Beginning today, UTRGV, along with universities across the country, have transitioned to online teaching until further notice in efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Last week, the Center of Online Learning and Teaching Technology (COLTT) provided training for professors to transition to remote delivery.
Francisco Garcia, COLTT director, said the department is training the faculty who are not familiar with the technology.
“There is a one-and-half-hour training from basics all the way to using the specific technologies for a synchronous delivery such as Panopto,” Garcia said. “Panopto is being used to record lectures, either PowerPoints or websites things like that, narrated from the faculty and those could be available to students.”
He said they are also training faculty in the use of Zoom, which is a live session.
“We also support SoftChalk,” Garcia said. “Which is the one that we use to create content online, and Respondus [Lockdown Browser] which is the program that we use for creating online exams.”
He said the department also wants to help students.
“In Blackboard there is a new tab that is called ‘Student Continuity Support’ where there is a lot of resources, especially for those who are not familiar with Blackboard,” Garcia said.
This semester, there were close to 400 faculty members teaching online or hybrid courses. As of press time last Thursday, COLTT had trained 365 faculty.
Jorge Canchola, biology lecturer, said this is a challenge because labs are hands-on.
“Our lab team has been busy working this past extended Spring Break week on developing this online content for the lab,” Canchola said. “The way we’re approaching this for the anatomy and physiology lab, is we’re keeping the same online contents that we already had however, we’re adding the online content which is going to deliver the materials that they would see in the lab such as experiments, lab models and microscope slides images.”
He said the lab team will provide labeled images of models and 10-minute videos of the instructors.
“If there’s experiments that are going to be done, the instructor will record themselves going through the experiment procedures and the result of the experiment,” Canchola said. “For the microscope images we’re taking pictures of our own slides and putting them into documents where students will be able to see the slides and have another set of documents where students will be able to study labeled slides where they can actually see the different structures they should be learning.”
He said the department expects to teach online until the end of the semester.
“I honestly do think that this is going to be going into the summer,” Canchola said. “So, the way we’re thinking of this is that it’s long term. We’re thinking of this as, ‘You know what? This is what we need to prepare for the rest of the semester.’”
Steven Block, dean of the College of Fine Arts, said online classes are very convenient.
“Sometimes you’re taking online classes and, like, other information, if it’s all factual, once you’ve done the testing you kind of forget about it,” Block said. “So, sometimes that’s the problem. But a good online class, one that involves interaction, one that’s set up well, can be very effective.”
