Category: Teaching online

Camosun Faculty Story #7: Robin

Robin is Program Lead and an instructor in the Community, Family & Child Studies Program at Camosun College.  He is in one of those more unique positions because he was not only teaching during the pandemic, but also supporting other faculty in his role as lead.  He also has had a lot of experience as a student taking online courses, which didn’t necessarily prepare him for the role of online teacher: “it always looked difficult to me, and wasn’t something I wanted to pursue as a teacher.  [And while] that experience helped me [understand the] student perspective, it also hindered me because I had a preconceived notion of how it worked.”  But, when the college moved online, so did Robin, without a second thought.  One thing he did mention to me was how excited he is to now be part of the long history of distance education in Canada, which indeed has been around for over 130 years, moving from correspondence, to televised, to teleconferencing, and now to the Internet.  “For Camosun to be a part of that, to me really connects with what a community college should be.”

After getting through the sudden shift at the end of the Winter 2020 term, Robin says: “early on, I realized that September was going to be online and…I [realized that I] couldn’t just shift exactly what I was doing face-to-face classes to an online course, it had to be something different. So I grabbed everything from CETL (Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) that I could … and just focused on getting myself and my courses ready for fall, figuring out what tools [I would need], what’s the best practice, and working on my courses.”  When fall hit, one of Robin’s big concerns was how to build instructor presence, without getting so involved and engaged in everything to the point of being overwhelmed.  As a result, he used a blend of synchronous and asynchronous modes, every three weeks having a live Q&A session rather than delivering a lot of content live.  “There were so many students who had connectivity problems, I didn’t want them worrying about that in addition to the content.”  Every Monday he added a News post describing the week ahead, summarized the discussions (rather than answering all the postings all the time), and asked for feedback from his students both in the middle and at the end of the term.

Robin says that finding creative ways of engaging students regularly is still a challenge for him.  Like so many other instructors, he still wonders “How much is the right engagement for them to be working together? How often should they be in small groups? How often should they be on their own?”  He also finds that in an online class, it’s harder to know if they are there, because “there are some students that will come to you, but there are other students you don’t hear from very often, and who when you reach out to the, you don’t hear much back,” very different from a face to face class where it can be easier to develop those relationships.  That silence in both the synchronous and asynchronous environments worries Robin that this relationship building piece is being lost.  Supporting students to navigate the online course is also a challenge.  Robin tries “to take that [support] role with students, being aware, and looking for those things that might be missing.

In addition to working with students to understand their role in the teaching and learning process as he normally does, Robin has added a new layer of explaining to students what’s going on for him, for example, why is he organizing the course the way he is, and inviting feedback so he can make adjustments.  He also says that “the online experience has forced me to consider what’s most important and how can I slow things down…to make sure students have time to grab on to what they need to grab onto. And I think maintaining that attitude in the face-to-face experience [will be] important [moving forward].”

There have been some rewards as well, teaching in this new format.  Robin teaches communication skills, and there is no doubt that being forced to communicate online has developed new opportunities.  In class “we’ve been talking about all the online skills that they have been developing and how they are related to other types of communication, how those skills parallel what they will be doing face-to-face and how important those skills are.”  In addition, Robin has felt a strong sense of equality online, for example, seeing all students being able to contribute equally.  “In the online environment, all the students are getting a chance to engage. In the discussion groups, I can see how they’re all engaging with the content, [something] I couldn’t with my 30 students in the [face to face] class.” And there is also, a sense of being in it together in the online classroom.  “Students, faculty and staff are all figuring it out together, and you want to impress upon the students that you are with them, learning with them. This is the place to experiment – that’s what learning is about here, trying things out…through the stresses of the COVID world, the stresses of online learning. [As] my favorite quote, Steven Stills says, love the one you’re with – this is where we are, and let’s enjoy it.”

Robin has a few words of advice and encouragement for faculty, saying first to remember that, “we’re pretty adaptable.”  In spite of not wanting to teach an online course before COVID, when he had to, he discovered that “we can make pretty great things happen.”  Also, “see yourself and your students as able…and remember that the important pieces of teaching, the engagement, the active learning pieces, our role in creating an environment that has both a balance of safety and challenge – none of those things have changed. They are all still there, it just looks a little different.”

