This was the last week of our training, and as expected we have mostly discussed what we will be doing in an advising capacity. Even the reading that we had for this week was mostly about wrapping up the online pedagogical concepts and looking forward: Helping students learn by giving them agency (which I think is takes them beyond the defined boundaries of the class) and tips on continuously learning and improving as an online teacher.
It feels like we are leaving the nest and learning how to advise effectively without supervision. Which is why we were assigned partners (most groups were pairs, but I was lucky enough to be in a group of three) and asked to review each other’s courses. I have also acquired the thing that I will likely be using the most (at least towards the end of summer) in the process while advising faculty; a checklist for reviewing a course and its content.
Even though I feel very comfortable about providing information on which tools to use to achieve a goal or how to migrate old course content, I think a checklist could be the most valuable tool for me because a lot of the time a second perspective is necessary to put the final touches in a course. I figured out the value of the second set of eyes while working on my partner’s course (and also while receiving feedback about my own course) since I had forgotten to fix some very basic issues even though I had been working on my course for the last four weeks. I like the checklist format because it forces me to look at the details carefully and provides me with guiding questions to think about what could be improved.
This peer review activity was a good experience for me also because I was very worried that I would have to help faculty from another department (due to the structure of the program) and would not be able to understand their issues well enough to be effective. Even though my partners were working on courses (even disciplines) that I had no previous academic knowledge on, the checklist helped me suggest easy fixes that would improve their course significantly. Now I realize that this is not as big of a concern as I had initially imagined.
One final thing I would like to reflect on this week is our newly named hybrid system: NUflex. As more details come out (I have become an avid reader of News@Northeastern over the last week for this reason) I have been thinking about how we as Academic Technology Scholars can help with the transition. Obviously, we will be trying to dispense information on how to use Canvas effectively to faculty. I hope we will help minimize the issues we encountered in the Spring semester while quickly transitioning to online teaching by helping form a deliberately designed online course. This is more important than I first realized because it seems that not everyone who would like to be in class will get to be in class due to social distancing rules and limited spaces in classes. A lot more students will likely have to take the class online than in-person (by the way, our current solution to this problem may not be the best).
Before this week though, I had always thought that we would only be useful in the transition to the online teaching bit of our hybrid system. I have come to realize the complexities of teaching a class in-person and online simultaneously since then. We may work with the faculty to pick the application that would work with such an arrangement with minimal effort on the part of the faculty (teaching is very hard by itself anyway). The problem is not solved by just choosing what to use though. The bigger issue here is how to use the technology in a way that would make student-teacher interactions (both face-to-face and online) manageable and I am not sure this will be an easy issue to fix. I am hopeful that conversing with faculty in the coming months will help us come up with an acceptable solution to this problem.