After a full year of online schooling, NAIT’s Vice President Academic and Provost reflects on the 2020-21 year.
Sue Fitzsimmons believes the first year of online learning went well and believes NAIT students adjusted quickly.
“Given the challenges that I think everybody faced just trying to get a handle on the pandemic both professionally from the point of view of being a student, family lives and all of those sorts of things, I thought things went well. We’re proud of our students for their resilience and their willingness to work with us,” said Fitzsimmons.
Fitzsimmons believes the reason for the successful year was the connections and increased communications formed by students and instructors.
“I think everybody had to be so flexible and accommodating, and throughout the whole thing we worked on connection, not perfection. So we tried to encourage folks to stay connected. We knew it wasn’t going to be perfect, but we know students care about their connection with their instructors, and we didn’t want that to go away even when we had to go virtual,” said Fitzsimmons.
Fitzsimmons believes NAIT will be evolving from the year and continuing to learn for the upcoming fall term.
“When you have to change your practice fast, whether it’s a student or instructor, you just do the best you can in the moment, so you have almost an emergency response and just try and make things work. Moving into fall, we want to build on our learning, and we hope students do too,” said Fitzsimmons.
“We want to make sure we’re using the best practices that we’ve learned.”
More information will be released about the fall term when it becomes available.
