The move to remote teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic has demanded rapid and unprecedented adjustments from Penn faculty and instructors and students. Below, seven faculty and instructors briefly tell their stories of those adjustments and of how they have worked to make their classes as successful as possible in this moment.

Robert Ghrist, Math and Electrical & Systems Engineering: As my multivariable calculus course is a flipped class, using a video-text I finished a year ago, my challenges in remote teaching are limited to keeping both spirits and academic rigor high. A light mood (and a fright wig) help with spirits. Rigorous remote tests are a challenge, but Canvas makes timed exams workable. Tips for successful execution include (1) using a separate Canvas assignment for uploading a scan of the on-paper work for the exam, with instructions to upload work within 30 minutes of typing in answers to the on-line exam; (2) instructing students to use a phone-based scanning app instead of snapping (large file size) pics, to save bandwidth; and (3) practicing the exam-taking, scanning and uploading with a low-stress quiz before the exam. Making sure that students can focus on demonstrating mastery of math without worrying about complex new protocols is one way to reduce student (and professor) anxiety.

Cindy Connolly, Nursing: I knew I needed to do two things as soon as I heard the University was moving to remote learning. First, I needed to get serious about figuring out how to better use technology. I had not really prioritized that in the past so I had a steep learning curve and I signed up for all the Center for Teaching and Learning courses I could. Second, given that I was fortunate to be teaching a history course, “Nursing 547 Nursing and Gendering of Health Care in the US and Internationally,” I decided to reshape course content around the 1918 influenza epidemic, both around the nation and in Philadelphia. The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn many comparisons to the 1918 flu. Some of them are well-reasoned and grounded in evidence. Others are not. Given that I had spent time at the beginning of the course arguing for the ways in which history can inform contemporary health care practice and policy, this was an opportunity to show how it can do so—but also how it can distort options and decision-making when used selectively or inappropriately.

In addition to ramping up my technology skills and reimagining some course content, I made a number of other changes to the course. Given the disruption students have faced, I cut out several assignments. I reminded them that they could take the course Pass/Fail but also, for the first time in my teaching career, I decided to offer extra credit to any student who wanted it. I hoped this would reduce stress and encourage students to build an individualized learning plan that would keep them engaged with course material. Because all of the students can meet virtually during our regular class time we do so, albeit for a shorter period of time, to discuss the readings, online materials and for primary document analysis. I have to be honest, I do not love teaching this way, but the students are patient and flexible and I have had a lot of help to quickly pivot the course to a remote format in a way that works.

Karen Detlefsen, Philosophy and Education: Doing a good job of launching and delivering a large lecture course with multiple recitations is, at the best of times, a team effort. The importance of effective team work to the success of such a course is all the more obvious during times such as those we currently find ourselves living through. I could not be more grateful for the extraordinary efforts and care that Matt Solomon and Eugene Vaynberg have made in their roles as teaching assistants for my 100-strong Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy course.

First off, we have students from Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, North America and beyond. Reaching all those students through live, synchronous meetings would seem to be impossible, but thanks to the willingness of Matt and Eugene to adjust their recitation times—including meeting late in the evening in their own time zone—we’ve managed to accommodate all students wanting to join a live recitation.

On top of the challenges of such a wide range of time zones, given the reorganization of recitation groups, students now find themselves in recitation sections with a whole new group of peers. The friendly relations that had grown up over the first half of the class have been interrupted, thus leading to the challenge of cultivating a new sense of community and belonging, and doing so through the imperfect mechanism of video conferencing. In order to work toward the goal of cultivating connection, Matt and Eugene have worked closely together to discern which small groups of 4-6 students might work especially well together in Zoom’s “breakout rooms,” which can be created in advance of each recitation session.

As colleagues across the University know all too well, we’ve had to radically revamp courses to try to make them as excellent as we can for our students in these sub-optimal conditions. This task is being made much easier with the indispensable help of our wonderful graduate students, Eugene and Matt included.

