Watering Two Plants With One Hose: Protocolization of Progress to Promote Practical Resource Sharing

When I first became faculty at UT Austin, I inherited an existing course; for a variety of reasons, I felt the need to overhaul all of the lectures. This process, however, proved time-consuming and I found myself unable to complete all of the lectures as originally planned prior to the start of the semester. Moreover, even the lectures that I did overhaul continued to have flaws and I was growing increasingly frustrated with the continued inadequacy of my lessons, despite devoting considerable time and energy to them. This was disheartening and my other responsibilities (e.g. research; scholarship; service) were starting to suffer at the expense of my efforts to be a better teacher. I realized that I had to set limits on the time I could devote to teaching. This required a growth mindset that emphasized progress over perfection, coupled with improved time management skills. I began to set explicit limits on how much time I had to spend improving my course content before launching it and correcting the errors that inevitably remained after class. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and I rapidly had to transition my class online, I started to attend various in services, workshops, courses, and conferences geared at improving online instruction. While enriching, I found many of these opportunities were time-intensive and left me without a clear path forward that would be manageable amidst my other responsibilities. I began to reflect on the initial time-saving strategies I employed shortly after transitioning to my faculty role. With relatively little time or effort, I was able to transition the rest of my content online following spring break. I began to consider not only how to further implement these strategies in my own course, but also whether this approach could be more formally operationalized to help other faculty members improve their own courses. Moreover, as I adapted my work routine in response to the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders and subsequent social distancing guidelines, I began to feel isolated. The value of my involvement with on-campus groups including the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), Provost’s Teaching Fellows (PTF), Experiential Learning Initiative (ELI) ambassadors, Online Education Task Force members, and my peers in other teaching-related groups became increasingly apparent.