A Year of Remote Teaching: the Good, the Bad, and the Next Steps
\nHow can academe make best use of the faculty\u2019s vast new capacity to teach with technology?
\nBy Michelle D. Miller March 17, 2021 from The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/p>\n
A year ago this month, the realization began to settle in: All the workarounds we\u2019d devised to continue teaching during the looming pandemic weren\u2019t going to be a short-term thing.<\/p>\n
Looking back, it\u2019s clear that pandemic teaching has pushed academics to the edge of possibility, and shown just what we can do with the tech we have and the willingness to experiment. It\u2019s also created a massive new reserve of faculty knowledge about how to use technology tools. We\u2019re never going back to a time when large swaths of the faculty lacked basic knowledge about things like learning-management systems and videoconferencing, or when the ability to teach in a virtual classroom was rare.<\/p>\n
Post-pandemic, that newfound capacity is something that academe can either waste or put to good use. I\u2019m hoping for the latter.<\/p>\n
Last March, as a veteran of online teaching and educational technology, I offered advice to instructors on \u201cGoing Online In a Hurry.\u201d By fall 2020, institutions had rolled out their own versions of HyFlex and other teaching models featuring some mix of in-person and online instruction. At Northern Arizona University, where I teach psychology, I\u2019ve been using its \u201cNAUFlex\u201d system for most of 2020-21. What follows are my thoughts on the surprises \u2014 good and bad \u2014 of this unprecedented academic year, and on what\u2019s coming next.<\/p>\n\n\t\t