Article 6: When the Familiar Became Strange: Face-to-Face Teaching in COVID Times

The calendar year of 2020 presented all sorts of challenges to university systems with the advent of the COVID-19 virus. In particular, it provided a massive experiment in online learning and its effectiveness. By the end of March of 2020, most colleges had moved swiftly and definitively to online learning in efforts to minimize the potential spread and exposure to the COVID-19 virus. Suddenly, for students and faculty alike, our classrooms became our living rooms/dens/kitchens—professional space was meshed with personal space, and family members and pets were suddenly inserted into our work lives in ways they had never been before. Our university’s spring break came just as our governor announced large-scale COVID-19 restrictions. Rather than being a respite from the semester, this “break” was converted into an intensive work stretch as faculty revamped, rescheduled, and reworked our syllabi to adjust our academic expectations to the pandemic reality. New instructional delivery modes, exam schedules, assignment instructions, and student communication systems were invented and cobbled together, sometimes well and sometimes not, as faculty at our institution and across the country attempted to salvage the remainder of the spring semester.