In March 2020, the call Robert Kearns, MS Ed ‘12, had been half-expecting arrived: the School of Medicine was going online, and staff had 24 hours to figure out how to make that happen.

And with that, the SOM Online Education Office ― which had been quietly ticking away since 2016 at producing Continuing Medical Education classes and online master’s degree programs ― was catapulted to one of the university’s most pivotal roles.

As director of online education, Kearns headed a team of 7-10 instructional designers, graphic designers, videographers and program managers. Putting all existing projects on hold, the group sat down in a room with the leadership of the MD program, office of information technology, the library, and other participants, looked at all the intricate moving parts of the program, and came up with a plan.

Classroom lectures were gone. Faculty couldn’t be asked to visit a recording studio and would need to be recorded at home. People had to be provided with and trained on equipment. Audio and video had to be good, and everything needed to be formatted for online access. Special needs accommodations had to be met in the new formats. School basics from patient interviews to online exams had to be made possible, as well as large events like research symposiums. Everyone suddenly needed to become experts in Zoom.

During the first week online, Kearns found himself inches away from a human brain, helping to film it from every angle with multiple lenses over eight hours as it was dissected in a lab.  

“We had huddle phone calls with the entire team every single night: ‘Well we got through today. How do we get through tomorrow?’ And it was like that for a long time,” Kearns recalled.

But there was also a sense of excitement and the thrill of meeting a challenge. Often online education lacks the prestige of  in-person classes, and it can be a struggle to change that perception, Kearns said. This was an opportunity to show the kind of quality that could be achieved. “You don’t want to be too excited about a pandemic,” Kearns laughed. “I love online education and believe in online education, so getting the chance to show what it can do was extremely exciting.”

Some of the most critical successes happened outside the classroom. The SOM has deeply meaningful traditions that were endangered by the loss of in-person meetings, like the white coat ceremony in which students receive their first physician’s coat from a mentor while loved ones look on. The SOM shipped the coats to students, and the Online Education Office encouraged students to send in videos of their own personal ceremony. Parents, spouses and children helped students into their coats, and people incorporated unique personal touches, from pets to ― in one innovative case ― a tractor. Similarly, students were asked to record themselves saying the Hippocratic Oath, which the Online Education Office edited into a unified chorus for Convocation. “It wasn’t the same, I would never say it is, but it is so meaningful,” Kearns said. “They weren’t about keeping classes running, but keeping the spirit of the education program running.”

While students have now returned to the classrooms, the pandemic created irrevocable changes, Kearns said. Lectures ― optional before the pandemic ― may be forever changed now that high-quality recordings exist, freeing up time and space for classroom sessions oriented toward case studies, questions, and personalized learning. Filming in laboratories and the Medicine Simulation Center has created a repository of ultra-high-definition content that students can turn to for study. “We now have this incredible library we’ve developed over the last year and a half that we can use forever,” Kearns said. 

Looking to the future, Kearns sees a host of opportunities for the work of online education, with the benefit of a new recording studio built during the pandemic, additional platforms for learning, and a team whose size increased by around 30 percent. “We’re never going back,” he said. “Every program we do will have some aspect of hybrid learning forever.”