Rising to the Challenge: Reflections on “Levelling Up”
The sudden pivot to remote delivery in the spring and summer semesters left many faculty feeling overwhelmed and scrambling to move their courses online. Some faculty are still trying to catch their breath, while others are frantically preparing for fall online delivery as the pandemic continues. For many faculty, digital delivery was not something they imagined ever doing and support would be necessary to help them make the leap into this new way of teaching.
The KPU Teaching & Learning Commons recognized early the need for support and were feverishly creating resources and planning workshops in parallel. The “Level Up: Learning to Teach Online” workshop was carefully designed and facilitated by Leeann Waddington and Lisa Gedak, with contributions from colleagues in the TL Commons and open educational resources from around the globe. Guest presenters from the TL Commons contributed additional expertise throughout the modules.
Recognizing the diverse needs of faculty with varied technological and instructional design skills, Level Up was created to provide faculty with an opportunity to conceptualize and design their online courses. The workshop is not prescriptive, and participants work on their course elements as they choose; the facilitators like to call the workshop a “choose your own adventure.” Providing participants with the freedom to explore allows the learning to be personal, relevant, and immediately applicable in their teaching contexts. Additionally, the intention was to provide a space to build relationships with colleagues, learn about digital delivery, and how to effectively facilitate learning in digital spaces.
Level Up was purposefully designed to model the structure of an effective online course, and the five modules are delivered through a mix of both synchronous and asynchronous opportunities. Participants are taken through the following five modules:
- A new way of teaching: Intro to online learning
- Building blocks for online design
- Where does all the time go? Re-imagining content and activities in digital spaces
- How do you know they are learning? Feedback and assessments in digital spaces
- Becoming a guide on the side: Facilitating in digital spaces
Each module provides participants with resources and tools to support re-imagining course delivery in online spaces. The entire workshop is underpinned by the Community of Inquiry Framework, providing faculty with the knowledge to develop teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence in their online courses.
Over two hundred and fifty faculty have completed the Level Up workshop so far, and have continued to access content, resources, and support in the “Level Up: Alumni” course site where they have become a part of a larger online learning community.
We are thrilled to share some of the recent Level Up Alumni reflections with the KPU community; we hope their stories inspire you.
First of all, it was nice seeing the rapport that you and Leeann have, which helped lighten the mood of a typical workshop. When we were shoved onto online teaching, I found reassurance from the immediate emails sent out by the TLC. I strongly feel that all Instructors would benefit from taking the workshop to remind them of the student’s perspective and to know that if we feel overwhelmed, we are supported. Some of the keywords that still ring in my head include community, engage, guide on their side, reflection, respect, connection, as well as unceremonious, which I thought was a perfect description to the ending of the breakout rooms. I think that I’ll use that with my students.
Susan Ju, Foundations in Design
In times of change, we often double down on what we know – Level Up gave me both the skill and confidence to try and apply new ways to engage my students online. Lisa, Leeann, and my peers shared ways to better utilize synchronous time together through Big Blue Button, keeping synchronous time focused on discussion and application of course content, and creative ways to build asynchronous learning opportunities for students to do at their own pace including H5P activities, Lessons, and reflective posts. Although I was already a confident Moodle user, I learned of pre-populated resources already in Moodle, for example the technology survey to inform my understanding of the tools my students had access to (cameras, microphones, laptops, reliable internet) or assignment rubrics to support efficient grading and feedback. I then customized these tools to use again later in the course. I also found the class well-paced and responsive to the curiosities of the class, where we were encouraged to bring forward questions and examples from our own classes.
Christine Ramage-Palak, School of Business
Having completed the Level Up course with Lisa and Leeann, I came to realize that there is an effective way to move towards an asynchronous learning format without compromising the learning experience. Embedding video’s, adding links and short assignments as well as creating a spot for students to discuss their questions really helped me out. Keeping students engaged is a must. I also learned that some synchronous contact is good to incorporate if possible since it is nice to hear one another speak and keep the human connections alive within the class, a venue for discussion on Moodle is key via the Big Blue Button. Additionally, Moodle is a fantastic tool for delivering randomized multiple-choice exams that are timed–it helps maintain academic integrity for the class and the marks are calculated automatically and immediately at test completion. Change is never easy; however, we need to embrace the tools available to us to move forward as educators rather than fall back to the mindset that the old way is the only way. I learned that keeping an open mind and listening to students’ concerns is also important, as this shift towards a new mechanism for learning may be a necessity in the future due to ongoing and emerging health concerns such as Covid-19. I have just recently begun the application process for a Masters of Education in Distance Education degree since I think it will help me learn more tools that I can apply as an instructor in the Faculty of Health at KPU. I thank Leeann And Lisa for their efforts in opening the window to the realm of online learning and applaud them and their teams for nudging us along a path that many of us never imagined we would be walking down!
