Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated existing disparities in educational outcomes, particularly associated with race and economic background. While online learning during emergency remote instruction solved for some of these inequities, it also widened learning gaps for some students, particularly those identifying as underrepresented, minority, or differently abled.

By applying pandemic learnings, higher education institutions have an opportunity to turn the disruption from COVID-19 into opportunities for substantial educational improvement. To this end, we have concentrated our investigation at Stanford University, conducting a case study on emergency remote instruction that highlights both promising practices and persistent challenges made especially visible during the pandemic. In particular, we report on a significant finding: faculty and staff who embraced empathy for learners and flexibility in meeting learners’ instructional needs during the pandemic saw not only improvements in student engagement but also greater success in student learning outcomes. This chapter offers a set of instructional and institutional implications for colleges and universities as they move into the post-pandemic educational landscape.

Perspectives from Stanford University

The disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic provides an unprecedented opportunity for the transformation of online teaching and learning practices within higher education institutions. Much of the higher education literature addressing the period of emergency remote teaching during the early waves of the pandemic focuses on the experience of learners, including their thoughts and reactions to online learning, immediate course outcomes, (in)accessibility to digital technology, and overall well-being. However, very little is known about the impact of the pandemic on students’ longitudinal learning outcomes.

Emergency remote instruction, though an excellent source of educational innovation, is not a method that engages intentional, backward-looking course design. Model online learning design starts with a set of desired student learning outcomes, then selects those technologies best positioned to achieve student success. However, institutions who choose to write off emergency remote instruction as a blanket failure in instructional design will have missed something important: the role of online learning in bringing forward opportunities to improve access, equity, and inclusion in higher education.

Accordingly, higher education institutions need to look beyond short-term digital education solutions. We know that online learning management systems improved accessibility for some students, while others struggled to obtain even basic access to technology. We also know that while some students thrived under emergency remote teaching, many others struggled with mental health and well-being. What institutions don’t know is what to do with these conflicting realities.

This is where thoughtful, long-range institutional planning comes into play. Higher education institutions need to develop holistic horizontal assessment and evaluation strategies for online learning which take into account the diversity of their own communities. This can only be achieved through extended self-analysis—institutional pedagogies of care and empathy need to be developed to provide greater accessibility for learners. The post-pandemic higher education landscape should be seen as an opportunity not to reinstate traditional teaching practices, but rather to radically reimagine teaching and learning pedagogy through the lens of equity, access, and inclusion. Online learning design is not one-size-fits-all. It is only by acknowledging this reality that higher education institutions will be able to effectively serve a diversity of future learners.

Introduction

Although online instruction is not new, the rapid transition to emergency remote teaching during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic left many faculty and instructors scrambling to redesign courses using unfamiliar virtual platforms. Instructors had no time to engage in rigorous, pedagogically informed backwards course design. Course content had to be moved online as quickly as possible, using whatever digital technologies were available at the time, to ensure student safety while providing academic continuity.

For many faculty, staff, and students across the nation, the transition from in-person, face-to-face learning to online, emergency remote instruction in March 2020 was difficult. The simple movement of instruction to an online format is not itself a guarantee of quality, as poor course design can leave students feeling isolated and without support. And many, if not the majority of, instructors did not even know how to deliver an online lecture.

While some instructors made a seamless transition to teaching online, others struggled to deliver quality course content. For students, burnout and Zoom fatigue became common as, particularly early in the pandemic, they struggled to passively consume long lectures on computer screens.

As the pandemic wore on, instructors adapted their teaching to the pandemic circumstances and to students’ needs. Instructors quickly increased their skill in using Zoom for teaching and thoughtfully reworked their instruction, with help from newly developed resources and training programs rapidly spun up by teams across campus. Faculty and staff who embraced empathy for learners and flexibility in meeting learners’ instructional needs during the pandemic saw not only improvements in student engagement but also greater success in student learning outcomes. Many teaching and learning innovations developed during this time—some of them explored in this chapter—improved student engagement in remote teaching and learning.

In discussions of the pandemic instructional experience, such gains are often, understandably, overshadowed by the way the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated existing disparities in educational outcomes for students, particularly with respect to race and economic background. While online learning during emergency remote instruction may have solved for some of these inequities, it also widened learning gaps for some students, particularly those identifying as underrepresented, minority, or differently abled. After undergraduates left on-campus housing, stark differences in the circumstances that contribute to such disparities became more evident. Some students had no homes to return to outside of their campus housing. Some students’ loss of a campus job impacted their families’ financial situation considerably. Others returned to homes where they were relied on to be caregivers on top of their academic obligations.

Now, with two years of perspective since the initial response, it is clear that many of the educational impacts of the pandemic were negative—but not all. By applying pandemic learnings, higher education institutions have an opportunity to turn the disruption from COVID-19 into opportunities for substantial educational improvement. To shed light on what those lessons might be and to provide colleges and universities nationwide with a model for how to identify them for themselves, we have focused our study on one school, Stanford University and shared our approach and learnings, hoping it may serve as a guide for others to follow.

