Doser:
I was a full professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Charbonneau:
What courses and departments did you work with?
Doser:
The department changed its name not too long ago. It is now the
Department of Earth, Environmental and Resource Sciences. I have taught
everything from environmental science courses, to geophysics, which is
my specialty, and intro geology courses as well.
Charbonneau:
How long were you at that university?
Doser:
I was there for 37 years. Unusual to stay at one place for a long time.
Charbonneau:
Walk me through how your teaching was impacted in the spring of 2020 up
until you retired this last fall.
Doser:
OK, so in spring 2020, we started getting reports about COVID and people
were getting nervous. I remember saying right before our spring break, I
said the university is starting to take some measures anticipating that
we might have to go either close the university for a week, or we will
have to go for some period online.
I was proactive about telling my students that. I also told them,
especially my graduate class, I said: “I suspect if we do get to this
state where we are trying to do a lot online, I do not personally know
if our servers are going to be able to handle all the traffic.” I am
concerned about the e-mail going down and things like that. I would
appreciate it if you sent me another e-mail or a way, I could text you
or something just to keep communicating. It turned out it was not
necessary, but that was a precaution.
Then I went away for spring break and traveled to Alaska. The day I
showed up here in Alaska was the day they started closing schools.
Everybody panicked and cancelled airline flights. Just the entire world
turned upside down in that kind of week or so. When I got back to El
Paso, we were taking an extra week of spring break. It was partly to try
and get the servers upgraded to the point we could handle a lot of the
online teaching that we knew we were going to have to do for at least a
while. Also, to get the faculty on board, and have sort of crash courses
on how to use various tools within our online content management system.
Fortunately, I had been doing a lot of my grading online, in terms of
like keeping track of student records and I had done that for three or
four years. I cannot remember exactly how long. I had also put all the
class material that was available online prior to the pandemic. I just
felt like that was the easiest way for students to stay with it. Then
“the dog ate my homework” does not cut it, because yes, it is there on
the Internet. Then the dog devoured your computer, OK?
That helped me a lot because I was already confident in using that
system and familiar with it. The thing that I think was not so good was
at the end of that first semester we were told not to do many real-time
kinds of lecturing or interacting with the students. Again, they were
worried about the overload with our servers. I was recording PowerPoints
and things, but that did not work for my graduate level class. But those
classes were small, and I said: “OK, let us start meeting online.” That
way you can ask me questions in real time.
I think towards the end of that semester I also had a help session for
teaching an undergraduate class geology for engineers where it I would
be online. This was time where I would I go over some of the homework. I
started getting increased student attendance once they realized that
that really helped, and they were doing better on exams. They started
getting more students to come.
It also impacted on our research. I do a lot of field work and the
university would allow me to be on campus. I was considered an essential
worker. We would tell them we are when we were going to be on campus,
and as soon as they got testing available, I started doing that too. But
that first summer my students could not get into the field to do
fieldwork. Some of it I was able to do myself or with my husband because
he is also a geophysicist. Sometimes my son even helped, so it was a
family affair.
I could do work that was locally in the El Paso area. That was a real
hindrance to my students. It set a lot of them back, I think, a year
because they could not get the data, or we had to completely switch
their projects. By the fall, we were in a mode of if you can think of a
creative way to do it, then do it.
We had some classes face to face, but many of them were like you could
only have 30 people in an exceptionally large lecture hall. because you
had a lot of social distancing and masking. I was at least able to teach
face to face for one of my geophysics classes. I was able to have my
labs since they were hands-on learning on how to run equipment type
labs. We would meet outside, and I would teach them how to use the
equipment, and even though we were outdoors, we were still masking up,
but that was the reality.
The students felt that they really needed it. There was a little more
face-to-face contact and they felt like they were part of a group and
that they were a cohesive unit interacting with real people rather than
doing everything online. I think as far as a morale booster that was a
huge plus.
I still taught geology for engineers most of the semesters through the
pandemic. By that time, I had figured out that it was important to make
sure that the students could interact with me. I was doing my lectures
online and problem-solving sessions online. Because of the flexibility
of the online world, you know I was able to do a lot with: “Hey, here is
the exam. If you have questions, tell me,” and I would interact more
with students. They were not afraid to ask me questions when things were
online, they were amazingly comfortable about that. More so than the
crunch when you are in the classroom, and you only have one hour to
finish the exam.
