Following NNU's switch to remote learning in the spring due to the COVID-19 situation, the Academic Continuity Task Force began looking toward how we might best prepare for fall. Your peers on this task force decided that we should prepare with flexibility, to set up courses in such a way that you might teach entirely in person, online, or a mix of both modalities as needed. For our purposes, we will call these blended courses.

Student Voices

Freshmen at New Student Orientation

This summer, NNU students from a variety of majors, freshmen to new graduates, shared their thoughts about the remote instruction in interviews with your peers from Instructional Design & Technology (IDT) and the Center for Professional Development (CPD). We also perused students' open-ended comments about their remote learning experience from the nearly 2,000 course evaluations received at the end of the spring semester.

Throughout this training opportunity, you will see quotes from the students, representative of the whole, that we hope will shed light on what works best, what challenges they experienced, and what they suggest for future consideration.

Faculty Voices

Faculty proceeding to Baccalaureate

Overwhelmingly, NNU students said they learned best when they could interact with their instructors and with classmates, and when their instructors set up a clear and cohesive structure within Canvas modules. Interviewed students supplied the names of faculty whose various practices resonated. This one provided short video lectures; that one had all readings, videos, and assignments gathered together in a weekly listing. IDT then recorded video interviews with several of those faculty, inviting them to share their approaches.

Practical Tasks

The concepts you'll hear about from students and your peers will likely spark ideas that you will want to try. The "assignments" in this training course will give you opportunities to put those ideas into action. Nearly all of the tasks will help you produce something you can use in your own teaching. We hope you will approach them as this adjunct did, as noted by one of his students:

“Though there was a learning curve with some of the technology, (my professor) persisted and found a way to teach effectively. He put time and energy into improving his teaching and adjusting to remote learning because he genuinely cared about his students.”

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