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Reflecting on Pandemic “Lessons Learned”
By Lisa Stephens of FLEXspace.org, featuring an interview with Tim Linden, Dave Test and Crystal Ramsay from Penn State’s Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT). Many thanks to Bart Pursel as well, who couldn’t join us for the live interview but offered lots of helpful feedback!
Before we dive into this month’s FLEXspace.org feature article, let’s first meet members of Penn State’s TLT who generously agreed to share their stories with HEAV – and, to a person, acknowledged throughout the interview how fortunate they felt to work with both their immediate team of colleagues, and with members of the broader Penn State community. Having been privileged to play a founding role in FLEXspace.org – we quickly went down a rabbit hole of how much we enjoy a “conductor” role within our respective orchestras, and how each instrument contributes significantly to the performance experience. In that spirit, this column is dedicated to everyone working in AV/IT, facilities, custodial, health and safety, librarians, our executive campus leadership and most of all, the dedicated faculty who have been asked to keep teaching, and the eager students who have kept on learning – we’re uniquely connected through our collective efforts! Thank you!
Crystal Ramsay
Assistant Director, Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) – Innovation
Crystal has been a professional educator for 28 years, working with students and faculty from 7th grade to graduate education and faculty development. For the past 6 years, physical learning spaces have been a significant part of her portfolio at Penn State. Crystal manages TLT’s Research and Evaluation group that conducts learning spaces research. She also serves as a member of the EDUCAUSE-sponsored Learning Spaces Rating System core team.
Tim Linden
Learning Spaces Coordinator, TLT Innovation
Tim serves as Learning Spaces Coordinator within Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT), supporting all of Penn State’s colleges and campuses. With years of experience in higher education, Tim is passionate about working with faculty and students to support instruction, learning, and transformational design. Previously, Tim worked in K-12 information technology and staff development, as well as in instructional design.
Dave Test
Manager, Learning Space Technologies, TLT Operations
Dave is the Manager of Learning Space Technologies, and his teams are responsible for the installation, support, and maintenance of the AV and IT equipment in the 389 general purpose classrooms and the open computer labs on Penn State’s University Park Campus.
Bart Pursel
Director of Innovation, Teaching and Learning with Technology
Bart has an Affiliated Associate Research Professor appointment from the School of Information Science and Technology. He also serves as Associate Director for the Center for Pedagogy in Arts and Design (C-PAD).
In addition to his research and teaching at Penn State, Bart has been a strong supporter of the FLEXspace.org Community of Practice, as has the entire PSU TLT Team and their leadership!
This month, we had the pleasure of meeting with members of Penn State’s Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) who, along with many others, were directly involved in planning and executing a response to the COVID pandemic to keep faculty, staff and students safe on campus. We greeted each other on Zoom with Tim uploading photos and layouts of spaces that had recently been very repurposed for teaching and learning, including the Grand Ballroom in the Nittany Lion Inn and the ROTC Drill Deck – a no frills approach to taking advantage of campus “nooks and crannies” in the interest of hyper-speed space planning!
Lisa: “On behalf of the Flexible Learning Environments eXchange community, thank you for sharing your “lessons learned.” Penn State has been a leader at the intersection of classroom environments, pedagogy and online learning space (no pun intended) for many years, and I’m sure our FLEXspace community is anxious to compare notes and learn from your experience as you reflect on realizing the gravity of the rapid pandemic growth, and working across units to execute a response. Higher education seems to be collectively moving in some new directions – informed in no small part by what has worked well to date (or not!). Perhaps we could start by focusing on your early planning efforts and how you think those may influence the future of teaching and learning on your campus, and across the Penn State system and beyond?”
Dave: “After getting our heads wrapped around the gravity of the situation and how this was affecting campuses on a global scale and not just those identified as hotspots in the news, we polled faculty to get a sense of their desire to continue on-campus, in-person teaching. What became immediately clear was the level of concern among those either in risk categories, or living in close proximity to someone in a recognized high-risk category. We needed some executive-level decisions quickly to begin response planning.”
Tim: “Fortunately, we have a learning space leadership team with representation from key campus stakeholders: faculty, facilities, AV/IT, the registrar and provost’s office. This multifaceted and multidisciplinary group made it possible to rapidly pivot to new space capacity planning in some pretty unorthodox ways. Having those relationships in advance of the emergency enabled us to tap into people who could provide immediate answers and deeper consultations. We all understood the gravity of the situation, and everyone was willing to pitch in and work hard to help each other.”
Dave: “The first key executive decision was to move high enrollment classes – those with more than 250 students – to remote teaching. Tom Kase, a University Architect, immediately started overlaying all general purpose classroom floor plans with six-foot circles to recalculate room capacities allowing for social distancing. The uniform approach of moving large lecture hall classes to remote teaching enabled smaller classes to meet in person where appropriate, but it was still a heavy lift on our registrar’s office to reassign classes in 25Live – the platform we use for scheduling.”
