175. Embracing Change

Faculty who had to shift to teaching online for the first time due to the pandemic were forced to confront their habits and typical ways of teaching in order to adapt to and support students in a new modality. In this episode,  Colin and Jonikka Charlton join us to discuss ways in which faculty and departments have embraced and resisted change during this transition. Colin is the chair of the Department of Writing and Language Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Jonikka is the Associate Provost for Student Success and Dean of University College, also at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Faculty who had to shift to teaching online for the first time due to the pandemic were forced to confront their habits and typical ways of teaching in order to adapt to and support students in a new modality. In this episode, we discuss ways in which faculty and departments have embraced and resisted change during this transition.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guests today are Colin and Jonikka Charlton. Colin is the chair of the Department of Writing and Language Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Jonikka is the Associate Provost for Student Success and Dean of University College, also at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. Welcome.

Jonikka: Thank you.

Colin: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Colin: I’m actually drinking blackberry sage, made by a company I don’t remember because I’m freezing, ‘cause It’s like 50 here. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That sounds really warm. I’ll go with that.

Jonikka: I’m just a water drinker. Colin’s the tea drinker in the family.

John: I am drinking a chocolate mint oolong tea.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good.

John: It is. It was a gift from my son.

Rebecca: I was gonna say, I think that’s a new one for the podcast, John.

John: I think it is.

Colin: That’s pretty cool.

Rebecca: I have a new one today, too. I have a Palm Court blend from Harney and Sons.

John: Ok. We’ve invited you here to discuss some of the challenges associated with teaching writing during a pandemic. But first, could you tell us a little bit about how your institution has handled and adjusted instruction during the pandemic?

Jonikka: Yeah, I guess I’ll start from kind of a wider institutional perspective. I was honestly really surprised and really proud of the institution, because when we switched to online really rapidly in the spring, we kind of stayed there. And so there wasn’t a lot of pressure internally, or even externally, for us to have a lot of students on campus. And in the valley, the households are generally pretty large. So there are extended families, large families, living in the same household. And so the threat, I think, was a little bit higher, potentially, than in some other areas. And people having barbecues and family get togethers all of the time, it’s really, really important. So in the spring, we were completely online, we started having to distinguish between asynchronous modality and synchronous modality. And then we pretty much kept that for the fall semester, there were probably maybe 8,10 percent, a mix of hybrid courses and face to face. And then now in the spring, I was just looking before we got on here, and it’s about a third asynchronous, a third synchronous, and about 18% is face to face and the rest are hybrid. And we’re really starting, even those hybrid, are starting online. And hopefully, if we get as many people as possible vaccinated, then we maybe can move toward the end of the semester, a little bit more people onto campus. But that’s kind of the way we have. We did a huge investment in online faculty development over the summer. And so the fall was when we got to really test and see how that worked and get some feedback from students, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit today.

Colin: I can speak from the developmental, and, I guess, the program level. So we did tons of training, as Jonikka said. I think the bulk of the response at the very beginning, whenever that was, I feel like it was a year ago, but it’s actually just a few months. So the bulk of it was invested in technology, both in terms of trying to figure out how to help students get access when they were sitting in Burger King parking lots trying to get Wi Fi at the very beginning, but that disappeared so quickly. So it’s like having whiplash from rapid response kind of triage stuff, like, something happens, Spectrum gives everybody free Wi Fi. We don’t have enough bandwidth to have more than so many Zoom meetings or recordings, and then we get an extension and now we have unlimited hours or something like that. It’s like being part of a really gigantic cable company, they keep giving you more stuff to try to make sure everything keeps working, [LAUGHTER] except the cable company actually works in your favor in this case. So there’s a lot of technology stuff, a lot of blueprinting for online classes. For faculty support, there emerged a need for psychological and wellness and self-care support. But that really wasn’t as much at the front of what was happening. But you can tell that people were starting to need it because there was a lot of discomfort and just unfamiliarity. And a lot of people doing things they knew they had to do, but they didn’t know how to do them with the technology side of it. And then from the program side, department side, at least in our department, we backed away from a lot of that and tried to offer something as an alternative to talk about concepts, because a lot of the work was in the logistics of getting things built and getting classes built, making sure people understood that you have to tell students how to navigate your courses, because that was a new thing for a lot of faculty, right? And at the same time, I’m trying to basically, not reinvent the wheel, but trying to get people in the department to have a talk about what engagement is and what teaching is, which I know probably sounds weird as a thing to do. But we had to have that discussion in a very small, private, disturbing, communication, like difficult conversations kind of moment. I guess it was conceptual training that was going on or retraining. And then there was also institutional support, that, I think probably allowed us to do the other because I don’t think if we had had the technology part stripped away from us or we had to be responsible for ourselves, I don’t think we would have found the space to do the wellness stuff and the conceptual training. I don’t know how widespread that was. I know every department handled it a different way. But we’re a big department. And we handle so many freshmen that we just had to do it for the writing program and for the language programs and all of those things, which went from zero asynchronous to literally 100% asynchronous writing classes over the course of the summer. That was a big lift.

John: That’s a pretty dramatic shift from going from zero to 100%. How did the faculty adjust? How did they come out of those difficult conversations?

Colin: At the Dean’s level, at least for our college, we were told we could let the faculty decide what they wanted to do in terms of their own level of comfort and preparedness, right? And so you had a few people who wanted to know just how protected were they’re going to make the classrooms because they couldn’t teach with a mask on and they couldn’t teach online. And so they felt like they had to have a situation where they were going to be with their students, and even getting some of those faculty to understand that they could only meet with half their students once a week and the other half. because of the room size constraints, like those conversations had to happen. So those faculty were incredibly stressed. And so faculty were making their own decisions. And I was trying to coordinate all of that, so that at least made sense, so that there would be as little damage done. Plus, I live with Jonakka, and she says things like “You don’t have any synchronous classes for writing. Are you stupid?” like, “What have you done?” [LAUGHTER] And she reminds me that I must have made a mistake somewhere, but that’s what faculty chose to do. But when you talk to the faculty who chose to do that, who I couldn’t believe some of the faculty that asked to do that, it was because they thought they were doing the students a favor, because it would allow the students to arrange the rest of their schedule. We get through summer, we survive the fall, we have already made the schedule for the spring. And then about half of those teachers said, “You know what, you were right. I want to do synchronous, but is that going to hurt the students?” And so those faculty had even more adjustments to make, I think, because they tried the asynchronous for the right reasons, but they lost more students than they were used to. They had difficulty with assignment completion, and all the things you have difficulties with every time you do a new class, but just kind of multiplied. But we have 97 people in the classroom in our department, that includes all the TAs, all the part-timers, everyone. So 43 of those are first-year writing teachers. And they were incredibly happy that 10 people blueprinted the courses for online asynchronous and just went with it. So that’s also something that you don’t often see. In a big program, you see a lot of people doing a lot of different things and asking if they can stretch the syllabus a little bit this direction. And nobody wanted to do that. Everybody was so worn out and tired. They were just like, “This syllabus is great, and when it doesn’t work in three weeks, I’m gonna blame you guys and feel just fine about all of it.” [LAUGHTER] So what does that mean? I guess there were new stressors they didn’t expect. And there were collaborative moments that they also didn’t expect. So they leaned into the stuff that you would expect them to be resistant to because of necessity, but they also then had better discussions, I think, about the purpose of teaching writing online, how you talk to students when you don’t see them in real time, that kind of stuff. I don’t think those conversations would have happened. So yeah, every time they would get comfortable, then it would be a new issue that came up about why are students disappearing and that kind of thing,

Rebecca: …a pandemic… time to get uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. [LAUGHTER] Right?

Jonikka: Yes.

Colin: Right. Learn to unlearn or learn to learn on a daily basis or…

Rebecca: …learn that you’re also a learner.

Jonikka: Exactly.