Methods

A case study conducted by Stanford Digital Education from March 2020 to September 2021 on teaching and learning at Stanford University highlights both promising practices and persistent challenges made especially visible during the pandemic. The project, which draws upon interviews with 59 Stanford leaders, faculty, staff, and students, highlights recurring themes and spotlights areas of challenge and progress. Interviews averaged 60 minutes each, conducted from November 2021 to June 2022 by the Stanford Digital Education team with university leaders, faculty members, staff, and students representing more than 25 academic units across the institution. The case study was also informed by analyses of internal Stanford reports and articles by University Communications as well as secondary digital resources, such as recorded campus events and stories in higher education publications.

A case study approach offers several distinct advantages, particularly when investigating complex phenomena such as the shift to emergency remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Case studies feature multiple sources of data, including interviews, documents, and observations, and the rich array of data sources enables researchers to triangulate findings, corroborate evidence, and gain a more holistic understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. Context is crucial in understanding the dynamics of educational practices, especially in a rapidly evolving and unprecedented situation like the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting reflections reveal how educators can shape their approach to online learning, as well as define future institutional digital education strategies that strengthen support for the whole student.

A Case Study

At Stanford University, extraordinary measures were taken to ensure academic continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2020, when the earliest indications emerged that the virus could find its way to the Stanford campus, Stanford leadership began planning for a crisis: meeting with counterparts from peer institutions, convening its infectious disease team, and conducting tabletop exercises.

On Friday, March 6, 2020, amid a worsening global pandemic and a rapidly changing public health situation, that planning turned into action. Stanford Hospital announced it was treating its first COVID-19 patients. That same day, university leadership acted quickly to move the remainder of its winter term classes online. At about noon, Stephanie Kalfayan, vice provost for academic affairs, and Provost Persis Drell called Sarah Church, then the vice provost of teaching and learning. “Can we go online by Monday?” they asked. Church said, “Let me call you back.” Several hours later, the answer was yes: about 7,000 undergraduate students and nearly 8,000 graduate students would be sent home.

Over the course of the following weekend of March 7–8, instructors (who numbered 2,279 in the 2020-21 academic year) hurriedly reworked their courses. Staff teams spent the weekend in marathon meetings, drafting documentation for students and faculty to guide them through this emergency shift to remote learning for what was initially thought to be a period of a few weeks. Soon after, spring quarter courses moved online until further notice, and the work to pivot successfully to remote instruction continued at a rapid pace.

Stanford’s world-class community of teachers and learners faced the emergency switch to online learning with ample resources, a deep understanding of technology, and a long history of academic excellence and innovation in distance education. Yet, despite the successful transition to virtual classes from in-person, the path was bumpy for many, particularly students with fewer resources.

The pre-pandemic campus experience had leveled the playing field in many ways: students slept in similar rooms in on-campus housing, ate similar meals in the dining halls, and had the same access to the internet, libraries, and study spaces. Pandemic learning removed this shared experience and brought once-hidden differences into the light. For instance, an April 2020 survey of first-generation and/or low-income (FLI) Stanford students conducted by the First-generation and/or Low Income Partnership (FLIP) found the FLI population was especially vulnerable to negative impacts from pandemic disruption. Among the 161 FLI students who responded to the survey, 80 percent felt they faced circumstances that made academic success difficult, 60 percent felt concern about access to resources, and 50 percent had concerns about stable housing and/or food. Moreover, Stanford’s Institutional Research and Decision Support office reported that data collected during a spring 2020 student survey (n=5,898) indicated that “roughly twice the percentage of FLI students don’t have access to an adequate place to study compared to non-FLI undergraduate students.” Many students joined synchronous class sessions from across the globe, in the middle of the night local time, some on borrowed wireless internet. University leadership took action to address this challenging context for teaching and learning, creating new programs for supporting academic continuity, such as shipping laptops to students in need, providing additional funds to students who receive financial aid, and other interventions.

The rapid transition to online learning left some members of the Stanford campus community without the required technology tools or internet access, amplifying inequities that would normally be camouflaged while students are present in a physical classroom. For instance, in our interviews, we learned some Stanford students found themselves sharing one computer among several family members, using phones to access hotspots in public parking lots, or losing the quiet study spaces—e.g., libraries and study rooms—that on-campus education would have normally afforded them. Many staff and faculty also suffered extreme loneliness because of isolation from their peers, and still others found themselves overwhelmed by new demands for education of their children and health care responsibilities for elder family members.

Societal Impacts

In addition to the challenge of remote teaching, other issues in our society had major effects on Stanford during this period. In the summer of 2020, the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of police aligned people across the country in a call for justice under the banner of Black Lives Matter. The movement had impacts on the Stanford community, as faculty and students made new space to discuss the impacts of racial injustice and inequality. At Stanford, a large-scale memorial to Black victims of police violence was erected at the Oval, while some students struggled to work with faculty to find space for organizing and for grief. Capturing the impact of this moment on students, a Stanford Daily opinion subheading reads, “Our friends are outside being tear gassed in the middle of a pandemic. Just please let us pass our classes.”

