Remote Memories: Joys, Gratitude, Optimism, Sadness… We Miss You, Our Students! Stories from the Trenches

Authors: Anne Marie Ryan (Earth and Environmental Sciences), Josh Bates (Chemistry), Marie-Soleil Beaudoin (Physiology and Biophysics), Angela Crane (Chemistry), Sean MacKinnon (Psychology and Neuroscience), Amy Mui (Earth and Environmental Sciences), and Jennifer Stamp (Psychology and Neuroscience) 

As a community of learners in the faculty of science, like many other faculty across campus we spent some time recently unpacking how the rapid switch to remote teaching had gone: the ups and downs, the uncertainties, and the no-time-to-think days that ended the winter term this year. As we shared stories, the joys, the gratitude, and the comments about learning that we all experienced started to overshadow the chaos, uncertainty, and the workload. We recalled with both joy and sadness these days: joy at the support from students, colleagues, and TAs, and sadness at missing our students, the energy that evolved in-the-moment in our teaching, and the connections and real-life relationships that we had built in our classes.  

In one of our communities of teaching practice our reminiscing led to the idea that we put pen to paper to share, in each of our own voices, a particular experience or take-away from the winter term 2020. What follows is a collection of these reflections, each written in our own voices as a series of short vignettes. Reading through these you will see some common threads. Collectively, we missed the connections with our students, but we are truly grateful for the patience and understanding they shared as they too performed herculean efforts to complete what for many must have been the most unsettling and unnerving experience of their lives! We tell these stories as thanks to our students and our colleagues who buoy us up through these uncertain and “unprecedented” times. 

As Jennifer shows us, when met with obstacles… take out a guitar! 

Making Connections with Music  
Jennifer Stamp, Psychology and Neuroscience 

As someone who has developed online courses and strives for a blended format for my face-to-face classes, I found the transition to online delivery relatively easy. However, what struck me during these surreal circumstances is how much I miss interacting with students, especially the chats we have at the beginning of class. I decided on a whim to play a song on guitar at the start of my first fully online COVID lecture in lieu of the pre-class chit chat. What blew me away was how much positive feedback I got from students. They LOVED it, and I’m really not a very skilled musician. I’ve recently taken up the banjo, so my teacher transitioned our classes online and I even recorded my terrible banjo practice with another rendition a couple of weeks later to show my progress. The number of encouraging emails I got from students was delightful, so much so that they fuelled my fire to practice more. In fact, my students are a huge source of enthusiasm for a lot of what I do, and to lose that vibrant energy all at once was a huge transition shock. I hope I never take this for granted. I miss everyone, I’m looking forward to a time when we can be together again (I might even play some horrible banjo). 

And as Amy discovered - yes indeed, not only can you make virtual office hours work, you can find that you want to keep them moving forward, even in the face-to-face world!  

Virtual Office Meetings Can Work!  
Amy Mui, Earth and Environmental Sciences 

This surprising discovery helped students and me navigate the end of a fourth-year GIS (Geographic Information Systems) research projects course. The shut-down occurred at a critical moment when work on projects was at its peak. Students found themselves scrambling to obtain the needed GIS software or to remotely connect to lab terminals from their homes (some as far away as Yellowknife). The final three weeks of class would have involved one-on-one support sessions both inside and outside of class, but the pandemic left us almost entirely reliant on the Microsoft Teams online platform.  

Normally I am a strong proponent of face-to-face pedagogy, but this virtual platform revealed some surprising online advantages. The ability to screen share and remotely take control of a shared screen allowed for quick and simple instructions and troubleshooting. The audio feature enabled us to circumvent phone charges while the group chat allowed me to send messages efficiently to the entire class and request a smiley face or thumbs up emoji confirmation. Individual chat screens were used for quick questions. All correspondence was organized neatly within a ‘Team’ and not lost in long lists of daily emails. Finally, it was much easier to schedule virtual versus in-person meetings as we circumvented the need to travel to and from campus (and reduced carbon emissions at the same time - win!).  

