From your friendly neighbourhood Faculty Developer.
We are now several weeks into the Great Teaching Transition of 2020, and so far, so good. Last week was the first week of actual online teaching for many instructors. At the beginning of last week instructors I saw you making the move, learning to adapt and adjust. People were learning how to organize their classes and engage their students using technologies that they were only just beginning to understand themselves. It wasn’t easy. But you were all in it together! There was an “All hands on deck!” mentality and a real “Can do!” attitude. And that was cool! I heard countless stories of how individual instructors supported one another, or made adaptations to help students make the transition to online learning. Here’s just a few of the successes I heard. I bet you know of many more:
And in several of the networking meetings I was in last week, I could hear instructors from a variety of programs connecting with each other, trying to build upon the lessons learned in facilitating labs and demos in an online environment. People were reaching out, making their needs known! This crisis has pushed us to find community and to collaborate as we problem solved. But by the end of the week, I could sense that people were spent. Some had the satisfying tiredness of knowing that they were able to accomplish many things, albeit imperfectly, but certainly better than initially expected. Others had the weariness of stress and concern. They realized that the move was almost traumatic, they missed the daily face-to-face interactions with their students and felt that the online environment was a poor substitute for what they had built up prior to the changeover. Most of all, they worried about their students and just how many of them might be coping with the uncertainly that the Covid 19 crisis has put us all into. Well, I hope that all of you have had a chance to re-charge. I hope that the weekend gave you a chance to re-connect with family, experience some kind of fellowship (even if only through technology), and feed your faith. Most of all, I hope you found some down time, when you could put aside Covid, NorQuest and the economy, and simply relax. We will be in this for some time yet.
0 Comments
From your friendly neighbourhood Faculty Developer. It’s weird being at home and trying to be of service to the faculty. I already miss the daily interactions with all of you and I sincerely hope that this Covid crisis will come and go quickly. This email is my way of trying to keep and touch and keep you informed. I know that you are probably being bombarded with messages, but hopefully there are some bits of information that you might find useful in this note. First some thoughts on where we are at with Online Learning:
|
AuthorJeff Kuntz Ph.D. ImagesExcept where indicated, images used in the blog posts are personal photos, images from NorQuest College or images from Pixabay. Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, videos and music. https://pixabay.com/ Archives
March 2024
Categories
All
|