Robin says he will never go back to using D2L in such a limited way again.  “I think I’ve got an understanding of the platform and the tools that I know that my students have missed out in the past because I didn’t use them. I’m sure I will continue to use asynchronous content and make sure that there are multiple ways for students to engage with the material, more ways for students to engage with material outside of specific class time.”  And in his role as Program Lead, he is looking forward to having conversations with his program faculty around what their program might look like in the future.  “I definitely think using online tools and how to create engagement through those tools [will be] part of the conversation now.  Whether we do something different or not, it’s just going to be part of our conversation.”

Camosun Faculty Story #6: Cheryl

Cheryl is a faculty member in the BSN (Baccalaureate of Science in Nursing) Program at Camosun College.  As you can well imagine, moving Nursing programs completely online, especially given some of the more practical, hands-on aspects of Nursing, would have presented a challenging puzzle.  And certainly this was the case during the sudden pivot in March of last year.  But luckily for Cheryl, after things settled over the summer, she was “fortunate to be teaching courses where there’s still significant face-to-face time. It’s changed [and compressed] face-to-face time,” so finding ways to address fewer/shorter classes by moving more material online (the program group had already built a lot of online course components into their teaching pre-COVID), and redesigning evaluations were where the lab team Cheryl works with spent most of their time.

Cheryl told me that the team “usually starts into a semester knowing how it was done last term, and we make a few minor tweaks and off we go. [But] the last two semesters since COVID, we’ve spent much of the week of start-up adjusting evaluative tools to make sense in this COVID environment with the type of learning the students are having.”  And when Cheryl says evaluative tools, she is referring to replacing students demonstrating their ability to perform a skill in the lab before going on to perform the skill on a live person in clinical practice.  “In the past pre-Covid, each student drew one skill at the end of the semester and had 10 or 15 minutes to gather their supplies and perform that skill in a reasonably safe manner. [But now,] we realized that the likelihood of us being able to have one-to-one time in-person with each student was slim to none…and we had to rethink how we could evaluate to ensure students had the knowledge, skills, and ability to provide safe patient care.”  After much discussion, the team redeveloped this assessment:  “a video skill was developed where students practice the skill, however briefly in lab, and then videotape each other in partners during lab time. [They then] take the video home and critique it. And last term [fall], they were graded on their critique of their skill.” I should note that Cheryl credits her other team members for this idea!

This was one of the main challenges the team faced, but it did not stop with the fall version of the evaluation.  They realized that just recording and critiquing the skill did not address the actual practice: developing the muscle memory of the skill. “So this term (winter), we added a second component of critiquing the actual performance of the skill and not just the student critique of the skill. While reflection on practice [is] a fabulous learning tool, we felt that there needed to be a level of competency as well.”

I asked Cheryl how the students felt about this new way of assessing their skills, to which she replied “I think it’s fairly across the board that students feel way less stress. What I’ve heard from students is, I like this a lot better than what I know of how it used to be done, because the stress before with one-to-one demonstration would not have been a true test of my ability of the skill.”  Comments like these from students, along with adding the skill performance critique, have convinced the team that they should keep this new way of assessing, something they may never have tried had it not been for COVID.  Cheryl reflects, however, that she does hope that as Covid cases settle, students will be able to return to open lab time to practice the skills in a way that is “more similar to how they practice in actual clinical settings with real people” rather than practicing at home with simulated materials.

Cheryl can’t emphasize enough how important being able to work in a team was to surviving, and dare I say to meeting the challenge of the move to online learning.  The courses she works with typically have 4 or 8 instructors teaching the same content to groups of students, each carrying a piece of the preparation and planning load, bouncing ideas off of each other…supporting each other.  That’s one piece of advice she has for someone new to moving a course online – “get help, find allies because it will gobble your time and you need other people to pitch in. It can’t be a solo kind of role that you take on.”  In addition, take the time to “talk it through and figure out what went well, what didn’t go well, and how it could be tweaked, and then bring in the experts that know and can give you ideas on what can be done to [move] forward.”  Think of Kolb’s Learning Cycle:  “experience and do, review and reflect, analyze and learn, plan, and [then] draw conclusions and plan, revising based on your assessment.”  And remember it is not going to come out perfect the first time.

