Ortiz:
My name is Alejandra Ortiz. I am an assistant professor in the
Department of Geology at Colby College. I started at Colby College in
September of 2019, right before the pandemic. I am finishing off my
third year and about to start my 4th.
Charbonneau:
What courses do you teach or work with?
Ortiz:
So, every year I teach an intro to geomorphology course, a 200 level,
and it has a lab, and we typically have about 8 to 12 students. And then
in the spring I am typically teaching one of our five introductory
geology courses, so that course also has typically 2 lab sections. It is
capped at 36 students, and it is a range of students from across the
college who need a lab science credit.
Otherwise, it varies every other year or so. I will teach a specialty
kind of 300 level seminar course. Last time I thought that it was spring
of 2020 and that was a tropical island geomorphology. And then sometimes
I will lead our department seminar series, which invites speakers to
give talks once a week.
Charbonneau:
When the pandemic hit in March 2020 how long were you virtual before you
came back into like some blended capacity and what capacity are you in
right now?
Ortiz:
In March of 2020, I was teaching my 300 Level seminar course, tropical
islands geomorphology, and I had about 12 students. I was also teaching
a lab section of my colleague's intro course: “how to build a habitable
planet.”
We went virtual the week before spring break and then did not come back
in person. I was very lucky in that my tropical islands course was easy
to transfer over. It was split between Tuesday lectures from me and then
Thursdays were student led paper discussions. What I did at the time was
I would live record my lectures on Tuesdays and students were encouraged
to show up for a synchronous class, but they were not needed and then on
Thursdays we had it needed synchronous class. I was lucky that all my
students were in the same time zone.
It worked well. We had a little bit of fun translating some of the
homework, which was very computationally based to making sure that
students could do that remotely. I was able to set up some remote
desktop access for my students so that they could get access to the
software on campus and not have to install it on their own laptops, but
compared to my colleagues, it was very easy.
For lab we do use Moodle here on campus. We ended up just switching to
that with virtual labs. We were lucky at that point that we only had one
kind of rock lab left. So, we had made sedimentary rocks, minerals, and
igneous rocks. We just had the metamorphic. So, it was not as terrible.
We lost a field trip. Students just had a kind of log in once a week,
and I would be online zoom and they could ask questions which no one
ever did, and they must fill out these Moodle lab exercises. It was not
great, but it worked, and I was not in charge. I was just following
along with what my colleague was doing. Then we continued virtually, as
I said, all spring of 2020. But then as of that summer, we were
continuing to the virtual so by the summer of June 2020, faculty were
allowed back on campus.
We were getting tested. We had to wear masks, but we were allowed on
campus. Students could do summer research with us, but it was entirely
virtual. I cannot remember if it was needed virtual or not. I do
remember both of my summer students who were doing research with me were
virtual, again because a lot of my work is computational. I pivoted from
doing field work, which had been the original plan to focus purely on
the computational, and it was fine.
Starting fall of 2020, Colby was back in person. We had testing three
days a week mandatory for everyone on campus. We had mandatory masks,
and it was up to each faculty to decide how we wanted to teach our
course. The options were virtual, blended or in person. In geo, because
we have the heavy emphasis on field trips, we as a department were in
person. So that fall I taught geomorphology again, which has a lab I had
around 8 students.
I did not have major issues. I think some of the biggest changes were
spacing in the classroom and then more importantly, spacing going to and
from field trips. So, you know, instead of having a kind of 112
passenger van we would have two big ones and have the windows down and
which is fun when it is 40 degrees out.
But other than that, it was not too terrible. Because it was a small
enough group it was not as disruptive. Then in the spring I taught my
intro course and that was more difficult. It was in person. I had 36
students, and again because I had 36 students, the spacing became more
interesting. So, what we did for our intra labs was our intra lab
sections, our 18 students each. We have one lab classroom that fits 18
but with COVID requirements we ended up splitting them into two into
like 2 labs. So, I would be running two classrooms simultaneously, so
the TA and I would be going back and forth between them to ensure we had
space and enough ventilation.
