It’s another course on pandemics, but with a twist.
A new course at the University of Guelph is taught in real time and the topics discussed are situations students and faculty are currently facing.
The online course, Pandemics: Culture, Science and Society kicked off last year after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It was so popular the creators of the course brought it back again this year.
“It really was an interesting result that it kind of formed a sense of community in the course because a lot of it was exploring issues as we were all experiencing them, but also with a lot of the themes, it became clear that not everybody was experiencing things the same way,” said Ryan Gregory who created this course with Beth Finnis, an associate professor of anthropology and sociology, and Sofie Lachapelle, a history professor at U of G who is now the dean of Wilfrid Laurier University’s faculty of arts.
“And so it was a lot of reflecting on our individual experiences and hearing voices from people in different circumstances.”
Gregory said when preparing a pandemic course last fall, there were concerns if students would still sign up for a course on pandemics online, so the professors created something specific and unique to the time period.
They brought experts from different departments on campus to look at the pandemic from different perspectives.
“So not just the medical side or not just the vaccine side," said Gregory.
At the time the course first kicked off, flour was sold so the course looked into markets and the food supply system affected by the pandemic. It also looked at how the music and art industry was affected with concerts cancelled.
The professors also invited alumni and students across different programs who were actively researching the pandemic to engage.
“By the winter it was about ‘how have researchers and scholars at the university risen to that challenge?’ and ‘what they have been working on and what they have learned in the context of that pandemic?’” said Gregory.
Gregory said so far, 600 students from different majors and year of study took the course across two semesters. Also, 300 alumni participated. Gregory said the diverse perspectives helped those engaged in the course keep things in perspective and feel positive while learning about what they’re going through in depth.
"Students were engaged in a weekly seminar discussion groups and they got a chance to talk about what they were experiencing and going through," said Gregory.
He said the first fall course was trying to make sense of the pandemic such as studying past plagues, how vaccines will be developed and how food security was impacted.
Last winter, the course was looking at the kinds of research and scholarship that has been done in response to the pandemic. This fall, the course will be looking at what happens after the pandemic such as how past pandemics have ended, what the future of the current workforce is with many people working from home, how the education and art sectors changed and how food production and distribution has changed.
“By this point we've had about 80 different experts take part and so we were a pretty good pool,” said Gregory.
He said the mode of this course is applicable to any topic that has multiple dimensions and does not have to be limited to pandemics.
“We already started talking about a course on climate change,” said Gregory.
“It's more of a new approach than just a pandemic specific kind of thing.”