The COVID-19 pandemic increased anti-Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) sentiment, sometimes resulting in hate speech and violence. Stanford’s community was not spared from the stress and fear caused by the increase in anti-AAPI hate. The Black Lives Matter movement and the movement to end anti-AAPI hate affected students’ presence in their virtual classrooms in an unignorable way. Many instructors made space for students to share the impacts of issues in society on them and centered conversations around topics of identity and equity. For much of spring and summer of 2020, the focus turned from coursework to basic survival, challenging faculty to engage students who were also dealing with direct or indirect impacts of pandemic-induced trauma, as well as social unrest related to racial injustice.

“There is no ‘normal’ to return to”

Stanford’s pivot to an online campus was meant to last for the duration of the pandemic’s threat, initially estimated to be the remainder of winter quarter, then the remainder of the academic year. However, remote learning lasted well into September 2021. While that fall quarter brought a buzz of energy back to campus and a push to return to “normal” face-to-face education, pandemic measures such as remote and hybrid classes and rules about social distancing, masking, testing, and vaccination remained throughout the 2021–22 academic year. The long-term negative and positive impact to students—to their learning, to their skills, to their well-being—is yet to be fully understood and is likely significant.

“There is no ‘normal’ to return to,” remarked one of our interview subjects, highlighting the lasting nature of the seismic changes of the pandemic in 2020–21 on Stanford, on our society, and on teaching and learning.

4 Takeaways for Higher Education

We have used our interviews to identify common themes that have arisen regarding the effectiveness of policies and practices put in place to support emergency remote teaching and learning. The following section introduces four principal learnings from the Stanford experience of emergency remote instruction:

  • Fostering a culture of empathy is crucial to ensuring student success.
  • Staff have a new and vital role in shaping instructional innovation and in building new collaborative networks.
  • The move to remote education worsened access for many students, though some saw an improvement.
  • The faculty-student relationship changed, providing new opportunities for students to take ownership in their own learning.

Additionally, we offer a set of institutional and instructional strategies derived from these learnings, touching on immediate, one- to three-year, and longer-term next steps for colleges and universities as they transition into the post-pandemic teaching and learning space. In doing so, we hope that higher education institutions can collectively map a more positive and hopeful future of innovation in teaching and learning that builds on this work.

Learning 1: Fostering a Culture of Empathy Is Crucial to Ensuring Student Success

In our research, we learned that fostering a culture of empathy is crucial to students’ learning. Particularly during the pandemic, when students faced record levels of anxiety and isolation, there emerged the need for a great deal of flexibility and understanding. These very serious challenges to student well-being required thoughtful solutions. “Student well-being is what allows students to show up in classrooms, labs, and research settings ready to learn and engage,” says Susie Brubaker-Cole, vice provost for student affairs. “And when students feel a sense of belonging, they are more effective learners.” Because of the importance of student well-being to its core educational mission, innovations in solving for pandemic-caused threats to student well-being proliferated at Stanford.

Indeed, students had challenges while learning at home. These challenges particularly impacted disadvantaged students: those from low-income backgrounds and those who were first-generation college attendees. These disruptions took many forms, from caregiving expectations to a lack of quiet learning spaces, that could impact their ability to learn. Some students, upon returning to their homes all across the globe, were required to participate in course sessions scheduled on Pacific US time—sometimes in the middle of the night for those students.

It wasn’t just the online learning environment that caused students to struggle. The pandemic itself not only caused stress, but also resulted in loss of health and lives on a staggering scale. Livelihoods were threatened: with the move off-campus, some students lost their jobs, and with them, their source of income. During 2020, the United States also reckoned with the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, resulting in many in the Stanford community focusing energy on grieving, reflection, and organizing. The pandemic caused anti-Asian hate and sometimes violence. This was certainly felt in the Bay Area, causing strain on students who worried about their and their families’ safety. In California, impacts from wildfires turned the sky orange on one day in fall of 2020. This all compounded into a heavy weight for many in our community to carry while trying to go about their usual teaching and learning activities.

A lot of work was done in response to this. A summer 2020 student survey showed troubling evidence of students struggling to maintain well-being. Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning, with a mission to “support and promote effective teaching and learning across the Stanford community,” and Vaden Health Services, Stanford’s hub of health and wellness services, jumped to act, collaborating to build a workshop and develop resources that provided instructors with the tools to support students by, first, identifying when students need support. The groups curated mental health and well-being resources and moved resources online when needed. The workshop was provided across campus to instructors, staff, and families of students.

A key effort to supporting student well-being was the development of inclusive teaching practices. Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning played a key role in building, documenting, and providing training for these practices, but others across campus developed resources in this space as well. To create an online learning environment where students can flourish, instructors developed ways to check in with students as whole people. Some instructors held space in their Zoom classrooms for the informal connections made on campus. Some instructors simply asked students to answer, in one word, how they were doing. Others created ice-breakers to get students talking about what they were watching or what new hobbies they were working on during shelter-in-place. Some created “share spaces” to invite students to share more about how current events were impacting each of them.

