Moving Face to Face Courses Online as An Emergency Initiative – Wallace Pond
As colleges and universities across the country race to make wholesale shifts in a week or two from face to face to online educational delivery, many are discovering the challenges of such initiatives in the absence of adequate infrastructure, trained faculty, digital content, tech support, etc. What is happening today in many schools is a process that normally takes years and substantial resources.
I have personally built out online capacity, in some cases from scratch, four times in four different institutions going back to the mid 1990s through the mid 2010s. What I know from that experience is that while it is possible to create “band aids” in order to salvage a semester, it is not possible to create anything approximating a best practice online education operation in such a short time frame. Even in institutions with existing capacity for fully online delivery, unless most of the content delivered is already online, scaling up in a couple of weeks is basically impossible without substantial compromises to what their fully planned online education normally looks like.
In short, under the circumstances, there are extremely limited opportunities to leverage the powerful tools present in learning management systems. On the other hand, as a last resort response, it is possible to create a bridge that keeps students enrolled through the end of the term. In most cases, this bridge will be pedagogically weak (so weak as to be indefensible under normal circumstances), but as mentioned previously, the objective is not a best practice learning experience, it is short-term survival.