{"id":6923,"date":"2023-05-15T09:22:10","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T14:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.everylearnereverywhere.org\/?p=6923"},"modified":"2023-09-27T10:52:51","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T15:52:51","slug":"when-emergencies-become-normal-how-uc-santa-cruz-sustains-academic-continuity-through-frequent-disruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.everylearnereverywhere.org\/es\/blog\/when-emergencies-become-normal-how-uc-santa-cruz-sustains-academic-continuity-through-frequent-disruption\/","title":{"rendered":"When Emergencies Become Normal: How UC Santa Cruz Sustains Academic Continuity Through Frequent Disruption"},"content":{"rendered":"

University of California, Santa Cruz has a lot of practice maintaining academic continuity through disruption. When Every Learner Everywhere\u00ae reached out to online learning leaders there to ask about the impact of the \u201catmospheric river\u201d of January 2023<\/a> and devastating floods that resulted, they pointed out that it was only the most recent disruption going back at least 13 consecutive quarters.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was strike, COVID, fire, strike, floods and power outages,\u201d says Jody Greene, Special Advisor to the Provost for Educational Equity and Academic Success, counting off the events that have brought continuity plans into action. \u201cWe were trying to do remote instruction during COVID when . . . . no, power outages came first. Then this past summer, we had a heat event. We’ve basically had everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

They say they can think of another possible disruption, but they hesitate to say it aloud. One doubts if it was the unprecedented snowfall that cut highway access around the campus<\/a> a couple of weeks after our conversation.<\/p>\n

Most of the disruptions Greene referenced are extreme weather events \u2014 drought, wildfires, landslides, and flooding. Those, they say, \u201care not discrete. They’re actually the same climate change event just unfolding in slow time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other disruptions impacting the institution recently have been unionized labor actions \u2014 a wildcat strike by UC Santa Cruz graduate students in February 2020<\/a> and a six-week system-wide strike in fall of 2022<\/a>. In both cases, some faculty relied on remote teaching and learning resources to keep running their courses.<\/p>\n

The 2020 strike in particular turned out to be an important experience to draw on; a month after it was resolved, all in-person classes were suspended in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

Growing capacity for continuity<\/h2>\n

As at other institutions, disruptions to the people who work and study at UC Santa Cruz can differ from the impact on the campus itself. On one hand, the January 2023 flooding never closed the campus, but flexibility needed to be extended to faculty, staff, and students who were unable to get there. Students and employees commuting from the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains, in particular, can be impacted by extreme weather that spares the campus.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, a wildfire in August 2020<\/a> not only closed the campus but forced an evacuation. In any case, the institution has developed the experience and the infrastructure to rely on online teaching and learning so classes are not suspended entirely.<\/p>\n

Michael Tassio, Director for Digital Learning and Engagement, says, \u201cWe make a careful distinction between emergency remote instruction and online learning. Our online courses have a great deal of attention put into the design. In an emergency, we put our care and attention into designing courses to have more flexibility, because some students don’t have power, they are unable to connect to the internet, or they can\u2019t access campus. There are a variety of reasons more flexibility is needed in response to emergencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

One effect of so many shifts to emergency remote instruction is that faculty depend on his office less and less with each event. During the recent flooding, Tassio says, \u201cIt was clear people had learned during the pandemic. People didn’t have to refresh their memory of how to put a class into an alternate modality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greene adds that videoconference tools like Zoom are a common resource, \u201cBut that is never the only thing we recommend to people, because teaching hybrid is really hard. We have a whole library of alternative ways to offer your class to people who cannot get there in person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those include video capture tools, for example. And the institution regularly maintains its Keep Teaching<\/a> page for faculty needing it during emergency remote instruction.<\/p>\n

Faculty development for continuity<\/h2>\n

Successfully handling emergency remote instruction depends on the fact that there are no absolute lines between faculty development in general and for online learning in particular.<\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly, it doesn’t matter if it’s an online or an in-person course,\u201d Tassio says. \u201cWhen we start talking about course design, everything changes, because we use the high-impact research-based practices we know work. Largely, our work is in the design space. It’s not about the modality.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, he often urges faculty to reconsider how they use high-stakes assessments, and \u201cCOVID gave us an opportunity to redesign courses to use models that focus more on low-stakes assessments that build on each other throughout the quarter.\u201d<\/p>\n