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1 Introduction: The Difference with Emergency Remote Teaching

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced educational institutions worldwide to move teaching to online mode, the term “emergency remote teaching” (ERT) (Hodges et al., 2020) was coined to differentiate this approach from previous instances of fully online or distance education. For one thing, in the past, online teaching was a choice teachers and students made among other options, whereas in this case, it was the only option. This meant that neither teachers nor students had a personal motive to choose online education - beyond the general imperative for “continuity” during imposed lockdowns. Also, most teachers did not have the training or experience of teaching online and the opportunity to design their courses thoughtfully with the help of instructional designers and instructional technologists over several months - everyone had to make the shift almost overnight, or at least within a very short period of time. It would be unreasonable to assume that people teaching online for the first time, and without time to prepare, would suddenly be able to offer good quality online education (Hodges et al., 2020). Faculty development and IT centers that had to support this shift had a sudden exponential increase in the number of educators they needed to support in a short amount of time, and so solutions varied.

Another important consideration with emergency remote teaching was the amount of trauma experienced by educators and students alike, from three main sources (as listed by Imad, 2021): (1) the uncertainty of living through a health pandemic, not knowing how to protect one’s loved ones, not knowing how long the situation would last, not knowing about economic impact, etc.; (2) the isolation caused by the government-imposed “physical distancing” in many countries, the stress of being unable to socialize freely with family, friends and colleagues; (3) the loss of meaning, as most people’s long-term plans were put on hold in order to deal with the emergency situation which changed the context of our everyday lives. In order to help educators through this traumatic stress, Imad (2021) proposes the following in order to offer trauma-sensitive educational development: help faculty feel they are in control in the face of uncertainty; use communication to help build trust; reestablish or reaffirm goals to create meaning; nurture community; and emphasize care and wellbeing. As a faculty developer in the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, and one who has a role in public scholarship beyond my own institution, I felt compelled to ensure equity and care for students during this time, and to also offer that kind of equity and care while supporting faculty, and at the same time meet the requirements coming top-down from administrators. How do you give faculty a feeling of control in the midst of uncertainty, while also ensuring a minimal standard of quality as required by administrators?

It is also important to recognize the ways in which the pandemic situation exacerbated inequalities (Czerniewicz et al., 2020), and that educational institutions had a moral obligation to try not to reproduce inequalities in their educational offerings. In Egypt, internet infrastructure varies by location and not just by socioeconomic status. The majority of students are privileged at my private American Liberal-Arts style institution, and AUC ensured that scholarship students had access to their own devices and high-speed internet. Faculty who did not have good internet at home were allowed to connect from their offices on campus. However, there are other less visible inequalities. Not everyone had access to a quiet, private space at home, some students and faculty members had additional care responsibilities at home, and people suffered from mental health challenges to varying degrees, and the pandemic situation surfaced new mental health challenges and exacerbated existing ones.

In all of this, it is important to recognize the role of faculty development centers not just as the main source of support for educators at universities, but also their role in modeling good practices for educators to emulate (Bali & Caines, 2018). The ERT situation required agility from faculty developers, as “best practices” in previous online teaching for the past 20 years before did not always apply in this case. Faculty developers needed to perform with agility but also to model agility in responding to this uncertain situation; they needed to model trauma-sensitive educational development in order to foster trauma-informed pedagogical approaches that would support and care for students. They also needed to do so while promoting equity and offering educators as much agency and ownership as possible, while trying to help maintain quality education for students. Moreover, in a situation where educators needed to provide so much more care to students than usual, faculty development centers became spaces for community support. As Noddings says, “when… the cared-for is unable to respond in a way that completes the relation, the work of the carer becomes more and more difficult. Carers in this position need the support of a caring community to sustain them” (Noddings, 2012, p. 54). As Brenna Clark Gray writes, as faculty developers, “we must do [the work] in a way that centres care, that acknowledges the stress and strain of our moment, that makes the digital humane: no one specifies those things, but they become central to my institutional purpose. The gulf between what the institution prioritizes and what I know is right expands” (Gray, 2018, p. 51).

