Author: eschudel

Tanis teaches in the Centre for Sport and Exercise Education at Camosun.  This past year, she told me, she was not teaching applied courses, but more lecture-based courses which meant that this, coupled with the fact that Tanis also was seconded to work part time for eLearning as an instructional designer last fall, made the transition from face-to-face to online teaching a bit smoother for her.

In addition, Tanis has previously taught online asynchronously at another institution, and has used D2L to support her courses during her time at Camosun.  So, last fall after the great pivot, Tanis started out teaching mostly asynchronously, using Collaborate only for office hours.  Then this Winter term, she taught primarily synchronously, but she “felt really puzzled at the beginning with Collaborate.  I didn’t know how it would work for me, but I was really keen to dig into it. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I hadn’t done asynchronous teaching before.”  While Tanis was comfortable with the technology and the online teaching side of things, she still faced challenges.  One of the biggest for her was not always knowing how the students were doing. “I had no feedback. I didn’t know how they were, or if they were overwhelmed.  You feel kind of alone in the world, talking into nothing. I wish I had been more proactive in getting ongoing feedback from the students.”  That piece of online teaching, when you lose the ability to see student faces, seems to be what faculty I’ve talked to miss the most.

One thing Tanis has learned from teaching online is how organized it makes you become.  “If you go into face-to-face class, you can just make it happen. But this last year I had my units all laid out in advance, and I created more quizzes that now I’ll be able to use again. So I feel better prepared going back into the classroom having more structure around my courses.”  Teaching online also allowed Tanis to explore the notion of flipping her class. “When learning online, students have to come prepared,” meaning that she, as the instructor, no longer has to drive everything in the class.  In-class can be more about the application and discussion of concepts students have reviewed online.

Over the past year, Tanis has learned to be more patient with herself and her students.  “We have no idea what situation they’re in so we need to have a little bit more compassion for all of us.”  And in addition to being patient with yourself, Tanis advises faculty getting ready to teach online for the first time to “keep it simple, and seek out help from eLearning and from other faculty members. Then you won’t feel so alone.”  And one interesting note that came out of our conversation was how, in spite of technology barriers, we seem to have more compassion for each other being apart than we had when we were all face-to-face.

Tanis is already thinking about what her courses could look like moving forward.  “I would love to keep some of it blended.  For example, keeping the D2L discussion forums to give students space for introspection, and keeping some of the lectures online, leaving the labs face-to-face where students can ask questions and practice. We have to imagine that students may not want a 100% face-to-face classes anymore.  They miss the social aspect of school, meeting up with their friends, but they’re not missing lectures where they’re hiding at the back of the room. So open up the social spaces, but let’s talk about how we can take the best of both worlds for teaching.  I think there’s some really cool combo opportunities we could explore.”

Jessica is Program Lead for the Early Learning and Care (ELC) program at Camosun.  Even though her main role throughout the past year (you know the one) has not been teaching, she has had a lot of experience teaching online having started her career with Northern Lights College (in Prince George) in a fully distance ELC program and then Northwest Community College in Terrace ( now Coast Mountain).  These initial experiences, reaching remote northern communities, many of whom were Indigenous, through distance learning means that for Jessica, concerns about the value of online teaching and learning simply don’t worry her, although she does admit that face to face teaching is a favourite mode for her.

One thing Jessica said that particularly resonated with me was how technology works, or doesn’t, and the impact it has on students and instructors.  “While distance platforms have improved and I’ve seen the progress that’s been made, some of the experiences this fall with implementing or trouble shooting the technology were very replicate of teleconferencing or video conferencing technology from the past. The same barriers and challenges [pop up] whenever we introduce a new piece of technology, and the frustration this last year was very similar.”  And all this leads to the same frustrations Jessica encountered in the past, that faculty encountered this last year “I struggle when I can’t support a student in the way that matches the high standards I have for myself.”  Just as an aside, while Jessica was talking about how similar challenge with technology are now to 12 years ago, I kept hearing a line from that Talking Heads song, “same as it ever was.”

