298. Sustainable Professional Development

The rapid changes in teaching practices and teaching modalities during the last few years have provided challenges for both academics and the professional developers that support them. In this episode, Judie Littlejohn, Jessamyn Neuhaus, and Chris Price join us to discuss ways of moving toward more sustainable models of professional development.

Judie is the Director of Online Learning, an Instructional Designer, and an adjunct instructor of history at Genesee Community College. She is also the Chair of the SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology, or FACT2. Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. Chris is the Academic Programs Manager for the SUNY Center for Professional Development. He coordinates and leads system-wide professional development in the SUNY system. Before moving to this position, Chris served as the Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at SUNY Brockport. Chris is also a member of the POD Core Committee. POD is the Professional and Organizational Development Network serving those who work in educational development.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The rapid changes in teaching practices and teaching modalities during the last few years have provided challenges for both academics and the professional developers that support them. In this episode, we discuss ways of moving toward more sustainable models of professional development.

[MUSIC]

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: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Welcome to this live podcast recording session at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology. The topic of this panel session is “sustainable professional development.” Our panelists are: Judie Littlejohn, Jessamyn Neuhaus, and Chris Price.

Rebecca: Judie is the Director of Online Learning, an Instructional Designer, and an adjunct instructor of history at Genesee Community College. She is also the Chair of the SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology, or FACT2.

John: Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. (Jessamyn will be joining us as soon as she finishes a presentation in a nearby room.)

Rebecca: Chris Price is the Academic Programs Manager for the SUNY Center for Professional Development. He coordinates and leads system-wide professional development in the SUNY system. Before moving to this position, Chris served as the Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at SUNY Brockport. Chris is also a member of the POD Core Committee. POD is the Professional and Organizational Development Network serving those who work in educational development.

John: Judie, Jessamyn, and Chris have all been extremely active in helping faculty navigate the challenges of the last few years. Welcome, Judie, Jessamyn, and Chris.

Rebecca: This wouldn’t be a complete episode of Tea for Teaching if we didn’t ask about tea, so, our teas today are: … Chris, are you drinking tea?

Chris: English afternoon.

Rebecca: Well, you’ve made the correct choice.How about you, Judie?

Judie: And I have Darjeeling, which is my current favorite.

John: And I have a Tea Forte black currant tea today.

Rebecca: And I have Irish breakfast.

John: Jessamyn, you’ve arrived just in time to be asked about your tea.

Jessamyn: Well, I specifically arranged to have to be somewhere else when I was supposed to be here so as to demonstrate in this meta way, unsustainable faculty development [LAUGHTER] where you’re in two places at the same time.

John: During the past three years, faculty have engaged in professional development at unprecedented levels in response to the global pandemic, and here in SUNY, with the SUNY-wide transition to a new learning management system. From what you have observed in your roles, how has this changed instructional practices? We’ll start with Chris.

Chris: Yeah, so prior to the pandemic, online learning was was more optional. You were either an online instructor or a college had online instruction as part of its mission, but it was a choice. And so after the pandemic, the whole “Should I do online?” just went away and it became “How am I going to do it?” or “How are we as a campus going to move things online? And so the validity of online instruction, that question, just kind of went away. We know, though, that during a pandemic, it wasn’t the ideal time to transition to online instruction, it was just everybody doing it all at once by the seat of their pants, and instructional designers and everybody that supports online instruction were definitely stressed out. So it wasn’t an ideal situation. But I think where it’s left us now, is that we don’t have to have those debates anymore about whether or not online is a valid mode of instruction or not. And so it’s allowed us to take a step back and be a little bit more creative with how we incorporate online instruction into our courses, our programs, our colleges and universities. And so, for example, if you think about HyFlex instruction, before the pandemic, I had never heard of HyFlex instruction, and it really kind of has emerged since then as being something that many colleges and universities are considering as an integral part of their instructional plans. If you would have told me before the pandemic that folks were teaching courses asynchronously online, online synchronously via videoconference, but also face to face, I would have really questioned whether or not that was even possible, and now campuses are doing it all over the place. We just presented today about a Tools for HyFlex courses project that we’ve been looking at, investigating the different types of video conferencing tools that faculty are using in their courses. And so, just to sum up, yes, the pandemic definitely, a lot of residual trauma that folks have from it, but I do think that overall that now the acceptance of online as a mode of instruction has definitely been a positive.