Tim: “In general, we were seeing about a 75-80% reduction in seat capacity. So 360 seats were reduced to 72. Depending on the room, sometimes we could safely fit 15 into a 44 seat classroom, but in general, the capacity reduction was severe across campus. We needed to identify a lot of spaces quickly to accommodate in-person hybrid and remotely connected classes.”
How did you start shifting focus from capacity planning to technologies necessary to support the pedagogy for remote learning?
Tim: “One of the response sub-committees was charged with ensuring classrooms met a threshold of Minimum Zoom Viability. We knew in advance that we couldn’t create ideal environments in every room, but at minimum needed to test and make sure students could hear an instructor on Zoom, and preferably students at both ends could hear questions from those connected without the need for the instructor to ‘parrot’ each question.”
Crystal: “A good example of multidisciplinary interaction that Tim is describing was the Teaching and PPE Committee, and how we connected environmental health and safety experts with faculty from the Graduate Program in Acoustics in our College of Engineering. Vic Sparrow, the program’s director recruited many faculty, and even an entire graduate class to measure the most appropriate mask types enabling good microphone pick up while remaining optimally safe.”
Dave: “Our acoustical engineering faculty helped us measure and quantify intelligibility by testing voice characteristics from female, male and ESL volunteers wearing different types of personal protective equipment (PPE). We learned a lot from that experiment! We used the same script with the same people under different PPE and microphone application conditions. Obviously an N-95 mask will offer maximum protection, but we didn’t know if students would be able to hear an instructor using one. We tried shotgun, lapel, boundary and webcam mics. Initially, we thought a cloth mask would offer the best result overall and were surprised to learn that it was a standard surgical mask that functioned the best. That’s because a cloth mask usually touches your lips, which tends to affect annunciation, even unconsciously. A standard surgical mask balloons out a bit over the mouth surface, so your lips are unimpeded which means the quality of the sound pick up is much better on all types of mics. In a normal conversation probably none of it would matter, but if you’re losing 5-10% of intelligibility in a large classroom learning a complex topic, that can make a huge difference!”
That sounds like it would make a great addition to the FLEXspace Toolkit so others can learn from that research!
Dave: “Yes, we’re happy to share those outcomes! We’ll upload the PDF into the Toolkit for sure!”
Does your work impact others beyond University Park in State College? Penn State has 24 campuses – did your solutions get broadly adopted or did each campus pursue their own solutions?
Tim: “We broadly share solutions we have, but there’s not a mandate for campuses to adopt common systems or solutions – and it might not be practical given that different campuses are meeting different teaching needs. University Park is the largest campus with the most classrooms, so it might be a little more complex environment than some of the smaller campuses. In the end, all our campuses have more challenges in common than not.”
Dave: “It did lead to a lot of bulk buying! We ordered based on the compilation of 1,300 general teaching classrooms across the multi-campus system. We also estimated equipment like USB-connected table top microphones and iPads. Like every other University in the world, we were asking our suppliers whether we could have 600 webcams all at once, and if they could supply them in time – and it was pretty touch-and-go right up until the deadlines!”
Have you found it challenging to differentiate between remote teaching in support of academic continuity vs. traditional online learning?
Crystal: “Yes, especially early in the transition. People tended to use the phrase “online” to describe remote teaching – but the pedagogy is very different. Since Penn State has a massive World Campus with people dedicated to making sure that truly online experiences are exemplary – we didn’t want to confuse faculty or students who might have expectations of an online course experience in a course that quickly transitioned from in-person to remote. Scaling a remote learning experience for all students can be done with quality, but certainly not the same way online courses are created from the ground up – that takes months of advance preparation. We only had days to transition last spring!”
Do you think faculty are looking at fresh options for teaching even once we return to life “pre-pandemic” whenever that may be?
Crystal: “TLT conducted a university-wide survey our faculty in late April to help us better understand the impact of the switch to remote teaching. Not surprisingly, many found the experience to be challenging while others reported that the shift to remote teaching resulted in improved teaching skills, and that they expected to use some of their recently acquired skills in future classes!”
So let’s talk more about the Nittany Lion Inn Grand Ballroom and the ROTC Drill Deck! How did you come to adapt these spaces for teaching and learning environments?
Dave: “The ROTC ‘Drill Deck’ is a cavernous space whose multi-purpose use was formerly for cadets learning to march in formation, practicing drills, followed by working out on weight benches scattered throughout the space. There was no technology to support teaching in this space. Not even a projection screen! But in less than one month, the Drill Deck was transformed into a general purpose classroom with dual projection, a teaching station, and two new HVAC units. Also, one entire wall was glass, requiring heavy draping to block light for the projection systems. It served a real need for good socially-distant room capacity… but it needed a very quick installation of all the technology for teaching.”