And finally, Cheryl advises not taking it all on at once.  “There comes a point where we’re so overwhelmed with the small incremental layers of newness, we can’t take anything else on. So make sure you contain what you take on, because somewhere along the way we need to retain enough energy to teach students, to maintain the focus on doing the best we can for students. And if we overwhelm ourselves with what we take on, we can’t really be there for them…so dive in, take a risk, ask for what you need, be ready to put in the time, but be realistic about the workload, who’s there to support you, and how you can manage and contain it. Don’t do it all at once in one term.

I am so proud of the amazing team of Nursing instructors Cheryl works with, of how they adapted to a new, unexpected reality, and how they embraced the changes.  I am excited at how excited Cheryl is at the possibilities, and I am so looking forward to seeing what they do next in the BSN Program.

Camosun Faculty Story #5: Susan

Susan is a Statistics instructor at Camosun – you can imagine perhaps some of the challenges she faced moving her class online, especially during the panic of last March.  But Susan was prepared.  The week before the College moved online, Susan came to eLearning and got set up with Collaborate so she could try out virtual live teaching using her tablet PC (which is a huge necessity for any course where you have to write formulas and draw graphs.)  So, the following week when we all moved online, she was ready to go and able to support her students using Collaborate + tablet to finish off her term.

After that mad rush, Susan had some time to consider how she was going to teach in the fall.  To help her figure this out, she first surveyed her students from the winter term to ask them what they would like – “about three quarter to 80% said they wanted synchronous classes, and the rest of them said partial-synchronous. Not a single person wanted to have asynchronous classes.”  Then Susan attended many of the eLearning workshops offered in May and June to find out what the eLearning folks recommended.  But, the surveys and what she was hearing in the workshops didn’t always mesh and Susan was confused.  So, while she initially had decided to run fully synchronous online lectures for fall, Susan changed her mind in the middle of summer and decided to create lectures videos and so she did.

Of course, every instructor and student is different in how they prefer to teach or learn, and over the fall term, Susan found her way.  She ran fully synchronous classes for the semester although pre-recorded lectures are already available to the students in D2L. This is because during the first month in the fall, she “interviewed all my students one by one – everybody got 10 minutes with me. It [seemed] crazy [in that] first month to finish interviewing them, but it made such a difference for many of them.” She asked them what kind of support they needed, and also what mode of delivery, live or video, did they prefer, and once again most students said they wanted the live sessions.  Why?  Susan says partly because “they want to hear what other students have to say. So many of them are there to hear what questions other people [have] and they don’t want to miss out on anything.”  This term, Susan does both:  she has her live sessions and posts the recordings of those sessions after by week.  But this term, she has also discovered that different student groups prefer different modes of learning.  Her first years, mostly social science students, still prefer the live sessions, but her second years (engineering students) wanted to meet synchronously once a week only, preferring the option of watching videos on their own time.

Susan found online exams to be a particular challenge for her.  Last March, while finishing off her winter courses, she unfortunately discovered her exams ended up on a cheating site, Chegg.com.  So, she decided that instead of worrying about cheating, or finding her exams on Chegg, she invested a great deal of time over the summer creating quizzes in D2L using randomized questions from her question banks, and working with the Quizzes tool to mitigate potential issues as much as she could.  The time investment she feels was worth it, “I would rather do a lot of work than get upset by cheating incidents.”

Susan spent a lot of time working on ways to connect her students, and to help them build community, but she finds the lack of face to face connection difficult.  She allocated participation marks for students to use the Discussion tool in D2L to post an introduction to their class and to read and comment on classmates’ introductions, and asked students to post a Profile picture in Collaborate to make their virtual classrooms more inviting. “I did a lot of things to make the students feel included, to feel supported by peers, to make connections…And when I didn’t have enough time to do one-on-one interviews, I did group interviews. So they sign up and they hear what other people are saying…so they feel that they are not alone” For Susan, supporting her students is a most important job she has as an instructor: “As an educator, I want my students to feel that it’s ok to make mistakes because that’s how they learn, but they have to feel safe [first]. I feel it’s my job to make them feel safe to feel uncomfortable while studying a difficult subject.”

