COVID-19 RESPONSE
By Paul A. Miller
REMOTE RESPONSE Zoom. Aside from describing a now ubiquitous brand of online meeting (or a children’s television show, for those of a certain age), the word is also an apt description for how the world rapidly responded to the COVID-19 pandemic that, practically overnight, upended nearly every facet of our lives. With little time to act and under directives from state and federal officials to guard public safety, nearly every institution — from your corner grocer to higher education — scrambled to keep their organizations moving forward. Quite simply, everyone had to zoom.
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UAlbany Magazine Fall 2020
o blunt the mandatory isolation and physical distance, UAlbany – along with much of the world – turned to technology. For Chris Moore ’00, the University’s associate director of Educational Technology Services, that meant he and his team needed to bring an entire university’s teaching and learning community – hundreds of faculty members, thousands of students – fully online in just a matter of weeks. “The scale of the task was something we would not have considered in the past,” said Moore, who earned a master’s degree in Curriculum Development and Instructional Technology from UAlbany. “Typically, creating an online course requires months of planning and building in Blackboard,” Moore noted, referring to the University’s online learning management system. At the beginning of March, prepandemic, there were more than 2,200 classes using Blackboard. Yet, the vast majority of those classes were not fully online, and nearly none were geared towards extended and entirely remote instruction. “I knew we
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