As the World Burns: Teaching Parable of the Sower During the Pandemic

Abstract

THE NATIONAL TEACHING & LEARNING FORUM 9 distinguishes the two, that’s a problem for your institution, he said. Finally, Robertson made the point that without well-thought-out evaluation processes, your institution doesn’t have a very good idea of the internal return on investment of online course development. “We’ve got to be able to look at [online course development] and say, where are we wasting time and money, and how can we get a better quality product out in less time, at lower cost?” Robertson said, adding those questions can really only be answered through thorough 360-degree evaluation, gathering responses from students, faculty and online course designers. Of those institutions who were doing robust evaluation of missionaligned online course development, Robertson said he developed the following takeaways: • Create a library of instructional strategies. Rather than reinvent the wheel every time an online course is developed and created, Robertson said institutions with strong evaluation practices would look at what worked in their online offerings, and then catalog resources about successful instructional design practices in a library for future use. That way, if a faculty member has crafted thoughtful, missionaligned learning practices into a course, they can share them with other faculty members or course designers to use in future course creation. • Integrate mission-driven components into teaching. It’s much more effective to embed and demonstrate mission-aligned principles into teaching, rather than simply teaching about those principles, Robertson said. For example, Robertson shared his idea for a virtual examen (a Jesuit practice of reflection) embedded into course design. “Imagine an online business ethics course where [in an examen] students are asked to think about a time when they were asked to compromise their own values. When was it? What were they feeling? What did that experience teach them?” Robertson said, adding that such a practice would be both more aligned with a Jesuit mission, and a more effective learning tool than answering an online multiple-choice quiz. Read more about Robertson’s research at https://bit.ly/3bi836z. You can email him at roberrol@lemoyne. edu. ❖