Innovating “Traditional” Instruction in Light of COVID-19

NATHAN A. FINN

The COVID-19 crisis has created unprecedented disruption this spring as schools have been forced to shift their instruction online mid-semester. E-learning experts have offered many helpful recommendations for instructors who are not used to teaching online. (See Kristen Ferguson’s excellent four-part series on this blog.) E-learning leaders have also rightly pointed out that the measures often necessary to enable a quick transition online do not necessarily reflect best practices in e-learning, when courses are designed for the purpose of online education.

My own institution, North Greenville University (NGU), is a comprehensive university rooted in the liberal arts tradition. In this way, we are like a majority of the higher educational institutions that affiliate with IACE. We have a growing number of graduate programs, and every year more of our curriculum (undergraduate and graduate) is offered in online and hybrid formats. Nevertheless, our institutional “bread and butter” remains face-to-face instruction on a residential campus for undergraduate students who have recently finished high school. These programs are so central to our identity we casually refer to them as “traditional,” which implies something about both the students themselves as well as the type of instruction they receive.

A potential problem with referring to in-person instruction of undergraduates as “traditional” is that it can imply that innovation isn’t welcome. You may be one of those instructors who teach in such contexts who is convinced that lectures, seminars, group projects, and various sorts of lab experiences are the essence of authentic pedagogy, depending upon the type of course being taught. After all, this how you were taught it college and things worked out just fine. Besides, you have innovated. You traded in the overhead projector for PowerPoint slides in 1999, proving you are technologically savvy—right?

In the interest of full disclosure, as a historian and theologian almost every in-person course I’ve ever taught was built primarily around some combination of lectures and classroom discussions. Traditional teaching methods are perennially effective when they are done well. But I believe the COVID-19 crisis provides us with an opportunity to innovate our traditional instruction because it has forced instructors to at least experiment with technologies and strategies many have never had either the inclination or the luxury to consider before. I want to offer some suggestions to that effect. Note that my focus is on innovating a traditional course rather than transforming it into a flipped, hybrid, or high-flex course. That is an important topic, but one that deserves a separate post (or series of posts).

Your institution almost certainly has some sort of Learning Management System (LMS) like Blackboard, Moodle, or Canvas. Some instructors think of the LMS as a tool for online courses, which of course is true. It just isn’t the whole truth. The fact is the LMS is really a tool for all courses, whether online, in-person, or hybrid. The LMS can be used to create a website for any course. In my experience, schools typically create websites for all courses, even though these websites are frequently not used for much more than maybe posting a syllabus and keeping a gradebook for traditional courses. But used strategically, the course website can become the “one-stop shop” for all things related to the course.

Instructors can move some or all of their assessments to the website, including quizzes and exams. This can reserve more class time for teaching. You can also supplement lectures and discussions with online threaded discussion, which allows students to interact with each other’s ideas in ways that aren’t always possible in the classroom. Just make sure that you engage as an active participant in the discussions so students don’t feel like it’s busywork or that they are just pooling their ignorance. Blog and journal functions can take the place of short writing assignments. Longer writing assignments like research papers, book reviews, bibliographies, etc. can be simply uploaded to the website and graded electronically.

Several years ago, I added online quizzes and threaded discussions to almost all of my in-person courses. The quizzes are graded automatically, saved in the LMS, and reused each semester; I only revise them when I update textbooks. The threaded discussions expand upon classroom lectures and discussions by focusing on applying that material practically to real-life situations. As for longer writing assignments, it has been so long since I graded a physical paper that I literally cannot remember the last time I did it. (All my red pens feel neglected.) Students upload their papers and I use the “Review” function in Microsoft Word to mark mistakes and make comments. Then I upload the graded paper back into the course website so students can access them at their convenience.

Course websites can also serve as a great tool for providing students with lecture material or pointing them to supplemental resources that complement classroom instruction. In my classes, I regularly recommend further reading to students. I sometimes add links to those resources in the course website. As an administrator, I periodically need to miss class because of work-related travel. Instead of cancelling classes or recruiting a substitute instructor, I normally either record a couple of mini lectures or provide links to relevant lectures from other scholars that are publicly available via YouTube or Vimeo.

I want to close by being shooting straight with you: there is no doubt that incorporating these tools into traditional courses will often mean more work on the front end. This is true any time you refurbish a course. But the good news is that material you upload into the campus LMS can be used again in future courses, saving you valuable time in the long run. Plus, you will often better connect with students who are digital natives and are used to the internet touching nearly every part of their lives. I would encourage you to talk with your school’s e-learning office about ideas for innovating your traditional instruction.

Nathan A. Finn serves as Provost and Dean of the University Faculty at North Greenville University in Upstate South Carolina. He has written widely on higher education, spiritual formation, and Baptist history and identity.