Tag: Camosun College

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

Camosun Open Sustainability Project: Project Story #1

My first interview for the Open Sustainability Project was with grant recipient Brian Coey. Brian teaches in Trades, in Sheet Metal/Metal Fabrication and Welding. Brian’s project was to create new and updated course materials, including student and instructor resources, as while he has used many “in-house” created worksheets and resources, they needed to be updated. There are also no textbooks which meet the needs of the program, nor is there ITA or BC provincial resources, even though 4 BC institutions in BC have Sheet Metal programs. In addition to receiving funding from Camosun, Brian was also received support from BCcampus to work on program materials with Okanagan College.

There are four Levels for Sheet Metal apprentice training, and Brian decided to take on a small chunk: starting with Level 1, and concentrating on the module for Layout, otherwise known as pattern development – “it’s our modelling of a 3D object, but shows what it looks like two-dimensionally, to start with. And that’s where sheet metal workers start, with two-dimensional shape, before working with three-dimensional objects.”

Since starting work on his project last October, Brian has completed work on the three different main processes: parallel line, radial line, and triangulation. “I’ve gone through the main common fittings in each of those three processes and completed three steps for all of them: I videotaped myself drawing on our whiteboard, and then added a written description of it to graphical animations.” Brian had initially started out working in WORD, but eventually moved all his work into Pressbooks, one of the main tools used to create open textbooks. Brian says “At the beginning of the project, I found [Pressbooks] fairly confusing, so I just stepped away from it completely and just focused on the outline. And once I was ready … within a couple hours of playing around with [Pressbooks] seriously, I got quite comfortable with it, and it was a piece of cake after that.”

In addition, Brian worked with a Graphic Designer at Camosun to create drawing animations, and also created videos of himself performing some of the various tasks he was writing about to support students who sometimes struggle with following textbook instructions. “There’s nothing like watching someone physically do something … If I try and read about [how to do something], it’s pretty difficult to follow the steps. But if I if I can watch a video … no problem… I think a lot of tradespeople are like that – we’re more visual, we’re hands-on.”

Creating materials in general was one of Brian’s goals for this project, but he was also looking to make them open for a few reasons. First, “to keep it open was really a savings of money for the students,” but also recalling “I was the type of journeyman when I was out working …[my old textbooks] were never too far away from me. So if I was at work and … got stumped on something, I had a resource to look at. Now we use YouTube videos … but you don’t know if they contain accurate information. But when you go to something that’s been vetted …, even journeymen can look it up and find the resource that can get them through a hurdle. Because it’s everybody runs across hurdles, not just our students – anyone in our trade will potentially need some help, or need a reference.”

Brian has already seen some of the rewards from his hard work. The videos he has put up on YouTube have been viewed by people from all over the world. But back in his shop, he has seen first-hand the benefits for his students. Aside from getting closer to the end goal of students not having to purchase a textbook, students now have the opportunity to watch his videos and animations in advance of coming to class, and can then go home and practice it more on their own until they feel comfortable. So much better than just trying to follow a textbook. “That’s why we teach…that’s why I do it. I want to see that light bulb in their eyes go … click!”

When I asked Brian if he had any advice for people looking to develop open course materials, he told me “I think it was really beneficial for me to have a good outline, a good plan of what I wanted to accomplish, and then I tackled that in small pieces…I would worry about just that one chapter, so I wasn’t worried about Chapter 12 yet, I focused on Chapter 1. And I got 1 exactly to where I wanted it and then I worked on 2. So, break it down and look at those little chunks. To me in at the beginning,…it just looked too big and daunting… I knew I needed the outline for the whole, but I left that as the skeleton, and then focused on the chapters individually.”

As Brian looks forward to launching his completed work so far, he is already looking ahead to doing more. Whether it’s utilizing materials already in the open, like the open Math text he integrated recently, or finding or creating more YouTube videos to support shop demonstrations, he definitely wants to keep working on, implementing, and sharing open materials.

Camosun College Open Sustainability Project Introduction

Just over one year ago, eight projects were funded to develop/redevelop their courses using open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP). This funding came from a grant awarded to Camosun College from BCcampus, and has brought together 11 faculty members, librarians, copyright experts, instructional designers, curriculum developers, indigenization specialists, and others to work on the projects. In this panel session, some of the faculty developers will talk about their projects and the benefits they are bringing to their students, and to Camosun.

I don’t know if you remember a year ago, well…maybe I’ll leave it at that. Suffice it to say that while at that time, one year ago, the projects were to have been concluded by the end of this term, unexpected events have pushed the deadlines for completion until the end of this year. That being said, all 8 projects are underway in spite of the challenges faculty have faced moving their regular teaching online.

In this post, I am going to tell you a little bit about the eight funded projects, and in subsequent posts, I will be telling you the stories of the project journeys in the words of the faculty members creating the resources, open textbooks, etc.

