In Progress

By Matthew Stranach

Matt working during COVID. Photo credit: Alicia Ashcroft

I would like to thank the CELT team for the opportunity to contribute to this blog, as well as for all the work they’ve put in to support our community over the past year and a half. While we are not out of the woods yet, the landscape in front of us does appear to be changing— particularly as we prepare to return to campus for the fall semester. I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on my experiences in this blog!

At one point early in my undergraduate years, I was looking at a potential career in journalism. I volunteered as a reporter with the local public access television station, and hosted a music show on the university radio station! While life and my career had a different path in store, I thought it might be interesting to frame this post in such a way as to answer the “five w’s + 1 h”; namely: who, what, when, where, why, and how. This will also keep me on track— I sometimes have a tendency to go on rambles, as readers of Mondays and Fridays might attest!

Who—  My biggest takeaway here is to be kinder to everyone. Without being twee about it, our lives have all been profoundly disrupted by this pandemic. Truly, you never know what somebody else has gone through or is going through. I am hoping we carry this sense of— looking out for each other— into whatever is next, particularly as we move back into a face-to-face situation.

What— I think the biggest “what” that I can think of would be “flexibility” and “innovation”. In my tech coordinator role, I’ve been inspired by the determination of colleagues on my team and across the university under all circumstances to make it work— even if the “it” was sometimes hazy! Again, I am hoping these habits of mind can follow us back to the physical campus. In many ways, I think we are going to need it!

When— This is tied closely to my next answer, but for me “when” speaks strongly to synchronous and asynchronous modalities. I’ve seen lots of amazing experimentation with virtual formats which try to make optimal use of time— and I hope that active asynchronous learning activities will still have a place after we have returned to campus.

Where— I think maybe above all else, our sense of physical locality as it pertains to teaching and learning has been thrown into flux since the pandemic began. I am as excited as anyone else at the prospect of physically interacting with colleagues and students again— but I hope that the physical classroom may be seen more purposefully as a tool in the teacher’s tool kit, rather than an a priori variable.

Why— I feel like we’ve all had occasion to question our purpose as educators over the past year. And I believe this is a good thing! I am looking forward to re-engaging with the physical campus with a renewed sense of purpose.

How— A huge question! And the answer will be highly personal to the individual teacher and students! The LTI team remains ready and available— and augmented with new faculty members!— to assist as you make decisions which are best for you and for you students. I am happy to engage with individuals further on this: please send me an email! CELT is also available to help; you can contact the team here!

Again, many thanks to the entire CELT team! I have personally benefitted tremendously from your programming and from the harder-to-quantify but incredibly important kindness and patience and creativity of everyone on your team! Kukwstsétselp!

By Catharine Dishke Hondzel

One Book, One Community is a collaborative community-wide reading project between the Thompson Nicola Regional Library (TNRL) and TRU. This is the first time that TRU and the TNRL have initiated a collaborative community project, and it’s an exciting time to be using reading as a means to gather people together once again. After nearly 18 months of social distancing and disruption, I appreciate that we have an opportunity to find a new experience that moves us toward place of shared learning.

I’m fortunate to have a bit of experience with a common reading program, as I’m sure others in the community and in the university have through book clubs and shared reading groups. Since the fall of 2018 CELT has been running a small faculty book club (A Bowl a Book and a Bun) where we discussed a teaching-focussed work. Last year when we moved our book club online the book club grew to over 30 faculty members who joined us in shared discussion of Flower Darby and James Lang’s book Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes. We discussed big ideas, struggles with the pivot to online learning, and together we grounded our work in care for students and thoughtful course design. This online book club was not only very fun, it also brought people together at a time when we were all craving connection.

You may also be familiar with other big ‘one book’ programs at universities or in communities. In my previous role before coming to TRU, I had the great fortune of being able to support the Huron1Read program where every incoming student received a copy of that year’s chosen book. Within that program, faculty built selected readings into their classes, students, faculty and staff hosted discussion groups, and the whole community attended author events and faculty talks. One of my most potent memories of being a part of that initiative was as a host for Thomas King when he came to Huron to meet with Indigenous students to answer questions about his book the Truth about Stories.  Hearing him talk about writing the book and answering questions from students about becoming a writer and author stands out in my memory a point of connection on such a personal work, and it added another deeper, more personal layer to his writing.

This year the book we have chosen for the One Book One Community initiative is Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians. Winner of many prizes, the book explores themes related to residential school survival, intergenerational trauma, community, the meaning of place, parenting, grief, and healing. It will capture readers in myriad ways. We think everyone will be able to relate to some of the complex experiences the main characters face while learning about the long-lasting impacts of the residential school system.

