Below is a short presentation I gave at an online session hosted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers in the early days of the pandemic.
COVID-19 and the Academic Job: Moving Online from George Veletsianos
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An oft-repeated narrative that you have likely heard is that Higher Education institutions are dinosaurs that are resistant and slow to change. That’s not entirely untrue, but it’s not an accurate representation either.
“Education is broken” is one of the mantras reformists championing digital technology as a solution use, resting on the assumption that today’s classrooms were pretty much the same as classrooms from 100 years ago.
Yet. Higher education is not immune to innovations. On the contrary, it is often the source of them, and indeed, contemporary higher education is deeply intertwined with changes in society. As societies change over time time, so does Higher Education.
The resilience and changing nature of higher education is on full display at the moment due to COVID-19. Large in-person institutions moved anywhere between 6,000 to 9,000 courses in alternative remote teaching formats in a matter of weeks. Smaller institutions have done the same, at a scale aligned with their size. Anyone who abruptly switched to a new teaching format can tell you that there will be challenges there and pain points there. But everyone involved in this transition deserves major kudos. Regardless of institutional size, this feat is impressive. For those of us who teach in schools and colleges of education, for those of us who prepare educational technologists, instructional designers, digital learning leaders, and educational technology specialists, this is also a moment of pride for the work that our students and graduates do.
So, no, higher education is not broken. It is in a state of transition like it has always been, and like it will continue to be. While this transition, at this very moment, focuses on modality (i.e. the transition from in-person to online/remote), the longer-term transition will focus on other aspects of teaching and learning as well, including ways of assessment, program offerings, and so on. Four hope that I have for Canadian Higher Education (and there may be lessons here for other countries) are the following:
- We collaborate more, rather than compete more
- We use what we know from research on online learning, learning design, and flexible learning to guide us.
- We pay greater attention to pedagogy, open educational resources/practices, and student equity
- We pay greater attention to the learner experience, guided by a sense of compassion and care
Sending my warm wishes and love to all of you.
Last month my colleagues and I were successful in our application for rapid funding from the Government of Canada to address COVID-19. Our project aims to study misinformation flows pertaining to COVID-19 and design educational interventions to address misinformation. We are now hiring for three remote positions for Canadian citizens or permanent residents to work with us at Royal Roads University (2 MA/PhD, and 1 postdoc).
[Update for clarification: Students do not need to be enrolled at Royal Roads University. As long as they are enrolled as students at a University/College they are eligible to apply for the RA positions and will be given full consideration.]Below are the postings. Please feel free to disseminate these to your networks
Postdoc: https://royalroads.mua.hrdepartment.com/hr/ats/Posting/view/705
RA 2 (Master’s or Doctorate student): https://royalroads.mua.hrdepartment.com/hr/ats/Posting/view/706
RA 2 (Master’s or Doctorate student): https://royalroads.mua.hrdepartment.com/hr/ats/Posting/view/707
This post isn’t about tensions, working long hours to serve our students and our communities, or how-tos. Rather, it’s about how one of the things that COVID-19 reveals is how collaboration and goodwill may help Higher Education respond and react.
A common element in both yesterday’s post and in today’s article that Shandell Houlden and I published with The Conversation, is the simple fact that coming together, helping each other, and collaborating is tremendously beneficial. Addressing COVID-19 and its impacts requires us – universities, individuals, systems – to work together. And we’d be better for it. In this post, I wanted to share some large-scale collaborative efforts that have popped up in the last week or so in Higher Education.
- The instructional design emergency response network “connects institutions and educators to e-learning professionals willing to help convert face-to-face courses or course components to online offerings during times of crisis, such as natural disasters and epidemics.”
- This is a crowdsourced document listing resources from U.S. universities related to planning for COVID-19.
- The crowdsourced spreadsheet that Bryan Alenxander instigated that rapidly grew into something massive.
Today’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Coronavirus and the Great Online-Learning Experiment, argues that researchers should use the natural experiment afforded to them by COVID-19 to examine comparative outcomes between online and in-person courses.