This article shares my experience as a faculty developer at the American University in Cairo’s (AUC) Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT), as a key member working in a team tasked with supporting all faculty members through this shift to remote teaching. Specifically, I will highlight the agility and responsiveness of the different approaches followed at different times during the pandemic, and how they fare in terms of promoting ownership, agency and equity (Bali & Caines, 2018), and how they were influenced by trauma-informed approaches (Imad, 2021). Most of the actions were local, centered on my university’s context and in response to administrative recommendations and faculty and student feedback and requests; some of it was of a global nature, responding to what the global community of faculty developers and educators needed, and taking advantage of the possibilities for trans-national and glocal faculty development opportunities because so many worldwide were teaching fully online.

2 Overview of the Agile Faculty Development Approach

Two major elements of the emergency situation that require agility are that faculty are diverse in terms of their digital literacies and attitude towards learning new technologies, as well as diverse in terms of who their students are and what their pedagogical approaches are. This meant that there was no-size-fits-all (Gachago, Pallitt & Bali, 2020). Agility was also needed because of the uncertainty of the situation. What was needed, how long it would be needed, how faculty and students would respond, were all unknown and constantly moving targets. The university administration was accountable to the board of directors, to the US accreditation agency, Middle States, to Egyptian government decrees, to Egyptian accreditation, and of course to the needs and demands of students, parents and faculty. As a Center for Learning and Teaching, we needed to listen to all of these, synthesize, and recommend based on what we know from our experience in digital education, what we know of how other universities worldwide are responding, and what we observed and heard from our own local faculty and students.

In order to provide agile faculty development (as I describe it), the Center for Learning and Teaching instinctively and continually went through four phases, all while maintaining an underlying ethic of care and equity:

First: Anticipating and imagining what may occur and what kind of faculty development support might be needed in the near and medium-term future, and planning ahead for it. This aligns with Dunn (2018) model for technical intuition.

Second: Implementing while offering agency, ensuring that what is needed by the majority of educators is available, but that faculty members have agency to choose something other than one-size-fits-all solutions (see Bali & Caines, 2018; Gachago, et al., 2020; Longstreet et al., 2020).

Third: Listening, observing, researching , such that members of the Center are not only offering a service to faculty, but also listening to their reactions and concerns, observing how they respond to it, and performing more formal research such as surveys to gather feedback more formally and make decisions based on this feedback. Where possible, we also listened to students and collected feedback formally from them. Of course, there were some strategic decisions taken at the institutional level and not by the center itself (similar to Dunn 2018 Inquiry step).

Fourth: Adapting , based on a combination of institutional top-down decisions, faculty and student feedback and needs, and our own expertise as faculty developers following our past experience, what other centers worldwide were doing and our own innovative local solutions to fit our context.

This was a cycle repeated multiple times, as we iterated on what we offered and how we offered it. The pandemic situation was first predicted to last 2 weeks, then a few months, then over summer, then over the fall semester, and then over the spring 2021 semester, with small adjustments for “dual delivery” and “partial face-to-face” mode. Plans were adjusted multiple times, due to the statistics on COVID cases and some government decrees for shutting down educational institutions completely during months of high infection rates in Egypt.

3 Practicing Agile Faculty Development at AUC March 2020-December 2020

3.1 Phase 1: Pre-Closure

Before the government of Egypt announced that all schools and universities would move fully online, AUC administration anticipated that this may occur and the Center was tasked with preparing all faculty for this move. The Center collaborated with the Learning Management System (LMS) team to offer basic training on the institution’s LMS (Blackboard) and lecture-capture system (Panopto) by offering training timeslots for small groups to work closely with a member of either team, and to rotate across different “stations” focusing on different functionalities. By separating the different functions, this allowed faculty members agency in choosing which “stations” to visit according to their needs. For example, if someone was already familiar with the discussion board of Blackboard, they did not have to sit into that session; if someone did not plan to use Lecture Capture, they did not have to attend that session. This was the “foundation” announced and offered to all. People who were very familiar with the tools could apply for an exemption approved by their department chair.

