Teaching During a Pandemic: What I Learned About Teaching that Transcends Location
Teaching during a pandemic has been no easy feat. Have our teaching priorities, strategies, and passions changed since the pandemic? For most of us, the experience required us to change our teaching modalities, methods, or tools. What lies ahead? As we look forward to coming together in the fall for Faculty Development Day, it’s time to honor the teacher in each of us, to reconnect with our individual and collective teaching identities, and to share our stories and practices.
Session 1
| Presentation Title | Presenter(s) | Description | Link |
| LibChat with a Side of Zoom | Amy Harris, Doris Van Kampen-Breit, Michelle Joy | As the University moved to a 24/7 online model, so did the library; we leveraged technology and met our students and faculty in the virtual “streets” of Leo Land. Learn how we combined 2 platforms to transform our teaching & learning model. | Presentation Recording |
| Walkthrough: Transition online and success | Claudette Andrea, Dr. Rafael Ortiz | The impact of digitalization in different areas of life has increased, education has influenced many aspects of our lives, and the traditional approaches are amending under newer circumstances. Instructors, as well as students, have different opinions regarding the factors of accessibility and how digital modes are using navigate the issue of personal interactions (Maggio et al., 2018). | Presentation Recording |
| Technology and Student Experiences in an Online Learning Environment | Kate Colello, Daniel Duerr, Cheryl Hemphill, William Hamilton | Findings from a survey administered by the AIR Office to all SLU students who were transitioned to online learning during the pandemic will be presented, along with recommendations for practice/teaching. The presentation will also show an examination of the role of techno-capital and cultural capital in the social integration of adult online college students. | Presentation Recording |
| Communication with Comprehension: Building Effective Learners Through Teams | Elisabeth Ballew | Creating a community of future educators who actively work and communicate as a team requires modeling best practices in challenging times. Microsoft Teams groups were created to utilize technology to communicate expectations, clarity in assignments, and encouragement through compassion for the college student. Tools offered in Teams and D2L at the start of the 2020 spring semester made the transition to online delivery and information less stressful to students and instructors. | Presentation Recording |
| Keeping the door open: Creating Alternative Learning Activities that Transcends COVID-19 | Christina Cazanave, Khalilah Louis Caines | Internship, volunteer, and service learning opportunities have been limited or postponed due to social distancing and quarantine protocols requiring faculty to find innovative ways to meet these needs. The recent pandemic required faculty to discover ways to meet curriculum guidelines while maintaining a high level of student engagement and real-word learning. This presentation will review how the undergraduate and graduate social work identified ways to keep the door open for students to engage in direct hands-on learning experiences amidst a global pandemic. From challenges and lessons learned, this presentation will provide insight, guidance, and practical ways on how to create innovative experiences that transcend the face to face and virtual classroom. | Presentation Recording |
| How to integrate MS Teams in D2L for team projects and Research Assignments | C’Lamt Ho | “Teams are a collection of people, content, and tools surrounding different projects and outcomes within an organization. Teams can be created to be private to only invited users. Teams can also be created to be public and open and anyone within the organization can join (up to 5000 members). A team is designed to bring together a group of people who work closely to get things done. Teams can be dynamic for project-based work (for example, launching a product, creating a digital war room), as well as ongoing, to reflect the internal structure of your organization (for example, departments and office locations). Conversations, files and notes across team channels are only visible to members of the team.” (Microsoft, 2020) | Presentation Recording |
| COVID Struck, Chaos Ensued, Hindsight’s 20-20—What Have We Learned? | Zachary A. Smith, Kurt Yann, Timothy Wiseman, Ryan Murphy | In this session, we are going to walk our guests through a few short ‘vignettes’ illustrating some of what we have learned since the outbreak of COVID-19 and how we adapted within our new learning environments. They are focused specifically on tools that we deployed or we will deploy in the future that keep our core tenants (fundamental principles) at the heart of our sessions, which are to ‘teach’ and to ‘engage.’ We will then lead break-out sessions that ask participants to engage in dialogue about some of the things that they tried in their classes as they transitioned to the online learning environment and that they wished they had tried; moreover, we intend to attempt to help them to identify the tools and techniques that could help them bring teaching and active learning into a remote learning session. | Presentation Recording |
Session 2
| Presentation Title | Presenter(s) | Description | Link |
| ZOOMing Motivation: Strategies to engage students in LIVE sessions | Fern Aefsky, Keya Mukherjee, Renee Sedlack | This workshop will enable participants to experience various technological strategies that will motivate online learners in a virtual environment. | Presentation Recording |
| Elusive Engagement: Active Learning on digital platforms | Michael Campbell, Robert Lucio | The Graduate Social Work program was founded as a blended synchronous and asynchronous online program designed to prepare students for their masters degree in social work. | Presentation Recording |
| No Lab, No Problem. Students can perform multidisciplinary research using both primary and secondary data even during a pandemic. | Christopher Miller, Cheryl Berry, Laura Altfeld | This session will provide recommendations to support both online and face to face student multidisciplinary research in higher education using citizen science projects, the meta-analysis of scientific studies, and student collection of their own primary data. | Presentation Recording |
