Kim Myrick from the Memorial University of Newfoundland has shared her views on how her students are coping with virtual learning.
Sputnik: Firstly, how has the pandemic affected your institution in particular?
Kim Myrick: Well, first off is the Teaching and Learning Initiative, where the whole teaching and learning area has been affected in the sense of, well, number one on the teaching side, faculty traditionally are prepared to go in face-to-face with a set time and set schedule.
In terms of student expectation, it's all very clear with the interaction between the faculty and the students what the expectations of those courses and the format and the content and delivery would be. Taking this and translating that into a different space or format has big implications not only for the scheduling, because students are now perhaps in different time zones - that has an impact as well on the format of what you would do.
Take for example, if I had a field trip in my class planned to an organisation in the field, that activity now, which was designed to meet a certain learning objective, would need to be changed to meet the virtual environment, to try to achieve the same learning objectives. And then, of course, the whole delivery mode is affected between the students and the instructor.
We no longer have face-to-face teaching, or we have to minimise that to a certain degree. So how do we take those face-to-face activities again and make them into more, what we would call "asynchronous activities". The instructor would create those activities at a certain time and put them in an online environment that a student could access at any time.
So all of those three variables to scheduling, the delivery, and even the content of the course are affected. So then instructors have to redevelop their courses, more or less, for the fall semester and that is probably the equivalent of time they'll put in to do that would probably double or more for a faculty member.
On the learning side for the students, of course, then they lose that environment. I suppose that is supported by their peers, those face-to-face opportunities to interact with the other students as well as their instructor in more ad hoc ways. You lose the ability to have that affirmation and confirmation within the environment that "I'm learning. I'm learning what I should be learning", because you kind of get that instant gratification from those face-to-face cues by an instructor and your peers.
Sputnik: How much longer do you think universities will continue virtual learning?
Kim Myrick: We are grappling with that right now in the Canadian universities. There's questions of will we go back in the winter or not? Right now, I think we have planned out as far as the fall for the short term. I think a big driving force for universities returning depends on a vaccine. There's talk that, you know, we wouldn't be able to have those large group settings in classes without that kind of reassurance and protection, that we have a vaccine and people are vaccinated.
But I still think that universities will strongly consider remaining virtual until there's an actual vaccine. Once we get our courses redeveloped, and in a better place by which we're, we know what we're doing, and how to deliver remote teaching effectively with what is considered to be of value to students, then, you know, it becomes less of a concern to remain virtual too. So I think there will be some of that. The learning curve will flatten out a little bit for instructors in their preparation as well as for courses.
And then I think we will remain hybrid. During these crisis times, the innovation and creativity will certainly spur a lot of change within how we deliver our curriculum to students going forward. I don't think we'll ever... some will go back to exactly the way it was, and there will be very good reasons for that, but I think there's definitely a shift in the way we will educate students going forward as well.
