The Whole College Group Project

THE WHOLE COLLEGE

GROUP PROJECT

A year ago, COVID-19 was imminent. In response, the College planned to shut down for an additional week after Spring Break, regroup, and get on with the business of providing education to our students.

“When we decided to go remote, more than half of the faculty didn’t have any kind of formal online development experience or training,” says Dr. Angela Sivadon, TCC senior vice president and chief academic officer. “And we were taking everyone online.”

Pieces of the puzzle were already in place. The College offers Teaching at TCC, a workshop that helps faculty develop strategies to be successful in the classroom, focusing on teaching, syllabus development, and course planning. Prior to COVID-19, the College pushed that class to adjuncts. Full-time faculty could opt to take an Online Course Developer course to help them design curriculum for online instruction.

College leadership spent that entire week after Spring Break prepping faculty for online instruction with a newly developed course: Online Teaching Fundamentals, a 40-hour curriculum that enables faculty to design online courses with the assistance of their peers. To date, more than 400 TCC faculty members have completed the course.

Faculty were paired, so that for every course, instructors backed each other up. Sivadon called it “peer mentoring.”

“It was great to see the collaboration among faculty as they ventured into this new learning environment together,” says Sivadon.

The rapid course development happened in response to demands of the situation, and required enormous amounts of collaboration, innovation and communication between TCC faculty, staff and administration.

“We wanted to make sure our students still received that excellent education we promised,” said Sivadon. “We wanted to make sure we were still delivering.”

For the Summer, TCC enacted 100 percent online courses. There would be no physical classes on any TCC campus.

“We required anyone teaching online to obtain at least Online Instructor Certification and we encouraged everyone teaching to take Online Teaching Fundamentals,” says Sivadon.

Lessons learned in the Spring and Summer carried forward, with revisions, into the Fall semester. And it all worked. But it wasn’t easy.

Faculty Deliver Dr. Jennifer Campbell is the College’s Faculty Coordinator for Online Learning. As such, she found herself at the center of the faculty pandemic pivot. The picture she paints of Spring 2020 isn’t one of panic, but measured upscaling to meet the needs of the moment. Each step of the journey created new resources.

“The first thing we did was quite a bit of communicating with faculty,” says Campbell. “We offered resources. Daily Tool Tips sessions had record numbers of attendees. Each session highlighted a technical tool that could help the classroom instructor shift to remote instruction. We normally have a steady interest throughout the year, but the participation in these sessions was up to 800 percent higher than normal. People were all of a sudden really interested.”

The College has been offering courses online for more than 20 years. The experienced faculty were of great support to those who were new. The pandemic lead to fasterthan-usual adoption of testing tools, Zoom, and a new lecture capture system. New and experienced faculty stepped up and learned to use these tools quickly.

That course we mentioned earlier? Implementing it required a total reconceptualization.

“Our online teaching fundamentals course? We were charged with getting a lot of people onboarded with online instruction really quickly,” says Campbell. “We knew an instructional design team of three was not going to be able to handle the enormous task. We had to reconceptualize the whole training program. We shifted from being the people who facilitated training to the people who put it together and coordinated everything.”

Fourteen faculty coaches were recruited to run the one-to-two-week sessions.

“We provided Zoom sessions in the morning, and then technologists would do a Zoom session in the afternoon. Each coach had eight to 10 faculty members assigned to them. Librarians made themselves available. Everyone was very busy. It was an entirely different training model.

“Normally, about 15 people completed our online developer certification a year,” she says. “Over the summer, we got about 450 people through the training. That was a huge thing. The support level needs were very high. We were fortunate Tim DeGreer, Mark Roylance and Kenny Loveland joined our division.”

Pieces of what was needed already existed. Back in 2018, the College created the eCore, which put together teams of faculty members, librarians and instructional designers to build courses that could be used by any full or adjunct faculty member in the discipline.

“eCore classes are great for faculty who don’t have the time to put together a whole online class. The eCore class provides the structure and the instructor has time to focus on teaching,” says Campbell. “The more we do this, the more we realize how long it takes to put together a good online course. If you have the content prepared for you, but you can still customize, but it makes it a lot easier. Instructors are still using their professional subject matter expertise. It’s a lot to do well.” Demand for eCore classes exploded during the pandemic.

The faculty were trained, prepped and ready. Time to … Zoom?

Zooming Forward If TCC has an expert on Zoom, it would be Mary Sirkel, director of Employee and Organizational Development. She didn’t plan to be the College’s go-to Zoom trainer. It happened serendipitously. About the same time the pandemic increased in severity, Sirkel happened to be taking some courses in Zoom from The Persimmon Group. Sirkel had a lot of prior experience delivering training in virtual environments, such as via WebEx, and was adding to her toolset with the Zoom courses.

