In a preview of their fall 2020 Pennsylvania CPA Journal Education column, Duquesne professors Valerie Trott Williams and Robert Kollar recount the obstacles they faced when their university was forced to move all classwork online as part of the coronavirus pandemic. They discuss the effect the move had on student grades, the time it took to prepare for online courses, lessons learned for when courses resume, and more.

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By: Bill Hayes, Pennsylvania CPA Journal Managing Editor

For more information on COVID-19 and the effect it has had on accounting education, make sure to check out PICPA’s panel discussion, Higher Education Teaching Opportunities for CPAs, on Aug. 27. 

Podcast Transcript

In March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic truly hit its outbreak point, colleges and universities around Pennsylvania and the United States were forced to move their operations online. One of the universities affected was Pittsburgh's Duquesne University. Today, in a preview of their column in the fall 2020 Pennsylvania CPA Journal, we are lucky to have two professors from Duquesne, Valerie Trott Williams and Robert Kollar, here to talk to us about the experience of converting from an in-class format to completely online, the effect the move had on student grades, the time it took to prepare classes for the online arena, and much more.

As you mentioned in your column, in March 2020, schools in Pennsylvania moved to online delivery of courses and it was a conversion that had to take place in a very short amount of time. Can you take us a little bit behind the scenes of the decision to go online and how it was managed in what, in your case, was basically five days?

[Williams] I think what's different about Duquesne than some other schools is our spring break is always just a little bit earlier. So, we were all on spring break that first week of March. And really over in the United States, there were very few cases even being talked about. Of course, you had the issues over in Europe, specifically Italy was very infected at that time, and Duquesne has a Rome campus and we have several students always over there studying for an entire semester. So when we came back to campus that was really the focus of getting those students home safely and that was put in motion.

That was really March 9 and that's when many other universities went on their spring break and I vividly remember speaking with our dean in the hallway the first day back after spring break, you know, what's going on? How might this impact us? Do you think we'll have an outbreak in Western Pennsylvania? On Monday, March 9, his conversation with me was we're focusing on international, probably won't be a big impact here in Pittsburgh. We're not like other universities, we're mid-sized, we don't have a large international population on campus. We'll see how it goes.

Literally within two days, so now we're on to Wednesday, March 11, some of the larger universities in Western Pennsylvania made announcements that their students were not going to return from spring break. That they already left, they're just going to stay at home for a couple of weeks and it was going to be assessed. As soon as that announcement came down, there was definitely a rethink at Duquesne, and maybe it was going on all along, that maybe we should also have some majors put in place as a precaution.

But remember, our students went away, went back home, and were already back onto our campus and we were all teaching live for that second week of March. By Thursday, I want to say it was March 12 at that point, that's when the announcement came that we were going to pivot or transition to virtual but only for a short period of time. At that time, we were finishing out the week, we had the weekend and then two days at the beginning of the next week where we were able to prepare anything we needed to get into this virtual environment.

That was the 16th and I want to say the 17th. Those were the two class days that were actually canceled. As you can imagine, many students were moving out of their apartments, their dorm rooms, parents were disrupted, picking up students, and they were really told to pack everything, you might not come back, we're not sure. Then we resumed on Wednesday, March 18, in a virtual setting. But it was that week that both Bob and I and a few other faculty and some administrative staff were still on campus.

We were still meeting with students, conducting business as usual and then certainly it came down from a state perspective, from our governor, it was that Thursday, so I want to say it was March 12 … no, it was the following week after that that we had to leave campus, pack everything up, and then from there out we were going to be virtual until otherwise known.

Initially, we thought we were coming back in April and then that all changed, and of course all summer we've been online.

[Kollar] I think the university really was monitoring it very closely and it … really, the decision was kind of two-pronged, right? First of all, we thought that many of us professors were going to be able to stay on campus and teach from there while the students were away, and then with the governor making the decision that we needed to close all of the facilities, the next step was, okay, everybody's going home. You will not be able to have any classroom access at all.