Rebecca: How about you, Judie?

Judie: I do agree with what Chris said, we’ve seen a huge growth in HyFlex courses on our campus as well, and the exponential use of Zoom. But I think these changes are not finished. At the beginning, just before the pandemic really sent us all home, we started training everybody in Zoom on our campus. We were fortunate that that final week, we were on spring break, so we were able to literally herd everybody into computer labs. And each day, we were allowed fewer chairs in the lab as people had to start to spread out a bit. At that time, the focus really was on Zoom, and on using our LMS for the faculty who weren’t using it yet. But then, I think, as people became more comfortable with Zoom, and also we knew we were changing LMSs, the focus really shifted to the LMS training. On our campus, we don’t have the dedicated lab space and personnel to teach all of our faculty a new LMS at the same time, so we took advantage of all the SUNY trainings that were offered. We were in the first cohort onboarding to the system-wide Brightspace digital learning environment, and a lot of our faculty attended every virtual workshop that SUNY offered, and thank goodness that we had those opportunities for the faculty because we could not have recreated them all ourselves. So there was a huge growth, I think, in faculty participating in webinars and trainings offered by SUNY. And it all translates, I believe, into course quality. I think, as far as instructional practices go, the students are having better learning experiences because of the way the content is arranged in the new LMS. But along with that, though, I feel like most of the faculty are more open to engaging with students in Zoom, even if they are in 100% asynchronous courses. They have more virtual availability, I’ll say, than they would have had previously in their face-to-face office hours. So those are the two big things, the course quality, and the virtual availability, that have really increased through all this.

Rebecca: How about you, Jessamyn?

Jessamyn: I guess I’m thinking of something a little less tangible than the other two, which I totally agree with what was just said. I would say the awareness of students’ life circumstances, and how life circumstances can impact learning. I remember very clearly, my first semester after the emergency pivot and a faculty member saying to me, like it was just percolating through his head, and he said, “But what if my student doesn’t have access to wi-fi?” …like he was thinking it through. I saw it happening and the change happening, really thinking about how life circumstances impact student’s ability to engage in the courses. And I would say that it was a good shift, that awareness, but it’s also been very overwhelming. Because once you start down that road, it piles up fast, all the ways, and all the challenges that individual students might be facing.

Rebecca: The tremendous pressures of the pandemic broke down silos between faculty, departments, disciplines, and institutions to initially support the transition to remote teaching and to support the increased interest in inclusive teaching practices. How do we sustain this culture of sharing and prevent the silos from being rebuilt? Judie?

Judie: First, I think the way the silos were breaking down just as SUNY was working on new, updated general education requirements, is really helpful as far as sustaining this, because, with the DEISJ requirements, which are Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice, they help us maintain this level of empathy and concern. I don’t want it to sound like the faculty didn’t care about the students before, but I think the level of empathy really increased throughout COVID and the new general educational requirements will help to maintain that. Faculty will continue discussing how they are meeting all these updated requirements in our current programs, and they’re sharing ways to incorporate the DEISJ requirements into different fields that may not have overtly considered those topics previously. So, yes, I think it’s fortuitous timing with SUNY’s shifts in DEISJ requirements, as far as keeping those silo walls broken down so that people can continue having conversations and sharing.

Rebecca: So what I was observing when I was hearing both Jessamyn and Chris is that in professional development we should be implementing the good pedagogy that we’re trying to have our faculty also implement in the classroom.

John: So faculty have become more aware of the challenges that our students face in terms of mental health and wellness, access, and family and community resources, resulting in more interest in inclusive teaching practices. How do we sustain interest in these issues while faculty, staff, and students all feel overwhelmed, and overworked?

