Abstract
In this chapter, the authors will explore the ways COVID-19 initiated widespread reform in how faculty approach online teaching. The researchers will focus on how they addressed the shift from emergency remote teaching to faculty empowerment, centered on best practices in online learning. The change, like many campuses around the nation, happened quickly and with limited resources. A central argument of this chapter is that the pandemic created unexpected opportunities for collaboration and innovation across the divide between face-to-face and online instructional design. In tackling this challenge, the researchers were inspired by the community of inquiry framework. The framework is a social constructivist model describing the learning environment as the intersection of three key “presences”: teaching, social, and cognitive. Combining this framework with social-emotional learning theory suggests that online instructional designers consider the trinity of feeling, doing, and creating when designing and delivering faculty professional development.
TopBackground
The three authors represent three distinct roles and voices in the College: an online instructional designer, a faculty hired to teach in partnership with an OPM, and a faculty teaching primarily face-to-face classes. Examples of educational planning in times of crises show that creativity is important but often hard to foster when there is high-stakes pressure to quickly retool. Within the context of the College making the rapid transition to fully online education, the authors investigate the question: What is required in faculty professional development to move from survival instincts of “how to do” online instruction to the creative flourishing of “now, what can I try?”
In tackling this question, the researchers were inspired by the widely researched framework for designing learning experiences in online environments, the Community of Inquiry (CI) framework developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (1999). The Community of Inquiry framework is a social constructivist model describing the learning environment as the intersection of three key “presences:” teaching, social, and cognitive. Combining CI with the authors’ shared experiences in leading reform in a time of rapid change, three operational frames resulted that instructional designers can consider when designing and delivering faculty professional development: feeling, doing, and creating. Later in this paper, after the authors provide context and historical background, the researchers will connect the Community of Inquiry framework to the three instructional frames of feeling, doing, and creating. What the researchers will present in this article is an intimate portrait of how three members of an academic community responded to the disruption in ways that were generative and life-giving.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social-Emotional Learning: An approach to learning valuing emotions and feelings in the process of acquiring new knowledge and developing new instructional approaches.
Transformation: The process of accepting that past practices are no longer effective and imagining new ways of being in the world. Transformation often requires elements of the unexpected, reflection and movement into novel intellectual and emotional spaces.
Community Inquiry: A social constructivist framework for describing learning spaces. The framework is premised on three overlapping “presences:” teaching, social, and cognitive.
Professional Development: The intentional organization of workshops and sessions geared toward helping educators learn about and develop instructional skills to address challenges and opportunities. Professional development is often geared to the needs of a context or group of educators.
COVID-19: A worldwide pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus. In higher education, it precipitated the rapid shift from face-to-face education to online education.
Disruption: The process by which the taken for granted becomes no longer viable and new ways of teaching and learning must be investigated and implemented.
Adult Learning: The unique ways adults approach and respond to the process of learning new materials or ideas. The process often involves disruption, reflection, and formation of new habits.