The thing we did find was that spring especially, we would have these
like waves of students getting out. So even though it was in person, I
was using Zoom or Kaltura classroom to record each session I was doing,
which did kind of change some of the teaching a bit because I could only
focus the camera on one part of the White Board. It will also change
some of the activities I did in class, things like that.
That was spring of 2021, then this past year fall of 21 and spring of 22
still in person, still kind of testing multiple days a week, masks went
to optional, but up to the professor. I continue to have them needed my
classroom, and then general students were very good with that.
All this kind of work, because we were much smaller college, we are very
isolated, would not near any large urban centers and it takes a while to
get to a large urban center. So that kind of made it doable. Colby has
now stopped all testing as of May 2022 and starting this fall we are
done with COVID stuff. I am not teaching this coming year. I am on
sabbatical. But yes, this past year, I had a lot more of the same. I
taught geomorphology in the fall. I led the department seminar, and then
in spring, I taught my intro again.
I would say the biggest differences where this spring I was not
splitting the lab into two classrooms because to do that we kind of had
them move around some other class space and it was kind of fell as a
department that we did not need to do that anymore. I had waves of
students go in and out with COVID. I was using Kaltura classroom to
record. I had a better classroom set-up for that, so it was less
juggling on my part like the whiteboard.
Our department seminar series. I would say the biggest change is about
half to 2/3 of our speakers were virtual and we gave the speakers the
choice. Some of the benefits where we were able to get speakers and like
the UK or something, which normally we cannot afford to fly those people
in. But we did have a couple of people in person. The other big changes
are we used to have every Friday a Geo lunch. We stopped doing that
completely during the pandemic. And then this last year when I was
running the seminar series, because we would normally have lunch with
the speaker and the students. We did it like once a month and we would
get pizza and eat outdoors, which is very widely dependent in Maine and
does not last that long. We did it like three times in the fall and then
about two or three times in the spring, so much less often. Those were
the biggest changes.
Charbonneau:
Are professors still going to have the choice to choose whether it is
blended, partially remote or in person? Or is it all in person?
Ortiz:
It is all in person, and last year was all in person too, so we had the
20 fall 2022, spring 21 was the year that faculty could choose, and the
estimate was about 25% of the classes were fully remote at the time. But
then this past year, so 21 to 22 was fully in person. A lot of us
continued to record sessions because we still had students missing
stuff. Just to keep it moving forward, we did that, but we have been in
person.
Charbonneau:
What level of virtual integration have you incorporated into your
teaching curriculum that you plan to use forward?
Ortiz:
I think the biggest is for the seminar series. I think moving forward we
are planning to keep doing about half of our speakers virtual and about
half in person. The benefit to the in person is the students get to have
lunch with them, the faculty have dinner with the person. We have
individual meetings. So, it is not just their talk.
We must be able to fly them in or pay for their travel. What we found is
that by being able to do a mix, it gives the faculty a little bit of a
break each week. We do not have to have lots of time booked off, but
more importantly it allows us to bring in speakers from broader areas.
And so, we have been able to have more higher-profile speakers
periodically because we can do that virtually. And at this point, so
many people are used to doing that, but it is not a major question. So,
that is probably where we are doing it the most from my courses.
Oher than that first March of 2020, I was not the I would say my virtual
stuff was very on the side. It was very much just a little bit of a
backup rather than a primary focus or tool even. Because I am still
relatively new to teaching some of these courses, there is enough
iteration going on that the old lectures are not necessarily that
relevant year to year. There is still a decent amount of change going
on, so I like having those resources. If I do have a student miss
something, I am like, oh yes, this needed lecture from two years ago
might give you a bit of sense. But I am not planning significant stuff
with that. Yeah, I would not say that there is a ton I am continuing to
use, but that is because we were in person, and I was mostly not using
virtual tools.