This is bad advice, for the following reasons:
- A large body of literature has already examined outcome differences between in-person and online courses, and the findings have typically been “no significant differences.” In the cases that researchers found differences, those are typically the result of factors other than the mode of teaching (e.g., extra time to study, better design in one of the two modes, etc). I cover this in the very first chapter in my book Learning Online: The Student Experience which arrives next month.
- The online classes produced under emergency situations aren’t going to be comparative to the in-person courses. I wish I was optimistic enough to imagine a course designed under stressful conditions within the span of a week to be be as good as the courses which one had months – even years – to create and iterate.
There’s nothing “natural” about the state that we are in. This is not a “natural” experiment of the kind of research that we need. The kind of research that we need asks:
- What made some faculty, students, and institutions successful in achieving the outcomes they defined?
- What institutional supports proved to be helpful to students and faculty in times of crises, and in what ways?
- What roles did instructional designers play in this transition, and what made some more successful than others?
- What vulnerabilities did this shock reveal and how may we address them?
- What are the positive and negative externalities of using emergency online teaching/learning?
- In what ways is this crisis being exploited, to what means, and by whom?
The kind of research that we need also inquires into the stories of people (students, faculty, administrators) to reveal our humanity: How did we come together during this time of crisis? How did we support and care and love one another to do what we could for education at a time of urgent and pressing need?
This year I was involved in the development and writing of the 2020 Horizon Report organized by Educause. In its first year since its redesign (now focused on trends rather than technologies), I was asked to write a section of the report focusing on implications for Canadian Higher Education. You can read a pdf version of my section here. It centers on the following argument:
…there is an urgent and pressing need to invest in professional learning and development of current faculty, near-future faculty (i.e., graduate students), and senior leaders in the use of digital technology in education.
You can access the 2020 report here:
Brown, M., McCormack, M., Reeves, J., Brook, D.C., Grajek, S., Alexander, B., Bali, M., Bulger, S., Dark, S., Engelbert, N., Gannon, K., Gauthier, A., Gibson, D., Gibson, R., Lundin, B., Veletsianos, G. & Weber, N. (2020). 2020 Educause Horizon Report Teaching and Learning Edition. Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE. Retrieved March 10, 2020 from https://www.educause.edu/horizon-report-2020
The kind of online learning that many of us aspire to requires careful thought and planning. But what do you do when you don’t have time to carefully orchestrate a well-crafted online learning experience, such as when COVID-19 requires you to abruptly abandon your in-person teaching and switch to an online solution?
Here’s a few tiny tips:
- Recognize that you are now in a new environment. You’ll find yourself wanting to replicate your face-to-face course. That’s a losing battle. You have neither the time, and if you’ve never taught online, neither the expertise to do that. And that’s OK. Let me reassure you once again. It’s OK that you aren’t an online learning expert. It’s OK that your new course isn’t dealing with the intricacies of everything that you planned but are now unable to do.
- Reach out to colleagues on your campus who have either taught online or whose job is to help others teach online. You probably have an office on campus that’s called The Center for Teaching and Learning or The Center for Teaching Excellence or something similar. There’s people with expertise there, and they can help. But do keep in mind that those colleagues also probably already overwhelmed, so be patient.
- Reach out to colleagues online. Over the last 3 days I saw many more threads that I can count on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and individual blogs. There are some great ideas/tips/approaches being shared there, including this post by Tannis Morgan on teaching with one of the most basic tools that we all use on a day-to-day basis – email.
For some of us, online and digital learning is our bread and butter, the world we live in and the world we are experts in. Doctors, and nurses, and epidemiologists respond to COVID-19 in the ways that they were trained to keep the rest of us healthy. At times like these, we can lend a helping hand to each other in the ways that we are familiar with.
(but, beware of vendors that appear our of nowhere promising to put your courses online or offering free software to help you through the crisis, and heed Ayebi-Arthur’s recommendation, who in writing about educational technology responses to the 2011 earthquake in New Zealand, notes that such free gifts “set in motion long-term expectations that need to be managed.”)