Chapter 8: More Than Tech Support: Instructional Designers as Community Partners in eService-learning

The introductory chapters of this collection describe many examples of eService-learning (eSL) projects and collaborations that emerged in response to the global pandemic. A common thread in these examples is the urgency with which community engagement practitioners and faculty moved to translate their work to digital contexts in order to sustain service-learning opportunities. We also know colleagues who were longtime service-learning veterans forced to suspend their work because there wasn’t support to translate their complex service-learning program in the midst of the crisis or most tragically, because the pandemic closed the doors for many community partners. We see all of you. The authors of this chapter are both long-time service-learning instructors and community engagement professionals. We know that service-learning is a labor of love. Whether you quickly translated your service-learning online and now need to revise that experience, or you hope to now bring your service-learning back with digital elements, we have written this chapter for you.