Kathy Davies, managing director of the Life Design Lab at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, more commonly known as Stanford d.school, and lecturer of mechanical engineering, recalls realizing she and her teaching team could not assume anything about students’ learning setups at home: access to technology, learning materials, and, importantly, due to the sensitive nature of some classroom discussions, a private space to engage in Zoom discussions in the class. “The kinds of conversations that we’re having are sometimes conversations that we want to have with just the people we’re having them with, and not our family members or the people in [the] coffee shop,” says Davies of her courses, ME 104B: Designing Your Life and ME 104S: Designing Your Stanford. Davies and her teaching team used surveys to discover who had access to what, in order to design the most inclusive learning experience possible, using small group discussions, but also relying on text-based discussions through Zoom chat and other technologies such as the team collaboration platform Miro.

Another key aspect of inclusive design was offering flexibility in assessment design. During this time, Stanford set a policy to prevent high-stakes, summative assessments in order to remove from students the anxiety final exams can cause. Many instructors took this opportunity to entirely rethink exams, focusing on a growth mindset by developing more project-based, formative, scaffolded assessments. This reduced stress on students and, some told us, improved learning outcomes for students simultaneously.

At the same time, many students were invited to provide more feedback on their courses than previously; as faculty innovated their instruction to meet the requirements of emergency remote instruction, they sought input on those designs from their students. This feedback resulted in learning experiences that better met learners’ needs. Thus, a more collaborative learning environment was created, one that centered the student experience. Indeed, a student and Course Design Assistant told us, “When faculty tried to adapt their courses to the needs of students learning online, students felt more engaged.”

What’s next

In our interviews, we heard comments recognizing the centrality of Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and other staff teaching and learning units embedded within schools and departments. We also heard ideas for increasing resourcing in order to continue providing instructional support at the same level as during emergency remote instruction. In addition to greater resourcing for CTL, we heard recommendations for broad implementation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles in response to increased student demand for flexibility and accommodations of learning differences. “This makes the need for student-by-student accommodations less pressing, because the learning design is already accommodating for learners,” said one interviewee, noting a need to institutionally address the increase in accommodation requests for depression and anxiety post-pandemic.

Continued meaningful engagement with students to understand their needs will be required to ensure these innovations are successfully implemented. During emergency remote instruction, students played new roles as co-creators of learning experiences, providing feedback, support, and ideas. This student collaboration with staff and instructors shows promise as a model for designing impactful learning experiences for diverse learners into the future.

Ultimately, the challenges faced by students during the pandemic were not new and will not disappear with the pandemic’s end. The Stanford community continues the efforts initiated during (and before) the pandemic on equity and inclusion. It remains urgent, too, to listen to students’ needs with empathy and to strive to improve student well-being. “I think of it as a huge permission slip to everybody on campus to care and empathize, and to bring their humanity forward in every interaction with students. We need to build a culture around that,” Brubaker-Cole says.

Learning 2: Staff Have a New and Vital Role in Shaping Instructional Innovation and in Building New Collaborative Networks

When colleges and universities ceased on-campus classes in March 2020 due to COVID-19, ensuring teaching continuity became the highest priority. Professors, lecturers, and instructors had to move swiftly to online delivery of course material. But they could not do it alone. Staff proved themselves some of the most crucial “emergency responders” of academia, ensuring academic continuity for students even as they endured unprecedented disruption from the pandemic.

During the period of emergency remote instruction, the heavily siloed nature of schools, departments, and business units necessarily gave way to agile, collaborative partnerships, particularly among university staff members in course support roles. Within the rapid pandemic timeline, academic support specialists and course designers were empowered to rapidly develop new, innovative supports for teaching and learning. Many assumed entirely new roles in technology support to ensure a continuity of services online. Still others took on additional responsibilities by providing online student support services in areas including student affairs, academic counseling and advising, residential life, and other student and faculty-facing units. That spirit of innovation continued as services were refined or built anew throughout emergency remote instruction.

In our interviews, we learned that at colleges and universities around the nation, staff came together to form cross-functional teams from units all across campus to solve problems and shape instructional innovation. Members of the Stanford staff and instructor communities participated actively in these efforts. Slack channels emerged for collaborative problem solving on new models of teaching and learning, and inter-institutional workshops, conferences, and summits increased as the need to provide enhanced teaching and learning support to faculty and instructors grew. Previously abandoned knowledge communities, such as online libraries and digital repositories, were revitalized, and educational technology programs were expanded or enhanced as campus demand grew for technological devices (such as iPads and laptops), classroom technology support, and online learning design.

During this period, staff teams worked tirelessly to pivot teaching and learning online in response to an emerging global health crisis and to refine and iterate online instruction as the pandemic wore on. New programs and projects were led by staff, sometimes in totally new areas of work, and often in cross-functional groups. Many of the staff support teams spun up during the pandemic featured more diverse representation, including from low-level administrators and union workers, and offered better support for diverse learners, especially those impacted by the loss of residential and in-person dining services. In some cases, staff groups developed collaborative teams within and beyond Stanford to pool knowledge and resources about emergency remote teaching and learning for under-represented and minority students. Prior to the pandemic, many of these staff members would not have occasion to interact with one another. Now, they relied on one another for information about rapidly changing academic policies, public health guidelines, and the latest in ongoing student support practices.

