How We Pivoted to Virtual in 2020

Recently an article was posted by Community College Daily about the accelerated paramedic program we have at Pima Community College and its incredible partnership with the U.S. Airforce. In that article, they mention how we pivoted to virtual during the pandemic. Here is the excerpt:

Pivoting during the pandemic

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, Pima and Air Force officials, concerned about student safety, decided that airmen would leave campus and return to their units. College officials then worked with Air Force officials to provide remote office hours for lesson review and one-on-one discussion to keep participants’ skills fresh, but formal coursework paused. While airmen were working back on their home bases performing their full-time jobs, many availed themselves of these voluntary online learning opportunities.

After a three-month hiatus, the program resumed in July 2020 with a hybrid model of virtual and-in person learning, and airmen returned to the college. “Any instruction that could be delivered online we did to minimize the amount of time that the students were on campus,” Abens said. Airman only attended courses in-person for their skills lab, clinical experiences and vehicular rotations. 

Despite the challenging circumstances that Covid presented, students continued to succeed in the program. The cohort from 2020 graduated in January 2021 with the highest first-time pass rate. Out of 20 students, 19 passed (95%).

Given the pandemic, the last three paramedic refresher courses were held via live lectures online, which still provided airmen the hours needed for NREMT recertification.

It dawned on me that I have not really shared exactly how we pivoted on a dime in 2020. It will remain a major part of my work accomplishments and I think deserves to be shared. I wrote this detailed account of our endeavors to give context to the challenges we overcame. Perhaps someone else out there has a similar story, I would love to hear it. We should all be sharing our successes from 2020 so it is not just remembered as a bad year, but a year we all showed growth.

How it all went down.

2020 was a crazy year. When the pandemic hit the U.S. and was making its way down the west coast, we could all see it coming. It was only a matter of time before it hit AZ and Pima Community College was mid-semester with a full cohort of boot paramedic students. Like a wave coming down the west coast, I watched colleges close their doors with each outbreak. I called our dean of workforce development Amanda Abens, and asked "do you want me to prepare a contingency plan in case Pima closes?" I believe her response was "absolutely!" We both knew our students needed to graduate; we train paramedics, and right now, the collective WE needed them on the streets saving lives. 

Timeline.

We were about two weeks from the pandemic closing our doors on Friday, March 20th (if my memory serves me correctly). We were about to be forced to pivot a hands-on skills-based course full of nearly 30 emergency paramedics to 100% online overnight. Here’s how it went down:

Infrastructure.

I support all of workforce development at Pima Community College and strive to infuse technology and innovation into each division (EMS, Cadet, Fire, AJS, Trucking, etc). In March of 2020, my focus had been the paramedic college at our Public Safety Center of Excellence because there was already a virtual foundation there.

Back in 2017, I created the online training platform PimaParamedics on YouTube (launched in 2018) and was working to leverage that channel’s success to support Virtual Reality instruction for our paramedic students locally. The platform allowed students to practice their training and watch faculty perform advanced medical skills while they were out on their clinical rotations. It helped make our students more successful prior to examinations. YouTube equaled accessibility. Two years later, PimaParamedics had grown substantially and with the global pandemic looming, it seemed we were poised to weather it given the supplemental online training already in place. Plus, many of our faculty had become acquainted with teaching on-camera, which was about to become a very valuable skill indeed. 

Just do it.

I couldn't simply tell our faculty, “just do your lecture over Zoom, it’s easy!” It is, frankly, not that easy. Virtual meetings and virtual classrooms are two completely different beasts. Two-way participation is not always expected in a zoom meeting, you are there to watch the show, maybe ask a question, and then get back to work. School is a collaboration between student and faculty, synchronous dynamic engagement back and forth is a necessity. Additionally, on short notice, it was not feasible to expect the college to pay for new, expensive, un-tested online products that may or may not be collecting student or faculty data. The college already had an investment into a few secure online platforms, they just weren’t necessarily designed to be used as a synchronous remote classroom as well. It was my job to figure out how to use the existing tools for just that. I needed to know what digital infrastructure was already approved and supported by the college, quickly become an expert in all of it, test the best platform(s) that meet the needs of the moment, train the faculty, and THEN (what many overlook) provide training to the students so they would know how to access class and be effective online learners. We had two weeks. 

The tools. 

Of all the platforms available to us, the approved tool that needed to rise to the occasion was Google Meet. At the time, Meet was not a very robust platform. I needed to pull together a half-dozen other platforms and extensions so we could do things like breakout rooms, clean synchronous video-sharing in HD where the students couldn’t fast forward through the content, secure recording of lectures so they could be easily shared and re-played, virtual backgrounds, a grid view of all students for proctoring and visual proof of engagement, white-boarding, etc. And all of this needed to be done in an accessible way because every student had a different device and varying internet connections. Remember this was before any government support came through so we were unable to snap our fingers and provide all our students with the same technology, and software companies were going to be playing catchup for the next 6 months. Another problem was hardware. Being an in-person workforce-skills training institution, before COVID, we did not have a need for a dozen webcams, and little did we know, everywhere was selling out, fast. 

