BIV MAGAZINE
22 | BIV MAGAZINE: THE EDUCATION ISSUE 2021 PUBLISHED BY BUSINESS IN VANCOUVER
THE AGE OF BLENDED LEARNING Universities use in-person, online learning for best of both worlds ALBERT VAN SANTVOORT
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ecessity has been the mother of invention for post-secondary institutions during the pandemic, forcing the industry to modernize more quickly than it had planned. “There was maybe a lot of interest, but a bit of resistance to blowing everything up and forcing a new way of doing things,” says Elizabeth Elle, vice-provost and associate vice-president of learning and teaching at Simon Fraser University (SFU). “But the pandemic has forced us to. [The pandemic] freed up our creative facility to come up with really different ways to get to those learning goals.” While many institutions had created some online learning capacity, they were still operating with a 20th-century mindset – with a chasm between their digital and in-person offerings. Before the pandemic, post-secondary institutions were beginning to blend those two systems of learning together, according to a 2019 report from the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association. It was a project that had to pivot and accelerate once COVID-19 hit. “We were forced to make some really big changes and honestly none of us were excited about it; but we had to, to be safe,” says Elle. “We’ve learned really good things from this experience, some of them we don’t want to continue but others we absolutely need to continue because they’ve been great for our students.” Some programs immediately benefited from a digital format. For instance, in order to adapt to online learning during the
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pandemic, language study courses at SFU were divided into smaller breakout groups held via Zoom video conferencing. According to Elle, students found that this format made it easier for them to practice their language skills since it was less intimidating for them to speak in front of four or five students than doing so in a traditional class of 30. This not only led to innovative digital solutions, but it also helped to generally shake things up in a legacy industry, and allowed new, interesting ideas the space and ability to flourish. One example is biology labs. Elle explains that biology classes where students followed step-by-step instructions through a typical dissection had become routine, and students were just following along rather than discovering the different scientific processes for themselves. When students were forced to do their lab work from home without the typical university-grade research equipment, it created the opportunity for professors and teacher assistants (TA) to create “kitchen sink” experiments. Students have been encouraged to get involved in simpler experiments, such as testing the friction of Jell-O on a plate. While this may seem goofy, Elle shares that it’s actually forcing students students to ask questions like: how do we measure that? How do we collect data so others can repeat the experiment? How do we analyze that data?
2021-01-06 9:46 AM
