“It’s a new challenge as we look toward coming back on campus,” said Jason Smith, Education Technology Service manager at the University of Washington. “At the drop of a dime, everyone is going online during the pandemic. And now it’s a new challenge for instructors–how do I redesign my course for a blended learning environment? Not only do I have to teach the students in my classroom, I may have students who need to participate remotely. How do I engage those students?” Smith’s team brought the university’s three campuses together with educational technologists and other experts to facilitate discussions around key training needs. Those discussions turned into a set of recommendations presented during the university’s Teaching with Technology faculty institute, which is taught each summer.
“we were very intentional about how we designed a whole host of new technologies, hardware, software, and integrations in classrooms. We were intentional about providing as equitable a teaching and learning experience as possible for faculty and students,” said Tom Marentette, IT Solutions Architecht for ND Studios & Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Notre Dame. “How do you leverage the infrastructure to provide as equitable as experience as you possibly can? Those investments in technology would completely fail if we didn’t put support scaffolding in place. The infrastructure isn’t just technical. It’s human as well. [Instructors need] training and support for this new environment that’s drastically different.
- Online and HyFlex options that started with the pandemic are helping ensure equity
“This fall, we decided to go back to face-to-face, so we’re almost exclusively face-to-face, but [our remote learning] infrastructure remains in place,” said Marentette. “Students might need to quarantine, might have an illness, might be traveling–it’s there. We’re ensuring that we have the technology in place to try and deliver an equitable experience.”
“We’ve never been a lecture capture campus. One of the things we realized was that students got used to lecture capture,” said Koenig. “Students used them for review sessions, if English wasn’t their first language, if they learned differently–[these are] all different reasons why that creates an equitable environment. The ability to have recordings that can be captioned has been huge, too. Those tools have been really invaluable and we want to keep moving forward. The ability of flex is allowing students who might otherwise drop out the ability to quickly pivot to a remote course section. They still participate via recordings or via the ability to come in via a live link. We’re opening those pathways to education and success that may not have been there previously.”
- Engagement remains critical, whether in person or in a HyFlex model
“Technology can help faculty remember that there are remote students,” Reeve said. “It’s very easy to teach to the audience in front of you and a little more difficult, and takes conscious effort, to remember there are students joining in with technology. As a faculty member, there are things you can do to make sure students who are joining remotely feel part of the class.”
“A big challenge for us, moving forward, is how do we encourage faculty to think about how they’re going to teach remote students, but also students in the class, at the same time,” Smith said. The HyFlex Learning Community has been a valuable resource in looking at teaching with different modalities at the same time while engaging all students.
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