Rebecca: You don’t feel that, do you John? [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Well, I would never underestimate the power of acknowledging the situation, acknowledging the reality. So I started both of my sessions by saying, “I know this is a tough time, I know that you are tired, I know that we are all tired.” I also have been taking care to frame and remind people that I would never recommend anything to you that’s not going to make your teaching life, working life, better, I would never tell you to do something just for the sake of checking a box or because I think it’s the right way. But this will make your life easier, your working life better. And finally, I’m really leaning into cut down on content, as much as you possibly can. That’s sort of an underlying advice I’m giving, is talk less and listen more, for me as well, but for faculty. And it’s not that creating more student-centered course design is less work, per se, but it definitely changes the energy in the room and feeds our teacher souls in a different way than nonstop lecturing does. Those are just a few ideas.

Chris: So, I’m gonna take a little bit of a different track here. One piece of advice that I would give is that you got to figure out ways to let things go, things have to go, we can’t burn the candle at both ends, but that, of course, is easier said than done. I’ve been privileged to be involved with, the last few years, online groups of tenure-track faculty throughout SUNY. These are sessions that are open to anyone in SUNY. They take place every couple of weeks. They’re about an hour. They’re not recorded. They’re in Zoom. But we just call them open mic sessions. And I do it with two colleagues at Empire State University. Alan Mandel and Shantih Clemans came to me and the three of us kind of put this together. And, and one of the things we keep hearing from new tenure-track faculty is that as the issue of service comes up again, and again, and again, they’re not really sure how to navigate that. And I think we know this, and I think the research bears this out, that women, minoritized folks, bear a disproportionate service burden on campuses. And so how do we get around that? We need everybody doing service, our colleges and universities just cease to exist if folks weren’t doing service. So I think what we need to do is do a better job of recognizing and rewarding service and distributing it more equally across campuses. Again, I know, that’s probably easier said than done, but I think that that might alleviate some of that disproportionate burden on many of our faculty. The other thing too, is I think, we need to encourage more of a team-based approach to instruction. So that, there are some things like you got to let go. And you got to say, okay, you know, maybe I don’t need to be tweaking every single thing in my course. And now I know instructional technologists and designers are also overwhelmed. But, I think they would all appreciate it if faculty didn’t come to them in an emergency and they came to them more proactively to figure out how to troubleshoot things in their courses. So those are two just very practical suggestions.

Judie: For me, on my campus, as far as sustaining interest in maintaining that level of empathy with the students when I’m overworked and overstressed… we’re short staffed right now, so I do a lot of things in a day and the day is long, and I also teach, but I teach as an adjunct, so I can’t grade or give feedback during my working hours, and I share this with faculty too. So when I what I do every single day when I get home, I go right to my computer, which sounds counterintuitive, but I just keep my day going and I sit right down and I grade all three classes for whatever the people did in the last 24 hours. So I grade every single day, all three courses, because I’m in that place, right? I’m home from work. This is what our students do. They’re working all day, they’re taking care of their kids, they’re doing whatever. And then they get home and they have to sit down at their asynchronous course, and try to rewatch the video, read the lecture, take the quiz, and do all of that. So I feel more connected with the student in that way. Because I do it every day, there’s not that much to grade. If I have classes of 25 students and they don’t all do their work on the same day, it’s spread out throughout the week. I’m real forgiving of deadlines and things like that, I suggest deadlines to keep them on track to finish on time, but I never penalize late work. And I don’t want to their I don’t want to judge their excuses, either. Because I always feel like, I end up being the judge of the best excuse if somebody needs an extension. So everyone has their extension out front. And I grade their work as it comes in and give them their feedback. And it just helps me keep my empathy that way, I think, because sometimes you’ll look and start to read a response or an essay and think, “oh, here we go… this again,” or you know [LAUGHTER] and then I always think, somehow, in my home space like that, it’s easier for me to take a step back and say, “I don’t know what their day is.” I always say “I’m not wearing their shoes…” Who knows what the students have had to go through throughout the day. And one thing that helped me a lot early on in the pandemic was we have a respiratory care program on our campus, and our respiratory care faculty were right there on the frontlines of COVID, like nobody else. And they’d never taught online. And they didn’t use the LMS. So I was constantly helping them get their materials online and their grading online and their announcements and so forth. And I could see the announcements that these people were writing to their students, and just how powerful they were, and they’d start off with, “Please take care of yourself. Please get some rest. We understand you have to take time…” and just how much concern and true love for their students that they were able to demonstrate in these announcements. And some of them I kept as just examples of how to show empathy towards your students. And I think having that sort of an example for me, as an adjunct, helped me set my own daily practice to be able to keep that empathy for my students. So I think just finding a good example like that and being able to share it, is how we can help keep it going forward.

