Spring2024 45 Oregon State University’s TRACE COVID-19 public health surveillance project. —JENS ODEGAARD 3. SOMETIMES ONLINE LEARNING IS ACCESSIBLE LEARNING Biscuitroots, buttercups, red bells and silver lupine — Rachel Werling, coordinator of the Extension Land Steward Program, often guided groups along the trails of southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley to enjoy these and other wildflowers in the spring. With group hikes shut down by COVID, she posted two wildflower walks online. The videos have been viewed almost 1,000 times. “Thank you. Thank you,” one viewer wrote. “I am disabled and cannot (yet) hike to see these and I am thrilled to see new and old flower friends. This means so much that when I saw the lupines, I cried!” Until 2020, the Oregon State University Extension Service relied on in-person outreach for classes, workshops and events. Then COVID-19 led to a boom in virtual attendees from all over the United States and abroad. When the Oregon City-based Tree School Clackamas — a oneday event about managing and caring for private woodlands — was shut down by the pandemic, the 2020 Tree School Online was born of necessity. The webinars drew more than twice the attendees of the in-person events in 2019. That growth continued into 2021, and the recorded webinars have been watched nearly 17,000 times on YouTube. Though some parts of in-person classes can’t be beat — it’s not so easy to get hands-on experience using a chainsaw through Zoom — the pandemic dramatically broadened the use of online trainings. “We learned that the format of Tree School Online worked very well, bringing in a diverse group of speakers, offering live webinars and recording the sessions to make them accessible for future use,” said Glenn Ahrens, M.S. ’90, OSU Extension forester in Clackamas, Hood River and Marion counties. As it turns out, remote babysitting workshops work well, too. The first year COVID pushed the training online in the Columbia River Gorge, 38 teens earned their Oregon 4-H Babysitter Certificate. In 2022 and 2023, a statewide virtual babysitting workshop certified a total of 368 youths from across the state. — CHRIS BRANAM 4. BURNOUT REQUIRES MORE THAN ONE SOLUTION As the COVID-19 virus swept the nation, boundaries between work and personal life blurred while people worked from makeshift home offices, faced their own or family members’ illness, cared for children and loved ones, and dealt with unpredictable and constantly changing circumstances. Burnout threatened success in all areas. In the spring of 2020, OSU faculty members Kathy Becker-Blease, Katie Gallagher and Regan A. R. Gurung launched the “Punch Through Pandemics” online course to explore the science of stress and find evidence-based skills for coping. It enrolled 200 OSU students and was offered free to the public, with nearly 4,000 people across the world participating. (See the professors’ tips in the sidebar “Beating Burnout.”) Among the suggestions: spend time in nature, cultivate plants at home, practice meditation, take walks and engage in other exercise (like cold-water swimming). Gurung remembers a student who shared views from a hike he was on with his class via Zoom. Other students shared art they had created. Two years into the pandemic, Gurung followed up with the Brightside Project, inviting students and faculty to share essays, memes, poetry, music and more about how they managed the ups and downs of the COVID-19 era.The pieces from that project are archived at OSU’s Valley Library. People primarily cite rest and relaxation as cures for burnout, but “The pandemic had higher education scrutinize much of what we took for granted, or at the very least, the pedagogical practices that had not changed in a long time.”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==