When COVID-19 was recognized as a major health threat in March, the University of New Hampshire was forced to shift to online learning, closing its campus for the first time in its 154-year history.
Enterprise Technology & Services (ET&S) is the hub of instructional design and technology at the university. It was the driver behind efforts to move instruction online, assisting students and faculty. During the days leading up to the COVID-19 shutdown, one phrase emerged that would define the work of parts of ET&S for the immediate future: instructional continuity … or how to maintain teaching and learning when the classroom lights go out.
Transitioning to Online Instruction
On March 18, UNH President James W. Dean announced the suspension of all in-person classes for the remainder of the spring semester. Faculty, students and support staff made the switch to online learning with flexibility, patience and creativity.
Although there were many potential tools for online instruction, ET&S focused on three: myCourses for modules, quizzes, assignments and class discussions; Zoom for meetings and office hours; and Kaltura for recording and posting lectures.
UNH employs 1,323 faculty. Reviewing pre-COVID-19 data, ET&S found:
- 76% of faculty were actively using myCourses and 27% taught an online course
- 60% used Zoom
- 28% used Kaltura and 18% used lecture capture
Although these numbers revealed some promise, they also showed there was much work to do in the way of training and support.
Setting Up the Starting Blocks
President Dean’s announcement had come during spring break, and many faculty took the opportunity to stay local and gain their online instructional bearings.
ET&S kicked off faculty engagement with a series of informational meetings, followed by break-out sessions to help faculty revise their course syllabuses. An online Instructional Continuity course also was launched to provide faculty with easy access to the resources they might need.
In short, the faculty needed a road map to navigate online teaching, and ET&S provided the required instructional design help and technological knowledge.
Putting it All into Play
Here is a synopsis of the support ET&S and its partners provided to faculty and students since instruction moved online in late March:
- ET&S staff made the student computer clusters Windows systems available for remote access, and also enabled remote access to academic software usually available in clusters and department labs.
- ET&S enabled access to Supertec classrooms to record lectures. These facilities are equipped with state-of-the-art technology to help faculty create engaging content for students.
- ET&S provisioned faculty with loaner laptops, web cameras, drawing tablets and microphones to make sure they had the required tools for online instruction and learning.
- ET&S staff hosted daylong, in-person office hours to quickly get faculty up to speed on Zoom, Kaltura, myCourses and Gradebook. These training sessions moved online during the waning days of spring break and continued once classes started. The schedule for all upcoming training sessions is available here.
- ET&S moved from in-person to online support, offering general and special software application support via Zoom to help ease the burden on faculty and students.
- In response to faculty concerns about the integrity and validity of online student assessments, ET&S created a best practices guide for faculty assessments while also introducing a technical solution: Respondus. This new tool can be integrated with myCourses quizzing to provide proctoring tools.