Colin: Exactly, and that it’s okay. I think that was the hardest part for our folks is, I set up teams and made people leaders that had never been leaders before for technology support to try to lift the burden away from the people you were expect to always go to because I knew what was going to happen. And that worked out great. But then they would also get lost in all the permutations of “Well, if you do it this way… if you do it this way.” So they burned through their need to explain how they do things in their class really, really quickly. Because you know how teachers do that thing there, unless I’m being unfair. It’s like, “Oh, let me give you three examples from my class about how great things go, or how terrible things go” …or whatever. They burned through all those anecdotes. And then they were left with the whole thing, like maybe the assignment really sucks and that’s why the students aren’t turning it in. Or maybe I was really boring on Monday and they just had to live with that. And that’s hard. [LAUGHTER] Is that not true, Jonikka?

Jonikka: I was just reminded, it’s really interesting to me that the writing program has a lot of really great teachers. It’s a very robust culture of teaching in that department at the institution. And so what I saw both there and across the institution was faculty who had their identity as being really great teachers who are able to engage students and their students come back and they do well. And so you saw a lot of those faculty whose students just disappeared, and then they were like, this has never happened to me before or not since I first started teaching. And so I think there’s that component of it, that it took us probably four or five or six months to get to that place when people realize I had a whole semester of this and I’m not having the same success I had before and I think we have to have conversations and find places for faculty to have those conversations and to know that it’s okay. It doesn’t mean that they were a fraud all along, or they didn’t do a good job and that sort of thing. So what you said reminded me of that.

Rebecca: It really is a different space.

Jonikka: Yes,.

Colin: Yes. And I don’t know how many of the teachers that were really stressed were stressed because of access. Because honestly, if you’re teaching face to face, and you have students that aren’t showing up, you have the same problems trying to contact them. I think we all have a sense that because we’re seeing people regularly, that we’re somehow seeing them more often, which is totally false. And so I had so many emails from faculty about how do I get in touch with students who won’t respond to me? And I’m like, I know what they were saying. But it’s a silly question, right? It’s like, “everybody who’s not here today, raise your hand” kind of question. You can’t get in touch with them, because they’re not paying attention to you. And you can’t make them pay attention to you if they’re not paying attention to you. But that reality was just heartbreaking for some of them. And we’re talking about people that are really just stressing over like having a 14% drop rate, because they’re used to having a 3% drop rate, or if like a DFW rate is like 3%. But our enrollment was up. What was it up, J?

Jonikka: it was like 18%, it was huge. We had a huge influx of new students in the fall, largest breaking enrollment and all of that. And so we also had the pressure of really huge classes. So that just exacerbated the whole thing, I think. We had lots of students who didn’t go to Austin, or they didn’t go to Rice, or wherever they stayed. A lot of that was that too.

Colin: And nobody wants to hear me say, and I’m the last person that wants to say it, but nobody wants to hear your department chair say, “Look, when you have a 16% increase in enrollment, you’re going to lose some people, because there have to be a high percentage of those people coming in who are somehow not college ready, or who are experimenting or who are at risk, and we have no way to help them or support them, because we don’t know why they’re here. Because this is unprecedented.” And so that doesn’t help.

John: Most studies have found that freshmen are much more vulnerable when they’re in online classes, the drop-fail-withdrawal rate for freshmen and even sophomore students is a lot higher than it is for upper-level students. Add to that a pandemic. And then you mentioned a lot of additional students coming whose plans were not going in the direction they originally anticipated, which just adds to all the stress. But having a drop-fail-withdrawal rate in that range is pretty low, actually.

Jonikka: Yes, it absolutely is. And he’s talking about like some really great faculty in his department. That’s not the case across the institution. And I remember back in April, May, as we’re having these conversations about modality moving into the fall… it’s great… and I’m supportive of the idea. And it’s kind of amazing, actually, that as an institution, we said faculty choose your own modality. A lot of institutions didn’t do that. But I was trying to be the consistent voice that was saying, “But could we at least make some more strategic decisions around classes that freshmen are going to take, because your sophomores, juniors, and seniors and your grad students, they’re going to be able to adapt in ways that our freshmen are not. It’s one thing for a first-year student to come in and have one class out of five or six on their schedule that’s online. But we’re in a situation where literally their entire schedule was online, none of the courses were organized in the same way, even though they may all be using Blackboard it just looks different, the whole classes operate differently.” And so I was really worried about that. And I was right to worry about that. Because as we moved into the fall, our first-year persistence rate from fall to spring is down about six and a half percent from where it normally is. And everyone’s really concerned about that. And of course, attention is also starting to shift to this year’s seniors and what that first-year experience is going to be like next year. We did a survey and I’m sure at some point, we’ll talk about the survey. But even the students who did well said this was not for me. Yes, my grades look okay, but I don’t feel like I learned what I needed to, so I’m going to stop out in the spring. And like, “I’ll catch you on the other end in the fall, when hopefully things are okay and we’re back in an environment in which I feel like I can learn.” And so that’s been really startling, I think, to some on campus. We’re trying to figure out what we have control over and what we don’t have control over and how you can shift an entire institution’s worth of faculty. We could not have moved and said everybody’s going to be teaching at a really high level. And I think too, the pandemic and what’s happened has just kind of uncovered some things about teaching and what was going on in classrooms that I promise you is going on in face-to-face classrooms. But now it’s been uncovered and people are concerned about it and more heightened awareness, I think, around it. But, that’s one of the opportunities too. I think it’s enabled us to say “Hey, let’s shine a light on and have those conversations about what teaching and learning really is about and how do we engage students?” And I was really happy when I heard a few engineering faculty say, “You know what, when we go back face to face, we didn’t know what we had, we didn’t know the opportunity that we were kind of squandering before in our face-to-face classes. Now they’re talking about flipping their classroom.” And I’m like, okay, that’s 20 years ago, or whatever. [LAUGHTER] But now you’re in that place where you see why that would be helpful to you, and what you could do differently when you go back face to face. That’s exciting to me. I haven’t been in the classroom in a while, but my first love and my first identification is as a teacher, and asking those things about learning and teaching and why we’re doing what we’re doing. I think it’s great that more people are doing that.

Rebecca: I think the same kinds of themes have come up in a lot of conversations that we’ve had over the last few weeks with guests about what’s happening between the fall and the spring and students timing out and faculty changing what modality they’re teaching in, and also just reflection upon what they might want to do in the future, too. So it’s kind of these interesting themes that are happening that may have not have happened otherwise, for sure. I know, Colin, you mentioned faculty choosing to be more synchronous, perhaps in the spring, can you talk about some other things that were learned from the fall that are going to improve the experience for everybody in the spring?