So, there is one thing, and it is pandemic driven, but I would say more
tangently, which I am just remembering now this I have a colleague in
the CS department who with a colleague at her earlier institution, had
developed a virtual field trip on using virtual reality, both in a
headset form and via desktop. When I found out about it, I was like, oh,
this is fantastic. I would love to use this in my intro course, and so
we did this past spring as a kind of lab test of ok, here is how we
could do a field trip and teach some of the spatial navigational tools
that we have students do in the field, and some interpretation of like,
if this works on top of this rock, which one is older?
That is something I did not derive from the pandemic but was originally
developed because of the pandemic. But now we want to keep using it for
two big reasons. One is the accessibility piece and two field trips,
especially when you teach in the spring. Here we tend to only have like
two labs where the weather is nice enough that we can really take
interested into the field and if there's bad weather those days you
just cannot do the field trip. Having that choice is something I am
excited about and that is something I have continued. I have been
working now individually with that faculty here to develop my own field
trip or field site that we want to this summer in Belize. And again,
that is me. I am going to incorporate it into my classes. That is the
biggest piece which I was totally forgetting about.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice what were the changes in terms of like student
recruitment and retention? Did you have like a drop off?
Ortiz:
That's an interesting question. know because Colby was in person the
first year of the pandemic, like 20 to 21. We had a huge increase in
applicants for the school. As a result, we had a much larger class
starting like freshman class last year. They have had to build emergency
dorms. So, there has been a real growth in Colby application numbers and
acceptances and those who are coming, so they say the yield is higher
than expected anyway. I know that has been true, and we have seen it as
a general pressure for the number of students signing up, especially for
intro labs. Like my colleague's intro, he had like 100 students sign up
for it, right? And it is a 36-person class. That we do see.
I would say on a more personal note, the thing I have noticed especially
in my geomorphic class fall of 21 was a significant uptick in student
anxiety and a lack of ability to deal with frustration. The two examples
I will give for that is I went through a box of Kleenex in my office in
one semester. That was because of the number of students who were coming
to me, not just in my class, but in more general, very upset.
I have my students do a decent amount of kind of computational
assignments in my geomorphology class and a lot of them have no
background with any kind of computational [work]. And so, there's
always frustration [with] things that do not work. And typically, I
have found in the past that students will give me a couple of minutes of
like trying to Google it and trying to fix it on their own before like
[saying] “I can't do it, it doesn't work.” And last year I was
getting 30 seconds. Like, I mean it would be like meltdown in about 10
seconds and just no desire to kind of handle it not working. Yes, that
was to me a real change. Much more so even than the first year.
I always offer a lot of office hours and sit-down hands-on. Ok, let us
like deep breath. Let us look through this cause a lot of it tends to be
tied to Python coding and the students who kind of would come in and for
office hours would do very well. Things I did, and I have done in the
past too, were if I had an assignment where students did not do well,
half the class did well, and half did not. I would offer say, ok, you
have one more week. You can work on everything, and you have notes. You
have feedback on what is wrong and if you work on it and turn it back
in, you can get up to 50% of the points back. So, if you have lost 20
points, you could get another 10 points added to this grade. That would
be a way for me to try and incentivize, let us focus on kind of
understanding what's wrong here and kind of how do you fix it? I have
done that with exams periodically. I have done it with homework
assignments and lab assignments, so that was something I used. I also
ended up dropping some assignments.
I would say it was the worst teaching I have had like the hardest
teaching I have had was the fall of 2021. So, this past fall was just
the most difficult. In general, where everyone was just very close to
breaking point all the time and talking with other faculty here, that
seemed very common, but it felt like normal, at the beginning of the
semester you have like a ramp up and the anxiety of students. It was
like just a step change. We went from low, anxious to high and never
came down.
Charbonneau:
What happened in terms of the amount of faculty you had at Colby?
Ortiz:
Yeah. I think the thing I have noticed is they have had trouble hiring
enough people. That has been an issue on the faculty and administrative
staff sides. You know the administrator for our department who is also
the administrative for physics and science policy, technology, she has
gone mostly remote. Well, like I do not know, 1/3 in person is like 2/3
remote and she is retiring this fall. I think there has been a bit of a
speedup of that timeline for retirement.