Rebecca: So along the lines of resources, budgets and resources for professional development are limited, I hear. Where should professional developers place their focus, and their efforts?

Judie: So for me…we did assign these by the way, we don’t just randomly know when to talk… [LAUGHTER] I take a project management approach to a lot of these things, just because I like to keep records and details and know who’s done what and where we stand. So definitely, from that perspective, I start with a needs analysis, and who has what, who needs to know what, and where are the gaps, and how can we fill the gaps? So I don’t think there’s a way to identify that one key thing that all faculty need right now, aside from entire LMS training. So, we are in cohort one, so this summer, everybody’s teaching their courses for the second time. So we’re kind of over that hurdle. I tell them, we climbed the mountain and our sliding down the back side and able to focus more on course improvement than how does the LMS work. But beyond that, I’m still trying to get some of our own training materials that existed in our former LMS. we have to Brightspace-a-size things. So, [LAUGHTER], we have to Brightspace-a-size, for example, the RSI, the regular and substantive interaction training, and bring that up to the right standards in Brightspace, so that I can identify who wasn’t able to complete it before and things like that. But by and large, though, it definitely is a needs analysis, that we can’t throw all of our professional development energy into one bucket. We got to figure out what are all the buckets and who needs who needs a ladle full from each?

Jessamyn: Yeah, I’m gonna piggyback on that because I think campus culture really is key to answering this question. The campus culture around faculty development efforts, really has an impact on what’s going to land and what’s not. I’d also add to that, that we, as professional educational developers, should be keeping track better track of where our time goes, where our efforts go, when we make a yearly action plan. We should also be doing monthly activity reports just for ourselves, and to save us time at the end of the year, compiling everything we did, and that can help us see where our time and energy and hours are going and if it’s unsustainable. So if you’re spending… well, I know I can say 100% certainty… what’s your biggest time suck, audience? I bet it starts with E…

Rebecca: …and ends with mail.

Jessamyn: [LAUGHTER] and ends with mail… and ends with “oh my god, another three hours doing email.” So really sort of self reflecting and reporting on that, I think is important. But the last thing I would say… just I’m going to put a plug in for where professional developers should focus their efforts on inequitable teaching labor, and systemic discrimination facing historically minoritized faculty in the academy, and faculty with… a term I learned… invisible and visible disabilities, because we might have some power to move the needle there. Like, for example, student evaluations of teaching do professional and personal harm to faculty every single semester, or every single trimester. There might be a way that, in our role as professional faculty developers, we can mitigate that, change some policies or provide people with actual actionable strategies for lessening that impact. That’s on the top of my list right now.

Chris: Yeah, I’m gonna pick back up what Jessamyn said, because I think the most important resource a campus has for professional development, are the people who work in professional development on the campus. You may have no budget, but at least there’s someone, and hopefully it’s a full-time person, or someone with a significant course release to do that work on your campus. So, that is a resource, and so doing needs analysis is important. And knowing what you’re doing is important, because it helps figure out what is it that you can do most effectively. The Center for Professional Development, now that I’m there, I do a lot more program planning a lot less working directly with faculty. And we don’t really have a budget, like a lot of the things that we do are things where we find people to deliver programs, and then we charge a fee for the program, so that, you know, we can pay the people who do the do the programs. But we do a lot of other things that are free, and they’re mostly relying upon folks giving their labor for free to do it, because mostly they enjoy doing it. So I mentioned that new faculty open mic series for new tenure-track faculty, and that everyone who’s involved with doing that does it because they’d love to do it. And it really energizes them as well as the participants. And so, I think, having those groups of folks coming together… Yes, people do want resources, they do want curated things… to learn how to use Brightspace, and that’s really important, and I think it’s also important to bring faculty together whenever you can, just to talk about a topic… any kind of opportunity you can have them critically reflecting with one another and doing it in a way that’s meaningfully tied to things that they’re constantly focused on in their teaching. I think that’s low hanging fruit, frankly, just when you get faculty together. It’s helpful if you have a budget for food and that sort of thing, but that’s not always possible. It’s even better if you have stipends to incentivize them to do that, but that’s usually not the case. And so, I think that that, mostly when you bring folks together and talk about things that really matter to them, usually has good results and doesn’t usually cost much.

