In Spring 2020 institutions across the world had to face the disruption of on-campus lessons and move to remote teaching. The presenters will discuss the strategies to move more than 4,000 courses to a remote teaching environment driven by one goal: quality and accessible education for all students.
Quality online education, culture of equity, digital fluency, and attention to an increased and diversified student population, are essential goals that institutions have to achieve. The Office of Digital Learning at The University of Texas at San Antonio, part of the Academic Innovation division, embraces these goals in their mission. But what happens when these goals have to be reached in less than one week, during a pandemic with no precedent in the history of the institution? The presenters will share their story. Through a socratic dialogue, participants will explore different challenges and reflect on what digital transformation is and how to promote digital transformation at the institutional level during unprecedented times. Participants will explore initiatives, lessons learned and successful stories about:
- Build consensus and create cohorts of online teaching champions.
- Implement a course template based on quality standards for online education, and disseminate these standards and principles of good practices across campus.
- Promote digital fluency and become the first four-year public campus in Texas to be designated an Adobe Creative Campus.
- Adopt new technology and procedures to simplify communication and cooperation, value student feedback, and create an ecosystem in which all units/departments work together no longer as silos, but as reliable partners for student success.
- Implement a massive action to certify faculty in the Appling the Quality Matters standards.
- Lead a Digital Learning team to be an active partner for the university’s overall strategy to advance academic excellence.
Participants will have the opportunity to work in small groups and be engaged in an active dialogue based on the socratic method. The use of interactive tools such as Padlet for live interactive surveys and the Adobe Creative Cloud will make the presentation more dynamic.
Session Learning Outcomes:
- Understand skills and cultural switch to become an active partner for academic excellence in a time of crisis.
- Build resources to help faculty embrace quality standards for online education and promote the development of competitive skills for their students’ career.
- Analyze data and target the design process to initiatives for student retention and success.