That continued through the spring. We only had virtual classes for the
fall 2020 and the spring 2021. I was also helping with the introductory
geology labs. We had been developing hands on materials prior to the
pandemic to do more interactive types of science with the students.
Trying to move some of that to a virtual world was challenging and I
just do not think that a lot of the students could handle that.
We lost a lot of students. They just powdered out partway through the
semester. Just try to do creative things when you cannot meet in person.
You know you cannot. You must look at pictures of rocks but try to do
other things as well. For example, a lot of people have stone walls that
they use to separate their houses, so we would have them go out and look
at these rocks. Do these tasks. Something so they could get their hands
on things.
Things started to ease up in the spring 2021. We were at least able to
do some fieldwork. Then with our students, there were specific
protocols. No more than X number of people in a vehicle. Windows rolled
down, the whole bit. But at least some students were now able to get out
in the field. By the summer, they still needed to go through some
permissions, but we had in the spring put a protocol in place as to what
we would do when we go to the field. If we reference that, the students
could get permission to go out to the field.
In the fall of 2021, we started back to the classroom. It was a kind of
rough time too. I think for the students there were a lot of people that
thought COVID was coming back. By then, Texas removed your potential to
mandate wearing masks, so masks were optional. There were faculty that
had immune problems and those that did not want to go back to the
classroom.
Fortunately, the university was lenient for at least that year, and
probably until the end of the spring semester of this year (2022). You
still had some flexibility about teaching all online if you felt you
needed to. I went back to the classroom. I was double masked, and I
fortunately had a classroom for the larger undergraduate class where I
could open an outside door. I opened the outside and inner hallway doors
and had at least had more ventilation, but I was concerned for my
teaching assistants, especially those working more closely with the
students in the labs. We could not provide adequate ventilation and we
could not get the students to mask up.
I would always bring extra masks and say if you forgot your mask today,
I had some available. We could not tell them to put on a mask, but
persuasively, I usually would get most of the class mask before the
start of the lecture. As it grew into spring and then of course people
started getting vaccinated, mask usage grew less and less. Even in the
fall of say, 2021 I was still masked. I was masked the whole time that I
was in El Paso. I would say that by the end of this spring semester
2022, you would only have a handful of students that were masked to any
point.
The university also had a good system for alerting people. In the first
part of the pandemic when we did get sufficient testing and were urging
students to get tested, they would tell us if there were a student in
your class or in this lab section who was sick so we could at least
monitor ourselves.
I think the other advantage to having taught for a year online was that
there was a lot of material that I had developed. I had the old lectures
and things like that, and for those students that were ill with COVID I
could work with them online. They did not miss much. Some of them got it
so bad that obviously there was a week or so they did not want to get
out of bed, but at least we had virtual lectures. We had virtual labs.
We could really fall back on that when we needed to for those students.
Fortunately, my teaching assistants and I did not get COVID during that
crisis. We were just lucky, but I think some of the protocols we
followed helped too. We went back to normal, and I assume now from
looking at some of my interactions with colleagues online that there are
very few people wearing masks at this point.
Charbonneau:
What platforms were you using for your teaching?
Doser:
We were using Blackboard. The tools in Blackboard for collaborating
online were cumbersome and I had been using Zoom a little bit before
that. There was just a faculty demand that we did not like what was on
the Blackboard. The university responded and said: “OK, we will provide
Zoom and we will even put it in Blackboard so students could just go to
Blackboard,” and there was the link for the lecture which would be in
Zoom. That was another thing that the university was on top of.
I am still part of a research group, that is a large group studying the
critical zone. We met for a while in Teams. When we have partners that
are outside of the university, it is cumbersome for people that are not
part of the university network to do things like share a screen and show
figures. We have turned to Zoom now for those meetings as well, although
I think the university still would prefer us to do Teams. When you work
with people outside the institution, Zoom has been the better platform.
Charbonneau:
When everything closed for your fieldwork, what did your university do?
