Work in Progress: Cultures of Collaboration in Emergency Remote Teaching and Beyond

Cultures of Collaboration in Emergency Remote Teaching and Beyond We pride ourselves on teaching through hands-on learning and being available to students and colleagues in campus offices. In part, these elements make us good teachers. Prior to March 2020, face-to-face interaction was the way we taught, collaborated, served and learned. Then, COVID-19 became real and, within a week, we could no longer be physically present with our students and peers. We shifted instruction to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). We also shifted the way we collaborated in our scholarship and service. Informed by research, this paper highlights aspects of our journey, challenges along the way and lessons learned to apply to the future. As educators in a predominately engineering university, the courses we teach address identified gaps in traditional engineering education and focus on the "soft skills" [1]. Team-based learning and team projects are central to our teaching pedagogy. In moving to ERT, we had many questions centering on retaining our pedagogy in a completely online environment. This dilemma required us to become collaborative learners ourselves, demonstrating an entrepreneurial mindset [2]. Specifically, we took risks to explore ways to create an online structure to enable students to reach course learning objectives. Within our own discovery process, we developed stronger collegial relationships and applied our learning not just to the classroom, but to our service and scholarship work. Moving online in ERT changed the way we lived out our culture and provided new collaboration tools that benefited all aspects of our work as faculty. These benefits can extend beyond the ERT period. As we look to the future, we must ask ourselves, how can we intentionally take these lessons learned and apply them to our practices as educators and as colleagues to promote collaboration and learning?