Seizing SOTL Opportunities During (and After) the Pandemic

By Mike Metzler, Ph.D. (Emeritus Professor, Kinesiology & Health and CETLOE Associate Director for SoTL)

One facet of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) is the study of new and innovative teaching methods, often comparing them with prior ways to instruct. Historically, those new and innovative methods have been implemented by instructors making voluntary decisions to try something new and see how it worked relative to prior practice.  Questions like, “How do I like teaching this new way?”, “Are students learning more this way?”, “Do students like this way better than how I used to teach this course?”, and “What does it take to do this new method well?” can be asked and answered through SOTL projects in one’s courses. 

In effect, those new ways of teaching and learning are really interventions—educational experiments, of sorts.  In that same light, all GSU faculty who have been required to change from a prior face-to-face (F2F) modality to any number of remote and/or online modalities are conducting interventions on every such course they have redesigned in 2020.  You are doing many things in very different ways, even if not through your own choosing at first.  But, those new and different methods and modalities offer unique opportunities to conduct SOTL research to capture what those differences are, and how they impact your teaching and/or your students’ learning, experiences, and perceptions.

Some of this SOTL research can be done by harvesting very low-hanging fruit: comparing grades from the same courses taught before and after the transition; similarly, comparing grades on assignments that were common across all sections of the same course; examining DFW rates across the same courses over time; even closely examining SEI data pre- and post-transition.  Purists will argue that the lack of control groups in these comparisons is an insurmountable limitation, but many SOTL journals accept this limitation due to the fact that almost all SOTL research is conducted in dynamic, authentic, and sometimes less-than-controllable settings in higher education.

Other SOTL research can be conducted by designing simple questionnaires or interview protocols to gather student perceptions of their experiences with remote learning in your courses.  Still other SOTL research can be done by instructors who make records (e.g., journals, blogs) of their personal reflections on this transition, and report these as auto-ethnographies.  It’s safe to say that no instructor has gone through this transition without having many strong thoughts and feelings—those thoughts and feelings are legitimate content for SOTL research.

The GSU IRB now allows researchers to retrieve archived data like student grades, course assignments, and communications to be used going forward—with some limitations that are not terribly prohibitive once understood.  It is now much easier to use those archived data for direct comparisons with data taken from current courses.  There are some nuances with this, so I would recommend that you contact me if you’d like to know more.

While we may never return to the ‘old normal’ ways of teaching and learning entirely, with the impending availability of vaccines for COVID 19, it is likely that instructors will be able to return to fully F2F courses in the not-so-distant future, if they wish to do so.  In a way, that will be another intervention and create yet another opportunity to conduct SOTL research—this time by comparing what you did during the all-remote/online transition with what you do after the transition back to F2F.  The key difference, and a big advantage for SOTL projects, is that you can collect data now, in anticipation of collecting similar data when you go back to F2F instruction.

If you are interested in designing a SOTL project, whether or not it is related to the transition to or from all-remote/online instruction at GSU, please feel free to contact me at mmetzler@gsu.edu.