But courses in Jessica’s program were not new to D2L, in fact all of the courses have D2L sites, and faculty in ELC have all used D2L tools in one way or another, and a couple of the courses were already being delivered online before Covid hit.  Because some components of the courses had already been designed for delivery in an online format, “that really helped us decide what courses we could teach online, [and because] most of the instructors really like having a synchronous option because otherwise they find it’s hard to engage the students who aren’t engaging, they could add a synchronous option if they wanted to.”  But of course, moving completely online was still challenging.  “We also have a practicum component, but we paused the practicum because the field was putting a pause on additional adults joining programs.”

Some of the faculty in ELC have also been collaborating on their online course development (before and after the shift last spring), sharing the load of developing content and creating the design and set up for it in D2L. Jessica note “I think when you can collaborate, it’s great because we don’t all have skills that the other one does,” and supporting the strengths of each instructor, and building capacity through collaboration and embracing different ways of creating and designing content she sees as a positive.  “Different faculty, different approaches – I think it’s the multiple ways in which you can engage [that really works], although I’ve also seen that could also be a barrier for some.”

Collaboration and support are a couple of the big takeaways from the past year for Jessica, especially “the opportunity for mentorship of new faculty and faculty who have experience and the opportunity to share resources,” while at the same time being mindful that not everyone has the same interest for collaboration and sharing. “I think that’s something that I learned with this other experience I had that I made a lot of assumptions.  [For example,] don’t assume that everybody has the same understanding of what online learning is, how they would do remote or distance learning, or what’s important for them.”  I certainly understand how easy it is to get caught up a passion for online learning!

Jessica has some advice for instructors moving online:  “I would say definitely attend a couple of workshops so you can see different styles [of online teaching] and find a point person [in eLearning] if you don’t know where to begin and just walk through your course shell with them. If you can, [ask other faculty] to be put into their master D2L shells so you can start to see other people’s styles because then you know what you’re drawn to.”   In addition, Jessica recommends considering what balance of synchronous and asynchronous will work for your courses and students. If you have a course that is very interactive, completely asynchronous may not work for you.  “Think about that contact with students and what you’re comfortable with, and think about what things are really important for you.”

Finally, “try not to think of online as being limiting.  It could be really freeing if you can change your mindset.”  One of Jessica’s mentors (and she does highly recommend finding a mentor who you can bounce ideas off of) “was the first person who taught me that, for a student, it shouldn’t matter how their program is delivered, their experience should be the same. So just because I did my education online and you did yours face to face classroom, it doesn’t mean that one or the other is any lesser – they’re still the same quality education.”  What’s important is what you value in your teaching.  “What’s important to you? Is it important that you develop some skills and are confident being independent?  Do prefer to work with a team that you can rely on? Is it that you are interacting and engaging with your students?”  Whatever your values, concentrate on those.

The ELC program will continue to not only use online tools to support face to face courses, but also to deliver courses completely online, as well as to develop more online learning opportunities (or as Jessica prefers to call them, multi-mode or distance rather than “online”) through support from the Ministry of Advance Education.  As faculty embrace the option of multi-mode teaching, working together when possible to share the load, and find new ways of engaging with students in the program, Jessica sees a future program that includes a wide range of options for students attending courses from across the province.

Before COVID hit, Linda was an Instructional Assistant with the Certified Medical Laboratory Assistant (CMLA) and Medical Radiography (MRAD) programs at Camosun.  She remembers last March’s pivot as an abrupt move “from being in the classroom and very hands-on every day to suddenly everyone going home, then trying to figure out how to teach online at the same time as learning how to use Collaborate and other tools.  At times it felt like we were fumbling our way through, but we recognized if we did stumble we would still try and give our students the best experience possible.”

But then, Linda had a break, and didn’t come back until Winter 2021, this time as a faculty member teaching online, after everyone else was settled into the new normal.  “Teaching online was a big transition for me because I’m so used to being in the classroom, gauging reactions to the material, and getting unspoken feedback from students’ facial expressions or even their postures.  But now I’m talking to a screen and I don’t get that feedback anymore which is definitely tricky. So it’s been a learning curve for me to adapt and draw students in.”  But at least the students, being a cohort, “already had a connection with each other that they could draw upon, the challenge was more about them learning at the same time as I was learning.”