Sarah Erdelyi, Jana Suraci, and Alex Purdy – Development of a Resource Package for Patient Management for Allied Health

The development of a resource package for this course, incorporating OER, would eliminate the need to require commercial textbooks and provide a learning resource for students that is highly relevant and focused to meet their needs. This course is shared among three programs in the Allied Health & Technologies Department, including Certified Medical Laboratory Assistant, Medical Radiography, and Sonography, and this package of resources will support these varied allied health contexts. Because the current textbook required for Medical Radiography is not suitable for the other allied health programs, the student experience differs greatly by program, so the development of a resource package would also ensure consistency of the student experience. In addition to the cost savings to students, we believe the students would benefit greatly from a common resource that considers the Canadian context and emphasizes the specific competencies related to their professional certification in a way that is learner-centric and applied.

Michelle Clement – Revising an Existing Marketing Open Textbook

This Digital Marketing Open textbook is severely outdated, having been published in 2013. The cases, links, and social media chapters in particular need updating, as well as individual topics in current chapters around internet security, ethical marketing online, marketing social and environmental injustices digitally, and cultural inclusion in online marketing. It would also be beneficial to create instructor resources. So this was a proposal for adapting an existing OER to produce a no cost to students required textbook. Michelle’s hope was also that sections would provide good background for other marketing classes, and that there would be there is potential to grow its use outside of her current course. While the textbook Michelle ultimately revised was a different one than she originally planned, she did take an existing 600-page textbook and reduce it to approximately 200 pages, updating and reorganizing content as proposed. She has future plans to add instructor resources and visuals to her revision before moving it into Pressbooks to share back with the world.

Pooja Gupta – Adapt an Existing Math OER

Pooja’s objective was to adapt the OER Key Concepts of Intermediate Level Math by Meizhong Wong for her online intermediate math section for adult learners. The scope of this project was to include adaptations to the original open textbook as well as create ancillary resources such as lesson videos, question video solutions, PowerPoints, quizzes/quiz bank, interactive videos, etc. Due to copyright restrictions on the content she has currently been using, it has not been possible to adapt to the changing needs of her students. The adapted version and ancillary resources would have the following benefits: significant financial savings for students; the ability to embed these resources into a learning management system (LMS); and ease of access for students through having the materials open online, and within the LMS students are already accessing.

Peggy Hunter – Human Anatomy WordPress Site Revisions

Laboratory study of human anatomy typically utilize an assortment of models and slides, and student access to these resources is often very limited. Institutions that have these models and slides in their labs cannot typically provide access to these materials outside of laboratory classroom time. Other institutions do not offer labs or laboratory resources, and students have no access to human anatomy models and slides. To facilitate the study and review of anatomy laboratory content at Camosun, Peggy has developed a study website (in WordPress) that provides access to all of the models and slides commonly used in first year human anatomy labs. The website, designed so students can test their knowledge of human anatomy lab content outside of the laboratory setting, is currently used extensively by first year anatomy students in the Health Science and Exercise Science programs, provides valuable access to anatomy models and slides outside of classroom time, and facilitates self-review of laboratory content. The goal of this project was to update the website content to enhance user interface with the end goal of making this laboratory study website available as an open resource for students of human anatomy everywhere. The latter would facilitate expanded use by students of anatomy at Camosun (in nursing, sport education, athletic therapy, dental hygiene, massage therapy, etc.). Moreover, this Camosun resource would be a valuable contribution to the global open learning community.

Stephanie Ingraham – Create Open Textbook for the Physics of Medical Imaging

For the past three years, Stephanie has been teaching a Physics course for students in the Medical Radiography program at Camosun College, The Physics of Medical Imaging and Radiation Therapy. This course is very unique, and there is a limited selection of textbooks and materials that suit the course curriculum meaning that previously, textbooks or course packs purchased by students have been used. Her goal was instead, to create an open textbook on BCcampus which would provide a simple, free method of allowing students access to resources for the course. The textbook would also include sections on general Physics topics, which will be available for use in introductory Physics courses. The development of this textbook would also involve carefully creating accessible content for all types of learners such as voice to text capabilities, transcription of images, and ideal visual contrast. As of now, there are no other OER that cover this selection of topics specific to the Physics of medical imaging and radiation therapy. Hopefully this will become a useful, free resource for Camosun college students as well as an open resource for students interested in the field of Medical Physics.

Brian Coey – Developing/Revising Materials for Sheet Metal Programs

Currently in the Sheet Metal program, students are required to purchase textbooks for foundation training and level one apprentice training. The program loans textbooks, no longer in print, for apprentice levels two through four. Unfortunately, this is a problem for the students as they have very little reference material once they finish their training at Camosun, and they must rely on notes and outside resources to prepare for further training and Interprovincial (Red Seal) exams. This also creates a difficult situation because once the program runs out of textbooks, they have no other resources at hand to lend out. Brian’s project was to allow him to create new and update current Level 1 material, including student and instructor resources, in an open textbook format through Pressbooks. A combination of open textbooks, course modules, multimedia resources, web resources and videos would all be added to the already existing resources, to create an open learning resource, available to students whenever needed.

