Phillips:
My name is Mike Phillips. I teach geology at Illinois Valley Community
College and a couple other roles that I have is that I am the secretary
treasurer for the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.
I also serve on the Faculty Advisory Council to the Illinois State Board
of Higher Education.
Charbonneau:
How long have you been a professor at Illinois Valley Community College?
Phillips:
25 years.
Charbonneau:
What are the courses you teach there each year?
Phillips:
In the fall, I teach environmental science, environmental geology,
physical geology, and natural disasters. In the spring, I teach physical
geology, historical geology, oceanography, and natural disasters.
Charbonneau:
What is going to be your mode of teaching when you return in the fall?
Phillips:
Right now, it looks like it will just be business as usual back to
normal. The one thing that is still in place is faculty have the option
if they so wish, to require students to wear masks in the classroom so
we can do that if we want to.
Charbonneau:
Are you still able to do field trips?
Phillips:
Yes, everything is back to normal.
Charbonneau:
During March 2020 when everything changed, did you switch to all online
learning? Did you completely close your doors and if so how long did you
close your institution before students were able to come back?
Phillips:
The way it worked out in spring of 2020, we went to spring break and
never came back. After spring break, everything was online for the rest
of the semester. Then in the fall, we came back with some on campus
options and most of the on campus in fall 2020, spring of 2021 was lab
courses. The courses that are hands-on need to be face to face. Lectures
were still online and were synchronous or asynchronous depending on what
the faculty wanted.
All our labs were meeting face to face. Although we had reduced class
size. So instead of 20 in a lab I would have 10 to allow for social
distancing. By the fall of 2020, we were back on campus in a limited
fashion.
Charbonneau:
For labs how often were students coming in face to face?
Phillips:
That depends on the class, but once or twice a week. For geology that
would just be once a week. Chemistry, depending on how it was
structured, it could have been twice a week.
Charbonneau:
When you did the asynchronous online remote teaching aspect, what
platform were you using for that?
Phillips:
We were using Zoom. We use Zoom in Blackboard, so the online course
delivery was through Zoom. As far as synchronous lectures, but the
asynchronous stuff, a lot of that happened in Blackboard.
Charbonneau:
Things like student hours and meetings you have with other faculty that
all shifted to Zoom as well?
Phillips:
That was all at the Zoom.
Charbonneau:
Are you continuing meetings and student hours in Zoom or is everything
back to being in person the way it was before?
Phillips:
It slowly switched back by last academic year. A lot of the meetings
were still online, like faculty meetings. Our office hours were still
online last year. This fall, I do not know if they have told us yet. I
am assuming this fall our office hours will be face to face.
Over the past year as more people were on campus, meetings shifted back
to face to face, if you wanted to. All the committees that I serve on
had the option to be face to face or you could be in Zoom. My division
meetings were all on Zoom all through last year. It has been a mix of
face-to-face online and a hybrid meeting format depending on who is
running the meeting and what the group is.
Charbonneau:
What level of virtual integration do you still have in your instruction
and curriculum now that you are transitioning back to the pre-pandemic
times?
Phillips:
One of the things that I did when my lectures were online is I had
created a full semester for every course. I now have a full semesters
worth of 15-minute mini lectures where I took my PowerPoints,
highlighted key points in those, and used a program called
Screencastomatic.
Screencastomatic will allow you to go through a PowerPoint and narrate
it. It will create a narrated PowerPoint video that you can then post on
YouTube. So those are all posted on YouTube and there is a couple of
things I did with that.
For a low cost Screencastomatic will let you have the full version of
their software and you can do long lectures. I did not do that. not
because the institution would not pay for it, but because I felt like a
15-minute YouTube video lecture was plenty for anybody to sit through it
at a time. To force my hand and keep me within time constraints, I used
that.
Then I posted them to YouTube because YouTube does automatic captioning.
My videos were captioned and accessible to most students. Those have
remained online, even though we went back to face to face because now
the students can have that as supplemental material if they miss a
class.
If they want to go review something and now they can go back and they
can access those videos. The other thing I did that I played around with
for a few years before the pandemic forced my hand, was I moved all my
exams to online exams.
All my exams are now designed to be open book and open note. They are
posted at the beginning of the semester. The exam questions are a bit
more difficult than we would have had in the past. They are all essay
questions, so it takes a little more time for me to grade. But the
students have those exam questions starting at the beginning of the
semester. The idea is that they can look at those exam questions and as
we go through the material, ideally the students would be answering the
questions as we progress through the material. Some students do that and
of course, many students do not, so they wait until the day before it is
due and then they go through and answer them all.
