Working as a team amidst disruption at the University of South Florida

“It was vital that we provided our professors, students, and support professionals with the tools to collaborate and connect just as they would if they were physically on our campuses,” explains Ralph Wilcox, Provost and Executive Vice President at USF. “As part of our response, we not only transitioned our classroom instruction to remote delivery, but as part of our commitment to student success, we wanted to ensure the delivery of our essential student support services remotely.” 

Confronting disruption as a team

When the news of the pandemic hit, and educational organizations worldwide were casting about for a solution, USF already had one available—if they could just come together and agree how to use it effectively. According to Joe Hice, VP and Chief Marketing Officer, who is responsible for the communications at USF, “The solution was already in place: Microsoft Teams.  We were pleasantly surprised as to how easy it was to get the senior leadership onto the Teams platform and talking with each other on a regular basis.”  

Those senior leaders included USF experts in technology, educational innovation, and business operations.  Sidney Fernandes, Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Technology at USF, notes that school was in many ways already prepared because of recent decisions. “We knew this was coming,” he recalls. “Not COVID-19, but we knew that continuing to run on a plethora of platforms would sink us if anything disastrous happened, because that kind of technical debt doesn’t allow you to move fast. Our goal was to be prepared to move as fast as we possibly could.”  In fact, two years before COVID-19 struck, USF made the decision to move to a singular environment, unified by singular accounts and identities.  

By the time the fiscal year hit in July 2019, USF was still running three different technology environments: two Microsoft and one Gmail.  The organization had already made what Fernandes calls a “deliberate, strategic decision” to move to a single environment by July 2020.  COVID-19 simply accelerated the timetable for the transition.  

As a result, Fernandes notes, “We moved all of our 56,000 students over to give them Microsoft Outlook accounts.  We were super ready, but we were super ready because we had planned to be ready.”

Patrick Gall echoes Fernandes’s assessment.  “For staff and faculty, Teams was there and ready to go.  All we did for our students was to accelerate the plan.  Of course, it enabled all these other things to go along with it, but it was really about having a strategic foundation and being able to accelerate.”

Through the use of Teams, USF was able to create a virtual classroom environment flexible and robust enough to meet the needs of all 56,000 students, including those at USF Health.  Christine Brown, Assistant VP of Digital Learning in Innovative Education at USF, highlights what really guided those senior-level conversations. “We support faculty in developing engaging, high-quality education regardless of the modality.  When we design a course, we’re looking at the alignment between learning outcomes, content and assessment, and how it all works together in a student-centered learning environment,” Brown explains. “Those learning outcomes drive decision making, especially when it comes to the design of innovative content, collaboration, active engagement, and technology usage.”

Making a healthy transition

At USF Health, perhaps no other time in recent memory has been as important as it is now to continue educating future healthcare professionals, and to do so without risk to their own health. Medical education, however, follows curricular norms that make it well-suited for a physical classroom environment. Still, USF knew it had to make the transition to a more virtual approach to training.

According to Javier Cuevas, Assistant Vice President for Faculty and Academic Affairs at USF Health, “From the health side, I think when the COVID-19 situation began, there was a significant amount of concern and we were particularly affected.  We don't have a lot of online courses compared to some other programs—especially our College of Medicine and the College of Pharmacy, which don’t have any online courses at all. We also worried about what was going on in the clinics; a lot of our students were working and learning in them. So there was concern as to how we would transition, how would it affect the people out in the field and those in classrooms, and what approaches we would take to rapidly convert a significant number of courses into an online delivery method.”

Again, Teams turned out to be an incredibly useful tool.  The school was able to pull in premade videos for asynchronous learning, and then run more synchronous class sessions where the faculty members discuss research articles and the videos they’ve put up for the students’ review.  In the College of Medicine, these are often team-taught courses, and yet despite the number of faculty involved, none have had their teaching disrupted.  As Cuevas explains, when they held a meeting of the deans to get feedback on whether faculty were having technical problems using Teams for virtual teaching, they didn’t hear anything.  In this case, Cuevas laughs, “No news is good news.”

Beyond the classroom, USF Health faced another challenge.  Many of the doctors who teach, and students who learn in the field, are involved with actual treatment of patients.  As a result, they needed to deploy a solution for telehealth.  Discussion of potential solutions and setups began Sunday night, and by 8 AM on the following Wednesday—roughly three days later—they had a fully flushed-out workflow using Microsoft Teams for patient interactions and were piloting it to three of their departments.  By the end of the week, USF Health had rolled out the solution to everyone.

That first Friday, the team reported 75 telehealth visits.  The following week saw that number soar above 1,400, and by April 6, close to 5,000 telehealth appointments had been completed.

USF also took advantage of Microsoft Teams live environment to invite 15,000 faculty and staff in a virtual town hall meeting hosted by Steve Currall, President of USF. “We felt it was very important to give our employees a forum to ask questions and hear directly from our leadership team,” says Currall. “Under the current circumstances, we couldn’t hold an in-person forum, but hosting a virtual forum proved to be a highly successful alternative.”

Building connections and learning in a time of social distance

In the final analysis, any educational technology is only as good as the job it does and the people it enables.  Dr. Cynthia DeLuca, Associate VP for Innovative Education at USF, puts it bluntly: “When a new product is introduced, I want to evaluate the effectiveness of that product in meeting our goals. When we started these discussions, it was not an immediate acceptance of the technology.  I needed to understand the capabilities as they related to what we were trying to accomplish.  This was not just about instructional continuity; this was about academic continuity.  The solution could not be ‘just’ average. Everybody was depending on Microsoft Teams as our way of continuing business—both in the classroom and throughout the university community.  To respond, Fernandes and his team spent hours answering questions, gathering information and providing examples to our campus community.  The commitment from IT and Microsoft gave us confidence in Teams as a reliable product. A product that is responsive to our current and our future needs.”

The proof came in a somewhat unexpected and sobering form.  Dr. DeLuca’s division had someone diagnosed with COVID-19.  She recalls hearing the news. “The announcement was very sad, and emotional and as a leader, I needed to relay the news to my team.  A task that could have been complicated; however, with ease I was able set up a meeting with a hundred team members, and I was able to convey my concern for our colleague and we were able to process the news together.  In unprecedented times like these, social consecutiveness through technology is an essential part of our everyday world.”

These connections matter.  In a time of social distancing and uncertainty, education as an institution must play a critical role in bringing people together.  In the virtual halls of USF, the IT teams meet for virtual water-cooler conversations, students work collaboratively on school projects, senior leaders get together for virtual lunches, and the faculty at the College of Medicine have used Teams to practice yoga together, united in their separation by a screen and a namaste.

With Teams, USF was able to take disruption and make of it something else.  Jason Hair, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Operations for USF IT, perhaps put it best.  “In many ways we’ve found—you can see it with the conversation we’re having now—sometimes things actually work better when everyone's online.”