For students feeling anxiety over this new isolation, the ability to speak to me from the comfort of their homes allowed them to open up about their experiences and challenges. While I still prefer face-to-face communication, I am also firmly on the virtual (dark?) side. Once life returns to some semblance of normalcy, I will be offering both virtual and in-person options for meeting. For me, this revelation has been one small silver-lining to this pandemic! 

Sean shares his experience moving his dynamic statistics class to the online environment, and how much he learned about himself in the process.  

Who Would have Thought…  
Sean MacKinnon, Psychology and Neuroscience 

The statistics classes I teach all involve an active learning workshop component.  Every other class, students work on applied problems and I operate as a “guide on the side.” During the rapid transition to online during the COVID-19 outbreak, this in-person experience was lost. In the face-to-face class these workshops are lively, and I (and my TAs) talk with many students during the entire session. With the transition to online, I had thought that these discussions would simply migrate to email, virtual office hours, and discussion boards. However, that’s not exactly what happened. Instead, most students just tried their best with the online activities on their own and didn’t talk to me at all. What really surprised me was the power of in-person, interpersonal communication for making students comfortable enough to ask questions and really engage in the material. When I’m physically present and able to answer questions in real-time, it makes such an enormous difference in student engagement. Beyond that, I recognize how immensely important the in-person communication is for me. Engaging with students energizes and motivates me, and I underestimated how much I would miss the live, in-person experience. It also gives me a window into students’ thought processes, that don’t always reveal themselves in the final submitted and assessed products. I discovered the soul of teaching for me is not just content and learning – it’s also the relationships, dialogues, and insights that blossom from verbal communication with the students.   

Teaching the largest class on campus, the switch was no deterrent for Angela, as she led the students through final term work and exams (systems crashes and all) with an upbeat optimism that was rewarded by so many expressions of gratitude from her students.  

Large Class? No Biggie!   
Angela Crane, Chemistry     

Coordinating and teaching the largest class at Dalhousie meant that moving completely to remote teaching, as we did in March, could have been riddled with challenges, anxiety and students feeling or being left behind. I’m certainly happy to report that was 100% not the case. In what has probably been the most tumultuous academic year of my career (hurricanes, power outages, snow days, and the COVID-19 closure), some (no, lots of) credit needs to go to the first-year students who just had to roll with it, and they did. I have never finished a term with more thank-you emails, or kind words from a student body. For those of us in First Year Chemistry, the students knew we were working for them, and they appreciated how we communicated our plans with clarity, but also light-heartedness. We continued to have fun and to be as “normal” as we could. Besides the students, I was astounded by the level of Departmental support we had and how a team can really come together in a crisis, even though I have seen our First-Year Chemistry Team come together like this before and knew we could handle the transition like a “well-oiled machine.” Having colleagues like this is not something I take for granted, and our togetherness really shone through in the face of adversity. That is not to say the term ended in perfection – our final exam crashed, for example – but due to swift action and clear communication even this “small” hiccup was handled with poise and grace. Also, in building materials for online, I learned that “fancy” educational software was often more cumbersome than free apps I could use on my phone (especially for recording audio) and that there is a time to say “good enough.” That said, I think the hardest part of the whole transition was the loss of student interaction. With a class size like ours, we could not find a suitable platform (in the one week of prep time we had) that would facilitate large scale, live, workshops/lectures/sessions. Going forward, having to teach remotely again, video conferencing capabilities to an audience of 1000 students (or more) is a must, and I look forward to tackling this challenge in the Fall!  

Josh speaks of how grateful he is for his colleagues and for the TAs who, in spite of their own life chaos, rose to the occasion for the students – we can so easily neglect to thank those who stepped up in amazing ways!  

With Thanks…  
Josh Bates, Chemistry

As I think back about the past semester, my primary sentiment is one of gratitude. Not to say there haven’t been frustrations and hiccups, but I found the transition to remote teaching went far smoother than I might have anticipated had I been told back in January that this is where we would be now. That said, I attribute this more to the support of a fantastic teaching team and the willingness of students to “play along” than anything I did or tried. While program coordinators, Drs. Angela Crane and Jennifer MacDonald, deserve so much credit for masterminding the transition of the first-year chemistry lectures and labs to remote delivery for our 1000+ students, I also want to acknowledge the phenomenal efforts of our small army of teaching assistants. I think all of the instructors were very impressed by these undergraduate and graduate students who, despite the uncertainty and confusion they faced in their own lives and education, really stepped up to ensure that lab reports were graded quickly and that first-year student questions continued to be answered via discussion boards. Although it is uncertain how significantly the current academic year (and beyond) will be impacted by COVID-19, I remain optimistic that we will build on the lessons we’ve learned from the winter semester and that I will have future opportunities to be grateful to our team for their collective efforts.  