I have been on a couple of search committees for faculty, and we have
been having trouble getting some people. There have been a lot of VIP
searches, visiting assistant professor searches to do one or two-year
replacements. It has been a little tough to get some people on the staff
side.
There has been a lot more difficulty in terms of like IT support. IT was
stretched before the pandemic. It got really stretched during the
pandemic and so now they have been really trying to make positions that
are remote flexible because it has always been hard, a little bit to get
people to come to central Maine if they are not already here for another
reason. I know that has been a big thing of kind of both being able to
provide the compensation that people in IT would be getting in the
private sector as well as being able to provide, I think a lot of the
other benefits that you can get in the private sector with more remote
options. Right now, we are trying to hire someone for the new artificial
intelligence center, and both people are working like candidates who are
coming are for remote position completely.
But on the faculty side of those who are already here I do not know of
much. They were a couple of people who, in their retirement, who I think
speed it up by a year or two. But not a huge amount. We have not had a
huge turnover on the existing faculty yet.
Charbonneau:
Did your departmental budget change?
Ortiz:
I do not know the numbers exactly. I do know that Colby had this kind of
huge testing campaign for like the four, you know, two and a half, two
years of the pandemic where everyone was being tested on campus two to
three times a week. Colby took a large chunk of their endowment and used
it to pay for that, which I was proud of, and no one was fired, and no
one was let go. During the time we were fully remote in March of 2020,
that spring. There were a lot of staff who are working part time less,
but they were paid their normal hours. Colby did a good job with that.
I do know they made a bonus of like $1000 the first fall, so fall of
2020. In terms of our department budget, we did not have much
tightening. We have had a little bit of extra because we have not been
bringing in as many speakers. Because we have had so many more virtual
speakers, there is just a bit more money there. We were able to do my
lab renovations, which got pushed back a year because of COVID without
any issue. Overall, I think it has been healthy. A large part of that is
that the endowment was very healthy before the pandemic. There was a
little cushion there. There is strong alumni support.
Charbonneau:
When the students came back to you after the peak of the pandemic, what
did you notice were like the skill gaps, social gaps. What did you
notice were the things they came in with that you had to adjust for?
Ortiz:
With our majors there was not a silly huge difference, but I will say
you know as a warning, I have only been teaching here a semester. So, it
is a little bit hard for me to judge that strongly with our non-majors.
In some ways, it is even harder because I did not teach non-majors until
after the pandemic started until spring of 21. There are some
significant skill gaps because our intro courses are dominant, you know,
95% are students who have taken a lab science and they do not want to
take any of the others.
My first lab for intro is unit conversion, and that is a stretch
sometimes like I am asking them to convert between meters and
kilometers. I would say a quarter of my lab students have trouble with
that, which is scary to me. So, there is a skill gap there, to put it
mildly.
Overall, I think on the emotional you know, so like the quantitative
skill gap, [I] was talking about with the ability to kind of handle
frustration that is something I have just been seeing students since the
pandemic. Yes, it is a little hard to judge. I was so new.
Charbonneau:
What geoscience and professional skills do you try to incorporate or
hope your students come away with when they take your courses?
Ortiz:
Yeah, I think you have named a lot of them. I would say for intro the
other big ones that we focus on are just the General Rock ID and mineral
ID. That is not a small part with the lab especially, but on the
geomorphology side, there is a focus on that, I think. Some of the field
methods, so this tends to be the first course where we are doing a bit
more field heavy. We typically do field 3 field trips, so things like
how do you use a field notebook? What should you be recording?
When we talk about taking measurements in pairs, and then as a group,
how do you come back into the lab and put that together? That is
something I spent a decent amount of time on. But I would say the other
big focus with my geomorph is computational skills. We do the basic
ability to read in data from instruments, clean it up. Analyze it and
visualize it. I use Python for that and part of that is driven by the
fact it is useful for students to have some basic computational
literacy, like just being comfortable with arranging different things
beyond just excel. Even that, in intro I must teach Excel, but it is the
200 level. I am trying to push them beyond that.
