Teaching in a Pandemic

I write this in late March, and we are two weeks from the end of classes for the term, followed by exams in April. On Friday the 13th of March, the university I work at, and most Canadian universities, canceled all live, in-person classes. At Laurier, we canceled classes for a week, and we were asked to develop an online plan for going forward. No face-to-face contact or meetings were permitted, but students had to complete their term with academic integrity and meet all the learning objectives in the course. This online process could take different formats depending on the nature of each course. On Monday the 16th, we held a department meeting to determine some common strategies for confronting this situation, and later that day, the university closed all its buildings except for essential services and asked all employees to work from home.

Shutting down a university and moving to a virtual environment is not a simple task. Our vice president of research ordered all face-to-face research stopped. When the buildings closed, all research, except work that might have relevance to the COVID-19 virus and some research that could not be ethically stopped (like research involving animals), was terminated. We already had online research and classes, and since they don’t rely on physical closeness, these are being maintained. Students were asked to go home and leave residences, but some students cannot go home (international students, for example); we needed to find accommodations for these students. Essential services must be maintained even when the university is closed, including security, animal facilities, maintenance and information technology.

This past week I have been working, from home, at remaking my courses into online versions. Fortunately, we now have an internet that spans the globe, and all students seem to have computers that can connect to this web. We have course management software that permits discussion groups, chats with students, grading, collecting of assignments, online quizzes, and even virtual classrooms. Fifteen years ago, none of this technology existed, and we would have been unable to do what we are doing now. There are clearly blessings associated with technology.

Online learning
This term I am teaching psychology students two courses on statistics, the first a master’s-level class with about 14 students and the second a third-year undergraduate course with about 80 students. Both involve lectures around learning the statistics that psychologists need to do their research. They both include learning the software packages that make calculations based on raw data, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) in the undergraduate course and R (yes, it is called R) in the graduate course. The undergraduate course has lab exercises to provide hands-on learning. I have five teaching assistants to help lead the labs, but they need to be supported. A lot of the course typically involves face-to-face meetings, which now must be conducted in a virtual environment.

I have been learning how to operate in such a virtual environment using my laptop as a platform on which I meet with my students. I held practice sessions with my classes, exploring what works and what the limits are for this technology. We made mistakes and learned that not all browsers are equal. Things that work in one situation do not work in another. I can, from my computer, run the statistical packages we learn (both SPSS and R), and students can see what I am doing and hear me explain what I am doing. We can have a PowerPoint presentation just like before, and I can talk to students about the material. Students can ask questions in real time using the chat function, and I can see those questions and respond to them live.

This week I had my first four online classes, and while it was strange talking into the void, they seemed to go as well as my in-person lectures. I pray that your experiences may be as positive using technology in this physically isolated time.