Page 23 - Campus Technology, October/November 2020

Each program went through “a healthy exercise in identifying the components of learning that were required to be in-person, to ensure accreditation and make sure that our students are learning all the things that these accreditors expect them to learn.”
for students to do education in an actual clinical setting. Those were disrupted just like the aca- demic learning environments were. Program leaders “aggressively partnered” with clinical education partners “to identify new opportuni- ties and shuffle around as needed,” said Moline. Those efforts resulted in a “really high percent- age of clinical education opportunities [for stu- dents] this summer.” Now, the challenge is mak- ing sure students stay safe in those external environments.
Designing for Worst Case
as Best Practice
In spite of the many upheavals, there was one benefit Moline observed: IT became “more pro- ductive,” especially when it came to providing support to students. “We were much more responsive,” he said. “We saw our average time to respond to tickets and average time to resolve them drop, because even though we had the same number of people, they were just able to pay attention better and be more responsive.”
Now the big concern is making the student experience as good as it can be within the obvi-
ous constraints. One-on-one and small group tutoring takes place online, with a combination of RingCentral’s Zoom and Calendly for sched- uling. But that’s just one aspect. There’s still the fact that the lunchroom won’t be open and that group study in the library won’t be available. Even a casual visit to the library can’t happen because it’s open by appointment only, Moline pointed out.
Even though there’s still plenty that has to be worked out for St. Augustine, on the IT side, Moline is driven by a guiding principle: that evaluating for resiliency is no longer something for the worst-case scenario. As he pointed out, “It’s best practice now.” There may be pushback for going with systems that are “significantly dif- ferent, that may have higher costs associated with them,” he said. “But as we’ve seen, this [time] has been disruptive. And the only reason we were able to be as responsive as we were is that we went with the most resilient systems possible.”
Dian Schaffhauser is content editor for Campus Technology.
campustechnology.com
23