Reaching beyond the screen

By Rebecca Kirkman on March 30, 2020

Before Professor Jan Baum resumed classes online last week, she created a short video to welcome back her students from spring break. Sitting at her dining room table on a Saturday morning, hair pulled back into a ponytail, she asks her students in the video, “bear with me, because I’m learning right along with you.”

Despite the challenges of moving to distance learning partway through the semester, faculty throughout the university are working quickly to create enriching alternatives to face-to-face learning and embrace the opportunities virtual classrooms can provide.

Finding teachable moments

Baum, a professor in the Department of Management who is teaching two undergraduate entrepreneurship courses this spring, says her students enjoy seeing her—and each other—in their home environments. “Students want to see you real,” she says. “It’s more personal now because there’s a crisis that bonds us. How we respond to this as faculty and staff has the ability to create an even stronger bond or a weaker bond. Together we create the Towson community.”

Read more: Faculty Resources for Remote Teaching

In an effort to maintain consistency and structure, she’s opted to hold classes virtually during the normal meeting time through Blackboard Collaborate for all students that have access. She begins class by checking in with her students and talking through any stress or anxiety they may be facing. Often, that time includes a show-and-tell of household pets. “I’ve started including dogs in attendance,” Baum says jokingly.

With accessibility in mind, Baum is working one-on-one to tailor solutions for students who are unable to join the group video meetings. She records lectures and posts them on Blackboard with her slides, uploads recordings of the virtual class meetings, and encourages the class to let her know how and when they need additional help, hosting spontaneous virtual meetings to answer questions for those interested.

She tries to keep the mood as light as possible, too. One day, students arriving to the virtual classroom space early were greeted by a “pandemic playlist” from Spotify. Think tracks like Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” and the Beastie Boys’ “Time To Get Ill.”

“We don’t have control over the situation, but we do have control over how we respond to it,” Baum says. “It can be positive.”

In a class format where most work is done face-to-face outside the classroom and then students come together to discuss and process their findings, the restrictions create obvious challenges. But overcoming those challenges is part of being an entrepreneur, she says.

“Entrepreneurs face curve balls all the time and success is figuring out workarounds or pivots,” she says. “This is where our hallmark skills of creativity, entrepreneurial thinking and perseverance come into play. We just keep going. So this is a very teachable moment.”

Learning from each other

With educators around the world in the same boat due to the coronavirus, faculty are leaning on each other to share solutions. 

“We’re all going through the same things,” says Associate Professor Plamen Peev, who teaches marketing in the College of Business and Economics. “I am in conversations with my colleagues within the department constantly. We talk to each other and draw on each others’ experiences.”

For his sales-focused classes, which rely heavily on role playing and the subtleties of body language, Peev has adjusted the curriculum using tools like Webex Meetings and Blackboard to most closely replicate in-class content for the web. One-on-one sales pitches will be recorded for later review and grading, and an exercise where Peev acts as the buyer and the entire class acts collectively as the seller will continue through Webex Meetings.

Through social media, Peev is able to connect with communities of educators around the world to share advice and sometimes simply a much-needed laugh. “Social media allows the sharing of information to happen now across universities, across continents. You can find a lot of tips in those groups that are run by faculty for faculty, and funny posts that offer comic relief as well. It gives you a sense of community.”

Connected to the world

As a lecturer in the Department of Secondary and Middle School Education, Jamie Silverman serves as a Professional Development School Liaison. This spring, she was overseeing a group of 11 secondary education interns completing their internship year in local middle and high schools when Maryland State Superintendent of Schools Karen Salmon closed schools on March 16.

“My immediate concern was how I would remain connected with my interns and how I could provide a meaningful learning experience as we wait to see just how they can continue working virtually in the field,” Silverman says. 

As she moved their sessions to Blackboard Collaborate, Silverman focused on the opportunities web meetings could offer. “Being forced to teach virtually has really opened the doors to a larger professional community,” she says. 

With in-person presence no longer required, Silverman has set up a speaker series over the next few weeks, with guests including former Maryland State Superintendent of Schools and TU Presidential Scholar Nancy Grasmick. She’s also reached out to past interns living across the country to share their first-year teaching experiences. 

“These individuals would not have all been able to come in person,” Silverman says. “I'll argue that a virtual seminar is now going to enrich the content of my interns' experience and I am quite excited about this opportunity I am able to create for them.”

Embracing creative solutions

For many disciplines that rely on face-to-face interaction, moving to distance learning provides an extra challenge, especially in the arts. 

“Remote learning is a particular challenge in our field, which has as one of its special characteristics the experience of human beings in a physical space together,” says Robyn Quick, professor and chair of the Department of Theatre Arts in the College of Fine Arts & Communication. “But theatre is also about speaking to the needs of the community. And this is what our community needs us to do at this moment.”

Costume Shop Manager and Adjunct Professor Alizon Santamarian grappled with modifying a class that’s almost entirely hands-on to an online environment.

Now, students in her Costume Construction for Theatre course have the option to transition to a hand-sewn rather than machine-sewn project and are investigating ways to repurpose common household objects. “No pattern paper? What about gift wrapping paper or newspaper. Need a small pattern piece that can be used over and over? Try a cereal box. Need fabric and the craft stores are closed? An old set of sheets or curtains might work,” Santamarian explains.

In his directing class, Adjunct Faculty and Theatre Director Yury Urnov’s students will create video versions of their scenes, shooting and editing them with resources they have at home. “Some will do scenes with their relatives, some will record scenes online with their classmates, some will do puppet-theater versions of the scenes,” Urnov says. “This approach actually creates some new level of creative freedom for them, even though they are deprived of the immediate physical contact with actors and their classmates.”

Urnov says the changes have provided an opportunity to know his students in new ways. “There is a new way of intimacy, seeing each student in their home, close-up,” he says. “I feel like we all are learning something new, human and beautiful about each other.”