CELT is excited to be supporting TRU library and TNRL on this project, and we encourage faculty, students and staff to get involved. You can start or join a reading group, bring the book into your course, or attend an author event in the spring. More details are available on the OBOC webpage which will be updated regularly.

Photo credit Dan Bissonette

By Mark Paetkau

Wow, what a year!  While “a positive test is a bad thing” punctuated 2020, I am mining for the silver lining…so here are a few nuggets.

Email greetings. I feel since the pandemic greetings of “I hope you are well!” or other such positive wishes are the norm.

Departmental Interaction/Support. Our department has had more email discussions about both important (pedagogy) and not-so-important (who will inherit a Captain Canada suit of a retiring faculty). These started with our department Chair just sending out a query “How is everyone today?” and concerns, support, as well as comic relief just grew from there.

Lecture Shake up. I adopted a flipped classroom approach: content consisted of short (15 min) video or reading and lectures dedicated to applying the content. The short video/reading was to spare me the hours of attempting to make LONG detailed videos, but more importantly to spare the students the task of watching me drone on. Lectures used clicker questions and problem-based learning. For the problem- based learning, I selected a student (or students) to work on the white board. One innovation was embracing “I don’t know” (idk). If a student did not know how to start a problem, a simple idk moved the class onto the next student. If a question resulted in three consecutive idks, then I reviewed the content.

Online white boards. Over the last few years I have been incorporating smart board technology, and this year I worked to leverage the shared white boards in Big Blue button and elsewhere. Imagine six students working on the white board at once (don’t try this on a smart board!): collaboration and engagement!  I also feel the online “anonymous” environment helped reduce barriers to engagement.

Online exams. I employed a quick-draw online exam for a portion of my exams. Twenty low-stakes Bloom’s level 1 questions provided a snapshot of student’s foundational knowledge. The best part: the exams graded themselves!

Online assignments. Electronic assignments have cleared my desk!

These are the positives I hope will survive—I hope you have a few of your own.

As we look forward to being back in the classroom in the fall, we think about the pleasure of being back face-to-face with students. No more technical glitches!

You can stand up, move around, and gesture!

And really see your students again!

But before you recycle all your videos and online exercises, recognize that you have done some pretty great stuff over the last year. COVID gave us lemons and you made lemonade! And some of that lemonade might be great served up as part of your face-to-face class too!

In a recent CELT workshop, Terryl Atkins reflected on viewing student artwork in online portfolios instead of in a classroom gallery set-up.

The community is amazing. The students are really focusing on the work…they are engaged…it’s amazing, I’m hanging on to that! The thing that is helpful is that all of that stuff is up there for them to look at in the interim…they can go back and they can look at somebody else’s stuff and they can say, “Oh, she said X about this” and then it pushes everybody. – Terryl Atkins

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” (Arundhati, 2020). Outside of the technical challenges that the pandemic presented us, it challenged us to find new ways to reach and to engage with students and help them to build community. It also may have impacted how you used the contact time you have with students (using it for discussion, collaboration, and activity rather than one-way information provision). In this way, you may have adopted a flipped-classroom pedagogy where students use readings or videos to learn basic information and then come to class ready to engage in activity, discussion, or case-studies. In a 2018 study of faculty transitioning from online teaching back to the traditional classroom, faculty reported that they took on more of a facilitator role, integrated more technology into their classroom, and incorporated more asynchronous teaching practices such as discussion forums, blogs, and wikis (Andrews-Graham, 2018). Deciding how you can leverage what you have built over the past year when you move from remote teaching back to the classroom will not only allow you to use some of your hard work, but also improve your face-to-face teaching practices and your student’s learning.

Over the next several months, CELT will be offering various workshops aimed at helping you transition back to the classroom in the fall while leveraging the pedagogy, teaching practices, and techniques you have discovered over the past year.

References:

Andrews-Graham, D. (2018). The effect of online teaching on faculty after returning to the traditional classroom. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 21(4). https://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/winter214/andrewsgraham214.html

Arundhati, R. (2020, April 3). The pandemic is a portal. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

Photo by lucas law on Unsplash

By Julieth Baracaldo

My name is Julieth Baracaldo. I am a second-year international student from Colombia. Currently, I am enrolled in the Post Baccalaureate Diploma in accounting in TRU, and I am part of the Intercultural Ambassadors team.

In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and all the uncertainty, switching from the traditional face to face classes to virtual delivery was not a choice for us, so we had to do it and adapt to it. For me it has been a big challenge: in order to deal with online education, I had to set an schedule and be more disciplined, which involves lots of dedication and self study!  Some teachers provide valuable resources, such as video recordings, live Q&A sessions, and Moodle work; in my experience, a combination of all those tools was effective for me. However, we had to manage those resources, improve our time management skills, and get used to dealing with technology. In my case, I just keep a positive attitude toward the whole situation we are living through in the educational environment. As we already have a lot of stress from all things happening from the last year 2020, changing the mindset is a big challenge for sure.