John: On campuses, there has always been some differences in the degree to which faculty participate in professional development: some faculty will go to every possible workshop or training program, others you only see if there happens to be a global pandemic and they need to learn how to use Zoom or their gradebook in the LMS. What are some of the major barriers to professional development and to faculty engagement with professional development?

Chris: It’s just not valued, recognized, and rewarded enough, right? And let’s face it… not as much on community college campuses. I have an example I’m gonna talk about in a minute, on one of the community colleges where it is recognized, valued, and rewarded, and what a significant impact that’s having on that campus. But, and I’m not going to call any campuses out, but on many of the four-year campuses, it’s kind of folks who do it, actively do it because they feel like they need to do it and they do it because they care about their students. Not that the others don’t care, but that’s front of mind for them, they really know that they need to be continually improving to reach their students, to engage their students, especially those who are hard to engage. And, they they do it on their own time, and they burn the candle at both ends, because they have to do the other things that are recognized and rewarded. So that’s the first thing. One of the things when I first thought about with the last question is rather than just strategies for developers to do that don’t cost much, we’re advocates as well. Jessamyn, you alluded to this, I think we have to be advocates with administration, with faculty leaders, for the value of professional development, professional learning, and you need the folks at the very top level to buy into it. So the campus I was thinking of, Rockland Community College, has a Provost Faculty Scholars Program, where they’re incentivizing their faculty to go through the Lumen Circles program, which SUNY invests in and makes freely available to campuses, which are critical reflective practice groups, and they give them a small stipend to do it. They have them report back on campus. And again, the Provost is actively involved in the development of the program, the promotion of the program, and it goes into their tenure and promotion dossiers, and it’s recognizes you are doing the thing that we want you to do. And they have a lot of folks on campus doing it. So it gets back to that critical point of tipping the campus in favor of being a learning organization and not just everybody for themselves.

Rebecca: Juide, how about you?

Judie: The major barriers to faculty engagement with professional development, I’d say, as I am on a community college campus, and we don’t have Teaching and Learning Center, we don’t have any faculty developers full time. So we are a really lean ship, I guess, on our campus. Faculty development happens in pockets in different disciplines or out of my office, basically. And it comes down to time and money. Community colleges are broke right now. Our funding is FTE based, and as we see the enrollment go down, or the population decline in the northeast, or enrollment goes down, every enrollment we lose is money we don’t have. And we can’t offer… I mean, we could give them a sandwich maybe… [LAUGHTER] but we can’t give people money for engaging in anything. And to be totally honest with you, that always baffled me that people expect to be paid to learn something, when usually, we expect our students to pay to learn and here we’re offering training, but you don’t want to do it unless we pay you to learn it. Like it’s wrong to me, it’s an ethical dilemma, maybe for me. But we also on our faculty… I’m certainly not slamming them or saying that they’re all greedy, and they won’t do anything if they don’t have any money for it. They teach five and five, and they are on Senate, and they’re on search committees and they’re club advisors. And nothing happens if they don’t do it. They’re a huge driving force on our campus, and they have just as many responsibilities as all the rest of us and then to try to pile you got to come to this training, and you got to finish this project. And if you do this, and you do that, like there just aren’t the hours in the day. So, untill something traumatic or tremendous happens like COVID or like an LMS change, it’s very hard for them to find the time and when they do find the time like you said, Chris, they’re burning the candle at both ends. So we have to balance burning out faculty versus helping them improve their practice. And we just try to do that by being available all the time and having drop-in hours all the time and troubleshooting where we can and offering consistent programs so they can come when they are able to attend.