The plan.

I didn’t have time to sit down with each faculty member and train them individually and before I brought them together as a group, I needed to make sure they had a reference for their training that they could re-watch a hundred times over (much like we did for our paramedic students on YouTube). The faculty needed to feel confident. As well, the students needed a reference to answer their inevitable questions on how to access their new online classes. I couldn’t expect faculty to have those answers, they were learning too. 

Step 1: Record the basics of “how to teach and learn online” and get it to the faculty/students yesterday. 

At this point, I had less than two weeks to pull everything together because the college was going to close. You may not have guessed this but my first stop on the way home from work that day was to the paint store. When I got home I stayed up all night clearing out the guest room and turning it into a remote learning studio. (T-minus 10 days)

Over the next few days, I recorded remote teaching/learning videos and sent them out college-wide. While the videos were created specifically to support the workforce I was tasked to support, everyone at the college was having the same problem. So, I made them vague enough that they could apply to any faculty or student learning in the remote environment. Which was all of us. (T-minus one week)

After the videos went out to our paramedic adjunct faculty and managers I scheduled an in-person training day for the “unlikely event” that we are pushed into a remote teaching environment. They were all instructed to watch the videos prior to the contingency training day. We had to schedule it when the most faculty would be available and since all of these teachers are full-time first responders, they are busy and have erratic schedules. We found a day the same week as closure. 

Step 2: Training.

It was a Monday, a down-day for our students, and everyone came together in one classroom for the remote training contingency plan. Remember, we had no official word yet that we were going to be shut down. There were approximately 15-20 faculty/course managers occupying the student desks, each with a personal laptop or iPad, one IT person (Eric Strong you are the man), and me at the head of the class with a laptop screen-sharing. Everyone had watched a few of my videos leading up to this day, we were “ready.” 

I was nervous, but I knew these faculty members. Heck, I was one of them! For a few years, I was teaching paramedic school in these very classrooms. I understood the course material as a paramedic myself but, I also had communications and production experience to meet the remote learning challenges they were all about to face. The timing seemed almost manufactured. I had already begun transitioning at Pima and was knee-deep in virtual education solutions well before COVID, and lucky for me, I understand this online tech stuff. I love it and I am proficient at it.

I consider myself exceedingly fortunate to have been in a position to help my colleagues and friends when the virus was about to hit the fan. And it did. 

Everyone teaches today.

All the faculty had done their homework, they watched the training videos before “class” which made for a very effective day because everyone was ready to try this “Google Meet thing” out. We all opened our laptops and muted our speakers/mics. Since we were all in the same room, it would have been feedback city. I hosted the first meeting and invited them all. Together we experienced the faculty side and the student side of a virtual classroom. There were a million questions and technical issues, but between Eric and me, everyone was up and running. We showed them it was possible. Then one-by-one for nearly 6 hours (including lunch) each faculty and manager hosted a meeting, invited the class to join, and practiced teaching virtually for the first time ever. It … was … exhausting, for all of us. And that speaks volumes about this adjunct faculty team. They are dedicated passionate teachers who will spend a full-day training on something they are not completely comfortable with, for a contingency plan that they may not even need. Not to mention, all of them are active first-responder paramedics, working in the middle of a global pandemic. They are treating patients on the front lines and learning to teach the next generation of paramedics online, during a time when there is a 30% shortage of EMS personnel. These folks are nothing short of superheroes. 

Oh, crap.

Remember those webcams? Yea, those were sold out nearly everywhere. It dawned on me mid-day during training that not every faculty had a laptop at home or a webcam/desktop setup. Some did, but the mic was broken or the camera was not HD. We needed to allocate resources and supply our lead lecturers with the minimum gear required to pull this off. We leaped into action; our Program Manager took the P-card and ran to all of the popular electronics stores nearby while I made phone calls, everywhere was sold out. Then I remembered a small local computer store might have what we need. Sure enough, we likely got the last three webcams for 100 miles from SWS computers. The appropriate faculty were equipped with webcams and we adjourned for the day. Everyone went home to practice. (T-Minus 4 days)

Closure.

Training day, I believe, was on Monday, March 6th, 2020. On Friday, March 20th we were not allowed to return to campus and all classes were suspended. The next day, the paramedic college was back up and running, lecturing online. Our students missed one day of class, graduated on time, with a respectable first-time pass rate of 95%. 

For the next 6 months, I would be on-call and in the weeds with our paramedic faculty and even other faculty across the college, helping them solve their remote teaching needs.

I am proud of what we were able to accomplish as a team and, I want to be clear about one thing. I am not suggesting that our student’s success during COVID is because I am tech-savvy by any stretch of the imagination. The faculty and their dedication are the reason our students graduated on time in 2020. I happened to have the appropriate skillset that the moment required, but they delivered the students to their certificate of completion. 

P.S. I took the photograph you see at the top of the CCDaily article, which I thought was pretty cool. :)

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my first article. Reach out if it made you think of any questions or ideas. Collaboration is a key to success, so let's.

-Devin