Colin: I think it’s across our department. And I think there’s a lot more people across the university, too that realize that there’s no such thing as a neutral delivery method anymore. And I think people like me and Jonakka knew that, because our training in teaching actually made us teach in different ties, even if we weren’t comfortable with them. The more people, I think, understand something that when I ran the writing program, however, many years ago, that was probably nine years, I remember telling people, your students who will turn in their assignments if you teach them how to do the whole course in the first week, and then just repeat over and over again. And a few people would do that, but very few people would do it because they do what teachers tend to do when they’re content focused, which is they say, “I can’t get through that many chapters of a biology book, if I take a week out to teach them how my class works,” or “I can’t have them read as many articles as I want them to read, because I’m taking this time out to basically train them metacognitively on how to actually take a Colin class.” Right? People complaining about that, they left my department and were replaced by strange little clones that wanted to say, “Hey, is there any way we can extend the first two weeks and just do an introduction about what online learning is?” And they got all these ideas and even like, I remember, we opened Blackboard a week early in the fall, but not at this spring. Our people were contacting their students and talking about how the course was set up. So I think there’s awareness. I don’t know how deep the awareness is. But there is an awareness with at least our people who teach 4000 freshmen a year that you’re not designing your class for yourself and your students, you’re designing your class for the students who go to four or five other classes, because they will drop you quicker than other people if they don’t feel like they have an anchor in your class. And sometimes that’s understanding how to navigate, sometimes that’s having a personal connection with a teacher, sometimes it’s knowing your peers’ names, whatever that engagement factor is, if they have it in your class, they will stick with your class, which means in a writing class, there’s more of a chance we’ll stick with their other classes, because we’re usually the ones that get dropped, I think. Either us or math, unless, J, you have different statistics. I think anecdotally, when we talk to students who haven’t been coming to class, and we find out they’re not doing well, they will usually stop coming to the writing class, because they feel like there’s no way to make it up. So I think there’s a sense across the writing instructors now that it’s not okay to build designs that work for 75% of the people. And then there’s this 10%, that will average out in the middle. And then there’s 10% that just don’t see how to get over the hump because they never have a success, or they never see an end product. And so they just cut that class. More like an algebra approach, you don’t understand the first three chapters of algebra and you feel like you’ll never be able to catch up because you have to know those things in order to move to the next. Actually, it’s a very forward thinking kind of threshold concept type of student that I’m imagining, because they really don’t feel like they can get enough under their belt to move forward. So I think we learned,as teachers, we’ve learned a little bit about that. I really hope that all the students that we worked with in the writing program, I hope that a large percentage of them took to heart what we said about having real conversations with their teachers and other students, there was a lot of conversations in our “Designing your life course” and in other courses where I saw students were constantly talking about setting up peer networks, or in our roundup and kickoff activities and that kind of stuff. They were constantly talking about the need to do that. But they had no idea how to do it online in online classes. They knew how to do it online. So as soon as people like me said, “I don’t care how you set up your community use WhatsApp, use whatever,” then it all went crazy. So there’s also I think, an understanding that students can organize themselves better than we can, or at least we should try to negotiate a way to organize ourselves that’s okay with the teacher and it’s okay with the students. Because nobody wants me teaching a Twitter assignment, because I don’t understand it. Like I don’t know how it works. But you also have to let students organize themselves in the peer network so that it will survive. And not just with team-building things because you don’t know how to run Zoom. And so you just force everybody into a breakout room because you somehow think that somehow is the same as having them work together in groups in classrooms. So I think we’ve learned quite a bit about design strategies, or at least design thinking, even if nobody’s going to call it that, but me. Maybe there’s a few other people at the university that will call it that.

John: You mentioned spending some time at the beginning of class, focusing on metacognition and helping students learn how to learn more effectively, is that something that’s widely done in the institution? Or is that something that’s becoming more widely done in the institution?

Jonikka: I would say it’s becoming more widely done. It’s very much at the heart of our first year writing program: metacognition, reflection, the whole thing. It’s just very built into the DNA there. And then we have a first-year experience course, that was kind of built on some similar kinds of principles. But I think some of the feedback from our student survey was that students felt their courses were completely disorganized. And they didn’t know when anything was due, they didn’t know when they were supposed to be working on something, or how to find what it was they were supposed to be working on. In some sense, that’s one of the easier things for a faculty member to address. Because it could be like a beginning of the semester video explaining how your course is organized or whatever. In terms of sticky teaching problems, that’s not terribly sticky, you can see a path forward to figuring it out and to helping students with that. My hope is that we can help those faculty transfer their understanding of that situation to their understanding of how to teach a project for a course, or when they make a big assignment. If it’s a writing assignment, or any other kind of assignment, that they recognize that the same metacognitive moves would be helpful for students. So I think that that would be an exciting thing to see happen. I don’t think we’ve had enough conversations yet about the feedback from students, both what we heard through our survey, but also what faculty may have heard through their course evaluations, or just their own experiences. I went to faculty senate before the break, and I had a number of faculty, and they were really good teaching faculty, talking about how they had gone through the blueprinting process and they had been asked to do all these assignments and stuff for every single learning objective and things like that. And they realized that they had gone too far, that they had overwhelmed the students. So now they were gonna back off after that. So they’re engaging in some metacognition themselves, which is good, and I think the more that we can encourage that in faculty, and then help them make the connection between what they’re learning and how they’re applying what they’re learning to the next iteration of the course, to what their students go through. I know I spend a lot of time having those conversations with my own faculty in my college. And now I’ll often say to them, I’ll try to find a gentle way of saying it, but like, I’ll say, “Would you think that’s okay from your students?” And how would you go about doing that with your own students and think about that for yourself. That’s my hope.

Colin: We also had a very small pilot for students as learners and teachers that at least that Alyssa Cavazos ran out of our Center for Teaching Excellence. And it was only five teachers, I believe, It may have been six, and I was one of them. But the other four teachers were from history, philosophy, I think it was physics, may have been just math, I cannot remember the other one. But they have never had a student observe them officially in a class. And we all spent an entire semester with a student partner, basically doing metacognitive work. And it did a number on me, and I know how to do that work. I respect student voices and I want them with me. And so it was really fun for me. It changed the other four people’s lives. And so there’s at least four other people in four other colleges, because we spaced them out around the university, who worked with a upper-level student about their classes and redesigning it and thinking about student reactions on a daily basis. And I hope we can scale that up somehow in a way that isn’t completely uncomfortable, but a little uncomfortable. Because the good parts are the uncomfortable parts. The good parts were where the students asked like, “How do we tell the teachers what we really think?” And the teachers were like, “How do I tell the student that I don’t really care what they think?” …like, those things happened at the beginning. And once they got over them, the conversations that happened as designers as co-designers were fantastic and amazing. And it was with people that are resistant, they wanted to be in the project. But they were not. They did not go into it thinking they were completely open to what a non- major student would say about their teaching as an observer that had been trained to observe. I hope that projects like that continue and thrive. And people don’t just let it go because things go back to normal and they don’t have something driving them to think about how to make their classes work better. It’s probably up to people like me and Jonikka to make sure they keep asking these questions and don’t just let them drop, right?

Jonikka: Well, we’ve been asking, the Interim Provost here and I, have been asking on a regular basis, like what will next fall look like? What will we basically have learned that informs what next fall looks like? And I don’t think most faculty were ready, at least before the break to have those conversations. Everyone is completely exhausted, students are exhausted, faculty, staff, everyone was just exhausted. And I think it’s gonna be a long while before we ever restore ourselves to some sense of space and ability to look at and reflect on the things that have happened in a way that enables us to move forward in a more substantial way.

Rebecca: One of the things that has come up in conversations I’ve had with arts faculty and writing faculty, here anyways, is the processing of what’s happening in a pandemic. That sometimes happens through writing or making in some way, or also the want to escape from what’s happening in writing or making. [LAUGHTER]

Jonikka: Yeah.

Rebecca: And that complex dance that’s happening and different people need some different things. Can you talk a little bit about how faculty in your departments tried to balance some of those needs, concerns, wants?