I had planned to actually teach from campus. I had gone through some training and a technology classroom so I could actually teach from there, and then the decision was made that now we need everybody off-campus. So, it came down just incredibly quickly. I mean, we literally, as Val said, last classes were on the 12th, we started back again on the 18th and the 19^th, and then the 20th was designed to be a day where we would kind of regroup. Well, by that time, the decision had been made. Then we were 100% online from there until the rest of the semester was over.

[Williams] I think the one thing I would add, and I really have enjoyed this and I think the campus-wide has benefited by it, our provost is an epidemiologist by training and background, and he's relatively new to Duquesne. I want to say he's been with us maybe one to two years and it's just so refreshing to hear him talk about the science and what we evaluated and how we make the decisions and really even going forward in how we're preparing for the fall delivery and he's very transparent. He has weekly sessions, anyone can get on, anyone can ask him a question, and I really think that enhanced communication has been helpful.

I'll definitely say that, if we can ever get this fully in our rear-view mirror one day, I'm certainly hoping to get an in-person tour of the Rome campus. I did not know that you guys had a Rome campus but it's something that I'm going to want to take a look into one day.

[Williams] Well, I was supposed to do the May semester study abroad. I was leaving in May and I was going to be gone for three weeks. I wasn't going to our Rome campus but I was going to France and Germany and chaperoning 39 students and, of course, that was also canceled.

You mentioned in the piece that many of your courses were presented via Zoom meetings. What did you find to be the pluses and the limitations of that format or even online delivery in general?

[Kollar] For me, using Zoom was brand new. I had maybe participated in one or two Zoom meetings prior to having to use it for class so I had to go through a crash course on how to use Zoom, what is it? What are the different features of it, etc.? So, crash course, got up to speed on how to use it, and I guess what I found from it once I did use it a couple of times in the classroom setting, it worked fairly well.

I would say that we were able to emulate at least probably 80%, 85%, of what a normal classroom setting was like. Both Val and I, and many of our colleagues at Duquesne, stuck to our normal class schedules so I had classes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9:00, 10:00, and 11:00, and I stuck to that schedule as soon as we moved online, so my classes met on their normal schedule via Zoom session.

I would call on students. I could see them in the gallery view in Zoom and I made sure that always at the beginning of class I used the gallery view so I could see them all and then we would come back again right at the end of class so I could see everybody again. I called on people throughout so that they had to interact, etc. I tried to make it as close to a normal class setting as possible.

But one of the limitations I think of that online delivery even as much as we tried to make it seem like being there face-to-face, and it comes with years of teaching, you kind of read the faces of the students, right? You can tell, okay, you know they just didn't get it. Or you can see that, yeah, they're grasping the concept. You can't do that online. You just can't replace that.

[Williams] You make a great point there with, are they really understanding it and not only to some of our teaching tactics, like I will walk around the classroom and I know you do that too, Bob, and maybe have them work a problem on their own or in a small group. Are they getting the right answers, and if they get the right answer then maybe they get to leave a few minutes before class is up. The rest of the kids still need to stay working on it or something like that.

You have no way of knowing if they're really ... You know we can say, "Okay, now I want you to spend three minutes, five minutes, doing this exercise." But we can't see their papers. Certainly, we could have them share their screen and they could put it up there and they could discuss it for the class but we could not do that if there's 40 kids in the class. You're not going to be able to have 40 kids share a screen in a class period.

So that part certainly had some limitations to it and I think that whole student engagement was probably one of the hardest things that Bob addressed. I think we all felt that. But I think surprisingly we did have very good participation. As Bob said, if you had class at 9:00 we were on at 9:00. All of the students got on and I would say the class participation was identical to the classroom.

So you're always going to have maybe one or two students missing for whatever the reason. Probably the same, and then we recorded every single session because it was so easy to do and those were available to the students if they missed the class or maybe they didn't understand a concept and they wanted to go back and review a segment of it. We did track that and that's in our article that you had referenced that's going to be published in the fall.

