First things first, a healthy and hearty shout out to Sun Associates’ friends scattered far and wide. As 2019 turned to 2020, I had it on my agenda to send out one of our periodic updates on new projects and ideas. But then, well, the world suddenly started moving in a whole new way. Now, “for the duration”, updates don’t seem that useful. Nevertheless communication in general seems more valuable than ever.
One of the things that’s been churning in my mind while sitting in the home office, is how to apply Sun Associates’ expertise in the most helpful way possible during what are most definitely difficult times for our educational clients. In particular, our work with school districts around the subject of digital learning has suddenly moved from the realm of “someday it would be nice” to the immediate here and now. The rapid way that many of our clients have gotten up and running with online teaching and learning is amazing. Watching students (including two college students here in my own house!) and faculty get up and running in a matter of days with online courses is a real testament to the resilience of systems and the people within those systems.
Of course, those of us who’ve worked behind the scenes with all of this for years – and in some cases decades – know that the systems and processes that are front and center today did not “just happen”. We know that today’s successes are built upon careful plans related to priorities and policies, learning infrastructure, teacher/instructor training, and most of all the development of a knowledgeable and flexible learning community that can make speedy decisions and transitions when the need arises. For online and digital learning, the need has certainly arisen.
Still, we also know that no plan goes without a hitch. All implementation needs fine-tuning, tweaking, and most importantly data inputs in order to stay on track and to continue providing optimum service and value. Right now, today, I suspect that most of our clients haven’t gotten far enough into their emergency online learning work to be concerned with gathering user feedback, but that will change. When it does, we’ll be there to help you gather real-time feedback from students and teachers that you can use to help you understand what is working and how best to build on and expand that success. This is how we’re all going to make lemonade from this Spring’s lemons.
As always, Sun Associates is dedicated to the answering the essential question of What are we learning? Everything that you do is a learning experience. How we turn all of these new experiences into a better future for students, teachers, and learning organizations is the “parking lot” topic to take up tomorrow. We’ll be here to help our clients when ready. Until then, keep in touch (from 6 feet away), stay online, and stay healthy.