Over the course of the pandemic, professional knowledge communities at Stanford and beyond formed and made active use of processes of information collection, curation, and dissemination. New communication systems were necessary due to the inherent complexity of the university ecosystem and myriad of business systems the institution needed to maintain during the pandemic, including institutional communication, library management, teaching and student support, research and technology transfer support, project management and fundraising, financial support, IT support, legal support, logistics, strategic planning, and others.

This section provides insight into the structure of several Stanford knowledge communities that emerged in the process of creating, filtering, and sharing emergency pandemic teaching and learning information.

Stanford Teaching Commons

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford staff members advocated to revive the Center for Teaching and Learning’s (then) defunct Teaching Commons website, an online resource devoted to providing curated content, such as online workshops and teaching guides, for all those with teaching roles in the Stanford community. “We had been trying to get traction on reviving the Teaching Commons website for a year before the pandemic,” says Beth Seltzer, an academic technologist at the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education during the pandemic. When the pandemic emerged, justification for the project became obvious.

The Stanford Teaching Commons, which the website describes as “designed for all members of the Stanford community (instructors, TAs, support staff) who are interested in learning, education, and pedagogy,” is organized around a set of digital resources, including teaching guides (arranged by key topics), articles (including how-tos, activities, and instructor interviews), and resources (other teaching and learning information that can be found cross-institutionally). Each academic quarter during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, participating members of the Teaching Commons—including academic technology support staff, program managers, and program directors from across the institution—explored an ever-expanding set of teaching and learning questions.

Notably, the Teaching Commons is a primarily staff-driven community of practice, which has provided the community a distinct perspective. Seltzer laments that it took a pandemic to show the value of a faculty-facing online teaching and learning repository. “We need to think more about how the university as a whole works … internal divides within the university can make it harder for people to connect with the resources available to them.”

Online Experience Team

The Online Experience Team was charged to get ahead of the unexpected by ensuring the continuity of academic services at Stanford, says Richard Webber, chair of the group and associate vice provost for Learning Technologies and Spaces and chief technology officer in the Office of the Vice Provost for Student Affairs. It brought together faculty and staff voices from across the institution, including (but not limited to) the School of Humanities and Sciences, University IT, Learning Technologies and Spaces, Vice Provost for Graduate Education, School of Medicine, Center for Teaching and Learning, Graduate School of Education, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Continuing Studies, and Program in Writing and Rhetoric.

Goals of the group included sharing information and knowledge, anticipating problems in teaching and learning, and engaging in collective problem solving. By April 2020, the team began meeting regularly to share information about the ever-evolving COVID-19 crisis. According to Webber, “transparency in communicating the uncertainty we’re facing” was sorely needed, as faculty and staff at Stanford struggled to move from a reactive to a proactive approach.

As institutional knowledge of the Online Experience Team grew, and as its leadership in innovative teaching and learning practices at Stanford was recognized, members were increasingly empowered to act as individual change agents within their own departments. The community became, for its members, a place to share new knowledge that was later transferred to the rest of the university. For instance, Online Experience Team members were able to share updates on such topics as academic policy changes, FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) issues (such as faculty reusing recorded class sessions), planning for online exams and remote classes, online placement exams, mask mandates in classrooms, the creation of on-campus study space resources, and, more recently, information about fall 2021 classroom shortages.

Staff Empowered to Address Inequities

In October 2021, the university took a notable step in online teaching and learning by creating a new unit in the provost’s office dedicated to bringing together the university’s teaching and learning expertise and technological capabilities in new ways. (Full disclosure: at the time of this writing, the authors were part of this unit.) Known as “Stanford Digital Education,” the unit consists of nine staff members and supports digital education initiatives across Stanford’s schools and offices, providing a framework to facilitate internal and external partnerships, incubate new ideas and projects, and spur innovation in Stanford’s online and hybrid education strategies.

What sets this unit apart from pre-pandemic online education efforts is its distinct mission: to advance education innovation for equity and opportunity. Stanford Digital Education aims to enhance equity in higher education by making Stanford teaching and learning available to students who historically have not had access to the university’s instruction. Stanford Digital Education is designed to help Stanford innovators better understand and meet post-pandemic educational needs involving disparities among who can benefit from Stanford’s academic offerings.

What’s Next

The new knowledge networks have broken down traditional institutional silos and enabled staff to be included more in decisions about teaching. Moreover, as a result of remote teaching resource guides produced by staff at the Teaching Commons, Stanford instructors have become more aware of the need to be inclusive in their course designs, not just in respect to affordability and accessibility, but also in regard to access to (and comfort with) technology. These changes are likely to be a positive starting point for conversations around teaching practices both within and outside of Stanford, especially concerning certain tools and technologies that were widely adopted during the pandemic and appeared to enhance inclusivity. Staff have played—and will likely continue to play—a critical role in such instructional innovation and knowledge-sharing communities.