Importantly, I recognized this “mass” foundation offering as insufficient for meeting all faculty members’ needs. With approval, I created supporting documentation that recognized that faculty who taught seminar-style courses needed more support for moving their teaching online. They were offered three additional documents: one for how to design and facilitate good online discussions (beyond the technical training offered in the foundation); one with alternative approaches to online interaction, such as collaborative annotation and Google docs; and one with guidelines for creating good synchronous online experiences such as Bb Collaborate and Zoom, even though AUC did not have a license for Zoom at the time. During our in-person training, we offered one-on-one consultations on the spot, and many faculty asked about synchronous video conferencing options, and we consulted with them on possibilities including Google Meet, Bb Collaborate and Zoom. Once the institution listened to faculty reiterate the need for using a synchronous video conferencing tool such as Zoom, and a large number of them asking for this particular tool as some had been familiar with it, the institution eventually bought an institutional Zoom license. Although the Center was not responsible for technical training on using Zoom, our future offerings once closure occurred used Zoom for online workshops, and faculty emphasized how important it was for them that our workshops modeled good synchronous video pedagogy to faculty.

On top of all of these offerings, our members were available for individual consultations, whether during these initial face-to-face training sessions, or via email or phone. As the pandemic situation progressed and everything became fully online, including training, we offered a one-stop-shop online form for requesting technical or pedagogical consultations.

3.2 Phase 2: Early Phases of Closure

As closure loomed imminent, administration asked us to write guidelines for faculty on how to convert various activities and assessments to online mode. We decided to make these guidelines in Google documents, as we recognized that guidelines could change every few days, depending on the situation. For example, at first, the university was planning to close for 2 weeks, and faculty were asked to postpone exams; later, the closure was extended for a longer period, and faculty were asked to convert in-person exams to alternative assessments; later, as closure went on, faculty were encouraged to convert exams to take-home or open book versions, and eventually, the institution started offering online proctoring software and guidelines shifted to when and how to use this software if deemed necessary. As the situation stabilized, these Google Documents started to have web versions that did not require constant updating. All of the material eventually became available publicly at https://www.aucegypt.edu/online-instruction

Agility involved also observing the situation and listening to faculty closely, as well as monitoring the worldwide situation. After initially promoting and recommending mostly asynchronous learning in order to promote equity, we recognized that the pandemic situation might require more synchronous teaching, for several reasons: the internet in Egypt improved, and synchronous learning seemed possible - and the institution was able to provide internet support for scholarship students who needed it; the socioemotional isolation from the pandemic needed educational environments to promote community and social connection, and not all educators or students knew how to do this via text in an asynchronous manner, especially in an oral culture such as Egypt’s; and synchronous learning offered a lower cognitive load for both educators and students than asynchronous learning, which would require more time management and preparation time - two things that trauma of the pandemic made more difficult (Imad, 2021). Equity and care looked different in this pandemic. As Farmer (2020) suggests, asynchronous learning becomes appropriate the more autonomous a learner is. Many learners during the pandemic were not prepared for this autonomy, and the trauma of the pandemic made it more difficult to make this shift.

In the early phases of closure, the Center offered several webinars to faculty on various topics of interest to them, such as how to balance synchronous and asynchronous learning, how to offer seminar-style classes online, and how to design alternative assessments. These offerings were provided via Zoom and faculty told us that they attended not only for the content, but also to watch us model how to use Zoom in pedagogically sound ways. For example, the first session on seminar-style teaching was by request of the newer faculty of the yearlong Faculty Institute of Learning and Teaching, where members shared their own experiences and concerns, modeling a seminar-style class.

Moreover, we had two types of “open-ended” offerings on Zoom. One was “morning coffee” and “afternoon check-in”, available most days, where anyone could drop in and chat, an open community space for socialization or quick trouble-shooting. The other was “Ask Us Anything” drop-in sessions twice a week, where people could come without registering and ask any questions they had, and a group of educational developers would be available to help respond. These sessions provided agile support and also gave CLT opportunities to listen to faculty concerns and feedback.

