Boot Camp Provides Teachers Online Lessons

Stephanie Barnett, a Thomas Nelson faculty member since 2011, teaches developmental English. She has bachelor's and master's degrees, as well as a Ph.D. She's considered a "master teacher," and has been teaching online classes for a number of years.

Yet she didn't hesitate to participate in the virtual VCCS Faculty Boot Camp, which provided tips on how to improve your online courses. She had a simple explanation why.

"I don't know it all," she said.

The Aug.10-13 boot camp, run by Sheri Prupis of VCCS, attracted an audience of about 200 from around the state. For those who couldn't make the Zoom sessions, they still could participate by reviewing the sessions, which were recorded. That is what Barnett did.

"I would recommend it to anybody (those new to online teaching and those more familiar with it) no matter what their status is because we can gleam something from it," Barnett said.

Prupis is the director of teaching and learning technologies for all 23 institutions in the VCCS, which has used online teaching in some form for more than 15 years. However, with the coronavirus pandemic, that has increased dramatically this year.

"We had faculty who really had to pivot, who were not using any online tools at all and were suddenly forced into an unknown environment," Prupis said.

She first started educational online sessions in the spring. She said she reached about 2,000 faculty through the March and April sessions. In June, she cut off registration at 500. At the August sessions, she had 200. Nineteen Thomas Nelson faculty signed up for the most recent sessions, with another 30 or so doing it on their own, as Barnett did.

The information and structure have changed since the spring sessions. The June series lasted four weeks, with just one or two sessions a week. In August, there were two sessions a day for four consecutive days, and there were homework assignments each day.

The focus this time was on methods and ideology.

"We really want to pay attention that it's a different way of teaching and learning when you are totally online," she said. "Even if you're synchronous, even if you're in Zoom, it's different. We are working with the faculty on how to have this new mindset back to reimagining of teaching and learning."

Barnett said that was helpful.

"Because I'm redesigning all my classes this semester as I go, to meet the pandemic needs, it's helped me," she said of the lessons. "It makes me rethink what I should be saying, and I'm rethinking past practices."

She said one example was engaging students as a group, which isn't easy in an online environment. If students are familiar with one another, they are more likely to engage, but if they aren't, then they are more hesitant to engage.

"It's just making me rethink stuff," she said.

As Prupis explained, an instructor can upload several PDFs to Canvas, but that won't make for an interesting and interactive course.

"Your content is there. You might even have your assignment there telling the students to email it back to you. But it's not an engaging course," she said. "You really need to understand how to use modules; how to create a course and a model objective; how to chunk their materials into reasonable amounts of time. And especially, how to create a community of learners among students."

Prupis said she has received a lot of positive feedback from the sessions, so she expects more, and she'll continue to adapt the lessons, just as the instructors have to adapt their lesson plans.

"I will continue to morph it," she said, noting this time she did not cover the basics of Canvas.

In the past year or two, she's done what she calls "one-off sessions," where she covers specific topics or needs. The August sessions had themes, but she expects to hold more "one-offs" in October.

"I'm likely to do an advanced class in creating assessments. I'm likely to do an advanced class on doing breakout rooms in Zoom and engaging students," she said.

She also expects to run boot camps in December and January to prepare teachers for the spring semester.

"It will be similar to what I'm doing now but it will morph. It won't be identical," she said.

Barnett said she will participate in those also.

"It may not be everything you will need, but we might come away with a caveat, and it might be later when you're looking at an assignment going, 'You know, they were talking about ...' and you might look at the assignment a little bit differently," she said.