Butte College preparing for online instruction

Butte College has helped faculty learn how to best teach online for years. This year is different, however.

OROVILLE » Butte College has helped faculty learn how to best teach online for years. The task ahead of the school, though, requires more than one-on-one lessons.

So, the school initiated Core Canvas Training. It is a course with multiple layers to equip faculty for the upcoming fall semester, which will be 90 percent online.

The first step is basic computer skills. The second step is a workshop that walks faculty through legal requirements.

“Teaching online isn’t just a different way to teach. There’s specific legal requirements for instructor presence and student interaction and accessibility,” said Suzanne Wakim, Butte’s distance education coordinator.

The third step is for faculty to fill out a form confirming the training is helping them.

The last step is a Canvas course. Canvas is an online learning platform built for education that was heavily used at Butte College even before the pandemic, but will be especially useful now.

“This is the heart of our training,” Wakim said.

All faculty are required to take the 15-hour-or-so course and are given a stipend for doing so.

Wakim spent more hours than she can count designing it.

“We were starting from ground zero,” she said.

Those who came to her in the past had a desire to teach online, a trait not necessarily shared by each of the hundreds taking the Core Canvas Training. Many are outside of their comfort zone and skill-set, Wakim said.

“We have to completely re-envision how to train faculty,” she said.

This is an entirely different discussion than that of what will be done for labs. This training is focused on technology specifically, and how to build the best online experience for students. The topic of labs is “a bigger challenge than technology,” Wakim said.

Students, too, have had resources created for them. Within Canvas, students can find information about technology, time management, and a wellness module to help them get through “the stress they’re facing during this time,” Wakim said. “This is a pretty extensive resource for students.”

This is all happening because “teaching online is very different than teaching face-to-face,” Wakim said. “It’s not a matter of moving your face-to-face content online. You have to completely redesign the class and rethink how you teach, rethink how you do assessments. It’s a big mental shift.”

Multiple choice tests are easier to cheat on from home than they are in a classroom setting, for instance. For that reason, among others, it would be more beneficial for assessments to be project based, rather than standardized testing, Wakim said.

Asynchronous instruction is increasingly becoming the norm in this sudden switch to online learning, meaning students and professors do not necessarily need to be logged in for class at the same time.

“Trying to do synchronous teaching is challenging,” Wakim said. For example, perhaps a student has kids at home who need support, or a student becomes sick and can’t sit in on a lecture as a professor is giving it.

“Rather than you providing the content, it’s more of curating content and helping guide students through the learning process using the amazing resources that are online,” Wakim said. “It’s been very helpful for a lot of folks and very challenging for a lot of folks.”

Anthony Ferro, a health professor, has experience teaching online. Even so, he found the basics covered in the training helpful.

“I think the school has done a fabulous job helping us with professional development,” he said.

More than anything, in taking the course, he learned about different resources the campus offers students, including some for First Year Experience students. He plans to keep these in mind for the fall.

“I feel more prepared for the upcoming semester,” he said.