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Lessons learned | Hybrid, remote teaching likely to stay at most local colleges
Making the Grade 2021
Saturday, February 27, 2021
4
BERKSHIRE EAGLE FILE PHOTO
At Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts In North Adams, Mass., a student receives a temperature check during move-in day in August 2020.
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Lessons learned
Hybrid, remote teaching likely to stay at most local colleges
BY DANNY JIN The Berkshire Eagle
During a four-week workshop over the summer, faculty members at Berkshire Community College became students — at least when it came to learning strategies for remote and hybrid teaching.
Seventy-three of BCC’s 142 fulltime faculty participated in the training.
“We wanted faculty to have the student experience, and I think faculty learned a lot from doing that,” said Lauren Foss Goodman, dean of the Pittsfi eld, Mass., college’s teaching and learning innovation division, which BCC established in 2019. “And every time we got frustration, we pointed out, ‘If you didn’t like how we presented this or what we did, don’t do this to your students.’”
Last spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic forced higher education institutions to shift to remote and hybrid teaching. For some, this was an almost entirely new experiment. Others had already planned to expand online offerings, but the pandemic sped up the rollout.
“The foundation and all the support structures were there,” Goodman said of the college’s online courses, which have been offered in some capacity since 2001. “We just really, really had to ramp it up.”
Five local colleges shared what they learned in the last year, what worked and what didn’t and what they hope to improve on going forward.
Challenges faced
When designing online courses, many institutions realized it couldn’t be a one-size fi ts all virtual learning experience for its student population.
It’s important to remember that students may have a disability, whether they’ve disclosed it or not, said Gerol Petruzella, director of academic technology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Mass..
Landmark College’s online courses, like all of its courses, are “engineered” for students with diverse learning needs. The private college in Putney, Vt., is designed for students with learning disabilities, attention defi cit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder.
“Some people are wired differently, and they have some different challenges,” said Landmark President Peter Eden. “Landmark’s model is replete with support systems.”
Disparities in access to the internet and technology also present a barrier for some students. At Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., that meant providing hotspots and other solutions for students working remotely, Dean of the College Marlene Sandstrom wrote in an email.
Measuring success
Although grades in the spring and fall were “pretty consistent” with most BCC semesters, there was a slight increase in the number of students who failed courses. That development was “not dramatic, but also not unexpected,” Goodman said. Students — like all of us — faced increased struggles during the pandemic with health, fi nances, child care and more.
To account for this, BCC encouraged faculty to rely less on highstakes, “summative” exams and papers in favor of shorter, “formative” assessments, Goodman said. When faculty give feedback on smaller assignments, students can adjust accordingly.
While some private colleges, including Williams College, allowed students to take courses pass/fail, it’s tougher for community colleges to provide those options, Goodman said. Many pass/fail credits cannot be transferred, which is something many community col-
lege students are looking to do. Instead, faculty offered fl exibility in other ways, including allowing students to take an “incomplete” in order to make up the remaining work during a later term, Goodman said.
At Bennington College, a private liberal arts college in Bennington, Vt., faculty write end-of-term narrative evaluations for each student rather than assigning letter grades. That system made the college better suited for the pandemic, said Noah Coburn, associate dean for curriculum and pedagogy. Descriptive evaluations, which focus on what a student did, rather than normative ones, which judge how well a student did based on a particular metric, can better capture what someone accomplished in a course, Coburn said.
What we learned
While the past year was diffi cult in many ways for these institutions and their students, there were some positive lessons learned that will shape higher education moving forward.
BCC found that hybrid formats allowed students to have the most success, aligning with national trends for community colleges. Expanding hybrid and remote teaching helps ensure students have options for courses that fi t their academic and lifestyle needs, Goodman said.
The pandemic led Landmark to experiment with “block scheduling,” and it will likely permanently shift from traditional semesters to shorter periods with fewer
BERKSHIRE EAGLE FILE PHOTO
Masked students walk the campus of Berkshire Community College in Pittsfi eld, Mass., in October 2020.
courses, Eden said.
“A lot of people don’t think [the semester system] works well, taking 12 or 15 credits over 14, 15 weeks, if you’ve got a learning disability,” Eden said. “There’s a huge potential pool of skilled workers that cannot get through college because of a traditional educational orthodoxy and model.”
Holding summer courses online, which MCLA will do again this year, allowed the college to have its highest ever number of summer students, said Ely Janis, its interim dean of academic affairs.
At Bennington, Coburn said he looks forward to resuming inperson instruction, a key part of its identity as a small residential college. But, he said, the past few months showed that “more aspects of a Bennington education are effective in online learning environments than maybe we expected before.”
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Making the Grade 2021
| Saturday, February 27, 2021
Making the Grade 2021
Saturday, February 27, 2021
6
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