Lessons Learned: Adapting to Aid Faculty for Teaching in a Pandemic

Lessons Learned: Adapting to Aid Faculty for Teaching in a Pandemic This Lessons Learned paper outlines the post-COVID faculty development offerings from one engineering Teaching and Learning Center. As was likely the case for many Centers for Teaching and Learning in the Summer 2020, our center pivoted our intended summer programming to better address the needs of our faculty for teaching during a pandemic. Our Center is housed within the College of Engineering and provides pedagogical support to over 400 faculty. Our approach for the summer was to host multiple virtual workshop series that solicited the experiences of faculty, assessed their needs for teaching in different instructional modes, then provided both pedagogical and technological development opportunities by teaming up with our College's digital learning office (DLO). The first series we offered (May 2020) focused on faculty sharing their experiences and successes in the emergency transition to remote teaching in March of 2020. This series was broken into different workshops around different course contexts: Design classes, large classes, and labs. Forty-six faculty participated in this series (unique participants across all workshops). In June 2020, the University announced that the Fall 2020 would include in-person courses practicing social distancing, remote synchronous courses, remote asynchronous courses, and courses that used a mix of these modes (some students in-person and some joining remote asynchronously, for example). Following this announcement and in collaboration with DLO, we hosted a series of Townhalls where faculty could voice their concerns and highlight what they would like to receive additional development on. The Townhalls were separated into different course content types: Theory/analysis courses, Hands-on courses (like labs and design courses), and First-Year Seminars. Eighty-eight faculty attended the Townhall series (unique participants across all Townhalls). Using what we learned from the first two series, our Center and DLO offered a Summer workshop series in July 2020 that highlighted key elements for assisting faculty to prepare to teach in different modes in Fall 2020. The structure of the series was that our Center would host a workshop around the pedagogy of the topic on Tuesday, the DLO would follow-up with the digital tools needed for implementation on Thursday. The topics in the series were: student engagement, facilitating student teams, developing community, and assessment. DLO also offered an additional session on remote labs. At only our Center's session for this, 104 faculty members (unique participants across all sessions) attended. With this Lessons Learned paper and presentation, we hope to share our experience with the broader faculty development community. We will also share the resources generated from these sessions and our process for workshop development. We hope to be able to present our work as a lightning talk at the conference.