Near-Real-Time Learner Analysis and Faculty Support During a Transition to Online Education

The teaching tip described here relates to a department level initiative to gather and act on student experiences in real-time during the COVID-19 outbreak in the Spring 2020 semester. The survey was developed to be an ongoing, department level, data collection source that could capture, triage, and react to student’s unique situations as they arose. This enabled us to coordinate across courses, follow-up and provide students and instructors assistance in real time, and also gather information that informed decision making for our summer online courses as well as our planning for the fall. In this teaching tips article we describe the opportunities and processes for using such a survey to identify and capture aspects of the students’ lived experience that influences the effectiveness of curricular change. Doing so fills a need, especially when unexpected changes in learning environments are required, to employ concepts of learner analysis to understand and plan educational experiences for students, even when such experiences are in flux or the concepts are used informally. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43683-021-00047-y.