Jessamyn: I think one major barrier is actually I’m just going to echo what Chris said about it being acknowledged and valued. And following up on Judie’s point about the financial compensation, I would say and not being rewarded, but not necessarily financial, like rewarded in the sense of being acknowledged as a vital part of one’s job as a college instructor, and therefore, part and parcel of how you’re evaluated and reviewed. And there’s even some kind of professional development that should be considered important campus and department service. So like the department delegate program I mentioned earlier, where one member of a department comes in, does some stuff at the Center for Teaching Excellence and takes it back to their department, that is valuable service, it needs to be in people’s employment review and their tenure file, not as a individual extra thing they did for their own pedagogical fun, but as service contributing to the betterment of the department and the campus and for students. So that’s a sort of top-down barrier to faculty engagement. And I think we also need to own, as faculty developers, something Flower Darby mentioned in her podcast with you that faculty development and advice to people about teaching can’t be a one-size-fits-all framework, that teaching contexts are very different, impacted by social identities and embodied identity. So that’s on us, on the people providing faculty development and advice about teaching, to better acknowledge disparate teaching realities. That’s Roxanna Harlow’s phrase: “disparate teaching realities,” inequities facing our instructors. So I guess that’s like the top-down, bottom-up and then sort of in the middle academic culture generally, academic culture that tends to not value pedagogical learning the same way it values research insights or knowledge production. It should be part and parcel. I mean, we’re a bunch of smarty pants academics, right? Like, we love knowledge, that’s why we’re here, it’s that this should be part of that. This should be respected and seen as part of the work we do, as knowledge creators in this world.

Chris: I just want to address the whole issue of if you’re lucky enough to have a budget or a grant to pay people to do professional development. So I’m totally of two minds on this. On the one hand, I totally agree with Judie, in that there is an ethical issue here, you’re being paid to do something that you should be doing anyway, just as part and parcel of your job. And yet, in many cases, campuses are investing in the resources that you’re taking advantage of. And that just added cost and makes it less sustainable over time, and more expensive, and it creates that culture of I’m not going to do it unless I get paid. And so there is a real, I guess, hazard there when you introduce the piece around paying people to do things that they ought to be doing anyway. But on the other hand, I’ve kind of come to see it as a way to help people be accountable for doing that work and whenever I’ve been in a situation where we’ve paid people to do professional learning, it’s usually not compensation for their time. It’s more just a way to kind of say, “Hey, here’s just a little sweetener to make it more of a priority and to remember, “Oh, yeah, I’m getting that money, I better do the thing I said I was gonna do. When we have the grants that we have through system, we gave everybody a stipend for participating. And, we had almost everybody complete all the surveys and give us all the data that we wanted for it. And so, I think it’s,, used correctly and used very judiciously, it can be effective, but it’s a problem that I think many of us would be lucky to have and most of the campuses that are using it are usually using grant funds and not just their budgetary state funds to do that sort of thing.

Jessamyn: One thing I’ve done for the department delegates which was a big investment of time, so it wasn’t like they came to one workshop, it was this big thing they did all semester. I was able to offer an honorarium. So honorarium sort of in the sense of like, what it really means. It was a miniscule amount of money. But it was symbolic of that I wanted to try to acknowledge in some way and honor the time and effort that they’ve made.

Rebecca: So now we’re gonna move to audience questions. There was a question early on, before we actually started recording about strategies to reach hard to reach students. And so I’m wondering what you all might be able to offer to that question.

Judie: On our campus, we have an early intervention system. And we have different departments that are involved in that, and they work together to create reports that can be disseminated between our success coaches who work with all students and our online specialists who work with what we call the truly distant students. And so if I can’t reach somebody in one of my classes, or another faculty member isn’t getting a response from a student, we can turn to these other resources, and ask other people to try to help us connect with the students to find out what’s going on. Sometimes that helps a lot when you reach out and say,” Hey, can you just check in with me? I want to know how you are.” But some you just never reach and they have different reasons of their own for just stepping away. And unfortunately, that happens sometimes.

Chris: I think this is where the siloing is the worst on campuses, between folks who work in the academic side of the house, and those who work in student supports, student affairs. That’s where I like to see student success initiatives. There’s a recent report by Achieving the Dream and it was about professional learning as essential for any student success initiatives. And those of you don’t know Achieving the Dream, they do a lot of work with Guided Pathways and they work in a lot of community college campuses. And so, that was the gist of the report is that, if you’re going to have a student success initiative, you have to involve the faculty and the faculty have to see their participation in those initiatives as part of their own professional learning, because they’re working with students daily in different capacities, they see students, you know, whole students, not just the student in my section, and those are the things that we said, faculty are doing more and more of now, trying to see their students as whole people and not just when they see them three days a week or whatever.

