A SPRING SEMESTER LIKE NO OTHER As COVID-19 disrupts campus, Iowa State perseveres
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How do you flip the switch and put 6,000 lectures, labs, and hands-on learning sessions online? It wasn’t easy. Iowa State instructors had a little more than a week to figure out how to move all of their spring course sections online. It took innovation, creativity, and hard work. “The switch to virtual instruction has been the fastest and most challenging teaching effort ever at Iowa State University,” senior vice president and provost Jonathan Wickert (A) said. “Today over 6,000 courses are being taught virtually. Frankly, this kind of work has never been done before.” “It was a mammoth undertaking,” said Abram Anders, associate professor of English. “It was all hands on deck, and we were working 24/7.” Sara Marcketti (A)(PhD ’05 text & cloth), director of the Center for Excellence
in Learning and Teaching (CELT), said the Center provided resources and plans for online instruction. A CELT Response Team was established to staff a call center and help faculty with their move online. Faculty uploaded lectures on video, prepared tutorials, and used a platform called Canvas to allow peer conferencing and reviews of draft work through discussion boards and collaborative writing apps. Some faculty chose to use Zoom for their courses. One instructor – Raluca Iancu, an assistant professor of art and visual culture – made miniature printing presses with a 3-D printer for each of her students so they could continue their printmaking projects at home. “Departments have been incredible sharing resources online,” Marcketti said. “It’s a nice unintended consequence that people are really talking about teaching and how to do it effectively.”
Mike Lyons, associate teaching professor of biomedical sciences, teaches to an empty classroom in the College of Veterinary Medicine.
DAVE GIESEKE
The ultimate flip
Online classes. Remote work. Zoom meetings. Essential employees. Social/physical distance. Virtual commencement. This semester, Iowa State, along with the rest of the country and the world, learned new terms and practiced new procedures for teaching, working, collaborating, and learning in this unprecedented time of global pandemic.
S U M M E R 2 0 2 0 W W W . I S U A LUM . ORG V I S I O N S
