Abstract:

The hastened change in the teaching environments at higher education institutions triggered by the COVID-19 Pandemic in the early days of March 2020 led to many ill-prepared transitions to Emergency Remote Teaching. In 72 hours, many faculty members transitioned from a known teaching environment predominantly face-to-face to one 100% mediated by instructional technology and Learning Management Systems in what was later known as Emergency Remote Teaching (Hodges et al., 2020). The change occurred extremely fast for much of the faculty and the student services personnel, which had never taught their courses in an environment mediated by technology before the emergency, nor imagined it to be the only medium to do it.

While they had an infrastructure to teach online courses, many institutions did not have a dedicated or sophisticated operational structure to support the rapid transition needed during this unprecedented situation. TCC Connect Campus, the online campus of Tarrant County College— the college has six campuses— five of them face-to-face and was prepared for such transition. In the prior seven years, it had developed the necessary infrastructure, processes, policies, and practices to offer, support, and educate 22,000 students entirely at a distance (Morales, 2017). The campus led the development of a basic training known as Blackboard Essentials made available to all face-to-face faculty to accelerate the transition to Emergency Remote Teaching. Six months before the Pandemic, a college-wide committee had secured the approval of the college’s first Academic Continuity Plan (Morales, 2020). In the subsequent months, the online campus released its Online Instructor Certification and made available to all faculty its more than 35 Peer Developed Courses (Morales, 2017b) to help those teaching face-to-face courses transition quickly to remote teaching. This approach minimized the disruption of the mandate to start working and teaching remotely within a week.

This presentation will discuss the role played by an online campus during the transition from face-to-face to remote learning. The presenter will share recommendations based on the experience gained during the Pandemic to manage and transition face-to-face teaching environments to those mediated 100% by online learning technologies, including workflows, assessment of student learning, and IT tools.

Keywords:

Online learning, virtual universities, distance education, faculty training, faculty and student support, instructional technology.