Learning 3: The Move to Remote Education Worsened Access for Many Students, Though Some Saw an Improvement

Emergency remote instruction polarized students’ learning experiences: educational access was improved for some students, while many endured worse access. Being on the Stanford campus has a homogenizing effect: students have access to the same resources on campus, from quiet study spaces to similar availability of dining options. However, students’ experiences learning from home diverged; students no longer had similar access to all the things that create a favorable context for learning. Many of the impacts were most felt by students who are from low-income backgrounds or are first-generation college students.

Student Challenges

Students’ identities were more visible in the online learning environment, because parts of those identities were often literally visible behind them on Zoom. Students, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, faced food and housing insecurity or had caregiving responsibilities. Such situations in some cases impacted students’ ability to focus wholly on their learning. Not all students had access to quiet, separate study spaces. It was harder for these students to be their authentic selves or have open discussions in class because of family members and friends who might be in the learning space with them. This not only impacted students’ ability to participate in class but also posed difficulties in their being able to complete homework outside of class.

And such disparities grew worse if there were technological and logistical challenges, which was often the case for less-advantaged students. Stanford spun up programs to ship hardware like laptops to students in need, but some problems were harder to solve: students, particularly those in rural areas, sometimes lacked access to the stable internet needed to participate meaningfully in their courses. International students sometimes had to participate in courses scheduled in what turned out to be the middle of the night because of a time difference.

These issues need to be understood in a wider context of harms that did not necessarily correlate to resource levels. Regardless of income, students indicated increased isolation and anxiety while they were removed from peer communities.

Flexibility is Key

From a student perspective, the positive aspects of emergency remote instruction included convenient online offerings of educational services and supports. Some students found it easier to balance busy schedules without having to travel across campus. These students could move from class to office hours to student group meetings without leaving their homes. In particular, this benefited students with mobility challenges, social anxiety, or, simply, very busy schedules.

Increased flexibility in instructional modalities also offered more variety in the means through which students engaged with their learning. Faculty noted students who had been hesitant to speak up in class engaged with course discussions more readily with the help of the backchannel discussions made possible by Zoom chat. Students appreciated that instructors were more likely to meaningfully post course content in Stanford’s learning management system, Canvas. Students could engage with course material in ways that worked best for them; for example, lectures recorded via Zoom and posted to Canvas could be watched repeatedly, more slowly or more quickly, and with subtitles. This has the potential to benefit students who have less familiarity with introductory material, a group that is likely to include those who come from less privileged backgrounds, those with sensory processing difficulties, and those with learning differences.

Some more experiential courses—courses that required hands-on access to spaces or equipment not readily available at home—had particular challenges. Stanford staff and instructors worked to creatively redesign these courses so the same learning outcomes could be achieved from home. Chemistry kits were shipped to students with chemicals that were safe for home use and met international shipping guidelines, for example. In some courses, simpler experiments or projects had to be developed that were possible to do at home. In some instances, these changes may have led to more effective pedagogy.

One instructor, for instance, told us he reworked the projects in his engineering course to be simpler and more scaffolded since the students would have less guidance and oversight at home than they would in the lab with their instructors. The scaffolding worked so well that his face-to-face course will retain elements of the pandemic design.

We learned of other creative approaches to some forms of instruction: a mail art course inviting students to create and send physical objects to one another. We also heard about a mechanical engineering course on designing experiments in which students designed experiments with household items, such as studying how cream dissipates into a cup of coffee.

What’s Next

Innovative teaching practices developed to augment Stanford instruction during remote learning (such as flipped course design, instructional media libraries, and project-based assessments) hold promise for long-term improvements to teaching and learning, though they are not yet universally embraced, nor are their impacts typically measured. Our interview findings suggest that much evaluation of the effectiveness of pedagogical practices—not just of student satisfaction, as is generally measured by processes like course evaluations—has yet to be done. That will be an important part of gauging the impacts of promising pedagogical innovations during remote instruction, especially those innovations that might be integrated into face-to-face instruction. “There should be more assessment of practices,” says Sarah Church, vice provost for undergraduate education and professor of physics, noting that Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning has the expertise required to do such work.

The Long-term Recovery Task Force, a group appointed by the university president to determine longer-term implications of the crisis on Stanford’s long-range vision, concluded that the university still needs to make its online education capacity stronger. However, it remains to be decided how to pursue that aim. What we have learned is that when faced with a fundamental change to the way the Stanford community teaches and learns, an initially reactive, urgent response gradually provided space for innovative and promising practices to emerge. Instructors used the disruption as an opportunity to rethink their course designs from the ground up. “We’ve all been doing this for a long time, and you get in some habits. It was kind of refreshing to just start over, and it didn’t take as long as I thought,” says Graham Weaver, lecturer in management at Stanford Graduate School of Business, in a fall 2021 faculty panel. “I’m going to bring that thinking back into the classroom as well.”

Learning 4: The Faculty-Student Relationship Changed, Providing New Opportunities for Students to Take Ownership in Their Own Learning

Undoubtedly, emergency pandemic teaching required changes in—and in some cases caused serious disruptions to—traditional classroom teaching structures at Stanford. Professors, lecturers, and instructors had to move swiftly to virtual delivery of course material in order to ensure academic continuity. For faculty and instructors proficient in technology, the move to online teaching went, if not smoothly, at least without insurmountable issues. For others, the transition proved exceptionally challenging.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, instructors were told to do the best they could to minimize disruption to teaching and learning. In most cases, they were provided only one weekend to pivot to remote instruction. Within that fast timeline, faculty and staff were empowered to rapidly develop new, innovative supports for teaching and learning. That spirit of innovation continued as services were refined or built anew throughout emergency remote instruction.