Linda also counts herself lucky because the course she taught this term was already developed, and one of her co-workers mentored her in getting ready to teach the course online.  She herself hadn’t used D2L or Collaborate as an instructor, but “I sat down with her and asked how all this would work, especially labs because my group wasn’t getting any face to face lab time with me and I wasn’t sure how I was going to adapt content from in-class to online. The subject I’m teaching, radiographic principles, is quite dry, so my co-worker video-recorded me making what I call video vignettes, and each week I provided the students with a video to give them a more practical understanding of what we would be doing if we were all in the lab together.”

Aside from, as she put it, feeling like she was jumping off a cliff without knowing where the bottom is, Linda says one of her biggest challenges was feeling comfortable with the technology she was using to teach, and not panicking when there was a glitch.  But the lesson she takes away with her is that “it’s ok to stumble and feel uncomfortable with the platforms, as long as students are actively engaging with and understanding the information I’m giving them.”  But she also told me that it “sure feels good when you give a synchronous lecture and everything works out really well, and students are engaged, asking questions and giving good feedback.  Or when they turn on their cameras, and you see their faces – those little things feel really good right now.”

Linda has some advice for faculty who might be teaching online for the first time.  “Pull out all the stops and don’t be afraid to try new things. Make videos, teach synchronously and asynchronously, and draw from everything you can. If it works, great, and if it doesn’t then don’t do it that way again. And seek out other instructors who have already tried something and learn from them.”  Linda reflects on her own experience as well, saying that she is a planner (as many of us are): “I like to know what I’m going to do and what my approach will be, but it can be a stumbling block in terms of being comfortable putting myself out there. Somebody said to me it’s like you see the train coming, and when it gets to the station you jump on and it just keeps going, so just enjoy the ride.”

Moving forward, Linda says she has found that “having the ability to be flexible with how we teach has been rewarding.  In the future, I can see a hybrid scenario which I think has benefits for instructors and students.”  At the very least, Linda would like to keep using the video vignettes she’s made for her lectures and labs.  “My hope is that they can be built on and used in future years by myself and others.”  She also hopes students have learned from having to adapt so quickly to this new world of online learning. “I’d like to say to them that you always have to be adaptable, because while you can memorize the textbook, a person will walk into your workplace and not look the way you remember from the text. You have to think on your feet and adapt to who is in front of you in the moment because no one is textbook perfect – you need to think on your feet and be able to go with the flow.”

While this experience has been challenging, Linda does not feel negative about it.  “I think it’s just another tool in the toolbox. As we talk about moving back to face-to-face in the fall, maybe we consider that hybrid, where you have hands-on labs for that connection with the students, and at the same time run online sessions where they can review material ahead of time – a combination would be great.”

Lynelle is the Chair of the Allied Health and Technologies programs in the School of Health and Human Services (HHS).  As Chair, she has had a different experience of the past year from other faculty I have spoken to, and brings a unique point of view to online teaching because pre- COVID, D2L was already heavily integrated into the courses in her programs.  “From day one of MRAD (Medical Radiography) and for every subsequent course or program in Allied Health and Technologies, our underlying starting point is face-to-face enhanced with D2L. When you take a job with us, it is so deeply integrated in the way we interact with students, it doesn’t make any sense to opt out.  New faculty are trained and supported in using D2L from day one, which I think is a huge key for a minimum level of universal adoption.” In addition, plans for moving some of Allied Health & Technologies programs into a fully blended format with some exclusively online courses were already in progress, which means that this past year gave AHT a jumpstart on achieving what they’d already been planning.

But even if courses already integrated technology, Lynelle’s faculty still faced challenges. “I think the biggest challenge that we all faced, students, faculty, staff, was creating boundaries between what happens at school or work and what happens in the rest of your life, but also accepting that sometimes those boundaries can’t be rigid. This also created a great deal of acceptance and understanding from instructors for what their students were going through because during the pandemic the challenge was the same for everyone.”  Another challenge was, as Lynelle puts it, that “some people and technology are like oil and water.” You have the happy adopters at one end of the spectrum, and at the other end those who prefer the way things are and are having perhaps the hardest time adapting.  “I empathize with the struggle those in the second group are having, and I try and remind myself that they’re living this struggle every day and it’s depleting their resilience faster than anyone else’s.”