We had an additional 145 viewings of the collective Zoom recordings that we had recorded, which we thought was pretty impressive. So, you think about a live classroom, if a student's not getting it the first time, there's no recording. They might have to come to you and ask you questions or they ask friends of theirs and are they really getting the concept. I think that was an advantage to being able to record it.

But sometimes I watched my own videos back and when you hear yourself you kind of shake your head a little bit and say, "Really? Did I say that?" I'm sure there are some other downsides from that perspective. But the one comment that I was going to make as it relates to Zoom, because that's now become a household name. I can remember my family saying for Easter we're going to have a Zoom Easter celebration. At that point, I was tied to my computer and tied to Zoom for a month.

There was no way I was going to say an Easter prayer doing Zoom. So, we didn't do it as our family but a lot of families, of course, have used it and have stayed connected that way. Certainly, from an online learning virtual setting, that's one of many tools, right? I know, Bob, you're a big user of My Media site to be able to do recordings. There's Voice Thread, of course, discussion boards where people are having dialogues back and forth. There's the publisher's materials, they have the pre-recorded videos that are very interactive. Kind of walk you through spreadsheets, show you where the numbers come from. All of those tools are out there and available and I think if you've taught online before, which both Bob and I have, we had a little bit of an opportunity of evaluating those tools and knowing which ones would work and which ones wouldn't. I know in some of my classes the publisher I was using I thought was a good publisher and had great online videos so I posted those as well as some of my own, of course.

Other classes, maybe we didn't feel that same way about the publisher so we didn't use those recorded videos. Personally, I don't like Voice Thread. It's like me just reading a bedtime story, it's me reading PowerPoint. I don't need to do that. I don't do that in the classroom, so I don't use that tool, but other faculty like that so they might use it.

I think having just the potpourri of all the technology that was available was beneficial but if you've never taught online before which a number of faculty, of course, were in that situation you just had to make it work and most people went toward the Zoom technology because it was easy to use. It was free for us but, of course, our university pays for a site license because we've been using Zoom for over 18 months.

So I used Zoom in my face-to-face classes and I would use Zoom sometimes for virtual office hours. If a student needed to talk to me over a weekend and really couldn't understand something, I would set up a small Zoom session for that student and I did that in 2019. We had the advantage of having that platform available to us and it wasn't like we had to get up to speed immediately on that.

[Kollar] The one limitation I would mention is that there were some students who had technical difficulties and they were kind enough to email you as a professor and say, "Hey, you know what, I can't get on. We're in a remote location." Or the common thing that I experienced several students telling me was that, "Hey, I'm competing for the Wi-Fi at home because my mom and dad are both working from home also." It was fortunate that we were able to record the classes as Val mentioned so that these students could go back and at least listen to it, but they may have missed the initial round of it. At least we did have the recording that they could go back to.

[Williams] And we had a few students who didn't have monitors or cameras on their computers so even though we told them we'd like them to have their monitors on they would be dark, but they would let us know that ahead of time so that wasn't a problem. Also, Zoom's feature of being able to do it on your smartphone was unbelievable.

We had students doing that as well so that obviously created more engagement. Then we certainly were able to invite outside guests using Zoom. It wasn't like it was an internal system, only certainly we could share those links with anyone and everyone. Password-protected, if we chose. I had a guest speaker just as I would in the classroom for auditing and all the students got on and paid attention, asked him questions, wrote a paper on it. It was a great session.

Also, Bob and I do a capstone project with our auditing seniors and they have to present to a mock audit committee and normally that's in the classroom or in the boardroom at Duquesne University and we invite in various professionals from the CPA community, and the students come in just like they would be like an audit team and present their findings and their opinions and their results on internal control assessment.

We've been doing this since 2005 and enhance it each year, and Bob and I talked about this when this all went down and everyone thought we were canceling it. And we're like, “Absolutely not.” Full steam ahead, we'll figure it out and it turned out great. I mean, it was very stressful. We wanted to make sure it was going to work and we had groups of teams come in for 30 minutes.

