Page 29 - Campus Technology, May/June 2020

CT: Can you share the route that EdPlus as an organization itself has followed as this pandemic has unfolded?
Regier: It’s intensified the organization’s opera- tions. There is a negative correlation between enrollment interest and COVID-19 attention. But as the arc of COVID begins to flatten out and go down, we expect not only a return to the normal interest in online, we actually expect a surge in interest in online education. And that’s what we’re really trying to prepare for — making sure that all our systems, all our processes, our tools within the university \[and\] within EdPlus are ready to go and handle what I anticipate to be an increased demand for online education from students going forward.
CT: Did ASU at large turn to your group and say, OK, how do we shift to remote education for everybody?
Regier: ASU was well positioned before this. Remember, EdPlus’ ASU Online has always been an integral part of the university. We aren’t some- thing that was separated off. We didn’t hire our own faculty. What I always say is, if you get a his- tory degree from ASU Online you get a history degree from that unit at ASU. And what that meant was that when the university made a decision to teach at distance the 70,000 campus-based stu- dents, we had a large number of online classes already being delivered. Those are referred to as “iCourses.” We had a third to a half of the faculty who had been trained in how to do quality digital instruction from a distance. And so our faculty weren’t panicked. It wasn’t something new. Teach- ing at distance wasn’t something new.
Certainly, many, many, many of our classes were taught using Zoom. But the difference is, we were able to train the faculty in the weeks before send- ing students home. And if they had not taught at distance before, every one of them knew people in their unit who had taught for ASU Online. It
“Everybody in EdPlus — all the success coaches, all the enrollment counselors, videographers, everybody is now working from home — and probably working harder than we have ever worked before.”
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