| In case of emergency, break glass: Ways to create course shells that support both on-ground and online learning. | Tammy Zacchilli | Learning management systems offer instructors resources that can be used to supplement material in the event that face-to-face courses must be moved online. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss ways that instructors can create course shells that can be used for both online and face-to-face delivery. | Presentation Recording |
| Students’ Perceptions of Responsiveness, Course Content, and Faculty Concern: Findings from the Pandemic/Transition Survey of Saint Leo Students | William Hamilton | Findings from a survey administered by the AIR Office to all SLU students who were transitioned to online learning during the pandemic will be presented, along with recommendations for practice/teaching. | Presentation Recording |
| Transition from VTT to Zoom with Nontraditional Adults During a Pandemic: Perks and Pitfalls | Eileen O’Brien | Some things transition smoothly VTT to Zoom, others not so much…but there are even things Zoom allows that VTT does not. Let’s discuss! | Presentation Recording |
| Microsoft Forms for Presentation Peer Evaluation | Cheryl Kozina | This program will show you how to set up Microsoft Forms for presentation evaluations, what the student view will be (and how to share the form with them) and the post evaluation data management. | Presentation Recording |
| Dear Charlotte’s Story a Pig to Remember | Rhondda Waddell | In this presentation learn about an imaginative approach that one small class incorporated to reach out to children and lighthearted adults everywhere through the building of a Wi blog and the writing of a children’s “coloring book” which chronicles the story of one lucky porker by the name of “Charlotte”. | Presentation Recording |
Session 3
| Presentation Title | Presenter(s) | Description | Link |
| Creating community and supporting both on-ground and online learning | Alexandra Kanellis, Kate Wittrock | Presenters will share technology resources to support online and on-ground student learning. They will focus on successful strategies to help students in on-ground and online environments keep up with their academic learning demands. Strategies and tools to bridge communication, advise students and build retention will also be shared. | Presentation Recording |
| The D.B.A. Virtual Colloquium: Bringing Teaching and Community to our Doctoral Students | Helen MacLennan, Dale Mancini, Andrew Gold | Because the traiditonal DBA Colloquium could not be held at University campus this year, students voiced their disappointment and the decision was made to hold a virtual Colloquium for our students. This presentation will include a discussion of the planning and setup necessary for creating the virtual DBA Colloquium. In addition, we will provide an overview of the content provided and discuss how it was received by the participants. | Presentation Recording |
| Using web quests to provide introductory material and teach online research | Randall Woodard, Dene Williamson | This session will demonstrate the use of a web quest as a way to engage students remotely, as a preparation for class, or as an instructional activity on its own. | Presentation Recording |
| Digital Wellness: Finding Balance during a Pandemic | Brandy Pollicita | Even prior to the pandemic, digital wellness was challenging in higher education; referred by some as the most “flexible” profession. Like most adults, we are tethered to our devices(mostly handhelds) for both professional and personal use. However, the line between tasks has become outrageously and critically blurred during this unprecedented time where we are performing our “flexible” job at home. This has manifested into compulsively shifting from responding to student emails to personal messaging with friends/family to grading student assignments to viewing social media to working on proposals, etc. Why does this matter? What can you do? Physiological and emotional well-being during this unpredictable time is dependent on setting margins, or creating balance, in technology use. This presentation will cover why limits are important, the recommended boundaries between AND within professional and personal technology use, and suggestions on how (i.e., stop responding to work emails at 11:00 pm). | Presentation Recording |
| Making It Up As We Go: Lessons in Online Agility | Alicia Corts | Fine and performing arts seems like an unnatural fit with online learning, yet with a growth mindset and agile thinking, fine arts activities such as devised theatre, improv, drawing/comics, painting, sculpture, and textile art, can evolve and lead to meaningful learning experiences. Rather than thinking of online learning as “less than,” this approach delves deeply into the potentials available to instructors and students when the resources change from in-person to online. | Presentation Recording |
| A classroom wherever you need it to be | Bill Ellis | Live field trips via Zoom! I took my students with me into the mangroves, on a eutrophic lake, and into a scrubby Florida forest with the help of a cell phone mounted on my bike helmet and a mobile meeting application. Students who attended the synchronous remote field trips reported feeling more engaged by the material. This sort of real world lecture will be a part of my courses in the future regardless of the threat of pandemic. I will discuss some of the challenges I faced, their solutions, and plans for future application of the remote technology. | Presentation Recording |
| Nuggets from Coronavirus | Kenny Embry, Adam Shoemaker | Discuss takeaways from the forced migration to online tools from Coronavirus. | Presentation Recording |
| The Equine Therapy Virtual Field Trip | Rhondda Waddell, Jodi Lamb | Come learn how to save an on ground field trip experience during a pandemic get your creative thinking caps on! Visit the Equine Therapeutic Riding Center and learn about how the pandemic has affected the center and the horses. See how technology was used to capture live interviews and splice video into teachable moments. Learn about a simple classroom tip called Whole Brain Learning and how to apply it. All this and It comes highly endorsed by Prezi too! | Presentation Recording |
