Course Change
When the world shifted in March of 2020, instructors, leaders and Orfalea College of Business students needed to adapt to it. Here’s how they learned to thrive in an online learning environment.
By Grace Power Smith
Orfalea College of Business Interim Associate Dean Stern Neill was training to take his new position when everything went virtual in spring of 2020. Part of those efforts was helping to organize the Orfalea College of Business by doing student outreach and scheduling, two aspects of his role that went into overdrive when the pandemic hit.
“You just adjust and adapt,” says Neill, looking back now with more than 18 months of perspective. “It’s a survival mechanism and, thankfully, I believe we were fit enough, even in a changing environment, to adapt.”
When universities were forced to shut down in the spring of 2020 due to the pandemic, students, faculty and staff were forced to adapt to a style of teaching and learning that was brand new to many. At Cal Poly, leaders within each college attended virtual campus-wide meetings and sent frantic emails to students about how to grapple with a world-wide pandemic and how it would affect education.
Although most professors and staff agree going virtual was a huge adjustment, they say members of OCOB worked together to get creative and support each other through the transition.
Instructional designer Teresa Cameron was instrumental in assisting professors in designing online classes. She worked with more than 100 professors to implement technology, provide tutorials and give tips to make virtual teaching successful.
“This would have been my ultimate fantasy if it hadn’t come with the horror,” says Cameron. “We’re always working to improve the pedagogy. We always want to improve the education system with the use of technology.”
The college also set up a virtual mentorship in which a professor from each concentration, who either had experience teaching online or had interest in helping other professors, would organize tutorials and assist their peers in providing an effective learning environment for students.
“You just adjust and adapt. It’s a survival mechanism and, thankfully, I believe we were fit enough, even in a changing environment, to adapt.”
Cameron said she believes Zoom is one of the best video conferencing apps, and the developers made changes that helped make it more applicable to education. Associate professor of Finance Pratish Patel used Zoom for his lectures. He said he believes in-person interaction is the best way to learn and teach, but he developed strategies to make sure students were engaged and learning.
“I think of teaching more as a performance, so I memorize all my notes, I memorize my jokes and sometimes I purposely make mistakes when I write stuff to see if someone catches it and slows me down,” Patel says. “And then I always ask the students, ‘Does this make sense, does it not make sense?’ more in a storytelling way.”
He added that most of his jokes bombed, but said Zoom made it easier to bring in outside speakers for the students.
Economics lecturer Solina Lindahl began teaching in a synchronous format, but transitioned to an asynchronous format and implemented technology she felt helped the students learn more effectively. She would also hold optional class time for students to work through problems and answer questions.
“I used a flipped model where the classroom isn’t used for lecturing, it’s used for problem solving and application. And the students prepare outside of class with reading or, better yet, videos and multimedia,” Lindahl says.
She said she used platforms such as PlayPosit, which pauses students during their reading so they can answer questions about the material, and FlipGrid, which she said she used as a verbal part of exams to help eliminate cheating and ensure students understood the material.
Associate professor of Industrial Technology Ahmed Deif said he aimed to strike a balance between providing quality education and being understanding about students’ struggles this past year.
“I definitely was very considerate about the load and the expected topics to be covered and to take it easy a little bit in terms of the quantity,” Deif says. “I was offering a lot of online office hours because there are a lot of things that you can do easily for all students at the same time with your office open and people just coming in and out. But with an online office hour, it takes a little bit more time and effort.”
Deif said one of the biggest challenges for his class was transitioning from a hands-on style of teaching, in which he would have students assemble equipment or use production lines in his class. To compensate for a virtual environment, he asked students to use online games that offered a simulation of manufacturing systems in supply chains and how they could be improved.
“I tried to do what we call a hybrid approach,” he says. “So, this was double effort on me. I’d upload the normal teaching early, so I was already lecturing. Then, I used the normal time of the lectures to go through this engagement and discussion and games with the students.”
Many professors got creative with how they would stay true to Learn by Doing in a virtual environment.
“I got more positive feedback from students reaching out and thanking me for things that I hadn’t done before, and that helps me just remember the humanity of us all and how the struggles and challenges that a lot of people face in any given quarter are way more important than anything else.”
Lindahl said she saw some of the best presentations she’s ever witnessed in her Economics of Poverty, Discrimination and Immigration (ECON 303) class because she was forced to redesign the assignment. Instead of having students present a topic to her one-on-one, she created teams and had them prepare for a debate on a $15 minimum wage and a wealth tax. They would flip a coin to decide which team would debate for or against the topic in front of the rest of the class on Zoom.
“I thought that was really successful,” she says. “That’s kind of when I realized there was a sweet spot for me for online teaching.”
Patel designed a project in his data visualization class where the class partnered with the Community Foundation of San Luis Obispo County, a charity organization, to analyze their data from a survey and create a dashboard.
“Because students are graduating in spring, and then they are just kind of done, the best thing I can do is maybe give them a sense of pride because they did something that could be helpful for the community,” Patel says.
Cameron said she believes the faculty and staff at OCOB were very responsive to students and took into account their needs and feedback. Patel and marketing lecturer Lisa Simon conducted a student outreach survey that captured student feedback on how the college was delivering online education.
Students responded by saying they prefer a hybrid class style, consistent deadlines for assignments, recorded lectures and the ability to get to know the professors and classmates. The survey results were sent to OCOB faculty with solutions about how to implement these requests, such as offering time before and after class to chat, posting topic-focused lectures to Canvas and posting all assignments at the beginning of the quarter.
For the most part, professors say they are looking forward to going back to the classroom in the 2021-2022 academic year, and they say they have missed the energy of being in person. Deif said he will be implementing what he has learned this past year and a half into his classes in the fall, and he realized how valuable classroom time is.
Lindahl said she realized how important face-to-face interaction is for students, and could tell they missed being in class.
“Students changed a little bit this year in that they became more grateful for the little things,” she says. “I got more positive feedback from students reaching out and thanking me for things that I hadn’t done before, and that helps me just remember the humanity of us all and how the struggles and challenges that a lot of people face in any given quarter are way more important than anything else.”