Given the title of this post, I write knowing I risk being accused of insulting my colleagues and yet nothing is further from the truth. If anything, this post serves to celebrate the ways we learned to work in a short amount of time when the pandemic hit and our classes went online. Over the course of a month, we had to move all of our classes to distance learning. Instructors that are ever so comfortable scribbling equations across a chalkboard in a room full of students now faced the reality of teaching online using platforms they might not have yet been aware of and handling student engagement in new ways. There were a lot of growing pains. The college prepared online trainings on various platforms but some were not tech savvy enough to even be able to log onto them. The vast amount of information sent our way during those first few weeks was staggering and some were clearly unable to keep up with it. Despite this many pressed on, learning new ways of teaching, trying out new pedagogies to engage students, sharing information any way they knew how, being flexible, and finding ways to support students.
I was worried about a few of them…very worried. An instructor I sat with in my office also met with a number of our colleagues in an attempt to prepare for distance education. She attended many training sessions before she even realized her computer lacked a built-in camera. Yet here we are weeks later and she is posting videos for her class and running her assessments using a free online software. I wonder how much of what was learned in those first few months has seeped its way into classes even now. Will we make more use of online resources even when we are no longer required to do so? Perhaps we will soon learn the answer to these questions. What we do know now is that for many of us, our new ways of working and living are quite a change from what we were accustomed to and yet weeks later we carry on as best we can, learning new things every day no matter how comfortable we were with the old or how ill-prepared we may have seemed at the start.