It was a small step to begin offering Zoom Tips and Tricks sessions to

College faculty and staff through TCC’s internal training system.

“All of a sudden, faculty started attending, and asking, ‘What do I do with students?’” says Sirkel. “It was not intended for that; it was just to get people used to doing virtual meetings.”

She reached out to Jennifer Campbell in Online Learning, and Cindy Shanks in Engaged Learning, and then to Mary Cantrell and Heather Wilburn, both in the School of Liberal Arts & Communications.

“We just started collaborating on what we could do,” says Sirkel. By Fall, she had offered five different topics in 20 sessions to more than 560 participants. “I had one faculty member who attended every session I offered, even when it was the same session she’d already attended. She wanted to get comfortable with the technology. She was so excited about how she was able to use Zoom and its tools to bring her course alive for students.”

The focus was on encouraging students to be active learners.

“If people learn how to use the interactive tools, virtual learning can be fun,” says Sirkel. “By utilizing those interactive capabilities, while it’s not the same as the classroom, it can be very interactive and engaging for students. They can even like it.”

Librarians Make It Happen Librarians at TCC are knowledge experts. They’re technology experts. To borrow a term from crime novels and movies: they’re fixers. Whatever you need, they can get. The College had faculty and courses ready, but there were also tons of logistical issues to address. Many of TCC’s students have no internet access. No computers. The Library coordinated with Student Affairs on a technology survey and discovered 28 percent of students did not have the technology they needed to successfully participate in classes.

“As of that technology survey, we realized that for Fall, we were going to have to connect students to devices,” says Paula Settoon, TCC Dean of Libraries and Knowledge Management.

So, the Library bought hotspots students could check out. Working with TCC’s Finance department and the TCC Foundation, they procured funding to purchase 350 laptops, which, again, can be checked out by students. The College also augmented this by adding Wi-Fi access to many parking lots on all four campuses.

“Students can be remote if they need to be remote,” says Settoon. “Some of them can’t afford a cell bill. Some of our students live in rural areas where they don’t have access to dependable internet.”

They augmented their online collections to get more streaming rights to films used by faculty for courses. They added more e-books than paper books.

“We know our students like physical books, but we can’t do that right now,” says Settoon.

Librarians did a lot of work supporting faculty. They provided copious

amounts of resources for faculty and students. They worked hand-in-hand with the eCore and two library employees are still “on loan” to the Online Learning department.

“The librarians have been doing this for a long time,” says Settoon. “They have been heavily involved in eCore and they already knew how to do a lot of this, but they went from doing this at a good speed to warp speed. It was difficult and exhausting, and we worked a lot of hours. But we have found and implemented solutions, and we’ve learned a lot.

“Distance, online learning, is going to get better and better as we continue. We’re still struggling a bit with adapting what we’re doing right now, but it is going to evolve. And now that we’ve done all these things, they are not going to go away. They will continue. We really have to solve that connectivity problem for our students. It affects traditionally underserved students the most.”

Things May Never Be the Same As daunting as the challenge has been, to serve the same quality education and opportunities to its students, the College reacted swiftly, decisively, and in the process, created change that may last beyond the end of the pandemic. Its capability to offer education has been expanded and refined.

“I think we’ll see some shifts because of this. People have been forced to try new things. We’re going to see a lot more openness to considering formats we would not have prior to the pandemic,” says Campbell. “There will be more flexibility in how we deliver content. We are opening doors to teach in the way that makes sense for the instructor.”

She mentions science as an area where online learning, previously, had not been embraced.

She doesn’t believe face-to-face instruction will ever go away, but is excited about the possibilities of the future, even if there are still many hurdles ahead, such as with testing and assessment. “COVID-19 has pushed what’s important in student learning,” says Campbell. “What is education now, and how important are those traditional elements. I think a lot of people are moving toward other types of assessment, but it’s a big shift.”

Sivadon lauds everyone who came up with innovations and solutions to new challenges.

“Everyone had to figure out how to do things differently,” says Sivadon. “It was more challenging for some than others. I was really proud of the out-of-thebox thinking. Faculty really stepped up. They became more innovative than I’ve ever seen. They strategically delivered course content to help students achieve their goals.”

“Things have gone very well. The decisions we made were good. It was such an asset to have Matt Sharpe (TCC director risk management, occupational health and safety), who has a Master’s in Public Health. And we’ve been very transparent. We had meetings up front. We’ve had open forums. We’ve let faculty ask questions. You can’t think of everything. I always go back to Cindy Hess (former TCC senior vice president and chief academic officer). She always used to say, ‘One of us is not as smart as all of us.’”

Sivadon believes the challenges brought about by the pandemic have better prepared the College for the future.

“I think we’ve positioned ourselves well to deliver to students in all modalities,” says Sivadon. “Forcing us to think outside the norm has created great opportunities for faculty and students in the higher education environment.”