“Hi–if you’re counting, this is shirt number three,” says Lamont School of Music professor, Lynn Baker. Donning a Hawaiian flower T-shirt on his webcam, Baker makes a cheeky reference to an ongoing virtual joke with his online Jazz and Commercial Music Repertoire course—count how many times he changes shirts in his recorded video lectures.

Jumping right into course material, Baker begins his class: “So let’s take a moment and talk about what was happening with pop music in the United States prior to rock and roll…” 

At the time Baker recorded this lecture over DU’s spring break, he sat in his Lamont office surrounded by speakers, sheet music and the sounds of his fellow colleagues knocking on his door. Only a few days later, he found himself in a different shirt and a different place: home. 

After Governor Polis issued a statewide stay-at-home order on March 25, DU professors made a mass exodus towards their respective residences. Bracing themselves for a life of blurred lines between careers and childcare, professors reconciled with the unique circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic. 

While doctors and nurses serve on the frontlines of hospitals and grocery store workers brave food service, teachers find themselves spearheading online education. Students lament the loss of physical classes, but the professors who made their continuous schooling possible have largely gone unrecognized. 

In the time of COVID-19, flexibility is a survival skill, and awkwardness is inevitable. While DU students struggle with their own set of challenges, the professors teaching them only had a week to salvage their coursework out of the rubble that coronavirus left on higher education. 

“Spring break week was crazy trying to get everything started so the first couple weeks [of the quarter] would be in position for students,” said geography professor, Helen Hazen. “I realized you can’t necessarily just stick online exactly what you had before.” 

DU closed all in-person classes on March 17, when final exams for winter quarter were scheduled to begin. As the first major hurdle for the university’s professors, they quickly re-adjusted final exams to an online format via lockdown browsers, mini essays, optional exams or downright cancellation. Meanwhile, professors in the Sturm College of Law and spring interterm geared up for a transition taking place in a matter of days.  

“I was in a unique position to be working closely with our tech person at MFJS [Media, Film, and Journalism Studies] and getting my cannabis journalism class running,” said Professor Andrew Matranga of his spring interterm course. “It’s a class highly dependent on being together in person: going to grows, going to dispensaries. We obviously did not have that opportunity.”

In the rigorous, 9-to-5 schedule of a spring interterm class, Matranga scheduled virtual tours of grow factories and guest speakers to guide his Zoom class through the week-long course. Although Matranga thought his online course fared better than previous iterations of the class, he mourned the loss of field trips. 

“I lost some of the wow moments of having my students standing in a grow room and saying ‘I can’t believe I’m in a class right now,’” said Matranga. 

While making the shift to online coursework, this mere human interaction serves as one of the most missed opportunities in moving virtual. 

Dr. Petra Frazier, a musicology professor at DU, expressed similar sentiments regarding the loss of in-person, interactive coursework. Frazier is currently teaching Modern Musicology as well as an independent study course exploring women in music. For her independent study, she was going to take her students to a multimedia musical presentation in a Boulder planetarium on composer Hildegard von Bingen. Instead of visualizing medieval harmonic spheres through the cosmos, Frazier’s students read an article by the artist and posted into a Canvas discussion forum, another example of a “phenomenally interesting” adventure fallen prey to the pandemic. 

Frazier referenced the week of transitioning her classes to an online format as one of the hardest times she has ever worked since she began teaching. As a music professor, she struggles with salvaging a meaningful course that relies on the idea of listening to music together and “Friday labs.” While her courses normally include a room of students laughing at the outlandish compositions of John Cage, she now lectures to a screen and uses Canvas for inter-classroom communication. 

Though Frazier chuckles about the comedy of working from home—like how she is often wearing yoga pants and a blazer for Zoom meetings—she is one of many professors grappling with her scholarly articles being pushed back for publication and simply adapting to online teaching. 

“I realize now that there’s a lot of nonverbal communication in teaching,” said Frazier. “You get a general sense that everybody in the class is looking at you like you’ve lost your mind or they don’t know what you’re talking about or they have no idea what that terminology means by the looks on people’s faces. You don’t get any of that feedback [online].”

Without this nonverbal teaching comes a lot more checking in with students. Professors now send emails that read, “Are you sick? Is your Internet down? Are you struggling with mental health or a home life situation? Are you in a different time zone or country? How can I help you?” as opposed to “You need to get your work done. Late assignments will no longer be accepted.”

Frazier labors with the same questions plaguing all DU professors: How do I make students read if they do not have their books yet because of shipping backlogs? What should the cadence of my assignments be in a new format? How do you mimic group work and hands-on assignments online? And, one of the most daunting questions: How do I know if my students are taking advantage of me or if they are actually in a compromising situation that prevents them from getting their work done?