For most instructors, the transition to emergency remote teaching meant rapid development of technology systems, including adoption of digital platforms needed to support remote instruction. In particular, course instructors found themselves needing to develop competencies in three principal areas to transform their in-person pedagogy to a remote learning environment: learning management systems, online course design, and virtual facilitation of quality remote learning. Though faculty and staff proficient in these technologies were available to assist, they lacked the bandwidth required to provide rapid and ongoing course support. To ensure continued academic continuity, new teaching support structures were needed.

Students, many with little or no prior experience in online learning design, were called to fill the knowledge gap.

As the pandemic bled into spring of 2020, faculty reported a “blurring” of traditional faculty, graduate student, and undergraduate student roles and responsibilities. During this period, students took on roles as learning management system administrators, peer advisors, technology experts, and academic thought partners. Teaching assistant (TA) positions were expanded to include not only academic content delivery, but course design and technology support. Decisions on approaches to teaching with technology during emergency remote instruction were, at times, highly localized and made very quickly, with input from across teaching teams and teaching and learning support staff.

Students participated in course design in novel and innovative ways as faculty sought input on redesigned courses or, in some cases, as faculty invited students to co-design courses based on students’ own learning goals. New support models, established to supplement existing academic technology support on campus, leveraged student technology expertise to enable faculty to adapt to remote instruction.

Notably, not only did instructors have to learn new platforms (e.g., Zoom) to deliver their instruction, they also had to teach while monitoring chat, watching for virtual “raised hands,” and maintaining direct eye contact with their audience. In such cases, students were often called in to help set the norms for a virtual, mediated environment.

In some cases, already challenging topics in the classroom were made more challenging by the virtual environment, leading instructors to avoid certain topics because of concerns about their being recorded and having remarks taken out of context. In others, a lack of connection to faculty caused the loss of mentoring relationships crucial to students’ continued academic careers.

Going Beyond the TA

New student-centered teaching support programs began to emerge almost as soon as emergency pandemic teaching at Stanford began. Other support programs, available for decades, took on new importance or shifted direction with the onset of emergency pandemic teaching.

One of the first formal graduate teaching support programs to form at the onset of the pandemic was the Stanford Graduate School of Education’s Digital Ambassadors Program, which was co-created in May 2020 by Josh Weiss, the school’s director of digital learning solutions in its Office of Innovation and Technology, and Shawn Kim, then the school’s director of special programs. “It was definitely created on the fly,” Weiss says. “Digital Ambassadors happened because professors literally said, ‘My Zoom isn’t working, can you jump into my class?’ We realized that our faculty would need support in Canvas beyond what a traditional TA [teaching assistant] would provide.”

Centering their philosophy on “what does digital learning mean?” GSE staff quickly spun up a Canvas “sandbox” where ambassadors could practice course design skills and access digital tools. They created their own resource guides, which were regularly updated week to week and enriched by other digital ambassadors providing peer feedback.

In the first two quarters of operation, ambassadors were automatically assigned to faculty. However, as faculty gained confidence and competency in Canvas, the program moved to become opt-in in spring 2021. “We noticed an increase in Zoom and Canvas skills (around that time),” Weiss recalls. “Graduate students and faculty were acting as thought partners and using creative solutions to facilitate discussion and leverage digital tools in the classroom.”

A Growing Trend

Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) decided to create its own version of the Digital Ambassadors Program in spring 2020, employing a cohort of undergraduate students trained in academic technology. Like the GSE model, the VPUE program appears to have enhanced the teaching relationship between faculty and their assigned ambassadors. According to Beth Seltzer, an academic technologist at VPUE, “Students came into class to help with technology, and would end up providing advice and consultations—it ended up being more of a collaborative relationship.” As a result, ambassadors were provided an unprecedented opportunity to give feedback on course design.

With the return of face-to-face learning in fall 2021, the VPUE digital ambassador model has since been reimagined under the Stanford Introductory Seminars (IntroSems) program, which offers small, hands-on elective courses to first- and second-year undergraduate students, as a new teaching support structure: the Course Development Assistant Plus (CDA+) program. The role provides support to faculty who need assistance with course design and implementation.

Although CDA+s may be either undergraduate or graduate students, the role is a student specifically hired and trained to provide “pedagogical, technological, and logistical support,” according to the Stanford IntroSems site. CDA+ students also have discretion to accept short-term digital projects, such as one-off seminars or guest speakers, in addition to providing course support. Unlike teaching assistants, CDA+ roles are explicitly not permitted to take on responsibilities that would traditionally be delegated to a TA, including “grading, evaluating student work, or taking the place of an absent instructor.” Seltzer explains that the CDA+ role is to “serve as more of a partnership between faculty and students, and promote an equitable classroom environment.”