During the pandemic, lots of international students went back home and continued their studies through a virtual delivery format. Apart from all the stress caused by the COVID outbreak, some of them still struggle with online learning: they use different methodologies when it comes to completing assignments, quizzes, etc. Some of them are very good at adapting to technology, while others have to learn how to use tech resources; some students don’t have access to a strong internet connection in their own homes in order to get through the online courses’ requirements, and thus they fail to catch up with their virtual sessions or miss some deadlines. According to them, being engaged is difficult sometimes because the lack of interaction and time difference between their home countries and Canada.

As the COVID crisis is growing, instructors realize this a great concern to most people and is clearly interfering with their studies–they understand about technical issues and other problems.  In response, they have been quite helpful by delaying due dates, re-arranging a time for quizzes, etc. We all know that online learning has been a big challenge for instructors as well, as they have had to adjust to and rely on technology. Overall, they try to be more flexible and available to the needs of students and understand their concerns; in that regard, they should always be open to having individual video appointments or engaging with students in many ways. Every professor has a different teaching style, but they can try to adapt to the general needs of all students. This is a learning process for everyone, but it depends on each one of us to embrace the change with positivity!!

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

By Ben Lovely

“You want us to do what?!”

I’m sure in March 2020, Trades and Technology was not the only school having emergency meetings regarding a mandatory shift to remote delivery. With much collective effort, TRU made the pivot to digital in record time. Below I’d like to discuss some lessons I’ve learned regarding assessment in an online world. These suggestions have worked well in Trades, but are certainly not limited to Trades courses.

The traditional go to assessment for Trades—multiple choice—has turned out to be rather ineffective in an online environment. In an effort to maintain academic integrity, faculty have attempted short timelines, creating multiple versions of tests, and using exam proctoring software. These have had the effect of causing extreme stress for students, large workload for faculty, and additional costs. In the end, it is still very possible for resourceful students to cheat multiple choice exams.

I propose the following: multiple choice, alternate response, and short answer questions should be limited to low stakes formative assessment. Due to our certification exams being multiple choice, students definitely need practice with this style of exam. I am merely suggesting that we reduce their weighting in favor of better assessment methods.

High stakes summative assessments, such as unit and level exams, should be as authentic as possible. Projects, scenarios, simulators, labs, and case studies are best. If assessing math skills, I like to assign the right answer as 50% of the mark, and the other 50% towards showing all work and the process of solving the problem. For conceptual understanding, a detailed directed paraphrasing assignment can work well. In short, I try to assess students’ learning by asking them to show me how they use that knowledge.

Benefits to this approach include potentially easier grading, difficulty in plagiarizing, and less concern over exam integrity as the assignment is assumed to be open book. Without a doubt, it is more work to create authentic assessments and their associated rubrics for grading. However, once completed, you will have an assessment that can be given many times over which will more accurately reflect student learning.

By Cael Field

A large part of classes I have taught in this lovely pandemic era has been asynchronous delivery. When I initially started back in September, my thinking was to use audio-only, or podcast, format. Podcasts allowed for flexibility in how (mp3 files are very flexible) and where (could be running or cooking) students accessed the content. After about four weeks, I asked students in one course (about 80 or so) did they prefer I keep going with podcasts only format, switch to video format (say Kaltura), or did it really matter? As one may expect, it came to around 33% for audio, 33% for video, and 33% for whom it didn’t really matter! I thought it would be lovely to do both video and audio, but I also thought it would mean a dramatic increase to workload in getting both formats out. After testing an approach, I found in the end that it didn’t really add that much more overall.

The approach was running two programs at once: one for screen capture and one for audio capture. I used Kaltura Capture for video, as I found the My Media access point in Moodle very useful. I then used an open software called Audacity for the audio recording. Audacity is quite easy to use quickly, even though it does have a lot of other features. When I want to record, I start the Kaltura and the Audacity recordings at the same time. I am lucky to have two monitors, so one monitor looks like this:
The top program is Audacity, while the bottom is Kaltura. I start and stop at the same time, which means both video and audio files contain the exact same content.

A question I have been asked using this setup is “what if you have to edit?,” which is a great question. Ultimately, my response is . . . I don’t really edit that much anymore. I try to approach recordings as if I were delivering them in front of a live class. If I made an error then, I couldn’t really turn back time and re-do it. If I fumble my words or mispronounce something in a recording, students are pretty good at letting me know, and I make a correction (such as sending out an announcement). I definitely relate to the desire to want to edit, but I found for the time I had to put in (even if it was only one format), I wasn’t really seeing a great return. Letting go a bit allowed me to spend time elsewhere, such as creating more options for students.