In order to guide further support, the institution gathered survey feedback from students and teachers on a weekly basis at the beginning of the pandemic, and faculty development offerings were adapted, based on this feedback.

The one-on-one consultations continued and occasional department-wide consultations as well, especially to support faculty with implementing alternative assessments, which we felt would provide more care and equity for students in a time where online timed exams, particularly proctored ones, increased student anxiety and stress, particularly those with less stable internet and less private home environments. The affective labor involved in all of this was significant. Faculty were under a lot of stress, as were students, and as faculty developers we needed to offer care and support for faculty to help them offer that kind of care and support for their students. As a center that initially supported a fraction of the faculty body who chose to ask for our support, we were suddenly supporting the entire faculty body, whether or not they wanted it. I remember personally receiving panicked phone calls and text messages from faculty members all day long, from 8 am to 10 pm the first few weeks.

3.3 Phase 3: Preparing for Summer

When it became clear that our summer semester (and later the fall semester) would also be online, it became important to ensure that faculty were better prepared for teaching fully online from day one. We recognized that these could not possibly be online courses of the same quality as ones we had previously developed over months with teams of instructional designers and instructional technologists, and that not all instructors would require the same type and degree of support. Therefore, we offered four differentiated options for summer PD, imagining what faculty would need based on past experience, and offering agency for them to choose what they would benefit from the most:

First: A self-paced course on Blackboard where faculty could both learn about all the elements of the process of designing an online course, and also see a model self-paced course on Blackboard.

Second: A 3-hour synchronous “summer institute” (later “fall institute”) where faculty could work together on developing their lesson plans, syllabi, and offer advice to each other in small groups. This session modeled good use of Zoom (which many of them were planning to use), particularly good use of Liberating Structures (see description in #4 below) for structuring equitable and engaging discussions in large and small groups, and good use of breakout rooms and Google docs for small group collaboration. This session relied heavily on faculty members learning from each other in small groups, modeling the kind of reciprocity and peer support they could continue to do within their own departments and in their courses as well.

Third: Optional technology hands-on sessions on designing their courses on Blackboard and using Zoom breakout rooms. The Zoom breakout room sessions became very popular after people attended the institute, because they experienced good use of breakout rooms and decided to use them in their classes. These sessions were conducted in such a way that every faculty member worked in a small group and was able to practice being the host and creating the breakout rooms themselves, in order to build their confidence to use it in class on their own.

Fourth: Glocal PD : Aside from the local PD offered, we also offered some “Glocal Educational Development” opportunities in late spring and early summer. At first, as part of the AMICAL consortium (a consortium of American-style Liberal Arts institutions outside the US), I co-facilitated several workshops using Liberating Structures. Liberating Structures are microstructures that offer “novel and practical how-to methods to help you include and unleash everyone in shaping [decisions]. LS distribute control so that participants can shape direction themselves as the action unfolds.” (Liberating Structures, n.d.). Moreover, AUC joined four US institutions in offering a more advanced exploration of digital literacies via DigPINS (Digital Pedagogy, Identity, Networks and Scholarship, as described in Bali & Caines, 2018), which allowed faculty who were already comfortable with digital teaching and digital literacies who wanted to reflect more deeply with others all over the world undergoing similar changes. We used a combination of asynchronous activities such as Slack, Twitter, blogging and collaborative annotation, and synchronous sessions using LS, and faculty could choose which elements to engage with at their own discretion.

The above options offered faculty agency, and also offered “care” to faculty and modeled how this care could be reciprocal amongst themselves and how they could encourage a caring environment within their classes, among their students. We received positive feedback on the value faculty members gained from these various PD options, including their success in using breakout rooms (and also feedback from students on enjoying this), the value of interaction with faculty peers in the synchronous workshops, and the value of hands-on technical workshops such as on Zoom breakouts.

