From “Director’s Updates” to “The Pandemic Paulcast”: Humanizing the Pivot at TRU Open Learning

Paul Martin

Given that Thompson Rivers University’s Open Learning Division serves more than 29,000 online and distance students from all over Canada and around the world and that our 265 Open Learning Faculty Members (OLFMs) all work remotely, one would presume that we would not have been all that adversely affected by the sudden move to remote learning in mid-March. After all, our nearly 500 courses were already online.

In fact, though, we were hit incredibly hard by the shutdown of our campus and of campuses across the country. The reason for this is that the vast majority of our courses relied on in-person final exams. To complicate matters further, our courses are predominately continuous registration courses. Students can begin their courses on any day of the week and can take anywhere from several weeks to thirty weeks to complete their courses. Thus, typically run upwards of a couple of thousand in-person exams per month at campuses and invigilation centres across Canada and around the world. Even worse, because these are carefully constructed online courses taught by OLFMs who don’t have control over the content or structure of their course, all of these assessment decisions had to be made and implemented centrally and not by the individual instructors.

To pivot such a massive operation and to come up with alternate assessments or virtual exam solutions for each of these online courses, then, we had to develop solutions that would work not only for two thousand students wanting to finish their courses in March, but also for those finishing over the months to come. With no end in sight to the lockdown, we also had to do our best to minimize chances for increased academic integrity violations. 

As the point person overseeing this entire pivot, I worked 15 hour days for two months straight before I was able to take a day off. The months to follow have not been significantly easier. The first several weeks of the lockdown, though, were the worst by far. From the moment we had to shut down in-person exams, my inbox was flooded with several hundred emails per day from OLFMs and students. Every email had a similar message. Students were panicking about when and how they would be able to complete their courses. OLFMs were just as concerned and wanted to know what to tell their students. Before long, too, every other email seemed to be an email from someone who had emailed the day before wondering why I hadn’t answered them yet. It was an impossible situation, and both OLFMS and students were incredibly frustrated.

Out of desperation, I drew on one of my favourite tools that I used throughout my previous career as a faculty member: the video update. One of the things that I learned as a faculty member is that the best way to answer students' questions you don’t have answers to is always to tell the students that you don’t have an answer yet but that one is coming. So, rather than responding to every single query with the same message, I started creating daily video updates for the OLFMs. Five days a week, I posted a 5-10 minute video update on YouTube to let them know what we knew and what we didn’t know. I let them know which courses we were prioritizing and also what to tell their students. I thought that I would only need to create these messages for a few days, but days stretched into weeks, and it was not until I was nearing episode 50 that things had calmed down enough for me to pull back on the daily updates.

As my experience with students had shown me over the years, these video messages helped to reassure our OLFMs that we were working incredibly hard to get these courses figured out. I also felt that I was able to model for faculty how helpful and humanizing these types of messages could be. Even then, I had not fully anticipated how much these video updates would matter to the OLFMs and also to me. They kept me going through some of the darkest days and weeks, and they helped our already physically distanced instructional team feel more connected to each other and to the work we were doing from our now decentralized central office. To keep us all entertained (and sane, perhaps), my videos soon morphed from very serious and apologetic daily “Director’s Updates” to daily editions of the “Pandemic Paulcast.” As the weeks went on different days of the week had special themes. Tie Tuesday carried on a tradition we have in our central office, but soon we also had “Wine Wednesday” and, my favourite and most delicious invention, “Poutine PThursday” in which I encouraged OLFMS to help address the nation-wide potato surplus by eating poutine with me every Thursday.

In the end, these videos helped transform the experience of the last several months from a near disaster to a shared experience that our entire team could celebrate getting through together. I’ve now reduced the frequency of the updates to a weekly basis, if only so that I can continue to celebrate Poutine PThursday. 

I have created a video that includes some highlights of the first 50 episodes, but you can also find the whole series of videos on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3oQtI6fsum46wFMpTCskH2-YNUoh070L