When I asked Lynelle about her experience, and the experiences of her faculty, of moving completely online last year, her sentiment probably sounds familiar. “Initially I think everybody wanted to vomit because, we were being forced to do something many faculty had resisted in the past. But then I think a certain percentage of faculty surprised themselves by how well they were able to do it, how well their students responded, how much they ended up liking it. They had just never given it a chance before.”  As a result, Lynelle sees many rewards from the past year.  “Some of the things we’ve learned during the pandemic are not new, but not everybody was there yet. But now we have an opportunity to figure out what we must maintain (for example, no student is going to want to roll back to having no D2L shell for some of their courses.) I’m really glad that this has forced everyone to the same page – keeping everybody on that page is going to be the next challenge for the organization.”

Lynelle does have some advice for faculty moving to online teaching.  “My advice would be that while we did it (we did it quick and dirty during the pandemic) which proved to us that we could do it, it wasn’t the best way to do it. Now we need to take stock of the things that are working really well and the things that we should continue doing as much as possible. Faculty need to carefully consider the content pieces they want to design and how they need to design them, for example making them modular so that it’s easy to switch things out, and treat that content creation as normal course refreshing.  Then get feedback from students, and revise.”  But she also cautions not to be afraid of trying something new, just don’t try to do everything at once. “My advice is to just do it. If it’s bad, don’t do more of it, do something else.  If it’s good, do more of it.”

And the future?  Well moving more courses to online learning with blended teaching approaches for labs and practice was always in Lynelle’s plan for at least one of her programs, namely the Certified Medical Laboratory Assistant (CMLA) program.  “We got such a bump – light years faster than we ever expected, and now we’re here.  We’ve ripped the bandage off and now we’re wondering how we can support all our instructors who will need to keep teaching in this way. We will need better instructional spaces for them, perhaps miniature recording studios with the features they will need to create really engaging content.”  Lynelle sees huge benefits for students learning this way.  “Students could miss a face-to-face class because they could either watch the class later, or they simply log on remotely.”  Maybe there are students from Calgary or Edmonton, or maybe students are working part-time jobs while they’re upgrading. “They can’t do that if their course schedule has them showing up in classes on Monday at 2:00pm, and Tuesday morning at 8:00am, and Wednesday at noon. But when you throw asynchronous courses or a combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning with a combination of face-to-face and remote learning, sometimes you can tick all a student’s boxes.”

Both MRAD and CMLA already have some of these options.  “We have face-to-face labs right now, but in some cases, students only have to come on campus once a week. So they can travel to Victoria, stay in a nice hotel one day a week for their entire program, for cheaper than it would be to move to Victoria for just one semester.”  And Lynelle notes that it was the students who figured out that math!  “That’s huge, especially since both programs require a certain percentage of students to relocate for their practicums anyway. So if they can arrange their practicums in locations where they would prefer to work, that makes everyone happy because employers want people that have ties to community and the desire to work in those places because they become long-term employees instead of employees that are on their way to something better. And so that’s better for the overall development of the island, not just us.”

With future plans already in motion, Lynelle is excited.  “Now we have educational resources that we never had before to make all this possible. I thought it was going to take us three, maybe five years to build those resources, but the pandemic happened, and now we’re ready. That’s what education should be about: delivering the learning to students where they need it, and when they need it!”

Kerry-Ann is in a slightly different position from other faculty I have talked to on this project.  While she was a teaching faculty member in Nursing, and will likely go back there in the future, for the past 2 years she has been the Simulation (sim) Education Coordinator for the School of Health and Human Services (HHS) at Camosun College.  If you don’t know what a sim lab is, see Sim-One Canada for more information.

Kerry-Ann only started working as the Sim coordinator in the fall of 2019, and had just begun developing relationships with her colleagues across HHS when Covid hit, and she mused that “going virtual does not help for developing relationships when you don’t know somebody.” So a survey in the fall of 2020 sent out to program leaders and chairs across HHS, which included follow-up meetings, helped Kerry-Ann to connect with programs and identify how she could support them.”

Kerry-Ann had been exploring virtual sim before COVID, but had a hard time finding faculty to join her in these explorations. Those of us who work supporting faculty in using technologies to support their teaching know that there are always those faculty who are on board before anyone else, those who adopt tools as they need them, those who want to adopt tools but often can’t find the time to learn more about them (I think this category is the majority), and those who don’t want to at all.  Last year, everyone had to jump on board in one way or another despite different comfort levels!