The other reason is if students want to work with me to do research,
they need that as a basis. Part of it is also selfish is not to make
sure that I can have students prepared to work with me. It is built into
the core significantly. We do several labs with Python. We have several
homework assignments with Python. I will do a lab the first week with
Excel on flood analysis, flood frequency analysis, and 2nd week we did
the same thing but using Python to kind of structure that and show how
we can use Python more effectively to do a lot of these same steps and
frankly much more quickly.
But yes, I think the two big pieces with geomorph is how do you work in
the field. How does that then translate to getting data realizing that
you did not get what you thought or did not work? Just those pieces of
the reality of gathering a real project and not kind of or so much of a
cookie cutter thing. Then how can we effectively analyze this and
visualize it? Those are the two big things we do in that class.
Then at my upper level 300-level course, a big focus was scientific
literacy, so that is why I do these student-led paper discussions. By
the end of the course, we had read about 20 journal articles. Each
student leads it in pairs. So, each student will have been like a
discussion later, usually three times throughout the semester. That is a
big focus, and that is just getting them comfortable with some of the
primary literature.
Charbonneau:
Did your program change any of its requirements? Did you
make some courses pass fail. Did you change what courses counted for
certain credits? Did you arrange any accommodation for the students?
Ortiz:
I think the biggest accommodations we tended to make is we have a couple
of students who were abroad and then had to come back midway. We were
lenient with credit for those courses where we might not have counted
them towards the major, but we were just like, ok fine, we will use it.
Within each individual course as faculty, we would be much more lenient
with things like deadlines and grading.
In general, I would say the past two years I have been much more lenient
with deadlines. Normally I have a thing like if you turn something late,
you lose 10% per day during the pandemic. It was officially changed to
5% but was 1%. The other big change we had was not so much pandemic
driven. It was a little bit pandemic driven. We only had a couple of
majors two years ago; we had three majors and then last year this past
year we only had two majors.
Normally we have a senior capstone class. Instead of doing that because
we had so few students and because as faculty we were stretched, we
ended up just having them do independent projects one-on-one with
faculty instead. That has always been a choice to do a senior thesis or
to do the capstone class. In this case we said, ok, we are not offering
the capstone class. You can do a senior thesis or independent research.
We did that in the past two years and continuing this year. The question
is now that we are trying to get back, we are trying to have more
majors. Again, if we are going to go back to the capstone class or not.
Then anyone who was studying abroad, just more lenient and credits,
could transfer and what could count for a credit.
Charbonneau:
When students complete your program with a bachelor's degree in
geology, do they have to complete a field camp?
Ortiz:
No. Our major is an eleven-course major, so there is one of like four or
five intro courses that can take if they take any of them, they can get
into the major. We do not have a single gateway. Then there are four 200
levels needed, each with a lab. Those are each taught by the four-tenure
track faculty every year. Then they must take two 300 levels, non-labors
and then one I think like two others either 300 or another 200 level and
then they must do 2 aligned sciences. The last requirement we have is
this geology some in our course they have to do 3 semesters of it. So,
we do not need a field camp. We do not need calculus or chemistry. We
suggest it, but it is not needed.
Charbonneau:
Were you doing any of your own research during the
pandemic?
Ortiz:
Yes. I had a couple of grants that we are continuing, as well as new
research I was doing with students here. Originally, I was supposed to
be doing more field work for one of my grants that was delayed about a
year and a half. Some internal grants from Colby were delayed about 2.5
years, so I just did the field work this summer. Much of my work can be
more computational, so I leaned into that, and as I said, my lab
renovations were delayed a year and a half because of the pandemic.
It was much more of a shift for me and a rearrangement of when we were
doing things. But it did not stop. I was lucky.
Charbonneau:
How effective was that strategy of just prioritizing that because you
knew at some point you did have to go back to the field work?