The grade distribution is the same as it was before the pandemic and
before I made this switch, so I feel comfortable that it is an accurate
assessment. I feel like it reduces the stress level for a lot of
students and it also takes out that kind of artificial time constraint
that we have when we are in the classroom doing that in person exam
where you have 50 minutes to complete the exam that does not work well
for some students.
Also it (a traditional, in-person, timed, closed book exam) is not the
real world. I mean, in the real world, you should learn how to look
things up. You know it is expectation that that students should memorize
everything. We know that the retention is not that great one or two
years out. The practice of looking things up, in like figuring out where
to find that information is more valuable and long lasting than some
tidbit of information that somebody was able to get right on a multiple
choice exam.
That was the other switch that I made. It was partly something I have
been planning to do anyway and then this just forced my hand so those
exams that are in every class I teach are now these online exams. If I
have an exam, it is open book, open notes and it is posted from the like
I said from the beginning of the semester so the students can use that
as we go through the material.
Charbonneau:
What did you notice happened in terms of recruitment and retention of
students prior to the pandemic, during the pandemic, and post pandemic?
Did you see a huge drop off or change in enrollment? What did you notice
happened at your institution?
Phillips:
We saw a big drop in enrollment. I want to say enrollment went down over
the last couple of years by 10 or 20%, so a significant drop in
enrollment. Now we had seen a gradual drop in enrollment over the last
decade, but this was like going off a cliff.
I feel like at least the numbers for this fall that we have seen look
like things are leveling off. So hopefully we have hit bottom and for
better or for worse, if there were a recession, I would expect to see
our enrollments go up because they tend to go up during a recession and
down during good economic times. This was a little odd because a lot of
times when things are bad, people come to college and in this case, what
we saw in Illinois at least was that community college enrollments went
down 10 to 20%.
The odd thing there was that the residential four years saw enrollments
stay flat or even go up a little bit, so it looked like students by the
fall of 2020 wanted a residential experience or they did not want to go.
It could also be that the student population that we serve, students who
are staying home, at least for the first couple years, was harder hit by
the pandemic. Economically, they may have been looking at looking at
doing more online classes and that was not what they wanted. That was
what they were telling us.
But having said that, the face-to-face courses once 2021 rolled around
the fall of 2021, the face-to-face courses did not fill up as quickly as
the as the online courses, so even though the students were saying that
they wanted that face-to-face experience, what we were seeing in terms
of what classes students were signing up for, they were still seemed to
prefer the online courses. In terms of recruitment like into geology
specifically, it made it much more difficult, especially in the first
year when we did not see students face to face on campus much.
They would come into the lab and then everybody had a mask on, and they
would leave right away. That makes it a lot more difficult to recruit
students as well. Every year I have a few geology majors and that has
continued. I usually get a couple, one or two students every year
because we are small. Our college has around 3000 students. In a typical
year, I will get one or two students who say they are majors. That means
I usually have about four or five majors that I am tracking every year.
That that has been that has remained consistent.
Charbonneau:
Are you implementing any strategies to recruit and keep more students,
or do you think it is just going to naturally ebb and flow with the
changes?
Phillips:
Well, it naturally ebbs and flows, but there are changes in recruitment
that really have to do with the long-term changes in student behavior,
not so much due to the pandemic. When I started at this college 25 years
ago, for our recruitment the college would get students to come to
campus for different events, and then we would do what we could to
recruit them during those events.
Over 25 years, the way we engage with students has changed. It went
through e-mail, and then there was Myspace, Facebook, and face-to-face.
Now I feel like we are into the Twitter, Tik-Tok phase.
The college is always trying to navigate that in terms of how to reach
the students, and then engage with them and get them to come on campus.
Really the trick is that the students do not necessarily know what they
want to do. Goal number one is to get them on campus and then when they
are on campus, what do we do to show them the different majors that are
possibilities.
Student behaviors change over time. What we must do to engage students
and try to say, hey, here is something you might be interested in that
changes as well. Over the past couple of years, our current recruitment
efforts include a different style of on-campus visits that they do
several times over the school year.
I have always tried to do whatever admissions is doing to recruit
students. If I can, I try to participate and set-up a table for the sciences,
but with the strong emphasis on the
geosciences. If I am the one behind the table, there is going to be a
lot of geology stuff. But just generally recruiting into the sciences is
helpful because some students know that they want to be in the sciences.
