12 C OMMU NI T Y U NDE R L OCK D O W N MOOR E M AT T E R S S P R I NG 2 0 2 0
The joys and challenges of community under lockdown Andrew Shead / Head of Old Testament and Hebrew, Lecturer in Old Testament Screens are mentally exhausting, work in isolation is demotivating, and uncertainty about the future creates anxiety. The College responded to this challenging situation in four ways.
Clear communication Uncertainty breeds anxiety, so clear communication became even more important. Mark Thompson gave regular COVID briefings; Paul Grimmond, our Dean of Students, delivered a weekly video message with advice for godly resilience; Chaplains chatted with each student individually. Good communication reassures everyone that we are all in this together, that nobody is forgotten.
Photo: shutterstock
Make the mechanics of online College as simple as possible
A
s every Australian well remembers, lockdown dropped over us quickly. Over the course of ten days of rapidly evolving messages, we moved from comfortable normality to a fully online environment. Our IT team did six months’ work in one; the student deans listened ceaselessly to feedback as we experimented with new models; and the faculty bravely threw the academic programme up in the air to see how it could be made COVIDfriendly. Ironically, the first thing isolation did for us was bring us together—faculty, students, and staff—to work on the problem.
The challenge: to support our students to keep learning and growing spiritually while also managing the stresses of lockdown life and ministry. Most of our students have set aside years of their life to train for a life of ministry. They come to Moore to work hard, to get every scrap of value they can from these short, relatively undistracted years. But lockdown is the enemy of productivity, the friend of anxiety, and dangerous for the soul. When all interactions are on a screen, human efficiency can drop by up to 50%. So says recent research, and our experience bears this out.
This required the simplicity of ‘genius’—the genius in question being our IT team. They collected every activity of the college into one system: a virtual interface which integrated with our existing online learning system, internal communications, and calendar, and gave each student a single point of access to lectures, seminars, chapel, chaplaincy groups, informal meetings, the library, and more. The library staff team spent long hours identifying eBooks to purchase, so that students had access to the materials they needed for their research and writing. We soon had virtual classrooms, discussion groups, private meeting rooms, collaborative work spaces, shared resources, and more.
