How the UC Davis English Department adapted to online instruction and life in the time of COVID-19

By Bethany Qualls

The new and improved homepage of our English department collaborative Canvas instructor site.

When planning for spring quarter 2020, who could have anticipated these extraordinary circumstances? A pandemic, lockdowns, curfews, national reckonings with America’s racism, a world that has tried to reside on Zoom, in TikTok challenges, and waiting in lines 6 feet apart. It’s been an intense few months, to say the least. 

This quarter I was in charge of putting together the annual newsletter, but I never thought I’d become someone sending memes to the whole department in an effort to enliven what seemed like countless emails about emergency remote instruction methods. Here’s a short recap of what’s happened from March to June and how this time of change has brought our department together in new ways, even as we all shelter in place apart.

A collaborative site is born

The Bay Area’s shelter in place order was announced on Monday, March 16 and went into effect the next day, which happened to be the first day of Winter Quarter’s finals week. Thankfully, in-person exams had already been cancelled. Then Yolo County’s shelter in place began Thursday, March 19. But the daily updates from our department chair Professor John Marx about the evolving situation were well underway by that point as the university and English department tried to make sense of just what was happening.

March 19 was also the day the English Department COVID-19 pandemic Canvas site was conceived after a thread about textbooks for Spring Quarter. I was already set to work for the department assembling and publishing the department's newsletter, so offered to help get this resource off the ground if John would just get me a course shell. And thus the awkwardly named Remote Teaching Test Class (ENL) Canvas site began. The guiding mantra, taken from this thoughtful blog post by Vanessa Dennen of Florida State University, was people first, content second, technology third.

It was a good thing that I didn’t have previous firm plans for spring break. Working with Professor Claire Waters, Director of Undergraduate Studies, we built out, as my first announcement stated, “a collection of hopefully useful materials for people teaching in English and beyond” and had it up by March 24. Since many instructors in the department had never taught online before in any capacity, we wanted to give people accessible information about best practices in this time of emergency. What, exactly, was Zoom? How could people teach discussion sections or lecture? What were the options for showing videos? Just which of the proliferating thought pieces were worth reading?

That week was also the start of a weekly departmental happy-hour style conversation where anyone teaching—professors, lecturers, graduate students—could gather in Zoom to talk about the best ways to handle the new paradigm in a rapidly shifting environment. Over the quarter, people workshopped ideas about group activities and syllabi, shared what worked or didn’t in their classes. Claire made videos about how to make Zoom videos—so meta. I pulled together materials in response to questions on the message boards, answered questions about how Google Forms and Canvas announcements worked, and sent emails with pleas to share materials with the whole group, adding gifs and memes like this:

Let the teaching begin!

Meanwhile, Spring Quarter actually started with the recommendation of having a soft opening, not hitting the ground running as we usually do in the ten-week quarter. In other words, instructors were encouraged to spend the first week checking in with their students and making sure everyone was familiar with our new teaching platforms before diving deeply into content. Everyone was trying to pivot to online spaces in quarantine conditions. But it was heartening to see how, in this time of online emergency instruction, many people were pulling together, especially since those who had been teaching the longest weren’t usually the most up-to-date with understanding Canvas’s many options or online pedagogy. Many of my fellow graduate students were happy to share their tips and tricks, from sending weekly announcements of that week’s tasks to midterm surveys, helping everyone try to do their best by our students.

There were discussions of how to handle chat in Zoom meetings, the affordances of synchronous vs asynchronous lectures, how to help people who had never met in person connect in new mediums, and just how crucial clarity of instructions really is to student success. People talked about how it felt to talk to a screen of black boxes when students didn’t use their videos or just into cameras with no feedback at all when recording video lectures. Others noticed how many more students were participating in new discussion modes that mixed writing and speaking in different ways than traditional classroom settings allow. Ben Blackman’s ENL 3 students read William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" as a quarantine poem. Christina Kelley, this year's Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz exchange lecturer, taught class on California time though she had returned to Germany, which meant logging on at 9 pm. Creative writing professor Valerie Brelinski shared how she was working to replicate the discussion that is normally such a vital part of a writing workshop via more directive prompts about what classes would cover. We all had guest appearances by a range of domestic animals. Everyone agreed that time feels different in Zoom and that workload balance was really tough for both students and teachers.

What remains perhaps my favorite Zoom background based on this iconic interview where a professor being interviewed live on BBC News in 2017 was interrupted by his children. A harbinger of life in spring 2020, had we but known.

Looking back, looking forward

While there’s been a lot of great cooperation and camaraderie this quarter, I’m also really clear that what happened in Spring Quarter was not truly online instruction, that is, planned, organized, and intentional for both students and teachers. What we have done was (and still is) emergency online instruction. These classes were not intended to be taught this way. Instead, everyone was trying to keep from sinking by slashing readings and assignments, recording awkward videos, and learning new tech just ahead of our students (if we were lucky). Even as we work through a revamp of our Canvas site to incorporate lessons learned this past quarter in preparation for summer and fall courses, there are still many gaps to be filled.

This quarter has been a time of real loss. Not only for those with COVID-19 related losses of friends and family, but of casual contact with friends. Of working in Voorhies and not knowing just who you’d run into and chat about teaching or research. Of feeling the energy that a class of 25 or 75 students brings to thinking about a text in new ways. Of focus, of hope, of routines, of basic safety. As crisis piled upon crisis this spring, it has become increasingly hard to know what tone to strike from day to day, hour to hour. The murder of George Floyd on May 25, coupled with the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, among others, led to the resurgence of activism around Black Lives Matter, which also coincided with the end of the quarter. Everyone—particularly our Black students and instructors—found themselves dealing with a maelstrom that upended the fragile routines we had been slowly building under pandemic conditions.

Yet through it all, I remain impressed by the creative ways more people than I have room to name here have shown up for their students and colleagues. Students and instructors alike have been learning, though maybe not what they anticipated learning. Senior faculty have told me that they’ve never had conversations about teaching in this kind of blended environment before. Some graduate students have discovered online teaching is much more enjoyable than they anticipated. I’ve found a way to contribute to a community during a time where it’s all too easy to get frustrated and depressed about the state of the world. To those of you that reached out this quarter to let me know how much the Canvas site helped, thank you so much. That has meant more than you may know. It seems we've all become a little more compassionate. 

Still, we have more to learn. And we still need to remember this vital order of operations in Zoom: turn mute off, then speak. 

Bethany Qualls is a sixth-year PhD candidate who put together the 2020 English department newsletter and became a de facto webmaster for instructional best practices in a pandemic-driven online environment. In normal times, she is completing a dissertation on eighteenth-century British literature and gossip’s role in the creation of new media forms and teaches undergraduate classes in the UC Davis English department.