Colin: We had one faculty member who started a journal writing, like, initiative right at the beginning of everything. And it wasn’t because of this. He had wanted to start it and he was going to retire. And he just wanted to give it one last stab to see if he could recruit some people. The students that joined that I know and the faculty said that it was incredibly insightful, and they wanted to talk about their writing, and they wanted to journal and talk about what was going on. So that was really great for him as a faculty member. I know that there had to be a shift for… I know that this may be a weird way to answer the question, but it felt like there was a shift from faculty always pointing students towards more…. I guess what you’d call more scholarly resources, like a path that… I use that word with air quotes around it, but you need to learn more and so you go off and you look and reread more. And I remember, we were having a meeting and I was like, “Why? It’s a literacy narrative.” And you’re freaking out, because your students are doing a literacy narrative. And the high school students just got sent home, and their teachers aren’t making them turn their cameras on and they’re not talking to them. And then in the college version of the class, your students are able to do the types of work in the field that you would normally have them do, because we’ve got a pretty crazy experiential component to our first-year writing courses. And I was like, “Dude, they live with their families, just have them do interviews. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel and just own the space that you’re around.” And I remember somebody else saying, “Yeah, it’s like, when my students don’t want to turn their cameras, I say, well describe the perfect space, it’s at least a reason to get you to be creative and think outside of the box,” or whatever. And so students started drawing their own ideal spaces for their Zoom things when they left their cameras off. So there, I think there was a lot of shifting and deconstructing of the boundaries between what you see as your life and what you see as the real world and what you see as school. Not everybody’s comfortable with that stuff, either. But I think people had to find their own outlet or their own break to a certain extent. I give my students my cell phone, and then I labeled them by the course and the semester so I can remember them. But I had tons of students texting me in the middle of doing things in class because things weren’t working, or somebody didn’t show up, or whatever, or they needed me to come into a group. When I told people I was doing that, the people that were having trouble managing people in multiple rooms that were kind of privatized, they’re like, “Oh, my God, that makes so much sense. I’ll just have them go on R emind and tell me when things go crazy, or tell me when it hits the fan or whatever.” And so all these people that think they know technology and how to communicate really well, they didn’t really know how to communicate really well in the new classroom environment. So I think they had to find a way to do that. So your personal chats with your teacher, those went crazy for a while, I think mine are still too crazy. People having jam bands, you know, after class, or I think we had a few departmental after hours cocktail parties or something. We had all kinds of weird ways of socializing with some of the groups. Not a ton, though. I think, from what at least the writing program teachers told me was what they really missed the most were the unexpected, spontaneous conversations they have with students and faculty, which you can’t replicate by having Zoom meetings where everybody learns the song and plays together. Like you can’t force the hallway conversation, which is why I always go in and like Zoom bomb Jonikka whenever she’s in an important meeting. She’s right across the hallway, and those people don’t laugh enough. But I’m the only guy at the university doing that, [LAUGHTER] like stand up comedy to try to break the fourth wall with people, because there’s so much investment in just getting through meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting. So I’m sure there’s more clowns at our university than just me. But there’s a small cohort of clowns and Jonikka knows all of them.

John: You mentioned some of the problems with engagement or with students making connections with other students. What techniques have people tried or will be trying this spring to help improve the development of more community in either asynchronous or remote synchronous instruction?

Colin: I think there’s a move in our program to have a version of teamwork or the idea that students develop an ability to do teamwork, or work together to finish a project and have different responsibilities. It’s a complicated definition. But I think people are moving away from longer collaborative projects, and they’re moving towards more, do the work in class in a small group, get something accomplished, present on it, and then rotate out. And then having students form their own communities for projects outside of it as support groups. So there’s more small team work in class that actually has a product attached to it. So I’ll give you an example. There’s a difference between having students get into a group to deconstruct a reading and then piece together an interpretation of a reading, made from five different groups working with different passages from the text. That’s a very different exercise in a face-to-face class than what they’re doing when they have students create a message from scratch, using some kind of social media outlet, using a pandemic context and trying to create a flyer that would get people’s attention to do some activity. And then to have that whole thing go from prototyping and ideation all the way to design and testing. That’s not something that I think the teachers knew how to do, or wanted to do to start with. So engagement wise, it probably would make a lot of teachers that I know mad to say it, but they really do need to feel like they’re entertained, because they’re enjoying what they’re doing. Not necessarily entertainment just for fun sake, it’s that there’s a felt sense that they need to enjoy what they’re doing, if that’s you being a clown, and they actually will engage with you and learn something, and they just use you as the magnet, that’s cool. But if it’s doing small projects that have a finish line to them and during the class, then that’s fine too. Or if it’s having your students teach the class, which is what I was doing, having different groups teach every week, so that it’s not just me that’s responsible for distributing knowledge, it’s more people doing knowledge. Jonikka too, would tell me this probably isn’t as widespread as I feel like it should be. But there’s a need, I think, for students to be the knowledge makers. And I think that there’s more evidence from what I’m seeing in my department that people let students talk through their ideas as they were developing and that that made students more engaged. It’s completely counterintuitive to a lot of our faculty, because they think that what they really want to see is what happens when the students finally get it. And I keep telling them over and over again, “No, you want to see the process, you want to be with them while they get it, you don’t really care that they get it because at that point, you have to move on to a new idea.” But I think they’re having to flip their own ideas about those “aha” moments, because the moments don’t really work anymore. The moments are just like, “Oh, I got it,” but then that person’s muted, and they’re off on their own direction. And so I think there’s a lot of us working with students to set them up in pairs or small groups, and then kind of coaching them on how to be with one another. That sounded really weird, but coaching them how to be with one another and work together. So that when they’re off on their own, they will have that as a habit to come back to when they don’t have you. And I’m sure that’s what we do in face-to-face classes as well. But it’s really, really different in an online, especially in a Zoom, environment. But in an asynchronous environment, I always said that being online was two and a half times as much work. But the amount of matchmaking of ideas that I had to do online through discussion lists that basically quote one person and pull them over and have them engage with another person in a conversation. That was my entire life at teaching for that last semester. It was just trying to manage a conversation and create a community of people who were basically posting and responding and then leaving… this, “here’s what I think. I’m out of here.” So I don’t think we’ve figured out the perfect strategies for any of that other than you have to listen to your students. And when they’re engaged, you have to immediately ask them, even if it’s very uncomfortable in class, “Why did you say that?” or “Why did you feel like that was really cool?” Like, “How did you come up with that?” like, there was a whole lot of asking students to expose how they came up with ideas and why they connected things that I did, that I always do a couple of times in a class in a meeting, but not as much as I needed to do it here. So it was really more like “That’s a great response”or whatever. “Talk us through how you came up with that.” So a whole lot more of asking students to teach the rest of everybody what they just did, which I guess is kind of engaging by example. It’s a kind of having the students be models instead of always expecting texts or pieces of writing or reading to be the models for the students when they leave your classroom. It’s a hell of a lot more work. I’m pretty sure that this is the way Jonnika and I always taught because I’m very comfortable with it. But teaching people to do it when you’ve been doing it for so long, is incredibly hard. And then telling them that it involves a whole lot of trust on your part for students, and then finding out that that’s not actually something that people have a lot of… that’s kind of hard too to cope with. There’s not as much trust as there needed to be or assumed trust that you can ask students to pick up the baton, or whatever the metaphor is, and take the lead on explaining an idea, I thought that was a whole lot more prevalent than it was. And so there’s a whole lot more of that that has to happen. A whole lot more of trusting of students, a lot more work in the first-year experience to try to get people to help students become leaders before they’re sophomores. I think there’s a lot of work to be done there, that can be really fun. Why are you smiling, J?,

Jonikka: I was just about to say, I’m going to be the Debbie Downer here. I don’t think we do this really well. I just think across the board, we’re not doing a good job at creating community, and making those connections for students. And like I said before, I really think it’s not new to the online environment so much, I don’t know that we were necessarily really great before. And I do think more people were able to do it in person than are able to do it online. And I do think that the technology is causing us some trouble. So down here in the valley, certainly not all students have access to Wi Fi, many of them are driving up to the Burger King parking lot, or driving up to our parking lot, or whatever. So even when faculty are making the choice to be in a synchronous environment, they’re not necessarily doing anything engaging in that environment. Actually, our son was in some synchronous classes last semester, and he would talk about how the teacher would call on the students to respond to something or answer a question or something. And then the student would have to unmute themselves and say, hold on a second, I’m with the customer, or whatever, because they were at work. And they were just listening to class. And so they at least did unmute and respond. But it’s very hard to imagine how you create a community out of that when you’re not able to take advantage of the moments when you’re in real time with one another. And lots of feedback from our survey about the black screens in Zoom, and how awful it felt to everybody and a lot of empathy on the students’ part for the faculty member. Like I cannot imagine what it must be like to try to teach to a screen full of black screens. So it was uncomfortable for them, uncomfortable for the faculty member. And so I think we need to do a lot better job of lifting up those faculty who have found those strategies that are working for them and to recognize when it’s people like Colin or some of the people who… really a lot of that engagement comes from charisma on the part of the faculty, you can’t replicate that with everyone. So what are those strategies that people are using? I’ve heard some people, it’s a different app that they’re using, or something like that. But the kind of things are available to everybody that are in Blackboard and things like that, you saw all these people move to using discussion boards, and now everybody hates discussion boards. Because it’s the same rote practice, write a couple, read a couple. respond to them, there are memes about it now. So students are making fun of it, and rightfully so. It can be difficult, and then you put the faculty member in the position of “Okay, now I either have to read them and treat them with the respect that they deserve or I just take it as you put in your time and you did your task and we’re done.” I don’t have any particular examples that I can share with you, which is terrible, and more probably a sign of me just not talking with enough faculty members. But I just worry that it’s not enough yet. And even as we move into post pandemic, there’s going to be more of a mix of online and different modalities. And so it’s not like the conversation stops now. I think it’s just maybe we’ll have a little more peace of mind to have those conversations as we move forward. But that engagement piece is absolutely critical. And I’m certain it’s why a lot of our persistence rates, fall to spring, are down and things like that. I don’t know how long students will have patience for it, I guess is what I’m saying.