 Marie-Soleil challenges us to consider how this uncertainty and new way of operating opens doors for us to help our students learn and grow in new ways. 

Turning Lemons into Lemonade: An Opportunity for Self-regulated Learning Skill Development
Marie-Soleil Beaudoin, Physiology and Biophysics 

I believe that self-regulated learning (SRL) is a critical skill that learners must cultivate through their undergraduate studies because it is essential for students to develop into lifelong learners. SRL involves a cyclical pattern of preparation, action, and reflection about learning tasks (Zimmerman, 2002; Figure 1) and is positively associated with academic achievement (Richardson et al, 2012).  

Figure 1. Self-regulated learning cycle. From Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Becoming a self-regulated learner: An overview. Theory into practice, 41(2), 64-70.

When I consider the increased reliance on online learning environments that COVID-19 brought, not only during the Winter and Summer 2020, but for the foreseeable future, I see an urgent need – and also a remarkable opportunity – to discuss, promote, and develop SRL with our undergraduate classes. Online learning environments are typically characterized by asynchronous communication and increased flexibility. In this context, time management, goal setting, motivation, learning strategy selection, and self-evaluation – all components of SRL – become even more critical for learners’ success. Consequently, I encourage all instructors to provide opportunities for students to practice SRL within their courses. Discussing goal setting, asking students to self-evaluate their comprehension, sharing evidence-based data about the efficacy of different learning strategies, or promoting peer-to-peer discussions of learning approaches are all ways we can unpack SRL in our courses. SRL is essential for all learners in all contexts. However, the current cohort is catapulted into a learning environment they did not choose. Perhaps this sour situation is the challenge we require to truly put students’ needs to cultivate SRL abilities at the forefront of our work.  

References: 
Richardson, M., Abraham, C., & Bond, R. (2012). Psychological correlates of university students' academic performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 138(2), 353. 

Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Becoming a self-regulated learner: An overview. Theory into practice, 41(2), 64-70. 

And from my perspective  
Anne Marie Ryan, Earth and Environmental Sciences 

My own experience echoes those of others. I knew I had wonderful groups of students, but to see them rise beyond expectations, to express such patience, understanding, and gratitude as we all learned together how to “go remote” is forever etched in my mind. I missed our end-of-year experiences, the energy, and the relationships. What has particularly stuck with me is that the students’ own stories need to be told, and it is my hope that some of them chose to write about their experience, their learning, and what had to be tremendous growth for them through that time. For example, the student who took 3 days to get home as she tried to keep up with a chaotic path of flights that followed anything but a straight line, or the students (and yes, they were more than one) who had to quarantine for 14 days in a hotel in a city they did not know before they could travel to their Northern home towns. There were the students who found their summer plans scuttled, their work in upheaval as their rural communities lacked stable internet, and those whose stories we don’t yet know. I also heard stories of how reconnecting with family in isolation had turned into joyful reunions and happy sharing, and the contented students who were surprised to find they preferred the on-their-own pace of the online environment. There are so many stories that need to be told, and so much we can learn from each other about these times. 

As we continue to navigate these new waters moving forward into this fall of change, we find ourselves exploring new ways to create learning communities, to energize discussions, and to connect with students from wherever they may be physically located. Although we all wish for a return to normalcy, we hope to demonstrate that lasting connections and profound learning opportunities can still exist through virtual means. We are grateful to our past and future students for weathering the end-of-term storm with such grace and fortitude, and for approaching the upcoming year with the same strength and open-mindedness. We are spurred on by the recognition that this too is a learning opportunity for us all, and a chance to really stretch our creative sides!   

Photograph courtesy of Anne Marie Ryan.  

contributions from the faculty of science