Intelligent design

For the last five months, John Gurnak has been running a marathon at sprint speed. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down campus operations at Loyola University Chicago in March, his Office of Online Learning (OOL) rushed to support faculty members who were improvising their way through a chaotic transition to remote learning. Then his team hustled to beef up professional development opportunities ahead of Summer Sessions, which were successfully held online, even experiencing an enrollment jump from the 2019. 

Once summer school classes were up and running, Gurnak and his colleagues turned their attention to the forthcoming semester. That the University decided, in June, to hold the vast majority of its fall classes online certainly didn’t minimize OOL’s workload. Instead, instructional designers were tasked with helping the entire faculty reimagine what their courses should look like in an online format, soup to nuts. “It’s been crazy, honestly,” Gurnak says. “Really crazy.” 

Even if they understand fully the underlying rationale, Loyola’s faculty and student body are justifiably anxious about our temporarily remote reality. Most undergrads, in particular, have never taken a purely online college course before. Is the technology hard to master? How much extra effort does it take to prepare, to maintain focus? How can a classroom sustain engagement without meeting in the flesh?

“We had to prepare faculty on how to best develop, design, and deliver an online course. Because it’s different,” Gurnak says. “The approach is different, the types of things you build into a course are different, the tools you need to be familiar with are different.” 

The good news? For two decades, Loyola has carefully and deliberately built online programs that reflect the University’s Jesuit values and educational approaches. Gurnak and his colleagues know what works. Their mission was to spread that gospel a little father and a little wider. 

And they did so primarily through a battery of trainings. To start, OOL scaled up significantly its traditional four-week Online Teaching Courses (OTC), OTC Design and OTC Facilitate. The former offers best practices for adapting an existing course for online delivery. The latter showcases how to build and deliver an online course from scratch. Each saw participation triple this summer—over 250 faculty completed the cycle. 

Yoo Na Youm, an assistant professor in the management department at the Quinlan School of Business, was one such participant. This fall, she’s slated to teach two sections of MGMT 304: Strategic Management, the first time she’ll serve as a sole instructor for an online course. Aside from the brass-tacks advice she received about student engagement and accessibility, the simple exercise of taking an online course herself offered Youm insight she didn’t previously have.

“The OTC Sakai site is so nicely laid out—it’s very student-centric,” she says. “I was able to see how those details, all of the formatting and the page layout, could be so helpful to students in following the course and understanding the overall objectives, how each week and how each piece of material fits.” 

For teachers who couldn’t commit to OTC’s month-long curriculum, OOL—partnering with Instructional Technology and Research Support (ITRS)—ran a series of four-hour intensive workshops called “Creating Quality Online Courses.” Trainers from OOL covered the basics of online pedagogy while ITRS layered in information about the technical tools faculty can deploy. Between April and July, over 600 faculty members took advantage. The course proved so popular, in fact, that Loyola loaded a self-paced version of this training onto Sakai, in late-July, allowing for greater access. 

Then came the topical workshops, shorter in length (typically an hour) and more specific in scope. One offered tips for managing large online classes. Another covered strategies related to academic integrity. ITRS hosted more than 30 workshops on a range of technology questions. OOL capped the summer with individual consultations for professors who attended a workshop and then sought out further assistance from an instructional designer.

Jessica Mansbach, associate director of the Faculty Center for Ignatian Pedagogy, administered many of the summer trainings. From her vantage point, Loyola faculty “really care about the quality of experience students will have.” 

Gurnak’s team will spend the first few weeks of the new semester troubleshooting, “putting out small fires” should teachers run into early problems. Another instructional designer was recently hired to aid in these efforts, a reinforcement that Gurnak deeply appreciates. From there, OOL’s focus will pivot to the spring semester and to ongoing program development. (Even before the coronavirus, Loyola administrators had green-lit some 30 additional online offerings in the coming years.) 

Youm spent Welcome Week finalizing her lesson plan and tinkering with her Sakai site, trying to make it just so. Enrolling in the OTC class pushed her “to make my course better, which is my responsibility.” She’s eager to see if the revamped design resonates with her students, and equates the additional summer preparation to running: “It’s painful, but at the same time, it feels good.” 

She’ll actually deliver her lectures from her office at the Schrieber Center, which she can walk to safely from her otherwise crowded apartment. She asked for dispensation to access campus because her husband is also teaching from home this summer, right beside a desk they’ve set up for their five-year-old son. He’s starting kindergarten remotely; like his mother’s marketing students, he’ll open up a laptop and take on a new challenge.