Welcome back to this new edition of Education Technology Insights !!!✖
| | December - 20209Other challenging aspects of transitionincluded engaging students in interactive learning activities as well as assessing students' learning with the same rigor and fairness as would occur in an in-person class environment.When asked to rate their specific teaching activities after the transition, faculty reported the lowest levels of comfort toward engaging students in discussions with online forums or chat rooms. It's also worthwhile to note that faculty were least satisfied with the activity of assessing students' learning and progress. These challenges were often associated with the fact that faculty were expected to handle students' increasing needs for accommodations. For example, students' participation in remote learning tended to decrease due to various technical obstacles (e.g., limited access to Wi-Fi) and personal challenges (e.g., lack of time management skills, living in different time zones). Moreover, it was not always feasible to get spontaneous feedback from students in an online environment. Considering these pain points, we concluded that structured guidance about available instructional tools and resources, as well as strategies to enhance interactivity and effectively assess student learning online couldbe beneficial. In response to the challenges we observed in our study, the C21U team developed and piloted a new `Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Tool'that provides instructors with course-specific weekly snapshots of student progress and performance.Currently being integrated into Canvas, Georgia Tech's learning management system, this toolis designed to enable instructors to easily and quickly monitor students' learning experience in their course. The Canvas KPI toolis expected to enhance learning in future remote and hybrid courses based on near real-time measurement of student progress.Regarding perceived helpfulness of instructional resources in Georgia Tech's emergency transition to remote teaching, a significant proportion of instructors rated support from their department/college (71%) and shared tips from other faculty (73%) as either "very helpful" or "somewhat helpful". Notably, many of the respondents (32%) never sought webinars or other outside training opportunities, and only 35% of those who sought these resources found them helpful. These results suggest that faculty may benefit most from proactive support from within their department or college to address field-specific challenges in remote teaching and learning. Also, considering that the design of online instruction is highly dependent on themethods faculty use to deliver instruction, between asynchronous and synchronous, it is essential to provide the campus community with clear guidance on which methods to choose and best practices for success. In conclusion, our findings elucidate how faculty have responded to the recent emergency move to remote teaching and what lessons the Georgia Tech community has learned this year.Overall,the transition pushed instructors to experience new modalities and experiment with technology beyond what they had typically leveraged. Yet, we observed that the transition process exemplifieshow agile and flexible our facultycanbe in adapting to novel situations.Building upon implications from this study, a crucial step for higher education institutions and stakeholders would be to reimagine a new hybrid modelof education for the post-pandemic era. Interestingly, we found that our faculty's attitudes towards remote teaching appeared to differ to some extent by their course subject as well as prior experience in using technology < Page 8 | Page 10 >