In some respects, Thompson Rivers University was in an advantageous position. Our Learning Technology & Innovation team is housed within Open Learning, an open access distance learning unit with a 40+ year history that predates TRU.
That said, the “campus” side of the operation did not have a corresponding maturity with virtual learning delivery. Fewer than half of ~600 face-to-face instructors had employed digital learning tools, and the majority of their uses were “administrative” in nature — the “management” piece of the LMS. In early 2020, we were just beginning a program to extend online literacies with this community. As Brian wrote at the time:
If our F2F courses had to immediately move to alternate modes of delivery, we knew our little campus support team would be overrun in humiliating fashion. The prospect of what lay in store was truly terrifying to us… We expected to be approached by hundreds of instructors who would want an immediate and comprehensible path forward. They would be anxious, uncertain and in many cases have little experience with online technology, much less online instruction.
We had a decent open source toolkit: (Moodle, WordPress, BigBlueButton, Kaltura, Mattermost, H5P), and a role within the OpenETC, but were still building internal capacity, and had much to do to extend the potential of these tools, approaches and associated issues to our community.
We were (and are) vulnerable to a dynamic Naomi Klein articulated in The Shock Doctrine, in which certain actors take advantage of a crisis to push profit-driven solutions in the name of expediency. Even privacy laws were being applied more leniently as a response to the pandemic.
It becomes all too easy to make bad choices.