Doser:
They got creative. They did a virtual field camp that first year of
Covid. That would be in the summer of 2020. The instructor of the field
camp does a lot of planetary geology. He said let us just treat this as
if you have landed on another planet, and you now can have a rover. Go
out and explore some geology. What they did is they sent the teaching
assistants for the class; they sent them out with Go-Pros. The students
would be communicating with them saying: “Oh, I want you to go up there
and take a picture for me,” as if they were a rover. They had to plan
out what they were going to do, and they would work together in a team.
They only had a certain number of hours to traverse or collect a sample.
It was designed like what you do in planetary geology, plus working in a
team and coming to consensus about what to do next.
The students that I talked to that took that class really enjoyed it and
it was an interesting way to accomplish it. It certainly could work in
situations where people had mobility issues and things like that. You
could use some someone to help you go to the sites and collect what you
needed to make your interpretations.
Charbonneau:
Can you elaborate on more the projects the students were shifting to
instead of the field work?
Doser:
In one case the student had been planning to collect data. What datasets
do we have on hand right now that she could use instead? The data were
still raw field data, so she needed to analyze them instead. She was
also severely impacted by COVID. She has caught it three times so far.
She also reacts very strongly to the vaccinations. She has had a lot of
coping issues there.
Another student had some field data that had been collected already, but
he also had some coping issues, and he likes to work more with others.
When you are sitting alone in your apartment, it is hard to get
motivated. That was a part of his problem.
Then a third student, as soon as we could get her into the field, was
able to drag her brother or somebody else in her family with her and
start collecting data. That was the one where I was able to go with some
of my family and collect some of the data she needed, too. She could
manage to do it once it got towards the fall semester of 2020. She was
able to get out during that Christmas holiday and collect some data too.
She was working on a project where there was not any existing data. Hard
to do anything without field time.
Then there was another student that did work in field work in Utah. She
and her field partner had to go through a protocol of quarantining
before they went out. Getting tested and all of that and then they had
to buy everything they needed before they left for Utah and not meet
anyone else, but they were working in a remote part of Utah. It really
was not that much of an issue. Her big problem was she finished in
December of 2020, and it took her six or seven months to find a job. She
filled out dozens and dozens of applications until things started
loosening up a bit. But she kept up hopefulness and ended up getting a
perfect job for her. It just took a while.
Charbonneau:
What did you notice about student retention during the pandemic?
Doser:
I would say for our majors I do not think we lost all that many. I think
if they were far enough along that they felt that they were part of the
group. That really comes in there in their sophomore year when they
really start working together. It depends on that. Environmental science
students do work together as first-year students too, but I think once
they had a support group, that helped a lot.
An additional challenge for our students, especially for the
undergraduates, is that a lot of them come from Juarez, Mexico, and so
we have issues with Internet connectivity, phone service, and things
like that. That was a challenge for those students. I suspect that some
of the students, even in the engineering class, these are students that
are already sophomores and juniors, well into their civil engineering
program, had issues with trying to get on the Internet.
Then there are a substantial number of family issues. Because it is such
a close-knit community, I know that I had students that had to drive
across country to get grandma to bring her back to El Paso because
grandma was alone, and they did not want her to be alone during the
pandemic. Then they lost so much time that they could not make up the
class. The university was also very flexible in the first couple
semesters in terms of like you could drop, up to the last day of class.
Normally it is I think about the 8th or 9th week of this semester that
is usually when you get your last chance to drop, and during the
pandemic you could also select to drop up to this last minute, or a
pass-fail grade option too.
Students would at least be able to say: “How I am doing? You think I can
pass?” because they obviously did not want to drop the class if they
think they could pass. They could pass even if they have a C, but it is
not going to show on their transcript. Not going to blow their GPA. That
was another strategy the university used to try and retain the students.
During the completely virtual lockdown, I do not think we lost as many
as we could have because of those options. But I am trying to think. ln
a normal intro lab section of 20, so this would be for your basic
geology that any student could take, I would guess that we were losing
four or five students out of the sections? We were doing some studies
with a group in South Carolina about teaching assistants and their
ability to adapt to hands-on learning techniques. Unfortunately, we
started this in the pandemic.