“In Fall 2019, my goal was to keep in-person simulations going and deal with various technology installations and setups that still needed to happen as we moved to the new CHW. And then Winter 2020 landed and midway through we went virtual, and we created some new simulations that launched new inter-professional collaborations. But come Fall 2020, in-person simulation was not a possibility, so I started exploring virtual simulation.”  Kerry-Ann reflected on Colette Foisy-Doll’s visit to Camosun during the development of the CHW simulation spaces prior to Covid. Colette, a long time simulationist from Alberta said that “in-person simulation was too resource intensive and it would fade away, and that virtual is the future. And now that’s what we’re living – it’s like this fast forward. So now I’ve had to apply the best practices of simulation, design and development, facilitation, and debriefing to a virtual world, and I’m seeing the benefits tremendously.”

Kerry-Ann sees a lot of other rewards coming out of the past year.  “People have found smarter ways to work. For example, meetings: at the end of a long day, you can stay home, you’re not rushing in traffic to get there, so there seems to be a larger uptake in meetings and even more engagement in meetings.”  And she also notes the increased use of Teams and OneDrive for file sharing, commenting that all of us at Camosun had access to these tools before, but many of us didn’t use them.  But now we have had to change how we work together, and wonder why we didn’t use them this before!  “You know, the pandemic has shaken things up in a way that is really exciting on some level. I know it’s been hard, but I’ve seen the excitement among faculty trying something new, saying that they never would have done this had the pandemic not happened. They are working harder than ever, but it’s exciting because there are so many new ways to do things now.”

Moving forward, Kerry-Ann says she sees that integrating virtual sim with the in-person sim will have huge benefits.  It “gives students the option of doing some virtual sim work before they come in to do the live sim work. And in addition, virtual sim development has helped improve formative assessment in face-to-face experiences.”  And Kerry-Ann is excited about the changes in learning and evaluation that can come from this. “So a lesson learned is that the virtual world has helped us think more in terms of assessment for learning, which in a health program like nursing is profound because it has repercussions that go well beyond a student’s program and into their professional career and their ability to contribute to a “just culture in healthcare”.”

One final reflection Kerry-Ann had for me as we talked about moving closer to the end of the pandemic “I think we were all so used to living a life where we looked into the future, so something I would tell myself is to live more day-to-day, and find joy in that day-to-day, because you don’t know what the future’s going to bring.”

Jim teaches in the Automotive Trades, which as you can imagine was a tough program to put entirely online.  But his group, there are three of them, worked hard to put everything together, in spite of not having used online technology, like D2L, to support their courses in the past.  When I asked how they did it, Jim explained how they reached out to eLearning for support, and then they and the 3 instructional designers they worked with set their goals.  “We could have spent a lot of time dwelling on what you can’t do, but we didn’t do that. We really concentrated on where we were, where we needed to be, and how we were going to get there.”

In addition to having to create a lot of material from scratch – videos, quizzes, content – and learning all the technology they needed to use, the team faced many challenges, as did their students.  One of the on-going challenges has been connectivity:  “it’s very difficult teaching a group of students when three or four of them are glitching out all the time.”  But in the end, Jim says that they recognized that they were all in the same boat.  “Students are really quick at adapting. They would help each other, and they were also teaching me, which I would acknowledge.  Then we’d have a laugh about that – humour was a great thing to bridge those gaps and we acknowledged the bumps in the road and tried to make it a fun place to be.”

Jim remembers as he made his videos, having to let go of being perfect.  “I was trying to do them in one take because if I didn’t, then I’d have to edit them, and I didn’t have time. I was burned out and exhausted from learning of all the new technology. So I would do one take, and do the best I could. It was funny when things didn’t go right.  For example, I did a pressure washer demo and the breaker didn’t work, and then I get the power to it and the water was turned off. All these little real life things happen, so I’m rolling my eyes and laughing. But it was okay, because it was more authentic – here you are on camera and the water doesn’t turn on and the cutters don’t cut. Anyway it turned out that those things were actually good because the students would laugh and talk about how they loved it when it didn’t work. So that was one of those unexpected things.” I also loved Jim’s description of a game called “Name that Thing” where he would show his students some kind of auto part on camera, and whoever got the name of it right in the chat would have their name put in for a draw, a kind of light at the end of the tunnel for when they could all be together in the same space again.

