Well … it has been one week since our small but plucky residential liberal arts college went from pretty much no online to completely online. Just down the road from Oprah’s house, Westmont students enjoy small classes, full access to their professors who mostly live in the surrounding areas and a full community life. Now, like everyone else in the world, we are scattered beyond the recommended six foot social distance and meeting in Zoom rooms and getting reacquainted with a much slower pace to life. Our IT staff is mostly working from home and helping the over 150 faculty and 1200 college students navigate the wild west of online learning. And … for the most part, this has gone amazingly well. Two years ago, our campus was evacuated 5 times in six weeks due to devastating fires and floods that rocked our area. The digital tools that we quickly adopted then to respond to help students take finals online, now have become some of the lifelines connecting this learning community. Here is what we have learned so far:
I will post regularly from now on with a view from my lens of the mix of technology and people and in learning environments. I welcome your comments and views from where you are. This will not be easy, but I feel like we will find a way through this together.
- Allow ourselves to feel awkward and unsure as we find our way. Schools that offer online classes have refined their strategies for years and we … we are doing this in one week.
- College age humans are resilient and adaptable. Yes, they greatly miss their friends, but have responded to the challenges of this season with humor, grace and have gotten down to the business at hand of finishing their academic year strong.
- Professor age humans are also way more adaptable and courageous than they may have thought a month ago. It is such a culture shock to go from face to face instruction to full online classes in just a week but … faculty have rolled with this with incredible grace and curiosity to find some new normal for them and their students.
- Canvas LMS has proven to be a stable platform and a reliable partner. Some faculty had used Canvas extensively and creatively, but most had utilized only the most basic features. As we have quickly had to rely on Canvas for all professors to deliver content for all classes, most have found their way to a deeper integration of this tool into their courses. We have added Canvas Studio and Respondus Lock Down browser to the Canvas toolbox in response to the varied needs of formerly only face to face instruction.
- Zoom video conferencing had been used for some remote meetings up until a week ago. We went from 10 users and 1 or 2 zoom meetings a week to over 180 users and 720 meetings per week in just a couple of days. Again … this platform is very stable with all the features needed for robust communication for a few or many folks. Zoom has been an easy adoption for professors and classes that are mostly lecture. The class can view the professor’s slides, have discussions and take quizzes. Now we are wrestling with the groups that do not easily fall into this paradigm; art classes, film classes, bio chem labs and choir and orchestra.
I will post regularly from now on with a view from my lens of the mix of technology and people and in learning environments. I welcome your comments and views from where you are. This will not be easy, but I feel like we will find a way through this together.