Learning from pandemic: Mastering the online

It’s what? Day 14 in our lockdown mode. We went from a 9 PM-5AM curfew to a 24-hour curfew, and our numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases moved from 1 on March 15 to 15 today. On average, that works out to about one new confirmed case per day.

It’s scary, but I can’t waste time being scared. I was, two weeks ago, specially because I’d spent the weekend in Eleuthera and sat in Governor’s Harbour Airport for four hours waiting for a plane that was very delayed, surrounded by people who were heading home from Ride For Hope. I’d rather spend my days on thinking: about if, and how, this is going to change the world permanently, and how we can take this interruption in the normal state of affairs to make the country we live in a better place.

Mastering the online
What’s the first thing we’ve learned? Let me bring it home. The university closed before the lockdown was instituted. In other words, on Sunday March 15 (the Ides of March, coincidentally), the university community received an email that told us that face-to-face activity was to cease as of the following day. We were to work on moving all activity to the online environment. This meant that all activity—and primarily instruction and meeting—was to move online.

We’ve been attempting to expand our online offerings and activities for some time now—certainly ever since we became a university back in 2016, but even before. But the systems on which the institution has been built—and, more critically, many of the people who operate those systems—are not nimble. Our transition has been slow. Over the past two years, we have mastered the art of meeting via Zoom, or patching people into face-to-face meetings using Zoom, or communicating between our main campuses and our research centres through Zoom, but we have not done all that much online instruction. The switch was challenging for faculty, especially given the ticking of the semester clock that drives our instruction. When you have to prepare and deliver face-to-face classes, it’s not easy to add the creation and mastery of online classes at the same time. Teaching in the two environments is different, and planning has to adjust.

This past fortnight, though, we have had to do it. People who have never taught remotely before are placed in the position of learning. The advantage to the lockdown is that there is nothing else to do; the competition between the face-to-face and the online has been removed. Online is all there is.

Maybe what we’ll get out of this is a faculty and a staff base who have far more facility in online activity than we might ever have imagined.

There’s more, of course; more stuff to learn, more stuff that we have already learned. But that’s for another day.