Aside from allowing his personality and humanness to show in his videos, Jim also learned to be more flexible in terms of the schedules for his classes.  Some days would go quickly and a test could be earlier, but other days he needed to spend more time with the content, or perhaps change a shop day into a theory day to make sure everyone was feeling comfortable with the material before moving on.  “I used to teach with structured time blocks in mind, but I’ve learned to not do that online, which makes it better for everybody.”

As for advice for instructors new to online teaching, Jim says to try to view the course and the online teaching experience from the student’s perspective.  “Don’t assume what they know or don’t know, take your time, smile and be authentic. Remember that it’s okay for you to make mistakes, and that things are going to happen that are out of your control – you can’t prepare for everything.  Just be okay with things that are going to happen that you can’t be ready for.”

Jim says he is going to take many of the things his group has created and the tools he has learned to use into his face to face classes when they return.  He likes the calendar in D2L, and has created a lot of quizzes – the quizzes tool he especially found made testing and keeping tests up to date much easier.  As well, all the videos the team have created will definitely remain part of the courses so students can review them as they need to. “I made about 30 videos which students can watch first, and come to class more prepared. Now when we meet, it’s going to be better overall because we can focus on other things. I can’t see us going back to the way we taught before, not at all.”

In the end, Jim says “if we want to say there’s a silver lining [from this past year], I think we will end up with a better program, and with something that’s probably more relevant for young people. It forced us to get a little bit more in line with the times, which is good.”

Liz teaches in the Dental Hygiene program at Camosun College.  Now, this is one of the programs that has managed to have some face to face teaching since just after the shut-down.  I remember last May, the students who had had their clinical courses interrupted in March, suddenly being sent back in so they could finish their program.  This created an even more stressful time for instructors, both moving some courses online, and working to keep their students safe while they completed their clinical work.  What Liz and I talked about, however, was her work moving her more lecture-based courses online for the fall term.

One of the first things Liz told me was that after the craziness of last spring, she had to take a break to clear her head.  She had already been thinking that her approach for moving courses online for the fall would be to “take a hard look at teaching in general. Take time to look back on the courses that I teach, and approach them in a slightly different way, which was to [determine] what is a “must know”, what is a “should know,” and what is a “nice to know”…Then, after making sure I had the course outcomes covered, I could focus my time and attention on the musts and then on the shoulds, and then if I had time, I could weave the nice to knows into it.” But first, she needed to rest her mind: “I think what I was doing was letting go over the summer, thinking about different approaches, and then I literally pulled out every one of my outcomes and performance indicators, and just blew it up.”

Liz believes that this whole last year was an opportunity to “reinvest in the approach to teaching.”  Liz has a background in educational technology, so is not afraid of trying new things, and she has always been free with her content, posting her PowerPoints and providing students with guided questions for their readings.  But now she had to figure out how to work in an environment where she couldn’t see 25 faces looking perplexed, saying “I think that lack of face-to-face connection makes adaptation a little bit more difficult.”  That ability to be flexible and adapt from what you are reading in students’ faces is definitely more challenging online.

But overall, Liz sees rewards everywhere.  One of the biggest ones has been integrating Universal Design for Learning (UDL).  She notes that while some faculty worry that “if you tape a lecture, the students won’t come, that’s not been in my experience at all. They all come all the time. If I have a synchronous class, I probably have 98% of them there every time…I think the value of having lectures taped for them is that they actually use them to review. I can get passionate and talk a little bit fast at times, and so I think they find it valuable to be able to go back over discussions. And that’s universal design.”

What was her biggest takeaway?  Liz says, “I think it is the opportunity to step back and try to figure out what is it that we’re actually trying to achieve. I think it’s a time for renewal. I think I had a past tendency to teach the way I was taught. And in the future, we need to embrace the fact that the Information Age is here and the speed of change of material is great.”  Not that she thinks this is easy.  “You need the time in advance to look at a course, back up from it, and think about how you would do this completely differently, and there can be really big wins on the other side of it.”

And this is also some of the advice Liz would have for faculty moving into online teaching for the first time. “Instead of thinking … I have to teach online in a traditional way, think outside the box. And also divide your content into those musts, shoulds, and nice to knows, because I think we have a lot of nice to knows, because we are passionate and want to try to give it all to them.”  In addition, Liz, like other faculty members I’ve talked to, points to looking back on the past year as a positive, saying, “there are times when you force somebody into a situation, and they’re going to learn something, be it good or bad, so I think the whole thing has been an opportunity to learn and be creative.”