Susan had a lot of advice for faculty getting ready to teach online for the first time, from preparing how your class is divided between live sessions and videos/asynchronous, to how to think about exams, to how important it is to be present for your students (using the News tool, for example), but what struck me particularly were her comments about time management.  “We cannot assume all students understand time management,” so be clear about what they should be doing every week. “I use the calendar in D2L, on top of a pacing schedule, so it pops up reminders for them, for example, your lab will be due in two days….However, do not send them too many emails – they get too many and…will be overwhelmed.”  And most of all “be accessible but have boundaries.”

Susan also noted the importance of having support and the right equipment to reduce the stress of teaching online. “One major reason that my online teaching transition went smoothly was because I have the tablet PC that my department chair obtained for us through a pilot project just before the pandemic. Another major reason is that I received sufficient supported from eLearning throughout last year; I asked many how-to questions and in turn I got as many quick and helpful responses. I also think being in a network or a community, as well as getting timely feedback from students around what is working and what’s not is important to online teaching and learning success.”

When I asked how Susan feels now about online teaching, she says she is tired, but that doesn’t mean she won’t continue to use some of the things she built into her courses moving forward. She even would like to teach another online course again!  That being said, Susan is looking forward to seeing her students face to face as well.  So, maybe this is an opportunity to explore the best of both worlds J

 

via GIPHY

Beth Cougler Blom: Design to Engage – new Book!

Beth Cougler Blom is a learning designer/teacher/facilitator/consultant who has worked in post-secondary education, as well as the government and community organizations, most notably for me with BCcampus and Royal Roads, for over 20 years.

If you are looking for strategies around designing and facilitating learning, check out her new book, “Design to Engage: “a “how to” book that will help you become an effective designer and facilitator of learning events. You will:

  • learn about facilitation roles and responsibilities
  • discover what good learning experiences look like
  • plan for and design effective learning events using practical, straightforward design strategies
  • raise your awareness about how to create inclusive, comfortable environments.”

I am looking forward to reading her book myself soon, and recommend you find out more at Beth Cougler Blom’s website!

 

 

Camosun Faculty Story #4: Bree

Bree teaches Statistics at Camosun College. I didn’t really get to know her until the great pivot last March, and during May and June when she worked moving her courses to fully online for the Fall. Bree did not really use D2L to support her teaching before COVID, but used an online homework system external to D2L for class assignments. So, moving online she was pretty much, aside from those assignments, starting from scratch.

Bree told me she was lucky to have scheduled development planned for May and June, but in order to develop two courses (in the Fall she taught two sections of one course, and one section of another), those two months ended up being “really four because I did work through the summer too, to build my courses.”

Having not used D2L for content delivery before, Bree found that one of the biggest challenges she faced was “figuring out how to translate the content that I would usually lecture into something that was a good online format…how am I going to do this so that it still gets the essence of my teaching?” And the second challenge she faced, as many of you will relate to, was time. “You are no longer just presenting a lecture. Now, I am typing the lecture, audio recording the lecture, uploading the lecture, you know, like it was taking three times as long to do one thing. So the time was a big one.”

I asked Bree if she finds now that all the work she did last term helped her with the current term (she is teaching one of the same classes this term), and she reflected on her experience from last term, working from 7am until 11pm every night, “I was exhausted and it was horrible.” But that time has now paid off and she can spend her time fixing things, creating more assessments, and teaching – because while last term Bree taught entirely asynchronously, this term, Bree has added a synchronous component to her teaching. And she does like this blended mode better because “I feel like I have more contact with the students. I feel like the students know me better and reach out to me more because they see me in those live sessions. They know my personality and I’m not just a name.”

As for rewards, Bree feels grateful to have some good work-life balance happening now. Being able to take a quick 15 minute break to make tea or load up the wood stove makes life a bit less hectic. But she also says that she misses the kind of student interaction she had face to face. “There have been students that I’ve connected with who have been sort of less shy to come on a video chat with me, and so I’ve really held onto those because that’s why I’m a teacher. I like that kind of interaction.”

