When classes begin next week, learning in the remote Fall 2020 environment will be just as new to students as it is to instructors. As in the March emergency, the vast majority of students will understand that instructors are re-learning to teach — particularly with the efforts instructors have invested these past five months. They will work with instructors who want to work with them as we all learn together. It will be important to trust each other, to allow each other mistakes, and to work toward the common goal of learning and growing.
Some students who struggled and were in distress in the in-person, on-campus environment will thrive in the remote, online classroom. Some students who were thriving in-person will have real trouble adjusting to remote learning. The same is true of instructors, and of the support staff and administrators who support learning across the university.
In the new environment, we have to re-learn to signal and to read each other. Reading and signaling comfort and discomfort, understanding and confusion, wellness and distress, engagement and boredom, is a whole new experience. Instructors and students have to give themselves, and each other, time to get there.
Perhaps the most difficult part of this transition for instructors is re-learning how to assess student learning. Strategies that worked reliably in the old environment and were familiar to both instructor and student are now problematic, and sometimes even counter-productive.
We can try to control and constrain the new environment so that the assessment methods we grew up with can sort-of-work, or we can ask ourselves what methods will actually achieve our assessment goals in the new environment. We need to ask ourselves afresh, naively, what those goals are.
Over time, comfort with an assessment method can replace the initial motivation for using it. What are we trying to assess? What evidence do we want that we have reached our goals as instructors? What methods will allow us to do that in a remote environment?
There is no short-cut or magic formula. It will be a lot of work; it will be different. Many instructors have joined online teaching communities over the past months to help them prepare; it’s not too late to do so now. Hundreds have accessed CTL’s webinars to get ready — another good resource. Check out what learning centers at other universities are doing. The more options and experiments we’re aware of, the more likely we are to find something that will work for us and our students.
Discuss it with your colleagues. Listen to your students. Listen to yourself. You know what you want your students to acquire in your assignments, your courses, and your programs. You know what you want them to have that they didn’t have when they started. Examine the new environment. Ask yourself how you assess their learning. Give yourself and your colleagues the freedom to rethink, to adopt a new mindset, or change your outlook. Give yourself and each other time and space to reflect and to get it wrong. Share your insights and your lessons learned.
Let’s all work together, instructors, students, support staff, and administrators. None of us have solid answers right now, but we all have the same questions. We’ll figure it out.
— André Costopoulos, Vice-provost and Dean of Students