Liz has spent some time reflecting on this past year, seeing it as an extension of her journey as an instructor.  “I think my journey in the last five years of teaching is about releasing control. Put it in the hands of the learner and they exceed your expectations every time.  I think [we need to ask ourselves] why we do the things we do? When I did that, I realized it was because that’s the way I’ve always done it or that’s the way it was when I was a learner…I don’t think it has to be elaborate and I don’t think you have to use the maximum number of tools…The goal isn’t to learn tech: the goal is to learn some content.”  And some classes will be a better fit for face-to-face, just as some students will perform better face to face – we need to consider what the best mode is for courses, students, and faculty, for their teaching and learning.  Let’s not take this investment we have all just made and toss it out because of the fear that online education is substandard.  Instead, look forward.  “I think it needs to be different – I think our world is different and I think it’s a giant opportunity to figure out how to teach this generation that’s coming forward.”

Zack teaches Learning Skills and Math Upgrading at Camosun, and has for over 25 years.  Since he now only teaches half time, and had never taught synchronously online (a mode which many of the students he serves really need), he found the move in March of last year to teaching entirely online very challenging.  He remarks “along with Learning Skills, I was teaching self-paced, upgrading math when COVID hit.  I had to pivot to doing almost all my teaching by phone, which was really clunky and hugely time-consuming…And doing tests online was really tricky – we wanted to keep the integrity of the test, but we had to let that go a bit.  So, we were all scrambling at first and it was a bit of a mess.”

Moving forward into planning for his fall term, Zack had scheduled development time in May and June, which he spent creating content for D2L (which he had already used quite a bit previously to COVID), and learning the complexities of Collaborate with some of his colleagues.  It was during one of these practice sessions that Zack had an “aha” moment – realizing that if he had uploaded a PowerPoint to Collaborate, students could write on it anonymously and that “students could take part almost more than they could in a regular class….I like that anonymous function. In fact, I keep thinking when we get back face to face, I would like to continue that because it allows students to participate more in real ways.”

One of the biggest realizations Zack has had over the past year is that he, and other faculty, now find themselves in the same boat as students.  He told me he took a Java course a few years ago, as a full-on student (taking exams, and everything!) and found that experience to be so valuable, because aside from learning the subject matter, he also stepped into that student experience and engaged in the learning skills he himself teaches.  That deep dive into the student experience he says helped him as an instructor, saying “if you’re teaching a support course like learning skills and you’re not relating to where they are, students may tend to discount that course.”  But not just if you are teaching support courses – “I would encourage other instructors to not to let go of their ability to be students,” and to let themselves experience that vulnerability, a vulnerability all instructors were forced to face starting last March.

One of the things Zack discovered as he moved his courses online “was that there are a lot of creative ways we can use online tools to save work, and then you can be more focused on the teaching.”  He especially appreciates the ability of D2L to support the marking of assessments, giving him more time to engage with students.  Speaking of engagement, Zack told me that he would like to have time to talk to other instructors about how they have engaged with students online.  He notes though that it’s “not just necessarily about online teaching because the online experience can be similar to the face-to-face teaching experience.”  He belongs to the Teaching and Learning Community of Practice at Camosun and loves talking about the craft of teaching with his peers, missing the face to face opportunities over the past year.  I hope that faculty will find opportunities to reflect together on the past year.

When I asked what advice Zack has for other instructors moving to online teaching, he said to first attend CETL workshops, also practice with your peers, and “keep in mind that….that you need to understand how vulnerable students can feel.  We need to remember that students can feel frustrated, wondering what’s wrong with them, especially when they’re on their own. I think that’s what scares me a lot about teaching online – students are really pretty isolated.”

Finally, Zack sees moving back to face to face as an opportunity to keep some of what he has learned and created, comparing the tools he now has available to him to a set of paint brushes (words from a fellow Camosun faculty member in Engineering) which allows him to be more creative with his teaching canvas.  We were all forced into this online teaching realm, but at the same time Zack asked himself “once I get past that first challenging part, and feel that I handle it and feel confident that I can do it, then can I move to that point where it can be fun and creative and interesting and rich?”  That is where we hope we and our students have gotten to now, and where we can begin building from as we move forward.

