From Emergency Remote Teaching to Academic Strategic Digitalization Planning: How a College Responded to COVID-19 and What Departments Need to Consider Implementing

There is a need for long term strategic digitalization planning to ensure robust and sustainable course delivery in higher education. Universities need educational continuity plans to be able to move seamlessly between in person and online learning environments with little notice. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a rush to move courses online. This became known as an emergency remote teaching (ETR) response that resulted in highly varied pedagogic products delivered on and off learning management systems (LMS) and online communication platforms. Academic strategic digitalization planning refers to the organizational structure needed for academic units to be able to provide a robust digitally integrated learning environment that can be accessed at anytime and anywhere. Long-term academic strategic digitalization planning recognizes that a disciplinary lifelong learning community is always already in person and online; it just requires thinking about the organizational and infrastructural frameworks required to guarantee robust and sustainable course delivery in higher education. This paper presents an Academic Strategic Digitalization Plan (ASDP) that uses an LMS deployed at the University of Arizona (UA). Four C’s are needed to effectively implement an ASDP: capture, convert, curate and, coordinate. The key components of this ASDP include an Instructor Museum, a Learning Community, and a Departmental Network. This case study describes how the impact of COVID-19 at the UA led to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences creating the Remote Teaching Taskforce that the author chaired. Work performed on the taskforce and with departments led to the conceptual framework and implementation of the ASDP with UA’s Geographic Information Systems Technology (GIST) programs. The conclusion reflects on the persist need for academic strategic digitalization planning in higher education.