A brave new hybrid world: Teaching, teamwork and technology under quarantine

Abstract

In early March the United Arab Emirates shifted to Ministry-mandated remote learning. As the Campus Dean for the Abu Dhabi Campus of the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) this posed logistical challenges but also promised opportunities for my campus. As a teacher, I had many questions about how the territory of cyberspace would accommodate a pedagogy and process of active learning. I worried, too, about how the loss of community in the form of a physical campus and classrooms would impact students’ mental health and well-being. The open door policy of the Dean’s Office would certainly be a casualty of the shift to on-line learning. Propelled by the curiosity of a life-long learner, I decided to jump into the fray rather than sit on the sidelines as verdicts were rendered daily about remote learning. I registered for Idesign—an on-line course to learn the fundamentals of on-line teaching. By summer, I was ready to pivot fully with the rest of the campus and the world in explorations of on-line learning. I offered two hybrid remote Arts and Science courses (The Sociological Imagination and Reading the Harlem Renaissance) in the summer of 2020. In weekly encounters and pandemic journals, students and I grappled with the frustration of quarantine and our forced condition of on-line living and learning. In both classes, the web-based tool VoiceThread was used to take advantage of a “multisensory environment” to create Communities of Inquiry (the CoI framework is widely understood as a space where teachers promote an active cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence). Following a brief overview of the timing and conditions of the shift to remote learning in the U.A.E., this paper will explore three pieces of student work as case studies in which role-play, virtual protest and writing projects were produced using VoiceThread. In each case, content, collaboration and community (building) bridged synchronous and asynchronous modalities producing new innovations for high-impact student centered learning in the face of Covid-19.