We had the external professionals have to log in, and certainly depending upon how external professionals are logging in, if they're on their own personal computer there's probably not an issue, but some employers really have very strict firewalls and maybe you can't just access a website like this. I had that one issue where someone had to swap out and get a personal laptop and couldn't get in right away.

So, it really worked for even a setting like that, but as we were kind of talking about disadvantages, that would be one thing I would say was a slight disadvantage. I thought the students did excellent, but part of the problem at least in my opinion was I felt like they had prepared remarks and they had possibly a piece of paper in front of them because they were pretty smooth.

When they have to do it live and they have to stand there and have everybody staring at them, they have no paper in front of them. They've got to remember facts. Now, of course they have their presentation. It's a little less smooth and it's a little more nervous, but it comes with the virtual platform.

Your piece goes into detail, and you just mentioned the senior capstone auditing course I believe, but the piece analyzes the performance of students in both that senior capstone auditing course and a managerial accounting course. In the column, you wrote, "Overall learning performance of the students in 2020 was surprisingly higher when you compare it with the prior years of traditional instruction." What do you think were some of the factors behind this? Have you come up with any theories?

[Williams] Well, we had some theories going in, and our theory going in was if we don't put all effort out more than we ever would in how many years we've been teaching – 20 years – that this might not work that well. We really need to engage the students. We need to be there more than we ever have been. We need to be compassionate. We need to be understanding if someone loses Wi-Fi when they're taking a test or something like that.

Unusual times, right? I think we had to get our mindset around that which in the classroom if someone doesn't show up for a test and didn't tell us ahead of time unless they're in the hospital, we might not be as forgiving. Here, I think we were more forgiving with that and we all came together as a community and an all-hands-on-deck type of thing. I think we knew we had to do that upfront. We did that and so I think students recognized that and students really put forth that effort and we all kind of got through it together.

We say at the end of our article, we're not sure this is sustainable, we're glad it happened, and, obviously, we need to rethink going forward, and that's what everybody's doing now with different models that are out there, but when you get thrown into this with a couple days’ notice, you just have to kind of adjust everything and make sure everybody feels that they're supported and learning.

But many universities struggled with how the grading system was going to work, right? That was all over the board and, back to our provost, he even asked for open comments like do you think it is a good idea to possibly go to pass/fail or let the student decide? Personally, I took extreme offense to that.

I wrote a nice long letter and I couldn't believe it because I really felt like, okay, as soon as a student hears that, they're not going to try. They're not going to put forth the effort, they're not going to learn, and then let's just talk about all of the bad things that are going to happen. They're not going to have the material to take the next class. They're not going to do well in their job and all those types of things.

So I was very nervous about that. We said let's just make them want to learn. Let's make them look forward to their Zoom session and I think we did that and you have to be an entertainer. They look forward to talking to you and hearing your perspective and what you have to say. I think some of that is helpful to continue that learning.

But we were not sure how these outcomes were going to go because there's been a long history of online learning and are students really learning? Here we are, everybody's pivoting to this on short notice. We really thought it wasn't going to turn out that way and then we also thought … and that's why we kind of looked at a sophomore-level course that is required for all business majors; the managerial accounting that is talked about … we said, will there be a difference? If we take our senior accounting students who are 21, 22 years old, about to graduate, maybe taking a full-time job, maybe going into a master's program, thinking about the CPA Exam, are they going to be more vested in their learning and they're more mature than maybe a 19-year-old who is only a sophomore and is an all-business major? Not necessarily accounting.

Certainly, I think we believe, and others, that accounting is not an easy major. When you have other students that maybe aren't accounting majors, maybe they're not understanding as well or they're not putting forth the effort that an accounting major would have. We really thought we would see a difference in the learning.

So we do all this analysis, what are the results? It didn't matter if you were a managerial accounting, a general business student, or a senior accounting student, the learning outcomes in a virtual environment for the last six weeks were stronger and more superior than the first eight weeks of live instruction.

That was not an outcome we thought we were going to achieve and we're fortunate we did. I'm happy we did, but I think it's based on the efforts put forth by everyone.