But they may not be as familiar with geology or geoscience because at
the high school level in Illinois Earth science and geoscience is not
needed, so a lot of the college focused students will take chemistry,
biology, and physics. They may take Earth science as a half a semester
their first year. But what they learned has sure faded by the time they
come to us.
When there are students interested in the sciences, that is that is
always an opportunity to recruit somebody into the geosciences because
it might have an appeal to them that they just were not necessarily
thinking about. There are a lot of students interested in environmental
stuff. There is a strong link between the geosciences and environmental
careers so that is the kind of recruitment today. Trying to figure out
how to reach the students and then in the geosciences trying to just
reach students interested in the environment and in the sciences in
general before trying to show them that the geosciences a potential
option.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice at your institution there was a huge shift in your
faculty? Did you have a bunch of people who switched careers or chose to
retire? Did you notice a huge shift in what the staff was at your
school?
Phillips:
No, I do not. What I saw was normal turnover. The college is a little
interested in reducing the size of the faculty in a couple of areas, so
the college offered some early retirement incentives. I do not really
see that as related directly to the pandemic. It might have pushed them
a little bit because our enrollments went down. But the enrollment
trends were such that that the college had been talking about some early
retirement incentives anyway, so that might have speeded things up a
bit. In terms of the faculty size and scope, that does not seem to have
changed due to COVID.
Charbonneau:
Did your departmental budget change over the pandemic?
Phillips:
It did not, and I think, and part of the reason is that the funding in
our college is partly based on enrollment, but we also get property tax
and other money. Of course, there was the federal funding that came in.
Any hit that our budget would have taken because of reduced enrollment
was more than offset I think by the federal funds that came in.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice in the geosciences were there any pandemic related skill
gaps or knowledge loss?
Phillips:
For some of my colleagues, I would say some of my colleagues would
answer yes. For me in geosciences, because of the lack of geosciences
being taught at in the high school anyway, my students typically come in
with a low level of understanding of the geosciences. I really did not
notice anything different because for a lot of the for most of my
students, it is new stuff. I would say you would get a different answer
if we had some if we had faculty from chemistry, or physics, or biology.
Or some of the English faculty or math faculty. But in terms of what I
was seeing, no, I did not really see any difference.
Charbonneau:
What skills do you want your students to take away from your courses?
Phillips:
It depends and varies on the class. All the courses I teach serve a dual
role, or most of them serve a dual role. They are general education
courses, but they are also courses for majors. Historical, physical, and
environmental geology are the ones the majors and general education
students tend to take.
The things that I try to emphasize, one is writing. Students need to be
able to write clearly. So having essay exams I think is an important
part of that. I mentioned earlier that I had moved all my exams where I
have them into being essay exams where the students have the questions
ahead of time. I want them to know how to look up the answers and I want
them to be able to write clearly and succinctly. I want them to be able
to explain what their understanding is. So, that is important for
somebody who will major and just students in general.
In environmental geology, instead of a final exam, the students write a
final report on the environmental geology of the area around their
house. As we go through the semester they need to look up, for example,
when we talk about floods and other natural hazards, they must do a
little bit of research onto which natural hazards affect the area around
their home. When we get to resources, they must figure out what is being
mined or could be mined in the area around their home. They may have
driven past the mine for, you know, seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen
years. Never thought about what was being pulled out of the ground
there. They must find that out.
For that research and report writing they must use proper citations and
they also must, with that report, do a summary for the class. They do a
short presentation to the class. Those skills of writing reports,
writing short answers to exams, giving presentations to the class, those
are things I tried to put into my courses to benefit the majors because
the majors are going to be doing that increasingly.
Also, to benefit the general education students too, I try to make many
of those assignments that they use to relate what we are covering in
class to their personal experience.
If we are talking about flooding in class and that abstract’s finding,
looking up the flood maps and finding the flood zones near your house,
that makes it more concrete. For some students that clicks the switch.
They are like: “oh yes, I remember when it flooded there,” and then they
start to develop a better understanding because they are relating it to
their personal experience or interest.
I really want the non-majors to think about how this may be seen in
their professional career. When they see a situation, it will click.
This is something I might want to contact a professional geoscientist to
let me know more about what is going on here. So, not just that they
took a class where they learned to identify rocks, but that they took a
class where they have an idea of what is going on here. I might want to
call somebody to find out some more information.
Charbonneau:
What accommodations did you make to your curriculum or your classes to
help push students along during the pandemic?