Jay Dhesi, Faculty of Health
The Level Up course was great. I took it right as the summer semester was about to begin, and I was moving my in-class courses to an online-only format. It was wonderful to learn from the discussions with facilitators and the other instructors and learn best practices. At first, I was overwhelmed by the number of new tools that I would need to quickly learn, in order to move my marketing courses online and facilitate student engagement and discussion. There are so many tools available to us! And many of the online teaching tools that I already knew are not in use at KPU. I then thought about my student needs and began my course redesigns by taking into account my students’ needs first, and only then did I think about facilitating tools. How it all worked out – I used only some of the tools that were new to me. I felt that students might be just as overwhelmed as I was with the prospect of learning new interaction tools. I didn’t want their learning curve to distract from the learning objectives of my classes.
And it all worked out.
To anyone reading this – you don’t need to boil the ocean when redesigning your course for an online format. There are many tools available to us – and we don’t have to use them all at once.
I will add some additional tools for interaction and for assessment in the future versions of my classes – it’s great that we have these tools available to us, and videos available (and online help) to answer common questions. I am keeping a list of ideas for the next time I teach the course, in my written self-reflections at the end of each class. Overall, my teaching is not about tools, but about engaging with my students, providing them with new information, presenting topics for discussion, and hopefully increasing their enthusiasm for a career in marketing
Vida Morkunas, Marketing and Entrepreneurship
I was delighted and honoured to be a part of the first Level Up cohort in May 2020. It was jam-packed, but in all the best ways–so many valuable resources, dialogues, and ideas. It was a chance to stop everything, jump in as a learner (something all teachers should do from time to time), listen, open my mind, and grow my knowledge and skills.
One of the things that Level Up revealed in some fairly stark terms–as with, indeed, the hasty pivot so many of us had to make to remote delivery in March–is the way in which, if I am being honest, I and many instructors can always improve in terms of being facilitators of active learning, engaged learner experiences, and authentic evaluation/assessment in any environment. Because there are so many aspects of a face-to-face class that may not translate to online learning (and, for me, pivoting to ‘remote delivery’ is quite different than planning and designing for authentic online learning), an online learning instructor is forced to (re)consider in new ways their resources, activities, assignments, assessments, and, of course, desired learning outcomes (be they formal or informal). While planning and designing for online learning is, no doubt, a daunting, immense, and time-intensive process (that never ends), isn’t that true of all teaching and learning? Or, more to my point, shouldn’t it be? Speaking for myself, it can be all-too-easy, in a face-to-face environment, to become somewhat complacent, even indifferent, with one’s course design and execution.
Please don’t misunderstand me. To be clear, that complacency and/or indifference is borne of many things–work overload, fatigue, the need for a magical 50-hour day). Nonetheless, with the move to authentic online learning planning and design, I find myself reflecting even more than I typically do about all of my courses. Why am I doing the things I do? Why am I doing them the way I’m doing them? How did I get there/here? Are these things actually helping my students achieve the desired learning outcomes?
There are days when I feel completely overwhelmed with the prospect of properly planning and designing an authentic online course experience–that is, taking full advantage of the technology and university/campus resources and what all of it can do to make learning, well, … real. Real engagement. Real active learning. Authentic experience. I like to think that my face-to-face classes achieve this end, but Level Up–and the many colleagues I shared the classroom with–has made me look honestly at all of my classes, approaches, materials, assignments, assessments, … and myself.
Level Up has made me want to be honest with myself. To do better.
Thank you to Lisa and Leann, as well as all my colleagues, for pushing me to think harder and do better
Janice Morris, ACP English
Level Up will continue to be offered for future KPU faculty with the next offering Monday August 24 to Friday August 28th (Synchronous sessions 10:00 – 11:30am each day) REGISTER HERE
Lisa Gedak is a Teaching and Learning with Technologies Strategist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU). Lisa is passionate about instructional design, the intersection of pedagogy and technology, and philosophical approaches supporting learner-centred education. Additionally, Lisa is an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Facilitator who values building on the strengths of individuals and groups and channelling energy to be positively focussed; and a Master of Arts in Learning and Technology (MALAT) candidate through Royal Roads University (RRU).
Leeann leads the Learning Technology and Educational Consultant teams in their efforts to support innovation in teaching and learning at KPU. Leeann oversees and advances existing KPU supported educational technologies and tools to align with institutional values and current best practices. Previously an experienced faculty member, Leeann holds a Post Masters Certificate in Curriculum Design and is a doctoral candidate in the Distance Education EdD at Athabasca University. Leeann is an advocate for the culture of folio thinking pedagogy and its potential to revolutionize KPU's learning landscape.
