DePauw Stories

What did you learn during the shift to virtual learning last spring, and how do you think you’ll apply it to mixed classrooms this fall?

Well, spring was a shock for everybody, and we had hardly any time to plan. I ended up doing a lot of things asynchronously, and I met synchronously with students in each of my three classes only once a week. It turned out that didn't feel right for me or for the students, so I created more times to meet synchronously. That seemed to keep the students and me more engaged.

Another thing I learned is that, when you take away the campus experience, you take away an important common denominator – a space, a schedule, the resources on campus that we all have in common – and I figured out that I needed to be flexible, not just in terms of classroom activities, but also in terms of assessment. So I moved to an effort-based grading system. Some people call it a contract-based grading system, which gives positive credit for effort rather than subtracting credit for flaws in work. I kind of changed my whole method of assessment based on remote learning, and I think I'm going to maintain that effort-based assessment system going into fall, too.

Besides the change to physical, in-person instruction, how else has the present moment affected students?

One thing that the pandemic has done is throw issues of equity into relief, and it's caused me and a lot of my colleagues – the whole campus – to reconsider the way that we assess student work (and) assign student work. Our usual way of doing business is kind of tied to assumptions about things that we take for granted on this campus. Essentially, when you have 25 students in a remote class, you have 25 different campuses, and that creates all kinds of asymmetries and inequities. It makes you much more conscious and flexible in dealing with and recognizing what different students have to deal with in different situations on their various at-home campuses, if you can call it that. In a way, it makes you more sensitive to the student side of the experience.

Have you discovered any silver linings to the disruption?

I got a grant to develop a new course on literature and pandemic, and the grant involves me working with faculty at two other GLCA (Great Lakes Colleges Association) schools. Part of what we're going to do is visit each other's classes. It's not like this technology was new, but video conferencing was really underused by most people. One thing that I've gained from Zoom is just the realization that you could bring almost anybody into your classroom at any time to talk to your students. I'm going to collaborate with two other faculty members from Albion (College) and Ohio Wesleyan (University), and we're going to move in and out of each other's classes and talk about our different areas of expertise. I'm going to bring in the authors of two of the books that I'm teaching in another class, and I don't know why it didn't occur to me to do this before, but with Zoom it's very easy just to reach out to someone and say “I'm teaching your book. Could you please visit my class for 15 or 20 minutes and create a whole new experience for students?”