That was probably the most exhausting week of my career. So far.
30 meetings (spread across Zoom, Teams, Skype for Business, phone calls, and Bongo). A few ad hoc unscheduled meetings and calls thrown in as well. 307 emails to respond to. 133 emails sent. The time that wasn’t in meetings was spent preparing for meetings and writing responses to meetings and following up on action items from meetings. And apologizing for having to miss or reschedule other meetings.
I drafted this as a briefing doc to help with decision making related to how we handle online exams for courses that are now being conducted remotely as a result COVID-19. It was circulated for feedback, so it may be useful to have a copy for reference here. I wrote it based on information gathered from the various vendors’ websites, and from conversations with colleagues. The doc was intended to give a high level overview of online exam proctoring software without delving into technical aspects. I’m intentionally not linking to vendor websites so this doesn’t turn into a sales pitch.
Hoo boy. Pandemic picking up steam. I’m running out of steam. Good times.
Like everyone I talk to, Zoom Fatigue has set in. I sit at my desk in my basement office area for hours at a time, without standing up or moving from in front of my laptop. Camera on for much of it. It’s exhausting. I don’t know if this is just an adjustment period, but I find it difficult to have the kinds of discussions we have in person - there are no informal “hey, got a second?” chats anymore. Everything is a Scheduled Meeting, or a chain of emails.
We’ve been getting questions from instructors who would like to use Zoom to conduct online exam proctoring, for up to 800 students. I mean. Golly. That’s just not a great idea. Aside from the philosophical issues involved with using a videoconferencing tool to surveil students during an exam, there are technical issues. How would 800 streams of video be recorded? How would that be viewed?
Also. The video feed isn’t necessary trustworthy. Not quite to the level of Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, but definitely something that shouldn’t be trusted 100%. Even if the software was able to fully lock out the feature, there’s nothing to prevent someone from using a doctored input as the source for their video. At the simplest level, here’s what’s possible directly within Zoom:
An article by Mehreen Kasana on Input Magazine made the rounds, talking about the “attention tracking” feature in Zoom, and how creepy and invasive it is.
It is. But it can also be disabled for any account - and if disabled for a campus account, it can also be locked out for all users.
Embedded tweet broken due to Twitter's arbitrary changes to how embedded tweets work. Thanks, Elon.
And, note to self: don't rely on embeds from third party sites for archival purposes because they will all eventually break.
With the COVID pandemic still picking up steam in North America, all universities had to make a rapid shift to online teaching as campuses were closed. Mine was no different. We’d been talking about possible pandemic planning since mid-february, but at the time it was all speculative and seemingly so far in the future. Things started to get real around March 11, 2020. There were local cases of COVID (although all travel-related), and it was time to start moving classes online - or cancel the semester outright. The impact on students of cancelling a semester would be severe, so all efforts went into avoiding that. We would shift courses online as classrooms were closed.
We implemented Zoom as a campus platform last week. It had been used in pockets across the university before that, but here’s the uptake after the first 3 full days of remote courses:
So far, the only real glitches have been with people using emails that aren’t in Peoplesoft (so the connection from D2L gets confused), and with people who had previous Zoom accounts with emails that aren’t in Peoplesoft (which is usually the same people as the first issue). We have workarounds for now, and will look at fixing the data quality issue in Peoplesoft after this semester wraps up. Zoom’s been holding up really well, aside from a brief DNS glitch on Friday (but even that didn’t appear to disrupt classes).
Whelp. All classes are online for the foreseeable future. 3,500 courses running at the moment, with no F2F classes. I’ve been absolutely blown away by how supportive instructors, students and staff have been. The UofC made the right call to move classes online before there was a known pocket of COVID-19 on campus. I mean, it’s probably already through the community, but by sending every student home, it should hopefully slow things down significantly. Flatten the curve.
Mercader, C., Gairín, J. (2020). University teachers’ perception of barriers to the use of digital technologies: the importance of the academic discipline. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 17, 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-0182-x
Article looks at instructors’ reported use/adoption/barriers of digital technologies for teaching.
The article appears to have been written in 2017, and only published in March 2020? Why the delay?
They propose a typology to classify barriers to adopting digital technologies:
Harel, I., & Papert, S. (1990). Software design as a learning environment. Interactive learning environments, 1(1), 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1080/1049482900010102
An elementary school math class developed software to teach fractions. One class. In a high-end experimental school with full access to then-new technology. For part of one semester. Some students did the usual fractions classes, some did the “write some software to teach someone something about fractions”. The software-design group spent a few weeks building their software, and showed better comprehension of fractions. Is it because they designed software? Is it because they were part of an experimental group and thus fractions were a special and exciting topic? Something else? Who knows. But the kids made some interesting software and Harel and Papert got another data point for constructionism.
We started preparing resources to support a rapid shift to online teaching, in case the COVID-19 thing spreads to Calgary.
I got to meet with a gathering of librarians, to talk about learning technologies that are available - and to talk with them about how we can support instructors in response to a potential COVID-19 thing. UWashington just announced they’re closing doors for a few weeks.
On a mostly-unrelated note, I’m involved with trying to make a few online tools available for teaching and learning, and am struck by just how hard and slow that’s become. I don’t think something like campus email could be implemented as a new thing in the current environment.
One of the major projects our team1 has been working on for the last couple of years is the University of Calgary’s Curriculum Links application.
From the project website overview:
It’s an application that supports curriculum design and review - an entire program can be designed before it’s submitted to a faculty for approval, allowing for pre-flight testing of the program. Do all of the claimed program-level outcomes get incorporated appropriately? Are there gaps? Redundancies? Is every course trying to teach one outcome, but none are teaching another one?