Colin: I have one practical strategy that I remember. See, you were a Debbie Downer…

Jonikka: There you go.

Colin: …but I remember the positives, so…

Jonikka: OK..

Colin: That’s why we’re married. I think teachers need to see the time in class, they need to completely redesign how they imagine that… I think ours is an hour and 15 minutes for a normal class… and never unimagine the potential for when they go back to different modalities. And it’s not just synchronous meetings, or asynchronous meetings, or asynchronous work with occasional voluntary meetings and that kind of thing is that the work that happens in class should probably be social and it should be structured and designed around community instead of being designed around: “This is a list of outcomes that have to be done before the end of this class.” More like these are lists of prompts of things that we’re going to try to address. Because the thing that I think made a lot of difference with some of our faculties… I coached them on how to do a green room… and maybe everybody was doing this and I just was too busy to notice that it was a trend or something… but not to have time before class and not to worry about seeing people in the hallways because they weren’t there. They weren’t any hallways and not to join your class early. But to literally have 10 minutes of a green room time at the beginning of a class meeting where everybody is mingling and talking and checking in with each other. And then to have 10 minutes at the end of class where you basically do the same thing, and people head off or they don’t head off. And what you saw when you started doing that in your classes, or what we saw, was that the students were showing up because of that time, and they needed that time, and they needed a different kind of entry into the class. And we had to coach them, it wasn’t an easy thing, it wasn’t a normal thing, because it’s not like being on your friend’s chat room or something. It’s still weird and awkward, and someone who forces everybody to do icebreakers and games, unless that’s just their thing, that’s going to be also awkward, but to have the time to talk to each other as human beings, and it not be like creepy, was incredibly important, I think, to have built into the class, as a normal part of being in the class because there were no breaks. Students were just going from class to class work to work. I had students get pulled over in cars, while they were in my class, doing presentations, like all kinds of crazy stuff happened. But in my classes, at least, they knew each other’s names, and they knew how to contact each other within the first few days, because we were doing those meetings. Now, they all told their friends that Colin’s classes are easy, because he doesn’t teach the whole time. But yeah, I was teaching, it was an experiment in social engagement, or whatever. But it, of course, changed what I could do during class time. But I think it was important for me to build that in. And I don’t think I will ever remove it again from my other delivery and modalities. The discussion boards are a joke, unless they’re an extension of an actual discussion. So if you’re not teaching your students how to have the actual discussion, then discussion boards are just going to be habitual writing behavior, and nothing new is going to come out of them. And so I think you have to learn how to be with your students that way. It’s probably not something a lot of people would be comfortable with, but I think it’s an actual practical strategy. You have to bookend your classes with at least the opportunity for engagement, where it’s low risk, but high impact talking with your students. Not in a conference, just talking with people.

Rebecca: I think that’s one of the key things that’s missing in online learning for students is just their general social community. So maybe we weren’t doing that in a physical classroom previously, but they had their actual social circles happening, they were able to connect with other students, and that existed for them. But when everyone’s in online classes, that part of the college experience is very difficult to facilitate. So that then became an academic part of college as opposed to just the social piece, I had the same kind of experience in my class, when there was that social time or whatever, they bonded a lot, and it helped a lot.

Colin: Yeah, I remember one student telling me, are we ever gonna stop changing group? And I was like, “Dude, all you have to do is say it. We’ll stop changing groups… keep the same group for two weeks. Two class meetings later, “Could you please get me out of this group, I cannot stay working with these people anymore.” [LAUGHTER] And I was like, “So I don’t know. What is the silver bullet?” They’re like, “Just go back to what you were doing before. I thought I wanted the same people. But my God, I do not want the same people.” But that whole class had a conversation about that and had a big joke about it, like who’s not going to be put in which group and they’re just like, “He’s gonna have to randomize everything, because if we start talking about who we like, and don’t like, [LAUGHTER] it’s gonna get really awkward really quick.” But you can have that conversation when the group has developed that sense of community. If it’s just me assigning names to stuff, then you’re not really having a conversation about why you’re doing it.

Rebecca: And each group is a bit different. I had students that asked for two different persistent groups that they just rotated between.

Colin: Yeah, now, that’s metacognition.

Rebecca: Ok. We can do that. I’m not sure how that’s gonna work. [LAUGHTER] But we can try that. And by the end, I think they thought, “Well, okay, that was an interesting experiment. Maybe we don’t want to do that again in the future, but you know…”

Colin: That’s great. I’ve got my aAclub, and I’ve got my B club, but I really can’t handle you guys today, so I’ll go with the B club.

Rebecca: Well, they had the project team, and then they had a different circle or whatever.

Colin: That’s great.

Rebecca: I could make it happen, so I did.

John: How have students on your campus responded to all the changes they’ve seen in instruction resulting from COVID.

Jonikka: I think one of the really interesting things that came out of our survey, which I’m curious to hear if any of you heard anything on your campuses, is that students consistently said they had more work to do in the fall than they had ever had to do before. And so every time I get a chance, I try to engage somebody in a conversation about this, because I think there are so many different complex things going on. I think, in many cases, students literally were doing more things than they did before. And part of that was a consequence of the online environment. So rather than having a discussion in class, they were having to write responses to the same kinds of questions that faculty might ask in class or something like that. So I think there’s actually more of that going on. And I think that faculty, through a lot of professional development things that we did were introduced to all these gadgets and tools and things, and then they started using them. And so they weren’t necessarily doing similar kinds of things in the face-to-face environment. Students when they’re going to class face to face… I think there was a lot of activity and a lot of work that was going on in class that they didn’t classify as work. It didn’t feel like work. But now because they’re having to do it while they’re at home or someplace else, now it’s homework or whatever. I read a little tidbit in The Chronicle at one point in the fall, it was kind of a national phenomenon that other people were reporting the same kind of thing. But I’m just really curious if we ended up having any deeper conversations about this, because I think it’s really easy for faculty to say, “Well, no I’m not” and for faculty to say, “Well, yes, you are.” but to have the conversations about what that lived experience really is like, and to be able to negotiate. Some of those faculty here did who said, “Yeah, I really did go too far. So now I have to rethink what is the most important things,” and maybe I’m hoping it leads to some like projects that are scaffolded, rather than 1000 little things that they asked students do, that are disconnected.

Colin: …or they’ll be a revolutionary cry for passive learning again, from students?

Jonikka: Well, we did hear a lot of that, we did hear some of that, like, just give me a few tests. And that’s it. I was like, “Oh, no, that’s not good, either.” [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve been hearing a lot of the same thing. And I think the surveys done in the SUNY system are affirming that as well, that students do feel like they’re doing more work. And partly, I think it’s because in the past, when there was a lot more passive learning, faculty would give students readings to do and then assume that they had read them. And now as more people have moved to a flipped learning environment, they’re giving them what they used to give as a lecture, except now they’re adding some questions and some quizzes to it. Where now students are graded on having done it. So now they actually have to do the readings…

Jonikka: Right.