Ortiz:
I will start with one of the grants I had with colleague, Ann in North
Carolina. One of the graduate students I think ended up shifting
completely his focus for that grant. It has been profitable from him,
and he is like now publishing the 5th paper on that work. He was very
theoretical and liked statistical analysis of existing data sets. Rather
than trying to use the field work to gather more stuff that we could
then analyze, the kind went to what already existed and used that.
I would say similarly, my graduate student in that project rather than
trying to get the field data to then kind of set-up the models we just
said OK, let us start with the modeling and then we will try and pull in
some of the field work once we get there. So, you know it worked it.
There was some I think gaps as a result where we could not really do as
much validation a calibration of our modeling that we would have to, and
we had originally planned initially to have kind of repeat field work
where we would go out early on and then kind of midway through to gather
more data and we just never got that. So, I think that also kind of it
puts some, not holes, but it changed how we could talk about what we
were doing.
I say that project wrapped up this past summer, and I can see that
clearly. I would say for the field work that I was planning to do here
it had less of an impact because it was a less defined deadline and
project right? It is much more driven by me starting to get some small
internal grants from Colby. I do not have a large thing of like, ok, I
must get all this done by these dates and because it was internal
funding with Colby, it was easy for me to push back and delay it.
I think, you know, costs went up, the travel logistics got a lot more
fun, thanks to COVID. But it in terms of like the research impact, it
was not huge with that because it was a new project that was trying to
get up off the ground.
Charbonneau:
I am assuming now with what is in play with the policies at Colby that
you are allowed to do your fieldwork and everything back to business as
usual?
Ortiz:
Yeah, it has been mostly how comfortable I feel about doing it. I would
say my methods have not necessarily changed that much because frankly I
am more of a computational person anyway. Just at the time of the
pandemic hitting I had field work lined up that had to get delayed. I
like to say I do fieldwork every two to three years and then I am back
on the computer. It is not a huge switch for me.
Charbonneau:
What new opportunities do you think the pandemic gave you reflecting on
it now two years after?
Ortiz:
I was teaching tropical island geomorphology when I ended it on the last
day of class, we did a class wide debate. So yes, the whole time we were
talking about atolls and looking at that from the geomorphic
perspective. The research has been done and a big focus is on thinking
about climate change, and its effects. The debate was, will these
islands be resilient with climate change in the future?
It was a fantastic way to end the semester. It really forced the
students to synthesize all the different pieces we had been to. We had
been talking about throughout the semester. They had to be able to
articulate the different arguments we had read and then put forth their
own. It was just fun. I do not know that I would have produced that idea
if I had not been in this virtual thing where I was like, ok, what
activity can I do?
You know this whole thing about the VR field trips, that is something
that I have been interested in for a while, but I think thanks to the
pandemic I have colleagues who are doing that and so I was able to
easily connect with that.
In terms of other positives, I now have some like recorded talks. You
know that is nice. I've I did a webinar with the group that was mostly
in New Zealand and Australia that was positive for me. So, that got into
a lot of interest in some of my research with people I might not have
been able to meet otherwise easily. But yes, it is hard to say. I would
say not huge benefits, but I was not necessarily as negatively affected
as a lot of people.
Charbonneau:
What piece of advice would you like to give yourself or somebody in your
position prior to them going through what you experienced?
Ortiz:
Be gentle with yourself. Be nice to yourself. I mean, all I can say, and
I did keep thinking this through the pandemic was how lucky I was to be
here up in Central Maine and not still back down in Raleigh, NC State,
my earlier institution. Just because you know we were able to teach in
person, I did not have to do zoom 8 hours a day for a year.
We were able to, you know, go to the grocery store, and go for walks.
And we were not locked into a tiny space. Well, we have a tiny house,
but that was my choice. You know, we had, we had a quite different
environment than most people. So, it was a very different pandemic. I do
not know advice is it will mostly all work out somehow.
Charbonneau:
What is your biggest take away for how to navigate restrictions and
setbacks if they ever occur in the future?
Ortiz:
Money. Yes, it is like the biggest one, frankly, can you throw money at
the problem? I do not know it is so dependent. I feel like in the
situation, being adaptable and trying to roll with the punches.
