Digital transformation
How Marquette transitioned more than 1,500 classes to online education in just over one week — a look behind the scenes
By Sarah Koziol, Arts ‘92
They call it the Dream Team
That’s how Dr. Maria Pares-Toral and Dr. Jennifer Maney describe the 40-plus faculty members, instructional designers and Information Technology staff who answered the call to support hundreds of Marquette educators who were abruptly tasked with teaching their spring semester courses from home. It was a necessity brought on by the deadly viral tsunami that was shuttering campuses across the country.
Marquette was not unusual in the crisis it faced: Within days, university leaders resolved to move upwards of 1,500 classes online, ultimately for the remainder of the academic year. The university’s Center for Teaching and Learning, Division of Digital Learning, and Information Technology Services — what would become the collective nerve center of this breathtaking operation — immediately began rallying troops and assessing resources.
Under normal circumstances, these offices — and leaders within them such as Pares-Toral and Maney — support Marquette’s expansion into online learning. They engage faculty in a five-month-or-longer process of rethinking a course’s pedagogy, “handouts” and other media deliveries, student assessments, and points of student-faculty interaction.
Under the leadership of Dr. David Schejbal, vice president and chief of digital learning, Marquette has thus grown its online course offerings by more than 40 percent in just two years. And the results are often a sight to behold — not just a video recorder fixed on a professor’s lecture for hours, as the uninitiated may expect, but a fresh reimagining of learning for a new age, tuned to reflect Catholic, Jesuit principles.
But the urgent situation in mid-March — just over a week to bring more than 1,500 classes online — left no time for these usual processes.
As interim director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, Maney, Grad ’90, ’08, sought faculty volunteers to backstop dedicated staff in handling the volume of course conversion that lay ahead. She started asking for help — and it came, in true Marquette fashion.
“Every single faculty person I reached out to — those who have their own classes rolling online, who have their own internships or practicums they had to figure out, who have their own research — without hesitation, said yes,” Maney says of this makeshift squad, many of whom were known across campus for their significant experience with online-learning pedagogy and technologies.
Pares-Toral, director of online pedagogy and e-learning production, says her division went into what she calls “triage” mode. This event required a stripping down of their typical process, to just the bare essentials faculty needed to complete the semester’s original learning outcomes. This was going to be learning from a distance, not online learning.
Phase one began.
Pares-Toral — plus six instructional designers, another one borrowed from Raynor Libraries, two media producers, a graphic designer and an instructional technologist — pored over all their trainings and materials to boil them down. At the top of Pares-Toral’s to-do list was to convey to faculty that the courses they had set out to teach in January would have to evolve due to this crisis. Expectations had to be adjusted.
“In order for faculty to feel comfortable and be successful, they have to work with something they can complete,” Pares-Toral says. “If they have too high expectations in terms of keeping the course exactly as it was being taught and that means using very complex technology, the timeline just doesn’t allow for that.”
Before students “came back” from spring break — to their classes, if not their classrooms — Pares-Toral’s distance-learning task force presented live training sessions on how to use D2L, the university’s e-learning platform. More than 600 faculty showed up for them that week. They also set up a series of on-demand trainings via videoconferencing and established a distance-learning help desk staffed by instructional designers who rotated late-hour and weekend shifts to ensure steady faculty support.
Through the next phase — the first two weeks of classes — the distance-learning help desk, the IT help desk and the faculty Dream Team members maintained faculty support through emails, phone calls and “virtual coffees.”
The latter video chats offered faculty more casual, intimate opportunities to share challenges, concerns — even levity — amid their unimaginable circumstances:
Who has experience holding a live, interactive class with students? Who could help when students could not get past the halfway mark on an online quiz? What was the optimal way to take attendance?
Faculty leaned on one another like never before. Dr. Amber Young-Brice, assistant professor of nursing and a member of the faculty consultants, says, “Our College of Nursing implemented daily check-in meetings for faculty, and I have to say the sense of community has never been stronger.”
“I have to say the sense of community has never been stronger.”
“Distance cannot keep us from celebrating successes — and joy — of our students together.” Read about one professor’s experience in the digital classroom.
Young-Brice herself was unshaken by the remote-learning seismic shift and turned her energies toward onboarding her colleagues. She had implemented virtual nursing simulations into her courses four years ago. She found the online program vSims, which puts students into real-time care scenarios at virtual bedsides, to be a complementary approach to clinical learning, so she integrated it into Foundations of Nursing Practice I and II courses.
When student nurses were pulled from clinical assignments due to COVID-19, the College of Nursing was familiar enough with vSims to start integrating it into a range of courses that were moving online. Several nursing faculty helped move 512 students and 118 faculty to teaching clinical, lab and simulation fully through online modalities in the first two weeks.
“Faculty and students are settling into their new normal. We are finding what we have control over and really shining,” Young-Brice adds. “Students I have talked to mentioned feeling uneasy with all of the unknowns, worries and newness, but are starting to find a new rhythm and ways to stay organized in a more unstructured environment than what they found on campus.”
“Students I have talked to mentioned feeling uneasy with all of the unknowns, worries and newness, but are starting to find a new rhythm and ways to stay organized in a more unstructured environment than what they found on campus.”
As the adrenaline rush subsided, the remote-learning leaders realized that technology complications — and there were some — could be resolved. The human factor, however, requires more ongoing attention. Pares-Toral told her teammates from the start, “Above everything, be kind.” You never know what is happening on the other side of the screen, she says.
“Some students will excel, while others will struggle,” says Dr. Scott D’Urso, chair and associate professor of communication studies and another faculty partner. “We need to make sure we are patient and compassionate in our relationships with our students.”
CTL encourages checking in with students as best as technology and stay-at-home orders allow. And many faculty have embraced the Jesuit tenet of cura personalis, care for the whole person, not just with meaningful teaching, but with attention to students’ mental well-being in a moment of change-induced anxiety, separation and disappointment.
Frequently this means faculty must prioritize the student experience while navigating their own concerns, such as school-aged children at home or at-risk elderly parents in isolation.
“When I hold optional video sessions each week for my classes, I can’t help but burst out, ‘I miss you,’ and students do the same.”
“It’s hard existentially for many of us, myself included,” says Dr. Melissa Shew, visiting assistant professor of philosophy and Dream Teamer. “Transitioning from in-person classes, where we come together in the mission and spirit of Marquette in a way that’s nearly palpable, to a virtual space, where that mission and spirit cannot be taken as a default, must be intentionally cultivated.”
Opportunities for personal connection and care have to be seized. “When I hold optional video sessions each week for my classes, I can’t help but burst out, ‘I miss you,’ and students do the same,” Shew says. “We are getting through it, but I do really, really miss the students in my classes, and for at least some of them, the feeling seems to be mutual.
“Perhaps remote learning will remind students of the ways that being together in person can be existentially important to our lives.”