[Kollar] I think that our efforts were trying to just keep the situation as normal as we possibly could, right? We haven't changed anything. Classes are still meeting. There are still expectations. We didn't water down any of the course requirements, but I think the other piece of that is the students just had more time.

If I had to try to theorize why they improved a little bit, they didn't have all of their clubs that they could go to or other options that are available to them on campus. Most of them were at home and had additional time available to study, and they used it wisely and I think it came through in the results.

[Williams] And I think mom and dad that were home also knew that they were supposed to be on a Zoom session and they would say, "Hey, get off that video game. It's time for Zoom learning."

I think a young adult who's used to hanging out on campus if they're at home they're going to be spending a lot of time in their room and might as well have the laptop out at that point studying. So, why not? The next question has to do with academic integrity and, as someone who parented, or coparented, three young boys through this, when I was doing the work with my oldest and there was a math problem, let's say 12 times 12 or something, and he was having a little trouble with it, sometimes I would be tempted to just give him the answer. I did a good job of not doing it, but academic integrity … it's a concern in this environment, with students having access to resources they might not have in the classroom. What did you do to address this concern and how much effect do you think it had on overall performance?

[Kollar] That's the $64,000 question. A lot of professors have concerns about academic integrity in the online environment and I'll say that our university did a great job of making us aware of different things that we could use through either the learning management systems that we have, Blackboard, or if the publisher of a textbook has an online homework manager, an exam tool, some of those things had some features in them that we could use that I can talk a little bit about.

A couple of things, or at least steps that I took, and I can talk about some other things as well: I always restricted the amount of time that students had for an exam. It wasn't open-ended. They didn't have multiple hours. A normal class session was 50 minutes; that's how long you had to take an exam: 50 minutes. At Duquesne, at least in our school of business, we emphasized, and throughout the university, I should say, ethics.

I incorporated into all of my exams a statement of ethics where a student had to indicate true or false – thankfully they all answered true – that they were in compliance with the student code of conduct and that they did not cheat or do anything like that. I also, through the Blackboard exams and I was able to do this with the publisher tools as well, put all of the questions in random order.

So, if you and I were sitting next to each other, we wouldn't see the questions coming up in the same order. Because I'm trying to at least prevent something like that from happening. Then some other tools that the university had available to us, there's a tool called Respondus. What it enabled us to do is, if we installed it and had our students install it, it would limit them so that their computer would go into lockdown mode.

They could not go out and access the internet from their computer. Now, theoretically, they might have their cell phone there and they might be able to do that but at least through their computer they couldn't. Then there's actually a feature of that where, through the camera on the student's laptop, you could be watching the student take their exam if you wanted to and some of our faculty did avail themselves of that.

I personally did not. Students will tell you that, from their perspective, they find it a little demeaning that you're assuming I'm going to cheat. So, you're trying to strike a balance between, okay, as a professor how do I protect academic integrity and how far do I trust my students? We walk a thin line there.

[Williams] Those are all great examples and I did use the monitor. I did turn that on for a few of my quizzes, but then Bob and I talked about it and he decided he wasn't going to use it and we wanted to be somewhat consistent since he has half the seniors and I have half the seniors. For comparing outcomes as well. We wanted to make sure it was as similar as possible.

So I did not use the monitors then for the final exam for them, but I did use it in some of my other exams and quizzes. Now when you go through that training, it's almost comical to watch because they kind of show you what the software's going to pick up. So, if someone else enters the room to maybe provide assistance with a test question, 12 times 12, okay, here's the answer, it'll pick up that someone else is in the room.

The comment about maybe looking at another computer or a cell phone to get an answer or a piece of paper that you wrote things down on, the software can pick that up too and actually say that the person isn't really focusing on the screen. Then it's really up to the professor to watch those results to determine if they want to further investigate. It's not necessarily that a student hasn't been forthright.

So, the tools are out there and I think some people are using them. Others might not be as much but they're certainly out there. Very easy to administrate and I guess the only other comment I would add as Bob indicated is some of the publisher tools do provide an online test bank that you could just select questions and, as Bob indicated, timed if it's supposed to be a 50-minute test, it's a 50-minute test.