Sandra Carr – Developing/Revising Materials for Joinery (Woodworking) Program

The BC Joinery modules have not been revised since 1988, and some sections are outdated. Visually, they lack imagery that portrays modern tools, and some sections refer to a textbook that is very dated, possibly out of print. While existing open Trades textbooks contain relevant material, they contain topics not applicable to woodworking, and there are topic-specific areas which either require expansion, or completely new materials to fill gaps. There is no textbook for woodworking machinery, which makes up a significant portion of term 1 learning outcomes, and currently Sandra is using a mix of photocopied handouts to support her students. Her proposal was to write an open textbook Describe Woodworking Machines and Their Use, as well as edit the existing Common Core materials for use in her program. She would use this textbook in her course, but it could also find an audience with other trades, foundation programs, Women in Trades, Continuing Education, and high schools. Video tutorials would also be created to cover selected topics based on the specific projects students complete in the program.

Liz Morch – Developing Modules to Support Nutrition Content for Various Programs

Liz had begun to design online modules for her nutrition course in Dental Hygiene , but recognized the need to provide flexibility in how and when students access course content.  After searching BCcampus and Creative Commons, she was unable to find existing open content relating to nutrition which would be applicable to her course.  Her project, therefore was to develop modules for use, not only in her course, but as resources for faculty who teach any nutrition courses.  The modules will also have evaluation tools in the form of online assessments.  While some individual components are available through Health Canada, students require more information, in the form of text-based content, images, and interactive components to support their learning.

Camosun eLearning Updates

There have been some changes with some of the tools we support here in eLearning at Camosun we wanted to let you know about here:

D2L/Colleague Integration

The new D2L/Colleague Integration will result in changes and improvements to the faculty and student experience in D2L. Read our CETL notice to learn more.

Coming Soon to Collaborate: Gallery View with 25 Simultaneous Videos

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra has been working on improvements to its video gallery to enable Moderators and Participants to view up to 25 simultaneous video feeds. Moderators will see up to 25 simultaneous video feeds beginning April 8, and Participants will get access to this functionality later in the month. Note that we still recommend not having all videos active all the time during a session to conserve bandwidth especially for students with poor connections.

Read our CETL notice to learn more about what’s coming to Collaborate in the future.

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.

 

 

Moving into a Brave New World: Interviews with Camosun Faculty – Introduction

March 18th, 2020. For me, this day will forever mark the day we all went home and entered a new world, an unknown world, a world where we all had to reimagine our work and home lives. None of us knew how all-encompassing this new world would be for us, yet here we are, almost one year later, still standing (or sitting, as the case may be…)

For me, the first weeks I spent in this new world are now a blur as the college pivoted and everyone moved online. Then April hit, and a new term was fast approaching. We in eLearning began to offer workshops – workshops up the wazoo. In the old world, there were no workshops planned for April, but in the end and on the fly, in the four weeks in April we ran 20+ workshops for faculty on D2L, Collaborate, Kaltura, facilitating online learning, creating online community, online assessments, and accessibility in the online classroom. At the end of every day, every day being 10-12 hours long (workshops, consults, emails…), I could not think or hold myself upright. Yes, it was exciting to help faculty and run workshops with 20-30 people in them (people now know who we are!), but exhausting. And not just because of those endless consults, workshops and emails, but also because I heard their stories. Faculty in tears trying to get things ready for spring and afraid they couldn’t do it. Faculty worried because they didn’t know where they could turn for help. Faculty up for the challenge, but not knowing how they could get everything planned to the quality they expected from themselves.

Then, the spring term began, while workshops, consults, and meetings continued to keep faculty supported, while planning ahead to the next day, week, month, and term.

I have to tell you, and I am not trying to sound trite: faculty at Camosun are all heroes. From the faculty members who pivoted into remote panicked instruction in March (believe me, this was NOT “online learning”), to faculty who gave up vacation, Scheduled Development, and other plans to get their spring and fall courses ready for online instruction (some of them developing 2-3 courses in weeks, when it takes 2 months or ideally more to develop ONE online course – I don’t have to tell you it is not a simple matter to take a face-to-face course, even one you’ve taught multiple times, and put it into an online format), to faculty who spent (and continue to spend) many additional hours every day continuing to develop their courses while they taught, while trying to support their students, who also didn’t sign up for this. And in addition to all the amazing faculty I am privileged to work with and support, I have to take a moment to acknowledge my colleagues in the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning – I am not sure I would still be here without you having my back.

And now, almost one year later, I want to tell the stories of our faculty to the world. So, I am embarking on a new series of posts where I will present interviews with some of our faculty at Camosun College. You will meet amazing instructors from English Language Development, Nursing, Business, English, Anthropology, Psychology, Statistics, Child, Family and Community Services, Hospitality, Trades, and many, many more – I am adding every day to the list of folks I will be talking to this term. I want to thank all of them for agreeing to share their experiences, both highs, and lows, with me and with the world.

Stay tuned for my first faculty interview post next week. And if you teach at Camosun and would like to share your story, contact me at schudele@camosun.ca.