This post marks the return of the Instructional Design and Development Blog, known as the IDDblog, after a 29-month hibernation. If you’ve been our blog reader, you may still remember one of our last scheduled posts in March 2020, titled “Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All.” That very timely post guided administrators and instructors on the selection of remote teaching methodologies when the coronavirus forced schools to move courses online in a matter of days. After that, IDDblog remained mostly static because staff members of DePaul’s Center for Teaching and Learning had to give up blog-writing to respond to the intense needs for faculty and student support as almost all of DePaul’s course offerings switched to remote.

I’ve heard a saying that to say Covid changed our lives is an understatement, and I couldn’t agree more. This global pandemic has brought something bigger than our common understanding of change. It threw us into what Yuval Noal Harari called “a large-scale social experiment” – an experiment that no government, business, and educational board would agree to conduct in normal times. In his article, “The World After Coronavirus,” Harari called for reflections at the global level, but I think it is the change that took place at the individual level that seems to be even more striking and unretractable. From the perspective of teaching and learning, the privilege we’ve lost for in-person instruction, the opportunities we’ve gained to access courses through a few clicks, and the habits we might have formed during this lost-and-found period are all worth reflecting on. As a guinea pig of one, I thought this blog could be a place for me to conduct my own reflection, like Michel de Montaigne did as he drew meanings and reasonings by looking no further than the life of his own.

The Identity of a Learner
A Chinese saying says “parents are the curtain between you and death; when that curtain gets lifted, you will be there to face death all by yourself”. On February 1st, 2021, that curtain between me and death was lifted as I lost my mom to Covid. I had always been obsessed with the study of death, mostly due to the fear of it, but until this day, death had always been an illusional concept hidden behind the curtain.

Like a child suffocating in the water, I grabbed, out of desperation, my life float – the books that contained thoughts to answer my queries and words to comfort my soul. I learned from Michael Singer that death turns out to be the best teacher in all of life, and no person or situation could ever teach me as much as death has to teach. I learned from Scott Peck that everything that happens to us, death included, has been designed for our spiritual growth, which is the reason for us to live this life. I learned from Louise Hay that the word “disease” means dis-ease, which happens when one’s body loses its sense of ease; from Gabor Mate that “healing” came from the older English term haelen, which means “wholeness” or a process of piecing together the broken parts to reform the whole. With the guidance of Natasha Josefowitz, I tried to learn and practice Living Without the One that You Cannot Live Without and by reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, I learned to constantly think of death and be cognizant of the impact that thinking had on every decision I made.

For the first time in my life, I devoted myself to learning without the pressure of either external demands or internal goals. I had to learn because I couldn’t find any other ways to get myself through the pain. And that process has given me a new identity – a learn-er! I am a learn-er because learning is what I do. As James Clear pointed out in Atomic Habit, one can form a habit more effectively when it is driven by the identity than the goals. The self-acknowledgement of being a runner makes a person more likely to finish the strenuous training for a marathon than the goal itself could. The same is true for a learner to whom learning is not to meet any given goals, but to fulfill a desire of being.

The Driver of Learning
In my blog “Why DO We Educate,” I once described the purpose of education as for resilience and redemption. During the pandemic, I found these purposes being served by my students as they used my class as a place to learn, to connect and to gain and offer comfort with a group of students from the other side of the globe. Since 2018, my Chinese language classes have been part of DePaul’s Global Learning Experience (GLE) program, which aims to build collaborative international learning experiences by virtually connecting DePaul students with students from other countries. Over the past five years, I had been adding GLE components into my beginning and intermediate Chinese language courses, where DePaul students were paired with students from Tianjin Normal University. By the end of the Winter 2020 quarter, when we could no longer meet in the classroom, I decided to increase the GLE element from 10% of our learning activities to 80%. Our weekly in class quiz was replaced by weekly journals that our students share with their Chinese partners. The topics of my Zoom lectures were driven by what students wanted to discuss with their partners, and things they learned from their partners that needed further explanations by me, either linguistically or culturally. During this time, GLE became the driver of learning. It made communicating and connecting with international partners not only a goal, but also a means of learning. To my surprise, my pandemic-time online courses received a significantly higher satisfaction rate in terms of language and culture learning, as you can see from the charts below.

One of the students said in the course evaluation: “I felt like I’ve spent this quarter in China”; another said, “I never knew that language can be learned this way, but it is so fun and so practical.”  One comment said, “this doesn’t feel like a class, but Gosh, I’ve learned so much.”  Among the overwhelming positive feedback from students, a one-word response really touched my heart: to answer what was the most valuable thing the student has learned in this class, one student wrote, “Life.”

 Life in Teaching and Learning

Speaking of life, let me present this video clip as I reflect on another learning experience I had during the pandemic – my ballet lesson!  

I am sharing the video with the permission of my ballet teacher Wang and her teaching assistant “Little Pineapple.”   I picked Wang as my ballet teacher, rather than the world-renowned ballet masters, because she, and her TA, made the class feel so real to me.  Every Friday night, I clicked the Zoom link to join her class with a dozen Moms and Grandmas.  Wang, a ballerina by training, wasn’t willing to lower her bar for our age group. She was as strict as a ballet teacher could be.  During our session, I usually switched the default “Brady Bunch” layout to speaker view so that I only saw her and myself on the screen.  This one-on-one display reflected how I felt about this class – an intimate setup of a learning space with me and the teacher who would call me out whenever my leg wasn’t raised high enough. 

In Wang’s class, homework submission took place in our class group chat within a social media app called WeChat.   Each student posted a video recording of the homework assignment, to which Wang responded with a video feedback, like the one below with her second TA observing from the cradle.  Since homework submissions and Wang’s feedback were viewable to the entire class, every feedback she gave to each student became a mini-lesson for all of us.

This class taught me ballet AND how to best teach a class, regardless of what modality we use.  As I was taking Wang’s class, I thought if only we could all teach like her, there would be no retention issues or enrollment challenges – because in the sea of online lessons, it is the ones with human touch that keep the students afloat..

 If you’ve read this far, I know that I owe you a big thank-you  — thank you for paying attention to my stories as in this day and age, attention is the most precious price you could “pay.”  As we resume our regular posting of the IDDblog, my colleagues and I are working hard to make our teaching stories, tech analysis, and experiment reports merit the attention that you are willing to give us!  

Thank you!  Please feel free to leave a comment and stay tuned for more!