You could certainly have multiple-choice as well as problems. It's not like it just has to be all multiple choice. You can have essays. We had all of that on our exams but you can also do algorithmics. Every student is going to get the same question but different numbers so its different answers. Then, I never would release the correct answers or the working solutions until some period after the test.

Even though they all had to take it Monday at 9:00 or whatever the time was, I would wait. No different than if I'm manually grading these, they're not getting them back immediately. I would set it up that the answers and the solutions would not release for two days, three days, or whatever. Since Bob and I were close on schedules, but slightly different and we use the same textbooks, a lot of the same exams, I would want to make sure that I'm not releasing anything until after his kids have taken a test. If he were giving a test on Friday and I was giving a test on Thursday, I'm not releasing until the following week then to make sure.

The results obviously were good here, and that's a great thing, right? Because you want your efforts to be rewarded. And you say conducting an online course took about 60% more time than conducting an in-person course. What were some of the factors that stretched that out, and, I guess, basically how did you survive it?

[Williams] You know, this is like having a baby and Bob can't relate to that so I'm going to start with the having the baby. It's horrible when you're doing it, but after you're done and as time passes away, you forget. It's been a couple of months so the pain is not as acute as it was during that time. I would say some of the extra effort was no time to plan and prepare, right? Five days.

So you were literally working a day ahead of the students sometimes. Right now, we're all working, getting ready for the fall, but you have more time and you can test things and you don't have to work 16 hour days to make it happen and being in front of that computer the entire time as well.

But some things that really from my perspective took the extra time is online grading. In the past, you pass out the paper, they do the testing, whether it's problems or multiple choice and you had that stack of paper in front of you and you're grading it. Now, online grading, they're submitting everything online and you are required to be in front of that computer calling up each one individually.

Reading what they wrote, typing edits back to them, typing comments back to them. You are at your computer, you're not being able to do this sitting in a chair on your deck as easy or sitting in your car grading when someone else is driving. No, you are really tied to that desk. That online grading adds hours. That's not just due to the virus, that's any online class you're going to have that.

I'm teaching an online class this summer and I know Bob is as well. I'm doing online grading, same type of issues. Then just preparing those exams. Preparing an exam just in maybe a Word document or Excel. There's lots of cutting and pasting and maybe some manual edits. Then we print out a copy and off it goes to support services and it gets copied even if you have multiple versions.

An online exam takes a long time to load, the questions, the answers, the feedback. Now once you load it once maybe you can reuse if you properly password-protect it and things like that, but there's still a lot of questions about reusing online exams after they've been known to students and maybe they've had an ability to access them.

So just getting those exams in there was very difficult and then just the technology itself. That's not going to always be seamless. You're going to have an issue where something happens and whether it's your computer or your Wi-Fi or your students, you're now on the front line. You're having to fix that. There's no one you're calling to say "I need assistance in classroom 305." You’re it. I said I want to go back to my CV and add all of these enhancements. Now I do administrative work, I now am a technology expert as well as a content expert, and then you're the student's support system when they can't figure it out or they can't get their computer to work right. They'll come to you to help figure this out and just that kind of troubleshooting takes a lot of time and then, like I said earlier, just being available to these students. Really, I swear, 24/7. It's no longer your office hours because they just want to contact you when they want to contact you.

That's pretty typical of any online class that I've ever taught so it's just really ... it magnified. When you teach an online class at least at Duquesne they try to make the numbers manageable. Maybe no more than 25 for this very reason. When we're in the classroom, I had 143 students over four classes and Bob has a similar picture. That just magnifies.

You have all of these people talking to you at one-off and, even if you start getting the same question and you can make a video or post something about it to help all students, you’re still fielding the first four or five questions that come in. So, all of that, we estimated a lot more time.

[Kollar] I think one of the other things that I noticed too was that when I went into class, the actual class execution. We've all talked about all those additional time things we had to do with testing, etc., but I felt like when I went online to teach I had to be 150% prepared. In the classroom, when you’re face-to-face, you can make adjustments on the fly as you need to.