Link to see the public version of the Wagner Room in FLEXspace
Tim: “This was certainly a case of everyone on campus pulling together. The ROTC staff understood what we were up against and not only offered the Drill Deck to the campus, they helped clear the space to enable the modifications for hybrid classes. We also needed to make sure the space would be Zoom viable.”
Crystal: “Yes, the Drill Deck was an amazing transformation – to go from no technology to a fully functional technology classroom in less than a month was a heavy lift, and Dave’s classroom team did an amazing job getting several spaces like that up and functional. The same could be said for the Nittany Lion Inn’s Grand Ballroom. We have a faculty member in our Business School who loves teaching in that space, and never misses an opportunity to rave about it. Of course we’re all hoping things will normalize sooner rather than later – but we’ll see how it plays out!”
Link to see the public version of the Nittany Lion In Ballroom in FLEXspace
Dave: “Our leadership was very clear from the start that our faculty needed the autonomy to select how to teach their classes. They know their courses best – and it was interesting that in the end, about half of all our classes are fully delivered remotely with Zoom, and the other half are divided up in some type of mixed-mode delivery. Many of our classes are scheduled with a reduced density where students are subdivided into cohorts that attend class in person on some days, and assigned to attend via remote connection on others.”
How did you enable students (or faculty) the choice of working/attending in real time remotely, in person, or via recorded content?
Tim: “There’s a lot of conversation in the community about HyFlex teaching–and we do have some faculty who teach effectively in this way–but in its truest definition this is the trickiest to deliver, both from a technological and pedagogical perspective as well as scheduling concerns. We made a decision to stay away from the “HyFlex” term to avoid confusion with “hybrid” or “mixed mode” then began offering a lot of faculty development workshops to orient faculty to the best tools and strategies to support their classes, and those efforts continue today. It’s certainly challenging to keep students engaged remotely when you’ve spent a good chunk of a career teaching and honing your skills in built environments. Once we settled on four teaching modes, the University quickly added and re-worked websites about flexible instructional modes and related COVID best practices.
Dave: “I enjoy interacting with faculty as they share “lessons learned” and how these new approaches have forced us all out of our comfort zones. Obviously when you’re working in mixed modality environments, being close-mic’d is the best – you have to have a mic on a person in order to reduce feedback and boost the audio quality so students and instructors can hear each other in lecture halls, classrooms and via Zoom. But trying to group people into subgroups to replicate active learning exercises simultaneously in a lecture hall AND remotely is almost impossible without extensive – and expensive – technology systems, so we don’t have too many rooms to accommodate that level of complexity. Also, If you’re using close-in mics, you’ve also got new sanitizing challenges. Ceiling hung mics are easiest and safer, but you’ll never get the same level of sound quality, so it’s been a series of trade-offs for faculty, staff, students… we’re dedicated to putting the health and safety of our community as the top priority.”
Tim: “We thought we had solved the microphone issue in large lecture halls with ‘catch boxes’ – the square, foam covered microphones that can be tossed around in a classroom like a beachball. But you don’t really want hundreds of hands tossing around a foam box that’s hard to clean, to say nothing of the speech droplets being deposited all over the box. That’s just asking for trouble in this environment. But it sure worked well pre-pandemic! Hindsight vision is always 20/20. Had we known and been able to plan for this kind of response over several years, beam-forming ceiling and wall mics could be incorporated for increased quality. More USB mics strategically placed around a classroom could have been a good second tier solution, so we’ve learned from this and will thoughtfully integrate more technology in the future as resources become available.”
Dave: “Zoom breakout rooms can help replicate active learning classroom exercises, but we really don’t have a good solution to help faculty manage that in a blended environment. Our learning designers have been working with faculty to accommodate some equivalent experiences that span and accommodate the available technology – and I think we generally have to be a little extra patient and tolerant with each other as we work through solutions.”
Tim: “I think it’s given the support staff a window into how difficult it is to simultaneously teach and keep track of multiple student audiences. The empathy factor for instructors has gone way up. Most of our faculty in classrooms don’t have help from a TA, and it’s a lot to keep track of when you have students in different modalities. It’s a lot to consider… how to best present material, whether all the students can hear you, how to best respond to questions from one audience without losing the other as well as asking probing questions and challenging two different audiences. We stood up a new Tech TA program to assist faculty who are teaching in this format as well as in the remote synchronous formats. We tell all our student helpers and staff to be understanding if a faculty member seems on-edge or a little agitated – and to take an extra few minutes to see if you can help. It’s not easy for anyone right now, but we’re all trying our best from the administration to the custodial staff!”
