| | MAY 20218CIOReviewFIVE LESSONS FROM CHALLENGING TIMESBy Jana Remy, Ph.D., Director, Educational Technology Services, Co-Director, Institute for Excellence in Teaching & Learning, Chapman UniversityAbout a decade ago I took up a new hobby: outrigger canoeing on the Pacific ocean. I remember vividly the first time I was out on the open ocean in a six-person canoe and a big wave started heading towards the boat--there was a giant wall of water coming straight for us and I froze. I was too terrified to keep paddling, until the person sitting behind me in the canoe gave me some sage advice, He said, "we're committed to this now...there's no other way than to keep paddling." Since that day, whenever a large task looms up ahead in the distance I remind myself that I'm committed and I just have to keep moving. This lesson served me particularly well as my team faced the reality last March that we would have to pivot 1200 faculty from teaching face-to-face to teaching online with 48 hours' notice. To add to the complexity of the situation, we were in the middle of a shift in our Learning Management System (LMS) and would have to support faculty on two separate platforms. We shortly decided to abandon our current LMS and move all courses to our new platform, which significantly accelerated our need to finish the system integration and deliver training to all faculty. So what to do when faced with these daunting challenges? Below I share the five lessons I learned from the changes brought by COVID, in hopes that they may help you and your organization when you have a tsunami of change coming your way.Team First: My lessons from canoeing reminded me that everyone in the boat needed to be paddling in sync in order to navigate rough waters. To do so, we set up a homebase for our Jana RemyIN MY OPINION
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