I felt like online I had to be completely in control, everything needed to be well prepared. I could respond to questions if they came from students, etc., but had to be prepared for any technology issues, had to be prepared for student technology issues, and try to monitor where the class is. Are they sending me any questions?

You've probably heard that term “Zoom fatigue.” After three or four straight classes back-to-back on Zoom, it really does set in and you have to kind of stop and take a break because I felt like it was just very intense.

[Williams] Boy, this Zoom fatigue, I remember people just setting up these Zoom sessions and I got to the point where I'm like, I'll be on Zoom if you're going to share documents and I visually need to see something. If this is just to see my face and have a discussion, I'm going to call you because, you know what, I'm going to get up out of this chair and I'm going to walk down to the end of my street because I can't sit in this chair for 16 hours.

I do think that was another problem because students have their own Zoom account. They can set up any sessions they want so there were times where there were probably sessions that didn't need to be on the computer but people just defaulted to that.

Both of you, as you alluded to earlier, have experience with providing courses online prior to the COVID pandemic. How much more difficult do you think this would have been if you had not? Do you have any horror stories from colleagues who maybe didn't have experience with it and all of a sudden had to have the crash course?

[Kollar] I can't think of any specific colleagues. I do know we have one gentleman in our department who I think this was all brand new to him and I have to say that he really did step up and took some training courses as quickly as he could because he realized that he had to do it. I think all of us realized that we were in the same boat and in order to keep our classes going this is what we needed to do.

I would say though that if I had not taught online before and wasn't familiar with, okay, how can I organize things on the learning management system? … We use Blackboard at Duquesne, how can I organize things there in a meaningful structured manner that students can easily follow? How do I make a video? How do I make sure that it's out there for my students? What are some tips for making videos? What's a good way to do it? What's a good way to structure the assignments?

Had I not done that before, I really would have struggled to pull it all together very quickly. I felt a little more comfortable at least going into it.

[Williams] I think for myself I actually went back and looked to see the first time I did an online class and it was in 2016 and it was in our MBA program. That was the first time I did it and I can say I didn't enjoy it and I really like the face-to-face and the interaction. But then I taught that same class through 2019, so ‘16, ‘17, ‘18, ‘19.

Four years of that class and as I was doing it based upon feedback I'd enhance it along the way and, as Bob indicated, we had some experience with some of the technology, what worked, what didn't work. I think that did help us, but when I look at my entire teaching load and how much I do face-to-face versus online I don't have the exact percentage but it's a very small percentage that I was doing online.

For me, only doing one class a year with maybe 20 students in it, you've got to relearn everything. It's not like I remember all of that. I have to get out my notes and the manual.

[Kollar] I have a six-week course that runs every semester –fall, spring, and summer – in our MBA program, so the good news is that every semester you're forced to go and look at that and I had volunteered to teach it several years ago.

I think the first time I did it was in 2014 because I thought, “I can see online is coming. It's definitely going to be a part of overall higher education,” and now as I look back, I'm really glad I did that because it at least got me familiar with it before having to be just plunged into it as we were here in March.

[Williams] I had signed up, again, forced myself to do this. The university was putting on formal training class in 2019. It was called Fundamentals in Online Learning and it was open to the entire university. All faculty, all schools on campus, could take it and I think this is the year we got our new distance learning director in and he was trying to put this out there and all the research and all of the different tools that you could use.

But a lot of our ISM, or information technology, faculty decided to sign up for this because they were developing a hybrid program for their master's program and wanted to make sure they had all of their individuals trained. Now remember, these are technology people too, so they're doing it. I decided, just as Bob said, you kind of have to force yourself. I'm going to enroll in that class.

So I enroll in that class. I have my normal five-class or four-class teaching load in 2019. I enroll in that class and every week I was kicking myself. I'm like, why did I do this? I got through it and, as you can imagine, everything was in there. I'm like, everything and the kitchen sink’s in here. And you would never develop a class like that. But it was like, here's the 100 ways that you could do this and they really forced me to incorporate and implement immediately and it was like a real class.

