Teaching The Pivot: Faculty Adjust to Online Instruction

When the administration at Oral Roberts University made the decision to move the rest of the Spring 2020 semester to distance learning, the faculty, in conjunction with ORU’s IT department, acted quickly to alter their various in-person classes for the new challenge of virtual instruction.

“There are classes that adapt really easily to virtual learning, like a Theatre History class,” said Courtneay Sanders, Senior Professor and Director of Theatre at ORU, who is teaching two acting classes this semester.

“One of them is a technique class called Viewpoints, which is all ensemble-based,” she said. “It’s supposed to be work they do as a group, collectively, so being remote is not ideal.”

To adjust to the new format, Sanders and her students embraced the limitation, moving to monologues over Zoom instead of ensemble scenes in a theatre, finding new ways to explore the curriculum’s emphasis on a style of writing and performance known as Theatre of the Absurd.

“The tempo and pace are different than in person,” Sanders said, “and the physicality will be very different, especially because we were doing Theatre of the Absurd, which is usually big and broad. It’s given the actors the opportunity to work with restrictions, which is a great experience for them and forces them to think in new ways and make acting choices that are less obvious to them.”

Christina Schneider, an Assistant Professor and Director of Dance at ORU, also chose the embrace-the-challenge route.

“It’s been interesting to look at the virtual format as an artist,” Schneider said. “We have new limitations in what we’re making and discovering, which means we have new opportunities. As an artist I always look at my limitations and determine how to be creative in that, so this has been good.”

Schneider, who has been leading her classes via Zoom from her living room, has also welcomed the interruptions that inevitably come from that.

“We can come together and embrace each other’s humanity a little better. That can be comforting,” she said. “My cat has attempted to join me on the mat multiple times, and the first time that happened I got frustrated that it wasn’t professional, but it was creating the sense of shared humanity. The students were excited to see my pets and share their pets as well; it gave us something to unite us at a time when we feel more separate.”

As is often the case with ORU professors, many of them are using every possible means to connect with their students, including virtual meeting software like Zoom.

“The first day coming back, I took time to open up with a scripture verse, and then we just talked about what we’re thankful for, what we’re struggling with, and prayer requests,” said Megan Weinkauf, Lecturer of Management in the College of Business. “And we’ve continued that every class meeting, providing a place for students to process what they’re going through.”

“I’m trying to be even more sensitive than I usually am and intentional about providing that space,” Weinkauf said, “giving them a way, through text, through email, through Microsoft Teams, to help them connect and reassure them they’re not alone. Because a lot of my students are feeling really overwhelmed right now.”

When it comes to the academic side of her instruction, Weinkauf is leaning into the technological.

“I teach business communication, and I usually have them do a five-minute TED-like talk in the classroom, but we’re doing it over Zoom,” Weinkauf said. “For a lot of them, this is their first time to present like this on Zoom, but I’m excited about that. A student told me he was glad he was learning Zoom because he’d just had a Zoom call with some business leaders and he’s comfortable being on it.”

“Online instruction has helped me teach my students to think about how delivering the message changes when the medium changes,” said Dr. David Burkus, Associate Professor of Leadership and Innovation, who is referring to his class called Creative Thinking in Business.

“Group projects are hard to do in a virtual environment, but group discussions are possible; you just have to seed them more with specific questions,” Burkus said. “So I try to have a mix. One discussion around one topic but it happens around discussion boards in D2l, and then when we meet live, we continue that discussion. My job is to see connections between people’s posts online and then call that out in the group discussion so they’re talking to each other. That tends to work in this environment.”

Other professors have found the COVID-19 pandemic perfectly dovetailing with their classes, so their adaptations have happened more organically. Just such a faculty member is Dr. Jason Pudlo, Assistant Professor of Political Science, who teaches a class called Leading Through Disasters.

“We’ve been talking about the virus outbreak since it popped up in January, so we’d already thought about it in terms of types of responses,” Pudlo said.

The class’s end-of-year assignment revolves around a hypothetical “tabletop” disaster, where groups are assigned a city, a location, and a population, and then must write up a disaster plan for their area. Ordinarily, this would be an intense, in-person exercise that would last the length of several class periods.

“When we went from being in person to being remote, that became much more difficult,” Pudlo said. “To adapt for that, the week before spring break, we set up each group as a channel in Microsoft Teams, and so we’re running the tabletop exercise in Teams to mimic a lot of what actual emergency management operations centers are having to do right now—conduct operations remotely.

“By using and adapting our technology, we’re copying real life, so that should help students have some actual experience and help them out once they graduate.”

Dr. William Ranahan, Chair of the Biology and Chemistry Department and Associate Professor of Biology, has also been able to rely on the previous weeks’ worth of instruction to adapt more readily to the challenges of doing biology labs virtually.

“Luckily we had several weeks to teach the techniques required to be successful; at this point in the semester we are mainly reinforcing those techniques,” Ranahan said. “For the introductory labs there are plenty of online ‘virtual labs’ that can help students reinforce the concepts, and for the upper division labs we are moving to more in-depth data analysis.”

Ranahan also credits ORU’s technological foresight for allowing him to continue engaging his students from a distance.

“I look back at the fact that approximately four years ago we began a serious overhaul of our technology on campus with the Global Learning Center and think, ‘Wow!’” he said. “That was God’s mercy and preparation so that when the moment came, our infrastructure was in place and many, many faculty had already experienced the technology. Without that GLC… we would be in a very different situation right now.”

It’s that nimble, adaptable spirit that has helped the ORU faculty continue to provide the best they can for their students in this unprecedented time, even embracing fully the lessons that social distancing and stay-at-home orders are able to teach.

“Our students are learning how to pivot,” said Weinkauf, “and learning how to pivot in life is everything. The world is forever changing, so developing leaders who can ebb and flow with that is so crucial. Thankfully that’s what we’re here to do, to provide that space and create a culture of encouragement, support, and failing forward. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing. It’s been good.”