What’s Next

A recent internal VPUE assessment of Digital Ambassador survey data suggests that there was, overall, a positive response to the original program from faculty. “We all started the job to help with course technologies,” says Ellie Bassow Fajer, a junior and CDA+ studying biology and music. “It’s now evolved to be a different relationship between us, the professors, and students. We offer something valuable because we have the student insight. It’s also meaningful to have these personal relationships with faculty … that’s something I’ve taken away from this program.”

As Stanford faculty have gained confidence in managing their own learning management systems, they may step back from participation in the CDA+ program. However, our interviews reveal that flexible student-centered support roles may inform future approaches at the institution as faculty are now more open to classroom experimentation, and, moreover, have seen the benefits of collaborative partnerships with their students.

Conclusion

While Stanford has largely returned to face-to-face instruction, as have colleges and universities nationwide, the lessons from the pandemic endure. Reverberations of pandemic-disrupted teaching and learning continue to echo at Stanford and beyond—and will likely continue to do so for decades. Undoubtedly, novel, collaborative models for supporting teaching and learning proliferated during the period of emergency remote instruction. Instruction that was meaningfully reimagined will remain as evidence of innovative practices successfully adopted during this time. Staff at college campuses across the country developed new knowledge-sharing networks within and beyond Stanford. Staff played a central role in more courses, in part due to greater visibility of their work and expertise, as well as a closer relationship with instructors. Similarly, students adopted new roles as academic support technologists—designing and supporting instruction on campus. Although the scope of our case study describes experiences at Stanford, the themes we document in this case study are not limited to this university alone. While we recommend institutions conduct their own case studies to discover what unique impacts may have been felt from the pandemic, the following implications for instructors and institutions are likely universally relevant.

Implications for Instructors

Build an inclusive, future-proof educational technology toolkit

Stanford is already exploring the potential of a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) and has a robust process for evaluating and implementing new technology tools. However, the emergency shift to remote instruction tested these platforms and their fit for instruction more than ever before. The experience of Stanford during emergency remote instruction points to the crucial nature of continually exploring new technologies for instruction, as well as the need to vet new platforms and evaluate those platforms actively used on campus, to ensure Stanford’s technology toolkit is flexible, stable, and scalable.

Within this effort, many comments in our interviews focused on the need for improvements in classroom technology. The flexibility offered by fully remote instruction showed the ways lectures can offer flexibility for those needing accommodations or for unplanned absences, such as due to illness. Although Stanford has committed to its return to face-to-face instruction, it is likely that some classroom technologies to support hybrid instruction will be required for these audiences. Continual exploration and evaluation of educational technologies will require a skilled staff who are provided the resources required to undertake these efforts.

Implications for Institutions

A case study approach allows for a detailed analysis of specific practices and processes within a context of interest. In this study, authors could examine how educators adapted their teaching methods, the challenges they faced, and the strategies they employed to support student learning in a remote environment. By showcasing real-world examples within the specific context of Stanford University, the study offers nuanced observations and reflections that can inform future educational practices and strategies at other higher education institutions.

Embrace an inclusive leadership model

University leaders, faculty, staff, and students nationwide are trying to determine which pedagogical practices and institutional shifts from the previous years should continue and which should be let go. Additionally, institutions are looking to address the inequities brought to the fore by pandemic experiences and the protests over racial injustice. The negative and positive impact to students—to their learning, to their skills, to their well-being—is yet to be fully understood and is likely significant. A new culture of collaboration and agility, supported by distributed decision making across institutional silos, could prove a crucial support for instructional innovation.

Throughout the pandemic, cross-unit knowledge-sharing teams across Stanford—and at institutions nationwide—worked to support members of the community in resuming university operations, to the extent that it could be done safely and within public health guidelines. During this period, state and country regulations were constantly changing, and faculty and staff had to be kept up to date on frequent changes to key institutional activities, including the academic calendar. This information had to be communicated quickly and accurately by a small group of key decision makers, typically senior staff at the dean and provostial level.

However, distributed leadership models, such as those that emerged among staff, faculty, and students during the pandemic, allow institutions to maintain organizational agility and empower university faculty and staff to take ownership in such a way that the leadership capacity of the entire institution can improve and grow, guided by the same set of goals and priorities. Affording this level of autonomy requires trust, but as the pandemic has shown, institutions that embrace such an approach can see more efficient and effective communication, as well as increased institutional capacity ultimately leading to better student learning outcomes.

Building a Sustainable Future for Inclusive Digital Education

Broadly, by undertaking reflections on pandemic-era teaching and learning, the shape of a shared narrative becomes clear. This narrative creates the foundation upon which we consider where we, as institutions of higher education, go from here. Similarly, the questions we need to ask in further studies become more apparent through the activity of discussing and documenting our experience of disruption, and of transformation. In short, further studies will be needed on the disparate impacts of the pandemic on learning outcomes. Institutions of higher education will need to prepare for incoming students by understanding the ways COVID-19 affected students from different backgrounds from early education up through and beyond higher education. By conducting such studies, through adapting agile institutional mindsets, and by carrying forward technology-enabled instructional innovations, higher education will ensure it is prepared to support diverse students’ success into the future.