Subtract: Enhancing Learning by Subtracting from your Course

Overview

In the nineteen months since COVID was classified as a pandemic and the University of Utah all but shut down, faculty have worked exceedingly hard to enhance their knowledge base and skills in order to meet the fluctuating learning needs of students: adding technology to our course and our homes, in addition to trialing different modalities and methods of teaching, posting and scribing online, and learning multiple ways to cast ourselves and our content into a video. To our courses we have added ConexED, Zoom, virtual exams, and zoomified discussions as we taught online, in person, and hybridized versions of both.  We preformed pedagogical back-hand springs and flips and twists, developing a sense of the academic ‘twisties’, that uncomfortable sense gymnasts and divers describe as being lost in the air.  So now, as we hope the pandemic world is quasi-settled and we return to a different teaching environment, it might be time to consider not adding, but subtracting from our courses as a means to improve student learning.