Bree does have some advice for anyone who will be moving their courses online: “build carefully for long-term benefits…thinking about this as being a course that you can use again and again and again and again…spend the time thinking about what it is you want and doing it carefully and comprehensively so you don’t have a lot of adjusting to do in the future.” And also, if possible, take online courses or find some way to experience online learning as a student. Bree took some of the workshops eLearning offered last May/June and “noticed that I got bored after 5-10 minutes, just staring at a screen….When we were first learning [to put our content online], it was like we were trying to figure out how to go from an hour-long lecture to something that captured that, and our immediate response was to do an hour-long lecture (as a video recording). It makes no sense…it’s not the same.”

Would she continue to use what she’s learner and built? Bree says yes. “Maybe I would do sort of a combo of that going forward…[for example, if] somebody’s away and needs to know the lecture or watch the lecture. I could post that, or I could do the webpages as well as doing the in-person classes.” Which I consider to be the best of both worlds: having that student connection face to face, as well as providing students with flexible options for accessing course material.

Bree wraps things up by telling me that “the hardest part was having a plan. Once I had a plan, I was okay.” She had to work really hard for a while to get there, but in the end she says “I have enjoyed it. Once I got through that first term, I have enjoyed it.”

Camosun Faculty Story #3: Lynda

I’ve known Lynda for a while now. I remember back in the days before COVID, before the Nursing group moved to a brand new building on Interurban Campus (I work at Lansdowne Campus), running up to her office every once and a while when she had questions about setting up tools in her D2L course site (she primarily used the Assignment drop-boxes and posted some Content to support students outside of class time.) I would sometimes run a mini-workshop for all four faculty members in her office – ah, I miss those days.

Lynda recently “sat down” with me again to talk about her experiences moving to online teaching. She confessed, “I think at first I was terrified because … I’m not really adept at using technology…So it was quite threatening for me to have to move into an online world when we had to adjust to using D2L and teaching online. But since that time, I think I’ve done my very best to learn as quickly as I can and then apply that to my classroom.” And she definitely has!

Last March, Lynda was teaching clinical practice groups. It was challenging moving from an in-person-care learning experience to “suddenly creating whole new learning activities that would…provide students with an opportunity to apply theory in an online learning setting. So it was a challenge and we actually worked as a team. There were…probably ten instructors, all contributing ideas and trying to create learning activities.” Last fall, Lynda was lucky enough to have her clinical groups back in face to face practice, but her three-hour theory course remains completely online. “[W]e usually have about an hour and a half of synchronous class time, then I post activities or other things to … support their learning.”

Aside from having to design new strategies for moving face to face activities online, Lynda says the biggest challenge for her has been missing the non-verbal cues she relies on in the classroom, something I think many faculty unused to teaching online can relate to. “[I]n a classroom of 40, I’m watching people’s faces, I’m looking for their expressions, their body language. [I]f you say, are there any questions and nobody responds, I’m still watching the non-verbal [cue]s to see if they’ve got it or they don’t. …In the online environment, it was a real challenge…because when you ask, do you understand or are there any questions and no one responds,…it’s really difficult to assess.” One trick Lynda learned was to “establish 1-to-1 communications – I wasn’t talking to a class of 40 anonymous people. I was learning who they are person by person and connecting with them as much as I could… establish[ing] that there were people out there who were listening and maybe as stressed about being in an online environment as I was, and acknowledging that with them…And I think after a while they became more open with me because I was willing to be authentic and open with them.”

But there have been rewards too. “When I first started, I was so nervous and trying to do the best I could to create an online community for [students] and make sure I was meeting their learning needs … I think the biggest positive has been that they’ve acknowledged that they can really tell that I’m trying hard. I do regular check-ins … just to see, are they getting what they need from me? And is the learning going well? And so far, the feedback has been quite good.” But in addition to student feedback giving Lynda confidence, she also has found herself enjoying this new mode of teaching. “When I first started, I thought, I’m not going to enjoy any of this…But I think taking the FLO (Facilitating Learning online) course as well as all those little short workshops…[a]nd then working with colleagues – some of our course teams would get together and do a little practice sessions that really helped build my confidence … [A]ll these little things: after I’d done them one or two or three times and it got smoother, I think my stress started to melt away a little bit and I just started enjoying the online learning environment. And also building that sense of community which I didn’t think we would be able to do online – I think all of those things contributed to my comfort in the online environment.”

