Conference: Transforming the Teaching and Learning Environment

The Northeastern University on Transforming the Teaching and Learning Environment held online Feb 1-12, 2021 presentation team includes Nathalia Holtzman, Corinna Singleman and Rachel Stern.

During the Northeastern University on Transforming the Teaching and Learning Environment Conference myself and the team hosted a round table session entitled, “Just in Time: Teaching Online- A scalable, rapid, & collaborative framework for training & evaluating teaching online.” Teaching faculty to teach online and creating quality online courses is an ongoing conversation in academia. Something that has always been very clear to instructional technologists, designers, and experienced online faculty is that courses must start with the learning objectives and be mindful of  the modality.  One cannot and should not simply copy and paste face-to-face course content into the online frame. One must take into account the affordances and limitations of the modality, the nature of motivation in online courses, and the technical capabilities (and limitations) of both students and faculty. With the Covid-19 pandemic, we were forced to move an unprecedented number of faculty and courses online. Many faculty and administrators still envision online courses as simple replications of a traditionally formatted lecture, leaning heavily on “sage on the stage” direct instruction, with occasional high stakes assessments.  CTLs (Centers for Teaching and Learning) can serve as a fantastic resource, clarifying for both administration and faculty, the strengths, and limitations of online teaching. This is necessary to ensure a quality of education and engagement, during the rapid transition to the online teaching environment. Given the financial constraints that have also hit universities on a global scale, campus Teaching and Learning centers must rapidly accommodate the massive number of faculty who require support in teaching online, without the additional resources or staff that would normally come into play when dealing with a transition of this scale. This conversation is of course ongoing, but we need rapid action that does not function well with the bureaucracy that large institutions tend to have. How then, can we leverage our existing resources to suddenly increase the number of faculty and courses we are supporting by an order of magnitude?

 In order to handle all of these requirements and constraints, we developed a framework which addresses these concerns, as well as incorporates strategies and practices that we have found beneficial. During the session we gathered input from participants in the room on how their campuses handled this transition, collected in a collaborative document. We intend to connect the participants in an ongoing community of practice through a Slack channel that will allow participants to continue this necessary ongoing discussion including what worked, what didn’t, and what we should do going forward..