I would survey the students in the labs, and I would collate the surveys
and send them to the researchers in South Carolina, and I was just
noticing drops in the number of students who were responding to surveys
and whatnot as the semester went on.
That is what hurt us, and that is going to hurt us for the next couple
of years. These undergraduates did not get a chance to do anything
face-to-face. I do know of a couple graduate students that just did not
get the support that they needed, and they dropped out. I was fixed on
keeping my students and some lost financial support because if you
cannot get your research work done and you are in your last semester,
you must find a job, and then you are working full-time. Trying to
finish a thesis and work full time is hard.
I was able, for example, to get extra support for one of my students who
was in that situation. I said: “You are never going to finish unless we
find a way to support you for like a month or two so you can just focus
on it”. Fortunately, the university has had a pool of travel money that
they would normally use to send graduate students to meetings, but
because nobody went to a meeting, they had this extra money. They were
allocating it specifically for students that needed something to finish
their theses, and so he applied for that and got it. I know that was
what saved him in terms of being able to finish.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice any changes in terms of staff and faculty retention due
to the pandemic?
Doser:
No, it stayed consistent. I do know that it impacted some of the younger
faculty that still had young children. But the university I think has
worked hard to do things like stop the tenure clock and things like
that. You could petition as part of your yearly evaluation that: “Hey, I
had a third grader that was sitting next to me doing his homework.” that
impacted my research work. I still know several of the faculty were
feeling overwhelmed. It is difficult to make a meeting when you have
children running around the house yelling and things like that.
There was at least one faculty member whose spouse had to show up for
work, so she had no choice but to stay home with the children during
that lockdown. He had to be at his job. That impacted her.
We had some new faculty arrive right at the beginning of the pandemic,
but fortunately things worked well for them. They were able to sell
their house and find another house, those kinds of issues during the
pandemic are huge. I do not see that the faculty were that impacted by
it. Although like I said, there were a couple of faculty that had immune
system problems. These faculty really wanted to extend the time that
they could teach online and at least the university extended it for a
year and a half, or two years after when we started going back to face
classes. Although this policy is now discontinued. I think you must work
it out with the Dean and the provost if you still have need to stay at
home.
Charbonneau:
Did your departmental budget change?
Doser:
As far as the budget went, there were not a lot of changes. We were
still getting some lab fees and things like that. What they did during
the pandemic was use some of that to upgrade the classrooms that needed
better projectors, screens, and computers. Also of course, buying new
supplies and things like that. Our budgets were not cut.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice any pandemic-related skill gaps in your students?
Doser:
Yes, I do think that in general the students’ capacity to interact with
one another and to work in teams was impacted. Again, if you have not
been with people for a long time, it is hard too hard to get back into a
thinking mode. In my geology for engineers class, they do a project, and
they must work together as a team. They made a presentation at the end
of this semester and there were more communication failures in the teams
than usual. I think for the graduate students it was not so severe
because we did keep engaged and we did keep interacting and as soon as
we could we got into the field. They did not lose quite as much from
that. But yes, I think in general if you have not used some of those
skills and even just some of your geologic knowledge in a while, it
takes a while to readjust.
That is typical, too, even without the pandemic. Some of the students
learn something as a sophomore, then they get to field camp and cannot
remember the order of geologic units. We have just found that every
semester there are things that we must keep reminding them about so that
when they do get to field camp, they have not completely forgotten
something they learned back in historical geology, or structure, or
something like that. I did not see that as severely other than the
social aspects. But again, on the other hand, I think even though they
were not as socially skilled as they had been before the pandemic, in
some ways, this idea with doing some hybrid things and the ability to
ask questions of me outside of the classroom online, made it less of a
pain to schedule appointments. Saying: “Hey, I can meet you anytime
within reason on Zoom so when you get off your shift tonight at 9:00
o'clock, I can talk to you”, that was just a new thing that we could
do. I really do think that helped some of those students because many of
the undergraduates work full time and have these weird hours and cannot
make it to school for office hours. Yet they still can interact online
and get their problems solved.
Charbonneau:
Were you doing any of your own research that was affected by the
pandemic?