John: …in ways that might not always have happened in the past. I think some of it is faculty, were often assuming that students were doing all this work, because that’s what the faculty had done when they were students, forgetting that they were not a random sample of the student population. So I think there’s a little bit of recalibration, perhaps, that needs to take place. {LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, I think too the class time that you’re mentioning too Jonikka was definitely something that I experienced, I teach in a studio program. So our class time, if we’re in synchronous time, we’re in class for six hours a week. And then students are used to having homework. So workload in general, these students are used to work, they’re used to doing a lot, but I didn’t have so much complaints about too much work. But I think it’s too much independent work, because I was teaching, partly synchronous and partly asynchronous. And I am in the spring teaching synchronously and setting a time in class to do the same kinds of exercises and things that I would have done if we were face to face because I just needed scheduled time to do the activities and some of that guidance. And they were really asking for that. We started off with meeting only once a week at the beginning of the week, which they liked. And then they kept asking for a little more and a little more and a little more. And next thing, you know, I was pretty much teaching synchronously. [LAUGHTER] You know, not completely, but it got pretty close by the end of the semester, because it was helping them to have some structured time because they weren’t managing their own time. Although I would say this is going to take this amount of time, you’re used to being in class for six hours, we’re only in class for two, you have that four hours, that’s still class time, that’s not even homework time. So it feels like it’s a lot, especially if they’re not used to it.

Colin: There’s probably a whole book to be written about timely motivation too, because listening to what you were saying, part of the issue I noticed was that students who are usually coming to face-to-face classes, they will plan to freak out because they haven’t done what they needed to do. And they will come to you either at the beginning of class or during group time, or at the end of class. That doesn’t work in Zoom. I remember having conversations during the end of the semester about when you go next semester, talk to your teachers the minute you think there might be something wrong, so that you can figure out how you’re going to talk to them. Because I think you all need to learn how to talk to people more quickly. Because you’re waiting, and thinking there’s going to be a moment and then you look up and there’s nobody around you. Nobody in your family understands what you’re going through with those classes, your friends are freaking out and don’t want to show weakness, or they’re already messed up or upset or passed you. And so there’s no timely motivation. It’s just it happens to happen. But it doesn’t happen to happen online learning, at least it doesn’t in my experience. And so I don’t know that we can build those things in. But I think you could make a whole career out of trying to figure out how to recognize when you need to be timely and motivated for a student and not be really creepy about it. Like “Oh, tell me what’s going on.”

Rebecca: And we all know that those moments aren’t happening because we would have those moments with colleagues and they don’t happen in meetings now either.

Colin: Yeah. Okay, everybody take a beat. We need to talk about what’s going on with Jonikka. [LAUGHTER] That’s only gonna happen in my meetings.

John: And there’s a lot of stressors caused by the pandemic and I think that’s a part of it. People are feeling overwhelmed. It’s harder to stay focused. There’s so many things going on in the world that are very distracting and concerning to everybody.

Jonikka: Yes.

Colin: I’m distracted by the distractions.

Rebecca: We always end by asking what’s next? …which always seems really big as we’ve had these episodes during the pandemic, but what’s next?

Colin: I need season nine of the British baking show to come out very very soon…

Jonikka: That’s true.

Colin: …for my own wellness and sanity. [LAUGHTER]

Jonikka: I think for us, one of the big things that’s next is that we’re taking advantage of some of the CARES dollars and things like that, that are coming in to support faculty professional development on a scale that I have never seen before. So we’re trying to do something, this kind of series that is going to be focused on faculty teaching first-year students. And so really taking a different approach than we’ve ever taken before. And really focusing, I think, in some ways more on the affective pieces, like, “Who are these students? What has their experience been?” Well, honestly, that’s just good faculty development, but we’ve not really done it in those kinds of ways necessarily before. What are their experiences? How do they learn? And bringing students into that conversation too like, “What did it feel like to be part of classes that operated in these kinds of ways?” And so really getting to the heart of where we started this really just about the teaching and learning piece, and what does it mean? And what shared values and shared understandings of what it means for students to be actively learning in a class. And what does that look like different? Why is it so special and important for first-year students. So that’s what we spent at least the last 24 hours, feverishly,trting to figure out what we can do for that, and how we can build those student observers and feedback givers into that process as well. And try to get at least 60% of the faculty who teach the majority of their workload with freshmen to do that. So again, that’s something that Colln and I probably have wanted to do for 20 years. We could have done it any of those years. But it means something different in this context now, where we’ve got our next freshmen class is going to have had an entire year and a half of their four years of high school be almost nothing. I mean, we’ve got one 21 year old and one almost 16 year old. And so we’re kind of seeing it firsthand what’s going on with these students and what it means for them to learn and be in school. And so we’re gonna have to reckon with that as faculty. And so I think now’s a good time to have those kind of real fundamental conversations.

Colin: Even though I ramble a lot and talk all the time and, as Jonikka told me today in another conversation, for somebody who loves to talk about all the intricacies of things, there are things in my life that I absolutely refuse to talk about. I’m not the most comfortable social person in the world, especially when it comes to difficult conversations that affect things like equity and diversity and how people’s identity are tied to the teaching. And I can make a joke, and I can point out something insightful, and then kind of run away while everybody’s laughing. But I think this last year has taught me, kind of along the lines of Jonikka with the affective stuff and thinking about students that way, is that I’m going to have to be a actual active sponsor of difficult conversations, and try to get other people to do that with me, because a lot of the things that have been happening in different groups I belong to, it really is all about sponsorship, it really is like all of the conversations are about listening to people and trying to have a conversation when people need to have it instead of figuring out how to put it off until a time when you can deal with it. And at least this last year has taught me that you can’t put any of those things off, because in 24 hours, somebody could lose it, or somebody could solve the problem and move on to the next bit. And so I literally was thinking I better remember to tell you guys to have a good weekend when we’re done. And then and then Rebecca was talking, I was like, dude, I think it’s Tuesday. It’s Tuesday talk time Colin, it’s not Friday yet. [LAUGHTER] So I don’t have any sense of time anymore. But I think that might be a good thing. I wasn’t joking about the timeliness thing. I think Jonikka and me and other people that are in positions where we’re responsible for trainings, I think we have to make sure that part of those trainings, deals with people’s need to have conversations they really don’t want to have. So if there’s a conversation about merit, and how we’re going to figure out merit one year, maybe we should have a conversation about why you deserve a raise, and what’s good teaching, instead of worrying about counting things. And if we’re going to talk about shoving something to do with equity into a training session, why aren’t we talking about having it as part of every session? And what would that change? And who needs to deliver it? And so I think there’s a lot of challenging conversations about student perspective, about equity and diversity, and about what good teaching is, or not even that, I think it’s about what do we really want to see happen in a classroom that is successful? And what does that mean for the teacher and it’s okay for it to be something different for the teacher than for the student. That’s actually why it’s interesting, because they’re both getting different things out of it. But I don’t think we have the language for learning from each other. I don’t think we’re that advanced in having a language about how that happens between teachers and students. I know that there are experts that have affective terminological screens and they understand how to deal with the way the brain works. I don’t think people that are good at teaching and people that are good at psychoanalyzing have really figured out how to mesh the thing so that it works for everybody in a way that you can have that conversation. So when I say we need to train our students how to talk to their teachers, I actually mean that. I don’t mean we need to train them how to write an email that doesn’t offend their teachers, because it’s grammatically correct. I mean, literally, I wish I would have figured this out five years ago and taught Ian, our 21 year old, how to start a conversation with one of his college teachers, and how to think about how to start it differently with one than the other. Somebody should have taught him that in a writing class, probably one of my teachers, but I should have taught him that too. As soon as I realized that he needed to have that conversation with somebody else instead of with me. So I think there’s a whole lot of react to the student in front of you and just fix it right there. And not as much training in the listening part and the having the difficult conversation. And having a moment where you can trust each other, I think we’ve got a whole hell of a lot of work to do in that area. So that’ll be fun for the next 15 years of our life… be an affective czar of an institution. There’s not enough going on, right?

John: And the pandemic and the shift online has exposed so much inequities that our students are dealing with. And that’s particularly true for first-generation students. And that’s something I think that all colleges are now being forced to face in a way that they had chosen to ignore for a very long time.