Meggie Crnic, History & Sociology of Science: When I first received notice that we needed to prepare to teach from home my instinct was to lecture live. The students in my lecture course provided a dynamic energy with their thoughtful contributions and real-time responses. I knew I would miss that, and I do. The green dot at the top of my screen is a sorry substitute for a class of nearly 80 undergraduates. I miss being able to see the students’ reactions. They help me discern if my words resonate or if I’m unclear, what triggers ideas and what falls flat.
However, I have gained an appreciation for new tools that capture the perspective of all students. In HSOC 102: Bioethics, we opened Discussion Boards with prompts for each lecture and reading set, asking students to post once a week. The students have excelled beyond our expectations. It has made me wonder if the disadvantage of distance has transformed into an advantage of time and space for engagement. Allowing students to respond when they have the intellectual energy, rather than within a tightly circumscribed 50 minutes of lecture or recitation, has opened the doors to stimulating and thoughtful conversations on a range of topics. Moreover, students whom we seldom hear from in class have voices that ring loudly and clearly online.

As I look toward the fall semester, I sincerely hope to be standing in front of a lecture hall full of students. Regardless, I will apply these lessons to reconsider how I can provide various platforms of engagement that will reach all students, from those who eagerly speak in class, to those whose voices we many not hear as often, but should. I look forward to hearing from each and every one of them.

Doris Wagner, Biology: For my half of BIOL101, a SAIL class with 72 students, I met my students in the classroom exactly once, the Friday before Spring Break. Then COVID-19 led to remote teaching. The extended Spring Break and the first week of class were rough. First, I did not know what was possible and then I was unsure how to implement the tools needed to support what I wanted. But last week our course started to feel “real” to the students and to me. What happened? We surveyed the students before class re-started. Their goal and mine, it turned out, was to keep the format as close as possible to what we had before. After week one, we asked the students how we were doing and made additional changes based on their comments. Now—as before remote teaching—students work in groups, where they get feedback from me or one of the TAs. We meet as a large group for discussions and for students “reporting out” to each other on how they solved the questions they worked on. We found a way to do this in two time zones and with some students working asynchronously. Additional challenges remain, but I am confident that together with the students, our postdoc and undergraduate TAs, we will find solutions.

Ian Fleishman, German and Cinema & Media Studies: One of the major challenges I’ve discovered in the transition to online learning under these circumstances has been to strike a balance between clear, direct communication of our revised learning objectives and how we’ll be structuring the final weeks of class, while at the same time remaining flexible to student needs and nimbly adapting to an evolving situation. We’ve all been buried under so many logistical emails in the past few weeks, that I’ve tried to keep my messages to students supportive and reassuring in their regularity, without emailing so often that it begins to feel intrusive or adds to the burden of the noise and chaos.

So, for a film course right on the cusp of 20 students, where synchronous teaching by Zoom is still feasible, I decided to make the first weeks back from the extended spring break entirely asynchronous, to allow students some time to settle in to this new normal. I also swapped in a new film by the same filmmaker we had been discussing just before the break in order to give the syllabus more continuity. I was pleased that student responses to a Canvas survey signaled an enthusiasm to try some live sessions, and I’m looking forward, now that we’re all getting a bit more accustomed to online learning, to our first synchronous discussion on Zoom.

Dennis Flores, Nursing: COVID-19 has impacted our class in several distinct ways. In NURS354, we assign undergraduates with community partners to expose them to social determinants of health that influence the outcomes that nursing students encounter in acute care settings. Students were expected to be at their sites at least two hours every week and work with site partners to identify and conduct a service project that community members deemed relevant for their unique health contexts. Since the suspension of ABCS classes in March, we have had to move the class fully online and ask students to revise their projects to deliverables that they can accomplish remotely. Moving the class online was not a big challenge as we already utilized Canvas for weekly discussion boards and incorporated several mandatory online classes about special topics via Bluejeans even before the pandemic. We changed some of the scheduled topics to underscore how social determinants of health impacts vulnerable communities differently in times of disasters. Not surprisingly, students weave in coronavirus-related examples in discussion board postings about other topics as this is an inescapable fact of life right now. Lastly, while the students’ revised projects have been scaled down, a handful chose to stay engaged with their partners and are assisting them from afar with fundraising efforts and pandemic-related calls to action that the community organizations are championing. All in all, the syllabus may have been revised but something tells me the goals of the class will be achieved.

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.