Doser:
I had an NSF grant that was for doing service-learning type things and
we were working with the Community College. We had a good partnership
going where we would do joint field trips around El Paso, and anybody
could come. We had field trips on the El Paso campus because there is a
lot of geology right there on campus, you do not even have to drive. The
idea was that we were trying to get the Community College and the UTEP
students to mix and for them to find out: “Hey, you do not need to be a
genius. It is not so scary; you can do this.”
Then there were just a lot of general kinds of things. We had tours of
the water utilities’ desalinization plant. We would have tours of the
waste treatment plant. We had this program that started at the Community
College called Water for Life. All those things were hugely impacted.
Then on top of that, not due to COVID, but my major collaborator at the
Community College ended up with some health issues. That was a problem
on top of the fact we could not do much for over a year. There is still
a reluctance, or at least there was the past academic year, the
Community College students did not want to go back to face-to-face
classes.
I have a colleague who is the Dean on one of the campuses there and he
just said the students would rather take things online. It is
frustrating because we had a good cohort of students, and we were
pulling a lot of our students from the Community College into our major.
Now, if they are all taking the online geology classes, they are having
to cancel all the face-to-face sections. How can you get a student
interested in being a major if it is all online? It is exceedingly
difficult. That took a backward step.
We decided to work on a virtual publication of a geology of El Paso
Manual that we hope that anyone could pull out a part of a section and
read. Oh, I am going to hike here and want to know what kinds of rocks I
might see, just the public. We did spend time working on that and we
were able to hire some students to help with formatting, illustrations,
making maps, and things like that. It would have been nicer if we had
been able to use that to pay students to help lead field trips.
That one was a hard one. I mean we were able to extend the grant, but
even so with me retiring and my colleagues still having some health
issues and our evaluator catching COVID early on (he has long COVID)
made it difficult - so there were many things we could have done if
COVID had not come. We would have continued to have that active pipeline
and continue to make inroads into the community and into outreach, but
some of the connections are there. Some of the things that we started
there are still involving collaborators that are at UTEP. I am hoping
that that will pick up again.
Charbonneau:
What new opportunities do you feel like became available to you due to
the pandemic that you would not have thought about or utilized before?
Doser:
Well, I certainly have become a lot more comfortable doing things
online. I was doing some collaboration, normally through Skype, not Zoom
before the pandemic. But yes, I think that has been a huge shift. I
think people have gotten a lot better about collaborating online and how
to how to handle group conversations, how to share data and ideas.
It is still not as great as doing it in person, but it works. It does
allow us to bring more people into the conversation. That helped. I
lived in one of the outer suburbs of the city, so I was at least able
to, even in the worst of the pandemic, get out, take walks, bicycle, and
things like that.
As far as my mental sanity went, that was good. I tend to be a person
that can find something to do, and so I dove into some other things, I
think. I started playing more music. I play flute and piano, so my
musical abilities went up, which I would not have anticipated doing. But
hey, is it something to do right?
There are a few benefits of that and some other things that I think I
could do on my research. When you got into teaching, it was still
time-consuming. Certainly, learning to efficiently grade everything
online was a challenge to do. Fortunately, the content management system
got a little better as time went on. It was not as cumbersome as I kept
finding out the changes. I am glad because I was sick of doing the
grading the way it as it was originally set up. I got more research
done, but there was a good chunk of the time spent grading.
Charbonneau:
Do you think the pandemic opened or closed more doors for you?
Doser:
No, it opened more doors. Again, just this idea of being able to
interact with people across the world has been positive. I am involved
with the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, and that is a worldwide
organization. We have had a lot of meetings with people all over the
world. It would have been a lot harder to do that had the tools not been
perfected during the pandemic.
Charbonneau:
What is a piece of advice, or a takeaway you would give yourself if you
could go back in time and talk to Diane prior to this pandemic
experience?
Doser:
As much face-to-face virtual contact as possible. Do not let people
discourage you by saying: “Oh you do not have the bandwidth.” I mean, I
do have very interactive lectures to begin with, so it was hard for me
to adjust. But I think that would be it is just reach out early. Try to
do as much face-to-face and take advantage of the fact that some of
these students that do work the odd hours, that have difficulties, that
sometimes the virtual world works perfectly for them.
