Providing Conditions in Which They Can Learn—Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The students now looked to faculty to help them understand what their old face-to-face, on-campus course was going to be like as a new virtual pandemic course and how we were going to help them get through it. How were international students who went home over spring break going to maintain contact with the content now that they were banned from returning to the states and were living a continent away? Because I didn't want my students to flounder, or stumble or falter, my new provisions included releasing my own intact lecture notes in both PowerPoint and PDF formats fully online;previously, the student version of the notes made available to them contained fill-in-the-blank slides as an incentive to attend class. [...]I revamped our lively classroom conversations for those who could not physically join us by creating real-time interactive discussion groups on a virtual discussion board or through chat rooms in D2L, our online learning course management system. Summer's Stride and Fall's Foreshadowing As with my spring colleagues, we summer educators worked extraordinarily long hours and demonstrated astonishing dedication in preparing course materials for our virtual classes.