Since late June, when the university announced its decision to have students on campus and enable a combination of in-person, hybrid, and remote classes, LSA Technology Services quickly took action to enable an unprecedented delivery of the LSA liberal arts mission. In two short months, we invested, improved, and implemented technology and services to not only meet the goals for fall 2020 but will also impact the LSA experience for many years to come. Here are a few of these amazing changes!
Preparing classrooms and other learning spaces for fall
LSA Technology Services determined new instructional capacities and density limits for classrooms and worked with a number of departments and the registrar’s office to identify available conference rooms in which classes could be held. We implemented furniture and layout signs and distributed furniture for physical distancing, all in partnership with LSA Facilities and to meet new health and safety guidelines.
To enable faculty to teach in person, with students in class and also remote, we upgraded and installed Lecture Capture and live-streaming capabilities in 136 classrooms, and delivered AV carts to an additional seven studio-lab spaces. We updated an additional 30 rooms for faculty to conduct remote teaching, record lectures, or both, and we plan to upgrade our remaining 49 rooms this semester. This new hybrid technology allows students unable to come to campus to participate fully in the on-campus courses and also allows students who are ill or quarantined to be able to keep up with their on-campus courses while they are out. In the future, this could also allow students who are on internships or study abroad or research projects to join courses remotely as they maintain schedules toward graduation.
We also partnered with multiple campus units to launch studyspaces.umich.edu to enable students to reserve rooms across campus for quality internet access and quiet, low-density areas to take classes and study. This is particularly important for students who have a remote course adjacent to an on-campus class and need more than 10 minutes to travel between the two courses.
In collaboration with volunteers from across the college, we pitched in and built and distributed over 300 hand sanitizer stations, packages of face masks, and sanitizer wipes for our classrooms so that students and faculty have everything they need to safely learn and teach in the classroom.
Helping instructors with technology and pedagogy
We introduced over 150 faculty to the new hybrid technologies in LSA classrooms at daily orientation sessions during the last week of August and answered many questions about teaching on campus under COVID, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to hybrid instruction. LSA Technology Services also provided hands-on-training to over 200 instructors on new classroom technologies, lecture capture, and how to best utilize live-streaming in a hybrid class.
Our Learning and Teaching staff and BlueCorps staff trained over 600 faculty and GSIs over the summer as they prepared for their fall term courses. 450 of those consultations helped identify effective ways to translate their pedagogical approaches to the remote and hybrid environments, how to use or expand the use of instructional technologies, and best practices to implement technologies that ensure LSA’s extraordinary learning environment extends into the hybrid and remote experience. This included creating original videos, collecting clips from film and video, helping faculty envision new methods of assessment that were open book, open note, and open internet, evaluating the best tools for video annotation, using collective virtual whiteboarding for problem-solving, and increasing engagement with better tools for online discussion.
We, in partnership with the Teaching and Technology Collaborative, LSA Language Resource Center, and other U-M units, designed, organized, and presented a series of synchronous workshops that collectively are known as Ready to Go Blue (R2GB). The R2GB workshops, which ran daily starting in July, covered a wide range of topics for faculty and staff, including engaging students in online contexts, accessibility considerations of online courses, effective use of Zoom, copyright considerations for online courses, and many others. The collective efforts of R2GB offered 222 separate sessions with attendance from over 1,700 members of the U-M community. Our staff offered over 85 workshops since the beginning of July with 18–20 people attending each session!
Providing equipment loans & support for students
We’ve increased our loan equipment inventory by 25% to strengthen support for undergraduate and graduate students in addition to expanding our length of loan terms so that laptops can be loaned for several months versus several days. We added over a hundred iPads and laptops, home video recording kits, webcams, and headsets, and several hundred Wacom tablets to support instructors and students who need digital writing surfaces. In response to the many concerns and issues students experienced related to their internet access, we secured several devices with hotspots for students with dire internet access issues.
Students can call us to get help with an equipment loan, internet connectivity issues, and other technology questions related to their course work and classes. They have access to a new section on our website just for students—Learning Remotely—with all the information available to help them leverage technology this semester.
Supporting college and department administration
We updated the course scheduling system to accommodate new course types of in-person, hybrid, and remote. This was used by department leaders, the college, faculty, and staff to work through determining which courses could be taught on campus, which faculty are available to teach on campus, and what rooms could be used for these courses.
We developed and implemented several administrative workflow applications to support multiple processes for bringing research back on campus as well as staff and faculty back to campus.
Many LSA staff, like other U-M employees, left campus quickly in March, not knowing they wouldn’t return until the fall or even later. Our teams worked with our departments to understand service and staffing plans and to outfit hundreds of LSA staff with new mobile computer equipment in cases where they were not able to move their desktop computer and/or were using personal computing equipment.
Additionally, we built and improved our LSA enrollment dashboards to be able to improve our understanding of trends and impacts that the pandemic may have on key financial indicators.
We appreciate and thank all of our university partners and are proud to be part of the University of Michigan team serving our faculty, students, and staff. Go Blue!
For questions or more information regarding this article, please contact LSATechnologyServices@umich.edu.
