a lab or a performing arts class? How do you teach a class in which students rely on equipment that they get from the college, maybe like a film class? How do you provide academic supports like tutoring? And this will come up more and more as the weeks progress, how do you give exams securely?
On a positive note, I get the sense that people are really coming together over this, sometimes across campuses and across disciplines. I've been following a couple of Facebook groups including one that The Chronicle runs, and it's impressive how quickly and widely people are sharing ideas and resources on things that are really technical or really tricky. And they're also providing emotional support as well, which seems crucial both for faculty members and for students.
Finally, I want to say that the predominant message I'm hearing is keep it simple. Now, I don't know if that's what administrators are saying to you on your campuses. I'd be curious to hear that from listeners. But the message I'm getting from a lot of online education experts about this is don't try too much, don't ask too much of your students. Let's just try to get through this together and do the best that we can.
Gerry Bayne: Bryan Alexander is President of BrianAlexanderconsulting.com. And he's also the author of a new book, Academia Next, The Futures of Higher Education. He says academia has been very swift in moving to the online paradigm.
Bryan Alexander: The process has involved colleges shutting down for a couple of days or weeks in order to give people a chance to ramp up and get online. This has put enormous, unprecedented pressure on support staff. Once online, I've been seeing a kind of two-pronged basic approach. On the one hand, people would move for synchronous communication, primarily through live video. On the other hand, asynchronous technology, primarily through the LMS.
The technology actually spread in some interesting ways. We're seeing some push for higher interaction technology that's more demanding, more challenging. Technology like virtual reality and more use of video. And as Ben has pointed out, there's also push for more intensive technology, more asynchronous technology due to faculty with limited experience, equity issues and the digital divide.
We're also seeing a push for policy changes. There's a lot of controversy right now about how to grade. Should we give students pass/fail or make it mandatory pass/fail with opt out for grade? Should there be the double A grading, which is A or A minus? We're also seeing initial calls for changing timelines now so that we may extend semesters in order or give students who are suffering from undue time pressures a chance to really finish.
Gerry Bayne: As Alexander looks towards the future, he sees many possible troublesome outcomes, but some positive points as well.
Bryan Alexander: At the very least a major financial hit to institutions worldwide in the United States, when you anticipate state governments spending much less on public institutions. And on the positive side, we're seeing the biggest boom in online teaching experience. So we're learning rapidly how to teach effectively online. In parallel to that, I think we may experience a possible backlash to online learning driven by stories of bad experiences, as well as by some faculty who didn't want to do this, confirming their ideas in practice.
On the positive side, we may see a boom in creativity as people scramble to find ways to connect more effectively with students. What I'm not hearing is much talk as students as makers. I expect to see more of that as students make more audio, more visual and more video content. Much depends on just how long Coronavirus continues its work. If in a given nation it burns through in two months or so, or if it takes much longer than that.
Gerry Bayne: Amy Collier is Associate Provost for Digital Learning at Middlebury College. She says they're concentrating on three things; faculty preparation, faculty governance, and student readiness and support.
Amy Collier: We also have had an asynchronous emphasis recognizing that a lot of our students are going to places all over the world, and having different kinds of connectivity issues. And so we have really been pushing for asynchronous modes of learning in response to this, which is a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to prepare that.
When this whole thing started, we developed a range of support opportunities for faculty. We did this, my group, the Digital Learning and Inquiry group kind of provided this, coordinated it with our friends in ITS and library, and the teaching and learning center, and those opportunities included creating a website that had lots of information on it, face to face and Zoom drop-ins until we were no longer able to do face to face when the closures and suspensions happened, consultations and workshops, highly, highly attended workshops. I believe the first week we did them, we had 13 workshops, over 240 RSVPs across those workshops. That's pretty high for us with a small campus. We also have relied more and more on faculty to faculty work, having faculty work with each other, departmental meetings and things like that.
Another thing I wanted to mention was that we recognize as an institution the need for faculty governance to continue. Faculty governance is an important part of our institutional makeup. But we also had to recognize the quick nature of decision-making in this moment. You know, minute by minute things were changing. And so we established an ad hoc Academic Continuity Committee that is made up of faculty from key faculty governance committees and then several academic administrators including me.
And in that very first meeting, the group made very important decisions like the move to an optional pass/D/fail, decisions about what a synchronous schedule would look like if we were going to allow faculty to continue doing synchronous work. Course response forms. The decision there was to have course resource response forms at the end of the semester, but allow faculty to make them optional in terms of inclusion in their tenure and promotion portfolios. So that's been a really, really important committee for moving forward and getting faculty input and perspective and feedback throughout this process.
And the last thing I'll point to that both Beth and Brian highlighted was we are very aware of the challenges that our students are facing in this new mode of trying to teach and learn. We have students spread across 43 countries and 50 states. We have heard from students who don't have electricity, who don't have internet, who are housing insecure or couch surfing, who are care-taking for family members. And so we have really wanted to be prepared to respond in coordinated ways to what our students need.
And so we have established a student support team. It began with a student readiness survey for both of our campuses. We have a Monterey campus as graduate and professional programs, and an undergraduate college. Both sets of students receive the student readiness survey, and that's allowed us to coordinate support with colleagues in the ADA office, ITS, our student support services. We're working on things like how to get students internet access, how to get them hardware, how to communicate effectively with them when they're dispersed, how to help them address financial issues, and how to continue to train and prepare students for these modes of learning.
So those are three areas; the faculty preparation, the faculty governance, and the student readiness and support that I think we've really tried to emphasize this last three weeks.
Gerry Bayne: Amy Collier, Brian Alexander, and Beth McMurtrie. For more resources, support, and tools, visit the EDUCAUSE online COVID-19 resource page. You can get there by visiting educause.edu/covid-19. I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE. Thanks for listening.