Phillips:
I think one of the substantial changes that they made was allowing
students to take a pass-fail option and they could do that at the very
end of the semester. They could choose to switch the class from a from
an ABC grade to pass fail. That was the substantial change, but other
than that I do not recall any substitutions that were allowed or
anything like that. There were some slight modifications to the
curriculum that were allowed by the state. Not in geosciences, but I
know that that there were some changes allowed for speech classes and
how the speeches had to be given.
I know that was one change made temporarily statewide in Illinois, we
have the Illinois Articulation Initiatives. General education courses
are covered in the in this articulation initiative and the way it works
is there is a statewide. description for what that class covers and some
of the characteristics of the class. You know for history for example.
It might say they have to write X number of papers that are X number of
pages long or something like that. It is a statewide agreement that says
if your class meets these smallest criteria, anybody in the articulation
initiative will accept that course as like a history credit or a science
credit. That is where the whole speech thing came in. I am just not
familiar with any other changes that were made like that. But that also
makes it difficult for an institution to make a change because as an
institution you want to stay in conformity with the with the state
articulation initiative.
Charbonneau:
When could students take that choice of pass-fail, was that only for the
spring 2020 semester or continued afterwards?
Phillips:
That continued out through the 2020 to 2021 academic year. I think fall
of 2021 it might still have been in place. I am not sure about this past
spring. I am not sure if it is still in place spring of 2022. I do not
think it will be in place this fall.
The other thing that I noticed came up, because we occasionally get
emails about this, is that when a student transfers, if they went with
the pass-fail option, some receiving institutions want to know not if
they passed, but if they have passed with a C or better.
Pass fail thing might have seemed like a promising idea then, but some
students might come back and get them (letter grades) when that
receiving institution wants to know what the grade would be.
Charbonneau:
Do you do any of your own research at the school?
Phillips:
I do not. At community college research is not part of our duties. We
have a full teaching load. A full teaching load for us is fifteen credit
hours each semester (30 credit hours per academic year). If somebody
adds or institution wants to do some research, they are welcome to do
it, but it is on their own time.
Charbonneau:
What new opportunities became available to you due to the pandemic?
Phillips:
That is a good question. I think some of it had to do with some of the
equipment and the course format offerings that we were able to use if we
wanted to. We got a bit more equipment in the classroom. One thing we
got in the classroom last year was the Owl, which was a little camera,
speaker, and microphone that hooks into the computer so we can teach in
the classroom.
Most of the students were in the classroom, but if somebody needed to
stay home because they were not feeling well, they could log in and take
part using the Owl, which connected through Zoom. There were little tech
things like that, not necessarily that I took advantage of all these,
but we had the option to the institution would get us a tablet and pen
if we wanted to use that so we could hook that into Zoom.
The institution provided us with technological upgrades if we needed
them to do whatever we wanted to do in the classroom. That was the
important thing. That of course was funded with federal dollars. Those
federal COVID dollars were especially useful in supporting that
transition. It also meant that even if you did not want to use that
stuff or did not need it, the option was there which is which is nice.
You can consider that even if you choose not to use that in the end.
Charbonneau:
What piece of advice would you give yourself knowing what you know now
if you were to go through this whole pandemic experience again?
Phillips:
Just be flexible. I mean, that is the key anyway to being a good faculty
person is to be flexible and be mindful of what the students might be
experiencing. Also be aware that the students might take it a little
farther beyond their personal benefit. So, just because you can stay
home, sleep in and log into Zoom does not mean you should. But being
flexible and being willing to make those last minute adjustments, being
open and trying to produce creative ways to help them navigate is
useful.
As somebody who has been doing this for 25 plus years, I was an adjunct
faculty member for a while.
If somebody has been doing this for a long time, I would like to think
veteran faculty have usually learned the lesson about being flexible. It
helps being flexible because if you have the end goal in mind, you can
think of different pathways to get there.
If you are focused on: “We must cover this material this week and this
way,” then your hands are going to be really tied. When something like a
pandemic comes up, you can think: “Oh well, we must go there on a
different route.”
Charbonneau:
Is there anything else you want to add to your statements or your oral
history? Any closing statements?
Phillips:
I would like things to come back to normal for a while. The thing I
missed the most was being in person with the students. Walking around
the classroom, walking around the lab. Seeing when a student is
struggling with something. It is much more difficult to do on Zoom or
online. It is just more difficult to tap into those nonverbal clues.
Multiple ways of engaging with the student are always important and I do
think that face-to-face aspect is difficult to recreate.