Rebecca: So yes, many difficult conversations in the future [LAUGHTER]. Good call. Colin. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This was really interesting, and I think has a lot of important things to think about, not just into the spring, but into the fall and many future semesters.

Jonikka: Thank you.

Colin: Thank you guys for talking with us and listening to us.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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162. Bichronous Learning

When we talk about online learning we often focus on asynchronous learning. In this episode, Jessica Kruger joins us to discuss the creation of rich online learning experiences that include a combination of synchronous and asynchronous components. Jessica is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health and Health Behavior, and the Interim Coordinator for Teaching Innovation and Excellence for the School of Public Health and Health Professions at the University at Buffalo.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: When we talk about online learning we often focus on asynchronous learning. In this episode, we discuss the creation of rich online learning experiences that include a combination of synchronous and asynchronous components.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Jessica Kruger, a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health and Health Behavior, and the Interim Coordinator for Teaching Innovation and Excellence for the School of Public Health and Health Professions at the University at Buffalo. Welcome back, Jessica.

Jessica: Glad to be back.

John: It’s great to have you here again. It’s been a while.

Jessica: It has. I’m so excited to be back and drinking tea with the both of you.

John: Speaking of tea, today’s teas are:

Jessica: I’m enjoying green tea with ginseng.

Rebecca: That sounds good. I have Big Red Sun again.
Bichronous online learning, which you experimented with this past semester. Could you first start by describing what bichronous online learning is?

Jessica: Yes, there was a recent paper, it really put a name to this type of learning. And it is basically a blend of both asynchronous and synchronous online learning. This is where students can participate in anytime, anywhere, and doing that asynchronous part of the course. But then they can also participate in real-time activities in the synchronous sessions. And so this actually can be varied, whether you have a predominantly asynchronous or predominantly synchronous course. So, it allows some flexibility.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how bichronous learning is different from blended, hybrid or hyflex learning that we’ve become so familiar with during COVID-19.

Jessica: There are many terms that are being used for the types of modalities of courses. The blended and hybrid approach, this is where that course in combination has a face-to-face and an asynchronous online delivery. And then that blended synchronous is a combination of face-to-face and synchronous components with online students in the course. And then of course, there’s hyflex, and this is designed as a model where students have options to be online or on-campus. And so this is a little bit different than all of these types, because it’s blending synchronous and asynchronous, but both online. And the neat part about this is that blend could

John: One thing I think people may wonder is, how is this different than a hybrid course where there are some synchronous activities and some asynchronous activities? What’s the difference in the approach that makes it this new category?

Jessica: I think it’s the approach because it’s not and/or it’s kind of this sliding scale of what you’re doing synchronously versus asynchronously. Traditionally hybrid and blended have been face to face, whereas this is focused more online. And maybe we’re splitting hairs creating a new term for it. But I think it does kind of create this new category that we can begin to think about and further explore. Is this model conducive to specific learners? We don’t know. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to begin researching and exploring these differences.

John: And this whole mode of synchronous online is really something that just exploded recently. That’s an area that we really haven’t looked at very much in the past, or most faculty hadn’t really explored very much in the past, that, for many, has become the dominant mode of instruction. So, thinking about it in this way, I think, could be really helpful. What would be an example of a structure that would use that approach,

Jessica: The bichronous approach? Let me tell you a little bit about my courses. Thi semester, I’m teaching a variety of courses in a variety of different levels. And I accidentally stumbled on doing this because it felt right. I really didn’t want my students to be all asynchronous. I wanted to meet them. I wanted them to be able to have time to ask questions, and for us to do some active learning online. And so how I decided to format my course was that students would have asynchronous components to where they would go through some videos, some readings, but once a week, they would come and join a 30-minute class session. During that class session, there’s a short intro talking about what they’re exploring this week. We also discuss a little bit about the assessments and the upcoming assessments, we answer any questions, and then we move right into active learning. And that’s where they get put into breakout rooms, they get to talk to each other, work on problems, think about solutions. We come back together, debrief for a short period of time, and we’re done. The neat part about that is, because my classes tend to be larger, I offer choice in the section in which they come to. So, students can choose to come to one of two sessions that are offered on that day. And those sessions are actually offered within the class time that’s listed in the course schedule. So, let’s say you’re busy, you have to work that day, or something else came up. I also offer an alternative assessment each week. So whether you’re Zoomed out, or you got called into work, you can still earn those participation points. This allows for flexibility and choice for the students.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some of the advantages of bichronous online learning and how that synchronous component complements the asynchronous component for students?

Jessica: I think it’s so nice to be able to get to talk to students, especially in this virtual environment. And sometimes it’s as simple as clarifying what you wrote in text. And so a lot of times when we start off class, there’s minor questions about the upcoming assessment such as, “What did you mean by this part of this assignment?” And I can easily clarify that and give some examples. Also, by whatever questions students are asking, I can kind of tailor our synchronous sessions so that we can talk through some of those challenging concepts. I think it also brings together a community. Students get to talk with other students. They’re all going through the same struggles right now, or similar struggles. And so having that time where they get to go into breakout rooms, talk about a topic, say something about their day, I think it really creates that community that we’re looking for online. And hey, when I go to the breakout rooms and say, ‘Hello,” they almost always have their cameras on for each other, which I think is a pretty cool thing.

Rebecca: I think Jessica, I was mentioning before we started recording that I’m also doing the bichronous online learning, I just didn’t know it had a name. And I’m finding that students really enjoy that synchronous time, and they request more time with each other. That’s the piece of it that they really love, is interacting and formulating community with each other and around the topic of the class.

Jessica: And I think that’s so important, especially as we’re all isolated due to COVID, that they have that time to talk out these assignments or to talk through these problems. And yeah, just as you said, the students always want more time. The 30 minutes doesn’t seem to be enough for them.

John: Did students know in advance when they signed up for the course that they would be synchronous meetings, as well as the asynchronous component.

Jessica: The course was actually listed in the course catalog as recorded and live sessions. And so at the beginning, they were actually pretty happy that they didn’t have to come for an hour and 15 minutes twice a week. Instead, they got to come for a shorter period of time and earn those same points and get that same information.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that my class also was listed that it was a synchronous time slot, it was listed as a hybrid. But it really was more of an online synchronous class with these synchronous components. And because I teach a studio class, the normal contact hours are six hours a week, which I couldn’t imagine us doing. It would be terrible. So we did the same thing. We were always meeting at the beginning of the week. And then I do small group meetings with students at other times during our regular class time during the week, and students have requested more time together, even if it’s just… we call it accountability club, where they’re just working during the class time on class things in a breakout room together, even if they’re not talking to each other.

Jessica: I love that idea. That sounds like a great way to get students to interact even outside of the typical class time.

John: It sounds as if these courses could be set up on a continuum where some of them are primarily synchronous with some asynchronous components. Or they could be primarily asynchronous with some optional or flexible, synchronous components. Is that correct?

Jessica: You know, that’s a great way to look at it. I’ve had a really nice conversation with some of my colleagues who have put so much time and effort into putting their courses online and making them quality, that they’re really kind of sad to see that in the future, hopefully, we’ll get to come back together and be in person, but you really don’t want all that effort and content to go to waste. So thinking about it as providing some extra flexibility might be a nice way to rationalize all that time that we’ve all put into our courses,

John: Like so many other things. It’s not necessarily a binary choice, that there’s a whole continuum on which people can select an option that works best for their specific courses.

Jessica: Yeah, and I think that is really what’s at the core of this model, is that it is really something that can flow one way or another. And I’m even thinking in the future, how can we continue to bolster this or give students more choice when it comes to their learning? We know that the choice is really important. And I think this way of kind of creating courses could be a way of the future.

Rebecca: I’m wondering if the synchronous component is particularly valuable in these online courses for students right now because it does provide that immediacy with one another but also instructor presence. So, we all actually feel like “Hey, there are humans behind the name and things that are in this online environment” …and help us formulate an understanding that we are all a learning community and a classroom community in a way that maybe is more difficult to get your head around in something that’s entirely asynchronous.