Lynda also shared some advice she has for people who might just be starting to move online. First, “really be structured with posting a news item every week to let the students know exactly where they should be in their studies and where they should be focused on in the modules. And then the second part is that synchronous approach… to be creative and provide lots of different types of learning opportunities in the synchronous sessions.” Lynda’s synchronous sessions are no longer than an hour and a half at a time, and “[r]ather than doing hour and a half lectures, [I] pre-record 15-20 minutes of content, letting them look at that independently, and then just make the online environment more of an exchange with learning activities that satisfy, rather than me trying to lecture them on there.”

Will she keep using some of the tools she’s learned to use when her classes return to face to face? Lynda says yes, especially “pre-recording [course material which] I think is really helpful for the students. And also it is more welcoming to them if they know who you are before they get to the classroom. If you can share bits of yourself with them and they start developing trust in who you are, it helps them when they enter a classroom, whether that’s an online classroom or an in-person classroom.” Finishing by noting “I’ll always enjoy them face-to-face more, but I can still connect and support and provide them with learning when we’re not face-to-face.”

I want to note that stories like Lynda’s make it sound like moving your courses online, during a pandemic or not, is easy once you get through your initial anxiety. But it’s not, and it wasn’t. Faculty here at Camosun, and at institutions all over, had (and continue to have) huge struggles and hurdles to overcome with very little time and sometimes limited support, giving up evenings, weekends, vacation, etc. to make sure they best serve their students. Developing fully online courses in a pandemic is not the model we should want to subscribe to, but I am going to keep celebrating all the faculty (even those whose stories I am not able to tell) who faced their fears and stress and made it happen in spite of it all.

Camosun Faculty Story #2: Kelly

Kelly is a faculty member teaching in the English Department at Camosun College. While she was not teaching when other instructors pivoted from face-to-face to online last March (has it already been a year?), over the summer she moved all her courses for fall into an online format, what she calls the steepest learning curve she’s faced since she began teaching.

I agree about that steep learning curve, since Kelly only really used D2L for posting grades and as a repository for some content before COVID. “I wasn’t even accepting assignment online,” Kelly notes. “Obviously it’s been a huge amount of work, [but] it’s also been really interesting to learn how to adapt that style of teaching to the content that I teach and to my style of teaching and my philosophies about connection which are a very strong part of my teaching.” And Kelly persevered, working within the new format while keeping the focus on what is important to her teaching. “It took me two months of full-time work to write what you see on D2L for each course, but I’m teaching people to be readers and writers. That’s my job.”

The brain of D2L, as Kelly puts it, presented one of the biggest challenges for her. Making edits and adjustments on Rubrics, for example, can drive one to distraction. “I spend so much time on formatting that it’s harder to develop new content.” Definitely one of the downsides to creating online content: making sure that the writing is clear, and also that visual design of pages are accessible. Kelly worries sometimes that the time it takes to put her existing content online makes it harder for her to find time to bring new research and innovation into her material.

Another challenge Kelly mentions, which will not be a surprise to anyone, is that she finds her synchronous sessions draining, wondering if anyone is out there. While attendance is high in her Collaborate sessions, “they will not use their cameras even when they have them…so that’s a bit alienating.” But she notes that the advantage to using Collaborate is that you can record the sessions for students who miss, or who need to go back and review a session. Not something you can do as easily in a face to face setting.

One of the upsides to moving her discussion-heavy courses online, Kelly says, is that she feels “connected to [her] students in a new way, and maybe a more thorough way” now. Through the online, text-based discussions, “they have to engage in the material in more than a superficial way,” which has also helped Kelly grade the discussions in a way she couldn’t before when they were more ephemeral. In fact, she says “the first time I opened the discussion and saw the level of work that was happening there, the amount of thought, I was blown away, and I still get so excited when I read those to mark them.” The students are learning without her jumping in all the time – learning from each other. That is one of the huge rewards from this experience.