I had to take tests and I had to turn in assignments and I always say, I don't know, I feel like I'm an old dog these days but I did it and, in retrospect, I am so thankful that I have that under my belt and I could really rely on some of those things that I learned in that class and implemented what worked then and did not go forward with some of the other things.

The one comment I was going to make as to who I thought really struggled in this whole process, and I'm sure this is typical at other universities, generally speaking full-time employed professors, PhDs, CPAs, etc., teach the classes in our business school. Occasionally, we'll have a part-time or an adjunct professor that might teach a night class or something like that.

Well, we had an individual on sabbatical spring of 2020 so we had one of our executive residents teaching a few of his classes to help us out in the short term, so it's people like that, that have had really full careers, they're seasoned executives. They have so much experience. They can walk into the classroom and basically just talk about anything off the top of their head.

Those individuals, whether it was Duquesne or elsewhere, had to switch to this virtual environment right in the middle of a semester and they didn't really sign up for delivering online classes and learning technology and online grading. That's not the expertise. But they were thrown into this and, I mean, we really did our best to try to support those individuals.

Not only did they feel supported as the professor, the students in those classes felt that they were getting the same level of education. I think all of us sort of knew who those individuals were, we partnered with them, I know Bob did that with an individual, I did that with two individuals, to say, "Hey, I already loaded this task do you want me just to copy it to your site and then you can edit it?"

We did things like that to really help support them but I think it was a very hard and unusual experience for them.

Now we all hope that we can get back to an in-person format again, right? We hope we can get some kids in the classroom and I'm hoping I can see the inside of my office again one day. We're all hoping that happens. Were there lessons learned from online delivery that you think you can put into effect when classes hopefully move back into that in-person format?

[Kollar] I think that one of the things I did develop from this experience was an appreciation for more things that I can move online. I can do short little videos, little 10-minute exercises if I think it's something that maybe I want to really reinforce so I could go ahead and put that out on my Blackboard site.

I could take a short reading assignment and maybe have a couple of questions and put it out on to the Blackboard site. So, things that I could probably save some class time by having these things out on Blackboard and the real benefit of that is that the students can go out and access it at 2:00 in the morning if that's when they're studying. If that's when they want to look at it, they could do it then and I could probably save some classroom time by doing that.

I think that was one of the things that really came through to me from this experience is that I don't have to do everything in the classroom. I can really focus in the classroom on some problem-solving on some meaningful discussions and then with some other background type things add on to the learning management system.

[Williams] I think one of my parting comments is just external stakeholder engagement. Historically, we bring people to the classroom, guest speakers, they serve on panels, they meet with the student organizations. They are on our audit committee and that's just the way it was: come to campus.

And we try to reach outside of Western Pennsylvania. People come in from Chicago, Atlanta, other places, and that's time-consuming and people are busy, and so maybe they can't always participate. Now you don't need to. “I'm going to send you a Zoom link, we're going to make a recording.” It could be live, it could be asynchronous.

I think we are going to be able to get more engagement from working professionals to help share experiences, further educate, help promote the CPA profession, and we might not have thought like that in the past. We invite, they say they can't come, we invite the next round. Now I can invite who I want, and as long as they don't have a conflict with that exact day and time, we can probably really make it happen.

And I think, Bob, you've realized that with your annual conference that you plan and direct that maybe getting the speakers all aligned is not as hard because it's virtual.

[Kollar] Right, I think that's going to be a big help to us. I think Val makes a really good point there. We have our annual orientation coming for our incoming Masters in Accountancy program and this year one of our guest speakers is going to be an alum who's been out for five or six years now and she works for one of the Big Four firms.

[Kollar] She's based in Toledo. Well, she's not going to have to drive all the way to Pittsburgh. She's going to join us via Zoom and it'll be great to have her again and she can share some of her work experience and how the program has benefited her during her tenure at this firm. So that has opened that up, I think, to us, something that we really didn't focus on as much before.