Jessica: I think that’s a good point. And I don’t require my students to turn on their cameras when we’re in person, but I do think they get a sense of who I am, and more than they would in just videos. We can have a conversation. And there’s some times I’m asking them to put information in the Zoom chat or reply. But, as I’ve gone through these courses, I’ve noticed more students are willing to unmute and talk out loud, even in these big courses. And that shows me that they’re beginning to be more comfortable not only with their peers, but with me and how I run these courses, which I think is a really good sign that we can create that community, even online.

John: Could you tell us a little bit more about the specific courses you’re teaching and the size of the courses as well as a little bit more about the division of your activities between what you do synchronously and what you do in an asynchronous modality?

Jessica: Sure. So I, ironically, teach a course called stress and population health. And this is a very salient topic nowadays, as you can imagine. This is an undergraduate course, and I have 125 students within it. During a typical week, I will have readings posted in our learning management system. I like to do a few videos, and I have the luxury of being able to be in front of a green screen for some of those videos. So, students do get a little bit of who I am and the wacky things I do while I’m giving them some lecture material. Along with that there’s some outside information that I like to pull in, whether it’s current news articles, or whatnot. But they have a substantial portion of what they’re doing that is basically asynchronous. When they come during our synchronous session, we start off with “How are you?” I usually have a wacky sort of “how are you?” question that’s themed around whatever the holidays are. I had them rate their mood based on candy and other silly scales, just to kind of have an icebreaker. And then, as we talk a little bit about the content, we then do some breakout sessions. So, today, we were talking about a new report that came out about stress in America. So, they had to look through this report and begin to talk about how this report relates to community stress and how we would assess the stress levels of what’s happening within various communities using some kind of higher level data versus that individual self assessment. And so they’re really applying the content when we’re together. And my other course I teach is a 88-person course… I know, real small. And this class is on models and methods in public health. And so, again, they have videos and readings to go through. In that course, we actually create an OER textbook, which is a fun activity. But, when we come together, we’re applying the models, they’re working together as a team to fit different problems, almost case studies together, or they’re doing something like a scavenger hunt. I’ve even done something like Kahoot!, which has been a lot of fun and students are now requesting we have more Kahoots! It does work virtually, which is kind of neat, except I can’t give them the prizes that I typically would in class. My last course that I teach is a 40-person course on incarceration and public health. And this class is a little bit different because we have more discussion. So, when we’re together, it is purely discussion based. And students do a really good job at interacting with each other. And so sometimes we stay together, sometimes we break into groups, where my TA is helping to run some of the discussion. But, that one works a little bit differently than my two larger courses, and it’s an upper-level course. So, I feel like we can really get into the meat of the conversation.

John: You mentioned that you do provide multiple times. And a nice thing about the Kahoot! is that, while they may have fun doing it synchronously, there’s also the option of posting it online so students could try it later if they weren’t able to attend one of the synchronous sessions. I’ve been doing that in my classes too, and students have really enjoyed it.

Jessica: Yeah, it’s a great way to fit in the alternative assessment or assignment that, if you miss class and aren’t there to hear some of the explanations on Kahoot!, I end up having students actually look up the correct answers and telling me why, as a way to have a little bit of deeper learning with that game.

Rebecca: How have students responded to the format overall?

Jessica: Oh, they absolutely love it. In kind of a midterm assessment that I put out, I asked about how do you like this model, and they said, “It’s great. I love that I can come in 30 minutes. We’re in, we’re out, we’re done.” But it’s also I think, created more of a connection, I have students reaching out asking for advice on “What do I do? Should I go to grad school? How do I do some of these life skills?” …and that shows me that they are making that connection to me as a faculty member, which is exactly what we want in these courses, especially these larger courses. And students will tell you, “I have courses where I sit through hour lectures, and it’s really hard for me to stay focused,” whereas in this, they’re continually doing something new, and they’re doing it in a short amount of time that has ultimately a high impact, because they’re getting their questions answered, they’re doing some active learning, they’re working together, and they’re getting to form a relationship with their instructor,

John: What are some limitations of bichronous learning, compared to, say, a fully online class?

Jessica: I think it takes some time to think about what activities you want to do live. With a totally asynchronous class, I think some of the alignment with the course objectives and the assessments become a little bit easier, because you have your roadmap, you know that this discussion board is going to align with this objective. Whereas this, it can be a little challenging to figure out: one, how to stay creative. You don’t want every session to be boring or the same sort of thing. Also, from an instructor standpoint, I’m repeating the same class. And in the model, it doesn’t mean that you have to repeat the same class. I do that personally, because I want smaller groups. And so, some days, it’s like Groundhog Day, when I’m doing the same class back to back. But, you know what? The second time, it’s always better. So, [LAUGHTER] it’s a good way to continually improve my teaching, and really reflect on how I’m displaying information or teaching the content.

Rebecca: If a faculty member was interested in incorporating something like this in the spring, what should their next steps be? It sounds like one thing is making sure that there’s some sort of time slot established for the class. But, beyond that, what else should they be thinking about?

Jessica: Yeah, I think the university modality’s important, making sure you’re transparent with your students about what they’ve signed up for. It’s never fun to find out that you signed up for a class and it’s going to be presented in a little bit of a different way. Second, I think it’s really figuring out what works best for you and your content. So, what content is going to be asynchronous? What content is going to be synchronous? And how are you going to establish some sort of rhythm or schedule for your students? And is this going to be… you only come one time once a week and you only have that choice? Or no choice in this case? Or are you going to make it with some choice? Are you going to offer multiple sessions? Are you comfortable with offering an alternative assignment for students? The reason why I came up with the alternative assessment is because I have students who are in different countries in different time zones, along with people in the active duty military, and they’re not always able to make it to the synchronous session. So I wanted to give them an opportunity to make up those points and to make it fair for students who… life happens. And the nice part about it is, it actually reduced my time in working through students’ challenges such as Internet outages. One day, we had a huge outage in Buffalo… well, you know, no problem… join the next day’s session, and you’re good to go, or do the alternative assessment. And so figuring out what your teaching philosophy is around the flexibility and choice, I think is kind of that next step, and then go for it. It’s a lot of fun to really get to meet and talk with your students so that you can explore this new way of teaching and engage your students in a different way.

John: For those students who, because of their work schedules need to take courses in an asynchronous manner, might this modality serve as a deterrent for those students?

Jessica: Most definitely, I think students who sign up for an asynchronous course are expecting an asynchronous course, I think this is just a different way to think about our delivery model, whether that be having the option of that synchronous session, or moving to a bichronous model to where you’re kind of in between the two and allowing some flexibility and some choice for the students. Or maybe it’s just a way for you to try something a little bit different each week, whether it’s one day synchronous, and the next day asynchronous. I think testing out these different models are important as we’re moving through this new online world.

John: We always end by asking what’s next? Which is the question we’re always t hinking about this year?

Jessica: That’s for sure. I’m interested in actually doing some research on students’ perception of this modality of learning. It’s so new that I think we need to begin by understanding what do students think about it and does it affect their overall performance in a course? And, from an instructor standpoint, what is it like at the end? We’re still figuring this all out. There is some research that’s being planned around asking faculty about how they’re rationalizing or thinking about this topic. Rebecca, you and I both are teaching this way. But, I’m sure it looks very different from both of our standpoints. And so I’m really excited to see where this research goes and hoping to be part of it.

John: It’s wonderful talking to you again, and we’re looking forward to having you back on the podcast again, with whatever your next venture is. I should also note, you mentioned that you have been doing this OER project. We have a podcast we recorded with you on your first iteration of that, and we’ll share a link to that in the show notes.

Jessica: Excellent. I’ll also share our newly published paper on some of the results around that.

Rebecca: Excellent. That sounds exciting. Thanks so much for sharing a new way of thinking about the spring. Hopefully it sparks some ideas for faculty as they move into what’s probably going to be another tough semester,

Jessica: That’s for sure. Hang in there, everyone.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts, and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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