4 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 303 2022 electronic content subscriptions, remote research consultations, email- and chat-based help, and online library course guides, the impact of the change on teaching faculty was profoundly disruptive. In his introduction to the spring meeting’s “COVID-19: A Catalyst for Innovative Course Delivery” session, Matthew Rascoff, who recently moved from a role leading teaching innovation at Duke University to a new position at Stanford University, suggested that we did not experience a transition to true online learning so much as a yearlong experiment in faculty professional development. This experiment did, however, set the stage for significant and meaningful work towards innovative online learning, conversations that eventually led to real curricular advances, particularly, as Dominique Scheffel-Dunand (York University) submitted, at network scale. She referenced initiatives in Canada to create teaching portals and repositories, where above- the-course sharing and affordances of networked learning demand more sophisticated approaches to reuse, knowledge classification, and intellectual property, areas where librarians’ expertise is particularly valuable. Opportunities have also arisen to leverage the technology to responsibly recommit to core values, particularly those, like privacy, that librarians have long championed, and to create more equitable spaces in which to provide the support and connectedness so diminished by the loss of a physical teaching environment. Josh Eyler (University of Mississippi) underscored an imperative to confront the tremendous emotional and physical toll that pandemic-forced remote teaching was having not only on students, but also on faculty and staff. Rascoff posed a challenge to embrace a new, overarching, and galvanizing goal, one that might be a worthy successor to the unprecedented achievement of successfully transitioning entire institutions to online teaching. Perhaps a similar, unifying goal to place equity and care squarely and immovably at the core of the educational experience, and to ground decisions that profoundly impact student success, such as course grading policies, to the learning goals they seek to advance, might not be out of reach for an academic community that has achieved what we have with the big pivot of 2020.
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