The biggest takeaway from this experience for Kelly, as well as some advice she would give to new faculty, is “that if you know what your philosophical goal is with a course, you can make any method of teaching meet that goal,” but you have to know your goal first. Identify what is important to your teaching and then look for help with that, rather than asking undefined questions about the tools in D2L, etc. Ask yourself “What are your absolute must-haves of the tools that are available – really work hard on what you need and get that core down,” especially because you will be spending a lot of time planning and then getting things up and running (Kelly notes that she is grateful she had uninterrupted time for development, unlike some faculty who were teaching online for the first time in the Spring while also developing courses for the Fall.) Finally, organize your content. Kelly recommends thinking in terms of weeks instead of classes to make it easier for students to know where they are at in the course.

Will Kelly continue teaching online once COVID has run its course and classes can return to face to face? Well, yes, she hopes she can in some way. While grading assignments online is a lot of work, she has seen the benefits to her, for example, being able to check back on a student’s progress, and for students as well, having all her feedback in one place. But what really has convinced her is the learning she has observed in her online discussion forums – instead of being focused on how to get a B in class, students are more “focused on communicating clearly to other people and [responding] to what they’ve heard.” They can also go back to re-read those discussions when preparing for the next assignment, and “I don’t know why anyone would give that up!” Right now, Kelly’s vision for the future is to do exactly what she is doing now, except her Collaborate sessions will be face to face: do what needs to be done face to face, and what works online, online. But definitely some face to face because both Kelly and her students are yearning for that connection, of human faces and campus life. And that’s a nice hope for the future: the best of both worlds.

Camosun Faculty Story #1: Debra

Debra is a faculty member in the English Language Development (ELD) area here at Camosun College. I have had the privilege of working with her in bits and pieces over the years before COVID, but until last March/April, she was really only using PowerPoints and videos in the classroom, and using D2L minimally, mainly the News tool – “I was using that just to give them homework and make announcements.”

Imagine suddenly being faced with teaching completely online having not really used any online teaching tools before. It’s not a stretch of the imagination for many faculty members we in eLearning have been working with over the past almost a year. Debra herself “was certainly frightened of the technology and having to use the technology in such a different way…I didn’t have any idea how to use Collaborate, or I how to use most of the tools in D2L.” But, she overcame her fears and, coming back from vacation early, attended as many eLearning workshops as she could And most of all, she took the time to practice with the technologies, with her colleagues in ELD – peers supporting peers.

And it wasn’t only faculty supporting each other. Debra tells me that her first time teaching online went better than she expected because “[she] had done a lot of preparation and went in there believing [her students] were probably just as frightened of the experience as [she] was, and … [they] basically supported each other through the experience.” Like many faculty, Debra and her students were used to being in a face to face classroom where students “presume that you have a certain command of the situation.” But in this new world, “I knew that they really weren’t expecting me to have the same level of competence with the technology, and that took some of the pressure off.”

Debra says there wasn’t one moment that stood out for her during her first online teaching experience, but points to her students’ progress, as well as their positive feedback for her around the content and the delivery of the course as factors that made her feel good about the experience. In spite of everything, students were making good progress. And with regards to the fear of cheating which haunts many instructors during these online teaching times, she says that even though “I didn’t have the same control over their output, I did see them making progress. They couldn’t have cheated their way through to the outcomes that I saw at the end of the course. I did challenge them if I believed they cheated and I asked them to resubmit the work. But my main concerns were, are they turning up? Are they participating? Are they making progress? And that’s what I focus on.”

As for one thing she didn’t expect from the experience, Debra says she was surprised how much she enjoyed it. “Lock-down was a very isolating experience…so, having that contact with [students] every day, I felt less isolated … And I enjoyed the differences. It was a different experience and it was interesting and it was stimulating, and that’s why it was challenging.” And that challenge has, by pushing her out of her comfort zone (which is something familiar to her having done freelance work all over the world) reinvigorated how Debra feels about teaching. “I was afraid, but I decided to accept the challenge and I’m glad that I did.”

