At the moment of the pivot, we began offering 4 hours of daily drop-in support (we have continued this, but scaled back to 3 days / week). This sizeable investment in time allowed us:
- to establish needs and areas of concern and
- to take the temperature of the community.
In general, it was clear that in addition to basic functional skills in Moodle, faculty were grappling with huge anxieties about the term to come. We needed to tackle:
- general preparedness;
- basic digital pedagogy skills;
- advising re: synchronous/asynchronous;
- basic audio/video production skills; and
- understanding how to report on an expanding skill set (to administration and also through peer reviews of online teaching).
Imagining a suite of programming that could address all of these areas in the ~six weeks we had available was daunting but also envigorating.