By Amelia Marcantonio-Fields
It’s crazy to think that we’re now almost in a month into the 2020-21 school year! The ERC computer lab has been closed now since March 2019 and we have fully immersed ourselves into online learning, which has turned into an exciting way to refine and adjust our teaching methods!
This summer and into the fall, I was lucky enough to learn about and assist with virtual course development and teaching. As a trial run this summer to get us prepared for the school year, the ERC led multiple virtual workshops, including: QGIS workshops for faculty, Python trainings for the Science Pathways Scholars Program, and introductory Excel sessions for the Pre-College classes. Under the helpful guidance of ERC Associate Director, Fatima Koli, the ERC reconciled with the challenge of being virtual and embraced this new reality!
Further this fall, I was able to apply these lessons as I had the pleasure of leading workshops for the intensive Fall A course, Society and Environment in the Ancient Meditarrean World, taught by Professor Ellen Morris. The course used QGIS to explore the historic spatial relationships between topics like trade, settlements, and topography.
Here are some of the lessons I have learned from teaching virtual workshops:
- Learning Close Up: The Benefits of Sharing Your Screen:
One of the biggest transitions to remote learning and teaching was leaving our equipment behind in the ERC computer lab. Our teaching set up in the lab includes an instructor computer that is projected onto various screens situated around the lab. Since virtual learning, our equipment has been scaled down to laptops, but we’ve noticed an unforeseen benefit with screen sharing. Screen sharing has allowed students to see close up the mouse moves that we make, the buttons that we click, and the formulas and inputs we write for examining data.
- Getting Over the Sound of Your Own Voice: The Beauty of Recordings
As learning went virtual at Columbia and Barnard, it became standard for professors to record their classes, which meant that as we taught workshops, we also adopted the standard of recording them! Recording workshops has been another unexpected perk of virtual learning as students are now able to rewatch recordings on their own time and use recordings as the first resource when troubleshooting their data analysis questions.
- A Need For Inclusion: Navigating Multiple Operating Systems
Lastly, as we taught workshops in this new format, we needed to adapt our teaching approach to include various types of operating systems rather than just Windows on our PCs in the lab! This adjustment, particularly seen in our courses taught with QGIS and Excel, has allowed us to both get better with troubleshooting for different softwares and make more comprehensive workshop guides for our students to review!
There is absolutely no question that the past year has been difficult, but the ERC is still cultivating supportive environments for students to explore empirical methods and data! Please let us know some of the lessons you’ve learned from online teaching and learning.
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