As for Debra’s vision for the future of her own teaching after everything that she’s learned over the past several months, she is currently preparing quizzes and other online materials, and planning to ”make much more use of technology than I did before…I might do a lot more online marking than I’ve done and I know I’ll make more use of technology.”

When I asked if she has any advice she would give colleagues, or any new faculty members who are suddenly having to teach online, Debra recalled an old joke: “How do you eat an elephant? One mouthful at a time,” something a friend told her a few years ago when she faced other life-altering challenges. “I think that taking on a big challenge, that’s the only way to deal with it. If you try to envision the whole problem as one problem, the whole situation as one…it’s too much to deal with. But if you just break it down and take it a step at a time, it isn’t.” And that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Supporting each other, and taking one step at a time.

Next for Debra, however, is a break. She finishes her Scheduled Development time at the end of February, and then will be off on vacation until she teaches this spring. This year I hope she gets a complete break and comes back refreshed, ready to meet her new students without panic, and with confidence.

 

 

Facilitating Learning Online: Summary of Defining Online Community Discussion

So, right now I am co-facilitating the Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) Fundamentals course at Camosun.  And this first week our participants had a full plate of orienting themselves to the online FLO environment, learning how to make video introductions, learning about their co-participants, AND engaging in a couple of lively discussions around online community.

I thought I would take a moment to share a summary/synthesis of the conversation in the Defining Online Community discussion, which was one of their activities this week, as well as add a few additional optional resources you may want to explore.

Some common ideas that leapt out at me in the discussions around what online community is:

  • Conversation/communication
  • Participation and interaction
  • Supportiveness, comfort, safety, trust
  • Co-operation, contributing, and sharing (shared knowledge space)
  • Co-creation and collaboration
  • Growing circle of knowledge/building of knowledge (peer to peer learning)
  • Interconnecting/convergence
  • Common interest, purpose, working together to meet common goals
  • Inclusiveness and belonging, connection
  • Diversity of people coming together to build knowledge (not bound by geography/fewer borders)
  • Mix of learning and social

Certainly, like any community, online community is about all these things. The question then becomes how do we create an online community with/for our learners that helps them balance the benefits of an online learning community with the pitfalls of being too connected (leading to exhaustion and stress), or feeling isolate and disconnected, or just having too many choices you don’t know where to turn.

I don’t have easy answers to this. Some participants talked about starting small – both with the amount of technology you use, and also with the kinds of activities you integrate (i.e., a lot of online group work can lead to stress, both from an exhausted by being online all the time perspective, and a trust perspective if you are thrown too soon into a large group project.) I am always happy to talk more about strategies, and have developed some that I present in my Creating Community Online workshop.  If anyone would like more information about this workshop, drop me an email (schudele@camosun.ca).

To close this summary/synthesis, I would like to give you some optional readings on online community specific to the online classroom space.

I hope you all have a great long weekend!

Emily

Some Resources to Help Students Learning Online

Looking for resources for your students with tips for learning online? Wondering where to send students to find support at Camosun College? We have some resources for you!

First, check out a collection of links for students on our Tutorials site.

Here you will find links to the Student Learning Success Guides put together by Camosun’s Learning Skills which includes tips for remote learning, stress management, and time management. Also, a link to Online Learning at Camosun College, which contains information about what kind of technologies students should have, and how to access it.

In addition, if you are wondering how students can access Office 365, the link for this is on this page as well as the link to Student Technical Support. You will also find direct links to Student Affairs and the Centre for Accessible Learning at Camosun.

If there are other links you would like us to include on this page, email Emily Schudel.

Looking for resources specific to learning online?  Check out Kwantlen College’s open textbook Learning to Learn Online,  or eCampus Ontario’s identically named Learning to Learn Online which was co-written by students, for students!

And finally, more for you as online instructors, also from eCampus Ontario, a chapter from their open textbook Remote Teaching: A Practical Guide with Tools, Tips, and Techniques called Helping Students Become Effective Online Learners with some strategies you can try yourself.