It sounds like your teams function well together, and the foundation for this culture was in place pre-pandemic. Have these efforts been recognized and fostered over time?
Tim: “I think that’s fair to say. Certainly we’ve had our challenging moments too, but one of the benefits of working in education is being surrounded by people dedicated to the campus community at all levels.
It’s been an unbelievable team effort. Our CIO and other senior leaders wrote several emails to IT staff praising how well committees responded to various charges, acknowledging the herculean task of getting classes open on time. Everyone put their best foot forward for the common good and to make the best of a bad situation.”
That seems like a lovely note on which to wrap up our conversation – thank you so much for your time, the sharing of your experience, and “lessons learned” – especially how we might approach things a little differently as resources and opportunities become available to continue supporting our faculty and students.
Lessons Learned Summary Table
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Have a cross-functional team in place before an emergency – build trust early! Don’t have one? Advocate for one now! |
Ask the question broadly, “Do we have all key stakeholders?” Facilities, architects, faculty, leadership, students, AV/IT, environment, health & safety, custodial… then organize by themes and tasks – not departmental responsibility. |
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Know your faculty! Tap into their expertise when possible |
Connections between TLT staff and faculty enabled the acoustic tests that guided PPE selection while teaching |
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Leverage informal channels of communication in addition to formal announcements |
With more “work from home” activity, it’s harder to maintain information communication. Reaching out to external friends keeps information fresh and provides “early alerts” of upcoming challenges |
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You can never have too many faculty development opportunities “just in time” |
Make good use of internal systems – put foundational knowledge in places where people who need it can find it! (This includes technical staff). Short “how to” video modules can help drive in person or Zoom workshops |
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A little empathy goes a long way – Call out specific actions & efforts when sharing kudos |
Demonstrate to faculty and co-workers that you understand how stressful the current environment is. Know where to find extra help and HR resources. |
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To the extent possible, be as flexible as possible – in all roles. “Remember there are lots of contexts and challenges out there – and we’ve asked students to continue learning and faculty to continue teaching” (Crystal Ramsay) |
There are differences among disciplines and our support approach – but remember too that lots of people are dealing with homeschooling, limited bandwidth and supporting elder family members during this disruption. |
On behalf of everyone supporting Higher Ed AV and FLEXspace.org – many thanks to the Penn State TLT for your support of the broader teaching, learning and technology communities in higher education here and abroad! We’ll be looping back to you soon about some research opportunities!
PSU keep teaching website – safety section
REBECCA V. FRAZEE, EDD
Faculty, Learning Design & Technology Program
San Diego State University
Associate Director, FLEXspace.org
Rebecca teaches in the Learning Design and Technology program at San Diego State University and is the FLEXspace.org Manager. She enjoys experimenting with new technology tools and techniques to support active learning and team collaboration in higher ed and the workplace. Rebecca is a singer and songwriter and has been having fun with asynchronous ‘socially distanced’ recording projects this year. Contact Rebecca at rfrazee@sdsu.edu, and Twitter at @rebeccafrazee.
LISA STEPHENS, Ph. D.
Assistant Dean, Digital & Online Education
School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
The University at Buffalo
Project Director, FLEXspace.org
Lisa serves as Assistant Dean at the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences leading the Office of Digital & Online Education, and also serves as Senior Strategist for Academic Innovation in the Office of the SUNY Provost. She enjoys an appointment in the UB Department of Communication as an Adjunct Associate Professor. Her SUNY portfolio includes leadership of FLEXspace.org™ and serves as the SUNY Partner Manager for Coursera.
The Flexible Learning Environments eXchange (FLEXspace.org) is an award winning community and open digital repository for higher ed that houses a growing collection of user-contributed content “by campuses for campuses,” with detailed examples of formal and informal learning spaces ranging from multimedia studios, makerspaces, computer labs, hybrid/flexible classrooms, and huddle spaces to large exhibit spaces, simulation labs and renovated lecture halls. FLEXspace was launched in 2012 as a collaboration between SUNY, the CSU Cal State University system, and Foothill-DeAnza Community College District and has since grown to include over 5000 members from 1400 campuses around the world, with PennState joining the partnership in 2019. FLEXspace won the Campus Technology Innovators Award in 2016, and the California Higher Education (CHEC) Collaborative Conference Focus on Efficiency Award in 2018.
FLEXspace users include practitioners, experts and decision makers in higher education, K-12, libraries, and museums who are focused on campus planning and facilities, learning technology, A/V systems integration, instructional design, teaching, and research. The FLEXspace portal provides a sophisticated suite of features that enables users to document and showcase their own campus learning spaces, share research, best practices and tools for planning,