3.4 Phase 4: Preparing for Fully Online Semesters

Given the success of the summer preparation PD, we offered similar PD in preparation for the fall semester, in addition to New Chalk Talk newsletters that included curations of faculty experiences, and a synchronous workshop towards the end of Spring 2020 in which faculty panelists from various disciplines shared their good practices in teaching online during the Spring 2020 semester. One of the most successful newsletters curated the input of 17 faculty members and was published towards the end of Fall 2020 (Addas et al., 2020).

We noticed that many faculty members (locally and globally) were saying they were not sure that it was possible to build community in a fully online course—some were able to establish intimacy one-on-one with students but not between learners themselves. While our offerings tried to offer options for doing so, such as creating breakout rooms and modeling Liberating Structures, they did not seem to be enough. People needed more diverse ideas that would suit their teaching philosophy, and more modeling of concrete practices.

Outside of my role at the Center, I collaborated with OneHE (an organization focused on quality of education globally) via my role as co-facilitator of Equity Unbound (an equity-focused, open, intercultural, connected learning curriculum) to create a website with Community-building Resources, a site that contained demo videos and templates and adaptations for activities educators could use in online class introductions, warm-ups, setting the tone for their courses and maintaining community via ongoing engagement and published here: https://onehe.org/equity-unbound. Our approach centered Intentionally Equitable Hospitality (Bali et al., 2019), where the teacher would view themselves as a host responsible for making sure everyone felt welcome, and ensuring this hospitality was equitable; as such, the site offered adaptations for each activity, knowing that some teachers would need to teach synchronously and others asynchronously; some had access to breakout room functionality and others did not, etc. This site included contributions from educators from all over the world and continues to receive contributions.

This site addresses the systemic challenges of the pandemic: not all educators worldwide had access to a faculty development center, and faculty developers were overloaded and burnt out from offering support non-stop for months (Bessette & McGowan, 2020). Moreover, previous good practices in online learning did not necessarily apply, especially with the mostly-synchronous approaches applied. This site offered demos and adaptations for activities that could be done synchronously or asynchronously. We received feedback from educators and faculty developers locally and worldwide that these resources were helpful and made it easier for others to imagine how to build community online (see a curation of some of the feedback in Bali & Zamora, 2021/2020).

4 Conclusion

The success of PD for online education is not only dependent on support for teaching via workshops and such, but also through fostering community support and institutional systems for rewards (Baran & Correia, 2014). CLT was able to imaginatively anticipate the types of teaching PD needed, and to foster communities locally and internationally to support faculty through their journey, but we are not able to offer substantive institutional rewards. However, by bringing faculty together to learn from each other, we were also recognizing what they had learned and their good practices, and inviting them to offer it to each other via newsletters and online workshops.

In the times of the trauma of a pandemic, where many of people’s choices were stripped away from them, we tried as much as possible to offer faculty members agency in which type of PD they wanted: in terms of modality (synchronous or asynchronous), in terms of focus area (basic technology hands-on, more pedagogical or more reflective such as DigPINS) and at the same time offer one-on-one support to those who need it. We also attempted to build community and foster imagination via the various options and approaches.

Listening to feedback and continually adapting, to continue being responsive to faculty members’ needs was key: we did not stick to previous good practices in online teaching (e.g. more asynchronous learning) when we saw faculty needed more; we continued ourselves to learn via our own PD opportunities and bring this back to campus. Moreover, as a faculty developer myself with many online networks, I was able to co-curate and develop community-building resources as an Open Educational Resource (OER) for all, resources that center care and equity, because I could see they were necessary even though my own institutions did not have resources to develop these: when something is needed and resources are scarce, but something is needed, we need to find other ways. When workshops and self-paced courses are not enough, we need to consider other approaches to PD, such as the video demos and templates and adaptations we used in the OneHE/Equity Unbound site. Community-building online was difficult for educators to imagine and they needed to see various approaches in action and know how to apply them.

Agility is necessary for faculty developers at times of uncertainty, and modeling this agility for faculty members is also necessary, but most importantly is that what guides our decisions is our underlying values, which in our case were equity and care for faculty and for students, and not neoliberal dimensions of efficiency and measurability that do not center the humanity of the pedagogical process.