Deanna is a part-time faculty member teaching English at Camosun. Her situation is a little different from other faculty members I’ve spoken with first, because she is 50%, and second because she teaches one course, and has taught this same course for a number of years. So, when everyone had to move online, Deanna only had to convert one course, but she didn’t know for sure she was going to be teaching in the fall until early August. As a result Deanna had a choice to make: would she take her old face to face course and simply convert it to online, or would she take her colleague’s already developed online (asynchronous) course (her colleague developed it for the spring/summer term) and use that, adapting it to how she teaches? In the end, she decided to take a chance and plunge head first into something completely new and different rather than staying in her comfort zone. She worked hard last fall, but feels that the work she put in has paid off, because this term she can spend more time working on engagement with the students rather than figuring out how the course and content work. And in the future, she can “spend more time … on what the students’ need, as opposed to learning the technology, updating content, updating assignments, writing news posts – those things are all there, so I can spend the real engagement time with the students helping to move their learning forward. That’s exciting!” Deanna thinks part of the reason she has enjoyed the experience so much is that she was “not comparing everything to the classroom because there is no reason to. I’m not comparing how well the classroom version worked compared to my online version because I’m doing something completely different – it’s almost like I’m not grieving the loss of what I was doing in the classroom.”

I liked a metaphor Deanna used to describe the move online as an opportunity created from having to “rip the Band-Aid off,” of using technology to support her teaching. In the before-times, she was content to use tools like D2L as a support to her classroom teaching, but last year, she says “I was forced to embrace the fullness of the options…I haven’t embraced all of them, but the ones that I’ve embraced have surprised and delighted me more often than not” and “now that it’s a year later, I see that there is this amazing capacity for me to engage with students and for them to engage with each other.”

One of the things that Deanna notes as instrumental in getting through this was support. Support from people in eLearning and in the Facilitating Learning Online course. While she was developing and teaching in the fall, “I felt like the support was there for me as a safety net, no matter what risks I decided to take, I had the support” and was able to debrief around what was working, and what wasn’t, until she realized that she “had moved from feeling like I needed that weekly handholding to now feeling confident when I come out of trying something new.” That’s the part that makes me happy – we help faculty to find that confidence to try something new themselves!

Deanna has seen a lot of amazing benefits for both her and her students from teaching online. Even though, as she says, “you don’t have the option of relying on the five senses that you used in the face to face classroom, or on your years of experience with in-person engagement…I think that I’m engaged in a more intimate way with the students than in the classroom. It’s weird and it’s exciting.” For example, they can “write on the whiteboard in Collaborate…and they seem to love trying different colours, and shapes when brainstorming – my creative self thrives and delights that students are being creative in a new way that didn’t happen when using a classroom blackboard.”

As Deanna spoke, I was struck by her comments about her online synchronous classes and not being able to see all the faces as you would in a face to face classroom. Rather than seeing this as a negative, Deanna thinks of this as an opportunity for her and her students to take more risks in a safe environment. “A student might put something in the chat that they might not have raised their hand to say, but they did it and felt brave…. we’re doing things that are creative and innovative and I’m feeling like it’s okay to take those risks when in the classroom I might not.”

Advice for anyone moving to online teaching? “Don’t worry about the bells and whistles! Understand where you’re at, who you are, and what matters to you as a teacher, and concentrate on…how your strengths as a teacher will translate into the online environment rather than seeing something shiny that somebody else does… Just put that aside and be who you are.” And also she wants faculty who have been teaching online over the past year not to give up too quickly on this experience. “I’m hoping we come out of this feeling really open and positive about online learning.”

As to whether Deanna will continue to use these tools to support her teaching, she tells me yes! “It’s been exciting to do this and there is so much potential in it, I want to be an online teacher…In the same way that I feel like classroom teaching was something that I do and I feel really great at it, I want to get there with online teaching.”

Deanna had so many amazing things to tell me, I can’t share them all here in one post, but I want to end this piece with something she said at the beginning of our discussion that for me makes everything I do in my work supporting faculty worth it: “it’s been an incredible journey that I’m extremely thankful for.”

Thanks Deanna – I know we will see incredible things from you.