I am sure there are other approaches out there to accomplish what I am trying to do, but I have found this process to work well.

Photo by Dave Lowe on Unsplash

By Carolyn Ives and Catharine Dishke Hondzel

As the fall term comes to an end, we’re reflecting on all of the amazing things we’ve witnessed over the last several months. So many faculty worked incredibly hard to ensure their students would have an opportunity to learn as well as virtually as in a face-to-face classroom. We’ve seen boundless energy, commitment, and care go into this work. But we’ve also seen how tired many people are now as a result—including students.

If we’ve learned anything over these last few months, it’s this: Less is more. Simple is better. It’s better for faculty, and it’s better for students. We learned this through offering the Facilitating Learning in Moodle course this summer. Each of the three iterations was simplified and pared down from the one before, but still each one contained elements that were overwhelming for some participants. If we were to offer it again, it would include far less content.

What might “Less is More” look like in your course?

• It might look like the elimination of any “nice to know” information. You may opt to stick to the essential content that students absolutely need to be able to achieve the course’s learning outcomes.
• It may look like integrating as much asynchronous activity as possible for your context. While this may not work in every course, students will appreciate the flexibility. You may also appreciate it as the winter term gets busier.
• It may look like simplified course Moodle sites. You may opt to reduce content, but add clear instructions when appropriate. Also, you don’t have to use every awesome technological tool possible to create a solid course.
• It may also look like the creation of recognizable patterns within your course. You may find it helpful to repeat content and activity patterns for each week; regular routines and class rituals can be reassuring for your students and use less of your own bandwidth, as you won’t have to make as many decisions throughout the term.
• It may look like flexibility for assignment deadlines. If this is something that works for your context, you might find it helpful, as it reduces pressure on students and helps spread out your marking load.
• Most of all, it might look like compassion—for yourself and your students.

Compassion can look like many different things, too. It might mean you have to acknowledge that mistakes are going to happen; deadlines might be missed; and instructions might be misinterpreted. But everyone is carrying a heavier load right now, so reach out to people who care about you to help you unburden and maybe even find humour in the situation.

So simplify if you can. We’ll be working on doing the same.

by Carolyn Ives

Part of the reason I decided to return to Thompson Rivers University after a nearly 10-year absence has to do with values: I believe TRU’s explicit commitment to equity, inclusion, and diversity closely match my own ethical stance about teaching and learning. In an institution that values student access above the elitism apparent at some other universities, teaching well is paramount. Who wouldn’t want to work in a teaching and learning centre that could help faculty achieve their big dreams about reaching as many students as possible? And since arriving a year and a half ago, I have not been disappointed. Faculty here value teaching and learning, and most go above and beyond to support students.

The recent shift to alternative forms of delivery (remote, distance, online) has been a bit of a mixed bag in terms of student support. On one hand, this shift has the potential to allow students extra flexibility about when they log in, access materials, engage in discussion and activities, and complete assignments and exams; on the other hand, though, it can also marginalize students who face limited internet access, limited working space, language barriers, and other learning challenges. It can also lead to extra work for both students and instructors when assessments have to be changed to accommodate an online environment. Furthermore, a crisis can serve to magnify already present classroom dynamics and reveal whether an instructor perceives their students as allies or adversaries. If they are allies, as Kevin Gannon in his book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto (2020) reminds us, we have to demonstrate to them—not simply tell them—that we trust them fully. If we don’t, then we are telling students that we do not trust them, that they are our adversaries.

How do we unknowingly signal to students that we are suspicious of them? We do this, perhaps unintentionally, by opting for heightened measures of surveillance in our new remote classrooms for the purposes of academic integrity, by insisting on very limited time frames for online testing, by failing to acknowledge the stressful situations many of our students may be in—including being ill or looking after someone who is, losing their jobs, and not having sufficient working space—and by failing to acknowledge their humanity, or our own. Conversely, by being flexible, especially now in a less than ideal learning environment, we can signal to students that we are on their side, that we know they are doing their best, that we trust them. And why shouldn’t we? It’s not likely any student comes to university with the intention of failing, cheating, or dropping out. Research shows that if we believe in students and communicate that belief to them, they will rise to the occasion (Weimer, 2013; Bain 2004).

So in light of the current COVID-19 crisis, let’s try to be flexible and kind to our students and ourselves and accept we are all doing the best that we can. If you find yourself needing support in terms of creating alternative assessments that don’t increase work or stress for you or students, facilitating good online discussion, or supporting students who are struggling, please reach out to us in Centre for Excellence in Learning & Teaching (CELT). Our goal is to help you reach yours.

References

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Harvard University Press

Gannon, K.M. (2020). Radical hope: A teaching manifesto. West Virginia University Press.

Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2 edition). Jossey-Bass.