I am an educator in several spaces and I am an Assistant Professor running the Master’s in Project Management programmes at UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business in Dublin, Ireland. I also consult on risk, project management and strategy with many companies and non-profits, and run a photography training business, training beginners to professionals in all aspects of camera craft, and delivering talks to camera clubs around the world. I hold an International Exec. MBA, and postgrad professional Diploma in University Teaching & Learning, and am part way through a postgrad Diploma in Entrepreneurial Learning. I also have been training and teaching all my adult life – over 30 years as I turn 57 this year. Current interests in teaching include project management, story-telling, creative modes of teaching & learning, risk management and strategic renewal, especially for non-profits.

I was contacted by EPALE to facilitate a workshop which will be running in September 2020 around the power of story-telling for adult educators. Since then I’ve contributed some blog pieces and other resources for educators facing challenges in online delivery, and look forward to learning from and sharing my own experience with the wider community here.

Little did I suspect that my classes on Thursday, 5th March 2020 would be the last time I would be able to physically be with my students. We finished the classes, looking forward to the 2-week mid-term break, never expecting what was to come…
Classes of full and part-time students, drawn from across the globe, come to study at one of Ireland and the world’s top universities, sharing a rich diversity of culture, experience and outlook with each other and the teaching faculty. Our basic model on the programme has always been co-located teaching, in a beautiful old convent site located on the outskirts of the Dublin conurbation in acres of leafy, wooded grounds.But on Thursday March 12th, the announcement came from Taoiseach (the Irish Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar that all schools and colleges were to close in-person operations from 6 pm that evening.
Because we were in the middle of mid-term, I don’t think that the gravity of the situation really hit home immediately.  My two little ones aged 7 & 8 were home from school, and  there were 10 days before I needed to teach a class. It was a bit like an extra few days of holiday and family time. But those 10 days went by like a flash. The news got very bad very fast, and even in our very comfortable home situation - living near a green and a park, food supplies available using deliveries or pick and collect, bills essentially covered, it was clear that this wasn’t going to be business as usual. But the 5 step commute into my study was a welcome change to the crawl around Dublin’s M50 ring-road...

As an educator, I read many articles about online teaching. I signed up for a pro Zoom account, ran a few sessions to familiarize myself with the platform, and essentially assumed that I could just deliver my normal classes by talking over my slides online. How wrong I was.

One saving grace of the timing of the crisis for educators has been that almost every teacher I know, including me, had prior contact with their students, had established in-person relationships with them, so we could draw on these relationships as we transitioned into online calls, trying out different platforms - BlackBoard Collaborate, Zoom, Google, whatever was out there to see which offered the best experience and caused least connectivity issues.

Reflections on disruption and evolution of teaching practice

My student classes had scattered to the far ends - literally - of the globe. The first class back on Monday May 23rd saw my students connect in from Ireland, France, Holland, Mexico, India and China. Suddenly I needed to be cognizant of time-zones - would the normal session timings work for my Chinese students as well as Karol in Mexico, or would I need to change class times? And it turned out that some platforms caused problems for students connecting in from different parts of the world. Eventually, I settled on Zoom as the platform which consistently delivered fewest technical issues and “just worked” with all the features such as polls, breakout rooms and auto-generated transcripts which I wanted.
I instituted a practice of recording every class - announcing this at the start as everybody joined, and then making a copy of the video available after the session on the Learning Management System so students who couldn’t make the class could catch up. This has been a side benefit of moving to online delivery - formerly if I wasn’t teaching in one of the few rooms equipped with lecture-capture facilities I couldn’t record sessions. I finished up the last 5 weeks of term in a mode where shorter online sessions - 1-2 hours rather than the normal 3 hours in class were clearly all that students could really cope with. Including 10 minute breaks at 10 to each hour gave attendees - and me - much needed time away from the screen, but some days I walked out of the study after 6 or 8 hours of screen time completely “zoomed out”, head throbbing, neck and shoulders aching from being in an office chair for too long. Liberal use of breakout rooms during sessions broke segments of Powerpoint deck narration up, but I was just treading water for these weeks, trying desperately to stay afloat and cover the material remaining without really being able to focus on how to really optimize the learning experience or best leverage the opportunities online learning offers. And yet I am so thankful for all I have, when thinking about what our front-line medical staff are experiencing, and the efforts everyone in the supply chain are making to ensure that we all have supplies, food, internet access and all the other “essentials” for living. Whatever small challenges I’m facing, they really are “first-world problems” - dwarfed by the real, life and death issues other families are facing.

I desperately miss the in-person interaction that physical classes offer. 

I used to walk around my classrooms, which are mostly laid out with pods of tables in a flexible movable form, and was used to constantly picking up cues from the room - expressions, body language, smiles, frowns - and then leveraging these to adjust my own delivery as well as solicit inputs, comments and discussion from my students. This is so much more difficult when seated in front of a screen trying to see 20 or 30 thumbnail windows, while trying to maintain eye contact with a little red dot at the top of my laptop, and keep track of where we are in the slides.
The students have been amazing. There were no complaints, no-one saying they were being disempowered or losing out. Many were stuck in Ireland, unable to travel back home to be with family and loved ones. Some were sharing houses with other students in the centre of the city, unable to go out to green spaces or parks, living in close proximity with relative strangers for long periods, whilst being asked to complete tough programmes with deadlines, and significant workloads. All have been worried, fearful, trying to be brave but - like all of us - not always succeeding. 

This is a never before experienced crisis most of us were not prepared for - and we’re still not.

We’ve extended deadlines of course, but in the end, the work has to be done, and graded in roughly the same timeframes as before, give or take a week or two.  The new semester rolls in as the old one finishes, and now the issues really start to coalesce. How am I going to deliver a block week of classes to a cohort I’ve never met? At distance, online, with no opportunity for meeting them face to face. How will we form relationships like we do in the co-located environment? Can I expect the same level of commitment, of focus and concentration? Is it even fair to hope for this while everyone is still grappling with Covid? These are issues I’m facing this week and in the coming ones - what are you facing, and how can we help each other? Like all stories, this one doesn’t have an end - it’s just a slice of life with us as actors entering at the top and hopefully still on stage by the end, moving into whatever unknown future is still to come.

We learn along the way, adjust and adapt, re-evaluate what’s really important to us and trust to the cycle of renewal Spring always brings to move us into a better future.

What about you? What challenges are you facing and how are you becoming the hero of your own story? The EPALE initiative, to collect our stories as a resource to share, to collaborate, to collectively support each other is a timely one, which I am proud to be a part of.

Look out for some sessions I’ll be facilitating online for EPALE around story-telling and how it can help and support learning and teaching in the coming months, and stay safe everyone!
From a sunny and warm Dublin, Ireland, feel free to connect with me here on EPALE.

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