As you may recall, I was involved in trying to launch a pan-Canadian effort to improve digital resources at Canadian universities, especially for those courses that looked like being biggest potential pedagogical nightmares (i.e. large first-year survey classes).  I am very pleased that this effort has taken wing with some funding from the McConnell Foundation and direction from my friend David Graham. Last I checked, it had over fifteen institutions participating in some way.  The focus of the effort has changed a bit (it’s a bit more bottom-up than originally envisaged, which is great) and it is doing interesting work in terms of bringing together like-minded people from across the country together to work on common challenges for the fall. 

I asked David if I could report on progress a bit, and he suggested instead that I should take a look at some of the great work that faculty across the country are already doing to improve digital instruction.  I’m glad he did, because it led me to speak to a number of professors across the country who are doing some incredibly interesting things.

Not surprisingly, some of the people who have been doing the best under the transition to COVID are people who were engaged in some form of online learning or were involved in the creation of Open Educational Resources prior to March 2020 (I don’t have a good sense of how many people meet this description, but my guess is that’s it’s probably around 20%).  Several of them are reaching out into their communities (either their institution, or within a broader disciplinary group) to assist others.  For instance, two professors from the University of Ottawa, Jeremy Kerr and Alison Flynn, just put out a wonderful open-access guide to online teaching, and Dr. Flynn is also active in a network of chemistry professors from across the country swapping tips on how to adapt teaching chemistry for next term.  A lot of the discussion, not surprisingly, is about laboratories.  But as Dr. Flynn told me last week, there is not much literature to support the idea that laboratories are particularly effective in terms of achieving their set learning objectives.  And this is leading people into interesting territory – re-designing courses around the actual learning objectives rather than around a given set of activities. 

There is something similar going on at the University of Alberta, where a pair of engineers, Samer Adeeb and Cagri Ayranci, have been trying to work out how to replicate engineering laboratories for asynchronous delivery. This has led them down the track of making a lot of short explanatory videos.  But what’s interesting is that in the course of working out what kinds of videos need to be made, they are finding all sorts of content overlap in different courses in the faculty.  In the short run, that implies important efficiency gains (they can use a single video demonstrating a particular concept in multiple classes, rather than re-doing it for each one).  But in the longer run this kind of content-mapping may simply make for a better overall curriculum, since the faculty now has a better understanding of how similar concepts in related classes can be taught in ways that better re-enforce learning.  The point is: engaging with learning outcomes enables you to modularize learning in quite different ways.

(One of the most interesting examples of modularizing learning I’ve seen recently is a pre-COVID initiative at Carleton, led by Dr. Kahente Horn-Miller.  As part of an attempt to integrate more Indigenous content into courses across the institution, she and a team have created “bundles” of Indigenous knowledge – lessons from indigenous experts accompanied by audio or video from knowledge keepers – which are available online and can be used by professors across the institution to incorporate in their own classes.  The work started out focussing mostly on Indigenous history and identity but is being expanded so that more bundles can be brought into areas of science and engineering.  As part of the Carleton’s new Inidigenization strategy, these are being rolled out across the institution, which means that all faculties at some point are going to need to go through the same kind of curriculum/learning-outcome mapping and unbundling in order to make the project work.  It is très cool.)

Not all the work need involve this level of structural change.  Sometimes, it’s just a simple technical fix to physically adapt the way a professor engages with students.  For instance, Keith Godfrey, at the University of Alberta, built a simple light board and mirror to be able to interact with students better online (check this video, it’s really cool).  This set-up only works for chalkboard-heavy classes, but it’s simple, effective, and easily replicable.  Light Boards all around! 

Sometimes it’s just the hard work of changing up activities and assessments.  Some of the hardest courses to switch to online are courses where a lot of physical movement is involved.  On a recent episode of TVO’s The Agenda (which included a very lo-fi version of yours truly) Ann Sado of George Brown College gave a great description of how that college’s culinary program made the move to online (start at about 32:05), which was simply to have students film themselves making things.  Instructors can’t taste the results, obviously, but they can monitor and assess all other elements of technique.  It takes more time to watch a couple of dozen students online than it would walking around a teaching kitchen, but that’s true of a lot of things in COVID-era teaching.    Take drama, for instance, where an awful lot depends on movement (which can be difficult if low-fi systems keep freezing) and on instructors being able to read subtle body clues from students (difficult on small screens at the best of times).  Todd Hiscock, a drama professor at Cape Breton University, told me about how much his preparation time for classes has changed as a result, because of the need to come up with new activities that meet the same pedagogical goals, but which can work within the scope of the new delivery method.  And yet, above all, he said he felt energized by the whole process, because it challenged him and made him think more deeply about pedagogy.

And this, really, is what is so exciting about this moment.  There has never been a time when so many profs have spent so much time thinking about pedagogy as right now.  Teaching is being dramatically re-thought, and people are genuinely engaging with concepts like learning outcomes both at the level of individual lessons and at the level of the full curriculum.  I kind of get the sense it’s the first time many people have thought about this concept as something other than a box-ticking imposed by a Dean or Provost.  It’s genuinely cool. 

Yet there is every possibility that this moment could be squandered.  Again and again I heard people say things like “there is no reward structure” for what I am doing (and they didn’t just mean the focus on pedagogy over research, they meant the act of collaborating with others in doing so ).  And that absolutely must change.  If universities want to be known for curricular and pedagogic innovation, they need to reward it the same way they reward research, and frankly that’s not really the case anywhere right now.  Change in this area needs to come fast in the fall if maintaining momentum in this area is any kind of priority.

But in the meantime, there’s work to do.  If you’re not sure how to do it, reach out to colleagues – there is a lot of expertise in institutions, but it is unevenly and opaquely dispersed.  And if you are interested in linking up with people at other institutions to share approaches and resources: why not join the Consortium I descried at the start of the article.  I know David Graham would love to hear from you (mail: David at thexenops dot ca). 

Good luck everyone.