Many DU professors are taking the lenient approach. Whether that looks like eliminating midterms and finals or creating fluid due dates, professors find they can’t assume anyone’s situation. While some prefer to value academic integrity by doubling test links and using lockdown browser tests, others are easing up on discipline. 

“I will say that as a faculty member, it’s really disconcerting to discuss, study, or lecture to a row of boxes with somebody’s name in it,” said Frazier. “That, again, leads to the conundrum that there seems to be two sides of the fence—some people think students just log in and then go away. Well, you don’t know that.”

Accepting that no one really knows anything for certain in this time is, in some ways, keeping professors optimistic. While another major struggle for teachers is simply figuring out how to teach film courses, theatre improv, chemistry labs or a music ensemble online, knowing that everyone is simply doing the best they can is comforting. 

Kareem El Damanhoury, an MFJS professor, is currently teaching Online and Visual Journalism, a production-based class that normally requires in-class Adobe software workshops, high-tech camera and production gear tutorials, and group work on documentary film production. 

His adjustment? Making the entire class adaptable to smartphones, giving free access to the Adobe suite and shipping out mini-tripods and microphones to every student in the class. 

“We [the MFJS department] were looking for resources for students in particular that if they have internet or computer issues, we go through plan B, C and D,” said El Damanhoury. “Yes, we can give the students the license [to Adobe], but what if the computer doesn’t run the software? So we found a solution for that, and we kept going through scenarios.” 

El Damanhoury is also one of the many DU professors coping with working with kids at home; he knows all his students can hear his infant son “screaming in the living room,” but El Damanhoury thinks this reveals a more genuine side of faculty.

Virtual meetings and choppy Internet connections, paradoxically, have actually humanized the learning experience in some ways. 

Whether it’s Frazier’s son “squawking in the background” of one of her lectures or El Damanhoury teaching with his son’s crib behind him, students realize their professors are not always divine visions of academia. Rather, they have similar lifestyles, struggles and comical walk-ins from their families during Zoom classes. 

Sarah Magnatta, an art history professor, has a seven and three-year-old at home. She currently teaches three classes while simultaneously homeschooling her children. During her teaching hours, she lectures from her basement while her husband works from home and her daughters run around upstairs. 

“We’re making it work,” said Magnatta. “It’s a challenge, but I think everyone is just being as positive as they can be.” 

Matranga also has his hands full outside of teaching; he works another job as a brand journalist for StickerGiant and attempts to work with a 10, eight and five-year-old at home. While he switches on his “On-Air” sign outside his podcasting and work space, he worries about the education barrier for his kids. 

“No parent should pretend that they’re gonna be able to create a really effective program at home for their kids,” stated Matranga. “I’m in a fortunate situation where my wife and I both have advanced degrees and know what would be appropriate…but we’re not trained to be second-grade teachers. You wouldn’t ask any other profession to be substituted, but, all of a sudden, everyone’s expected to be able to be teaching their kids at home.”

Higher education is in a better place to deal with online or remote schooling than elementary or middle school education. While college students already have laptops and don’t depend on crayons or handouts for their education, younger children do and may not have access to the online classrooms set up for them. Second graders Zooming into class? That’s a whole other beast. 

However, professors are trying to see the positives during this time. Considering this type of education would not have been possible 10 years ago, it can be adapted to a valuable, short-term learning experience. 

“I think what we learned from this experience will be really positive moving forward,” said Magnatta. “I can now see using Zoom to bring in curators and artists from around the world to speak to my classes, and I would not really have considered that before.” 

This quirky spring quarter has also allowed everyone to examine the larger philosophical questions of pedagogy: Are classes only meant to give students the necessary information,  or should extra time be spent on activities and tangents of discussion? Do discussions make classes worth $3000 a piece? 

Looking to the future outside of a pandemic, higher education will most likely look a little different. In a basic sense, teachers may opt to offer Zoom office hours and many graduating high schoolers may take this next year off. On a much grander scale, teachers may require students to “Zoom in” to classes while they are sick. Yet, would that be dangerous to a student’s mental health or does it allow them to stay on top of their work? COVID-19 catalyzed these 21st century discussions. 

“Historically, this is a really interesting time to live in,” said Frazier. “That doesn’t mean it’s not full of anxiety, but it’s interesting to have looked at history and tried to understand why watershed events have occurred, whether they’re cultural, political or economic and then to suddenly say, ‘Wow, this is one.’”

The clichéd teacher phrase, “I’m learning along with my students,” has never reigned more true than today. No matter the status on the higher education tier, everyone is sheepishly making friends with Zoom and moving through the virtual awkwardness of online calls in this ongoing watershed event. In the midst of it all, DU professors are continuing to further students’ educations, even while dealing with trials of their own. When El Damanhoury comically changes his Zoom background to the Egyptian pyramids as a nod to his home country and Baker changes into another brightly patterned shirt, professors keep DU and their students’ spirits afloat.