COVID-19, a Year On
Josh Kaufman, M.Ed
I want to take this opportunity to reflect more on the world that was, rather than my usually scheduled piece on accessibility. Not because I want to go back there, but because I think it’s important to see how far we’ve come. And because we can never forget the pain that the last year has inflicted on all of us.
The last large public event I went to was a hockey game, my alma mater Boston University against Northeastern, a loss, the final game of the season. As my friends and I sat in the stands, we talked about the virus, about what would come of it, and whether there would be a playoff season. I remember my head jerking around as I heard someone coughing a few rows away. The guy looked around, sheepishly “I wasn’t on a cruise!” he declared. As I walked out of the arena that night, I had no idea what was coming, that within a week we would be embarking on a totally different way of doing business and learning.
“COVID-19 Shutter Campus” was the headline in the Tufts Daily on March 11, 2020. The night before we had received an email, ironically while I was in a HETMA meeting, notifying us that we would be, effective Friday the 13th, moving online for the foreseeable future. I had been waiting for that announcement for at least a week, as I saw more and more colleges sending their students home and moving online. We began looking at our calendar, what large events were scheduled and how we can support them in a pandemic. I sent probably hundreds of emails to clients asking if their events were still on and if they were moving them online, promising them support if they were. We began to discuss safety and hoarding wipes and masks. It wasn’t until I walked into the office on the 11th, and saw that headline, that it became real to me, though, because our world had just stopped. I haven’t been to my office since March 17, 2020, I don’t know when I’ll be back.
But at the end of the day, what have we learned and how can we apply that when the pandemic ends and we return to the new normal? The controversy around remote learning may hamper us in trying to implement it, but we can capitalize on it. Instead of leaning into the debate, we can leverage it to look at how we can develop better, more inclusive remote learning. Similarly, we’ve reached a point where hybrid learning is no longer something we can afford to consider as a “rarity”. Instead, we can leverage the discussion to generate new uses for hybrid learning. Boston University coined the phrase “learn from anywhere” to describe their hybrid learning model, I prefer the term I used in my talk at NWMET in 2019, “Anytime, Anywhere Learning.” We’re at a moment where we have grown accustomed to classes where parts of the class are remote, and where we integrate video conferencing as a part of learning rather than an exception.
That same “anytime anywhere” mentality means we also have the opportunity to embrace asynchronous learning in a way we haven’t before now. Synchronous learning isn’t the only option, it hasn’t been for years but we never had the impetus to expand it. The same can be said for accessibility in the classroom. We’re suddenly in a world where anyone can access captioning in the classroom via the Zoom call, where students with ADHD or other reasons that cause difficulty in taking notes or otherwise attending class can access recordings of the lectures after the lecture. All of the tools that we have deployed, and the room upgrades we have done, are reusable for the post-COVID world, but only if we are willing and able to market them to our faculty.
As we’ve seen when forced, faculty and administrators will make rapid changes, but we cannot rely on that to ensure that our schools are moving forward. Instead, we need to rely on what we’ve learned over the last year to both improve the tools and deploy them at our respective schools.
Get to Know Josh Kaufman
Josh Kaufman has spent his entire career in higher ed AV, starting as a student employee at Boston University where he worked for seven years and later moving on to Harvard University where he was the assistant director. He is currently the Operations Coordinator and R&D coordinator at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He holds a masters in instructional design from the University of Massachusetts as well as two graduate certificates in instructional technology and instructional technology design.
Josh has presented at NWMET in 2019 on the application of Universal Design to AV in order to increase accessibility, as well as at HETMA’s virtual conference in June and at EdSpaces 2020 in November. He had been slated to present at Infocomm 2020 prior to its cancelation on the same topic.
In his spare time, Josh enjoys attending NCAA hockey games, exploring the historic sites of New England, traveling, and spending time with family and friends.