Jessamyn: Yeah, I really agree with both of you that there has to be a systemic response. And like, Kevin Gannon, I think on your podcast, I heard him say there are things we can pedagogy our way out of, and student success is one of those things that the broader system needs to support as well. I would just add one, one thing, and the only reason it’s on my mind is because I this semester was added to what was called as called the Student Success Consortium on my campus, and at the end of one meeting, they turned to me and said, ”So, if you could do one thing, what should we do?” I was like, “Oh, no pressure,” but I did think of something, and that is: if, on an individual basis, what instructors can ensure that students have numerous on-ramps when they get off track, and that a lot of students disappearing and ghosting is because they flub something, or they’ve made one misstep or they’ve missed one assignment. And if it’s not drilled into their heads: “there’s a way back, there’s a way back, there’s a way back,” then, it’s really easy to spiral into, “I’m done, I failed, I can’t. So I’m just going to avoid it.” So I ended up saying, ”that was one thing I could change was to ensure every class offered students clear, consistent, and repeated reminders about the ways to get back on track when you stumble.

Rebecca: Lots to think about for sure. There is one question that’s come in, and it’s an anonymous question, it says: “To the best of your knowledge, is it against the state rules to lobby vendors to provide professional learning programs to various colleges, or maybe even your take on doing that?”

Chris: So we just did these two projects, Tools for HyFlex courses and Tools for Large Courses, and we also work with Lumen Learning to do the Lumen Circles. So, I’m no expert on procurement, [LAUGHTER] but my understanding is that if whatever is spent is within a certain threshold, it’s acceptable to engage with vendors to try to meet needs that you have, and the POD organization actually, a few years ago, had in EDUCAUSE a guide for faculty development folks, for educational developers, to working with vendors, because when I first started doing this work, I tried to keep them at arm’s length, and like, we could do this in house, and I had this kind of can do attitude. But as I’ve gotten a fewer years under my belt, I have a different attitude now, and that we can certainly work productively with partners who are working in a space where they’re trying to make money off of whatever they’re doing, be it educational technology, or a faculty development kind of thing. And you just have to, as Jassamyn said earlier, do it within the context of your institution and what you need it for. You shouldn’t just think you’re gonna buy something off the shelf, and just think “I’m just gonna plop it in here, it’s just going to work.” I’ll bring Rockland up again, they’re incorporating the Lumen Circles in their campus with already pre-existing programs, they hired somebody to coordinate the faculty going through it. And so it just needs to be mindfully incorporated into the things that you’re doing. And so that applies, like I said, to either faculty development, educational technology, or anything beyond the LMS that you want to bring on your campus to help faculty work with students.

Rebecca: Sounds like a way to extend some sustainability to the work that you all do by leaning on some other resources.

John: We have a second question, which is, “Is there a repository that lists free webinars for faculty development?” and the person submitting said they pass out a list of those through email on their campus. How can you find free webinars?

Judie: Oh, I think lists like the POD listserv. I’ve been to so many AI webinars lately, and I haven’t paid for anything and then once you become familiar with who offers them, you get on their mailing list. For example, I did the Project Management Conference at Arizona State University, and those people are awesome. And they run all kinds of programs, and they’ve never charged anything to me. Oh wait, let me rephrase that. [LAUGHTER] They don’t say we like that, Judie Littlejohn, she’s free. though. They advertise their free offerings externally. And so I take advantage of those. But, once you start to discover these, it feels like they just lead to more and you can see like on LinkedIn, the different social media outlets, and even reading different articles. In Inside Higher Ed, you’ll read articles about different opportunities that are free. And that’s where I find them. I don’t try to assemble them in a list though. That’s an interesting idea. So, every Friday, I send an email out to all our faculty, it’s just our Brightspace update (that’s what I call it), but it’s not always Brightspace related what I list under there, but it generally is. But I will if I find things, especially the SUNY offerings, I always list exactly what faculty are welcome to take advantage of that they don’t have to go through us for, they can do that on their own. A lot of people are very appreciative of those. So it’s helpful, but I do like that idea of trying to put a list together to share or have posted on a site that people could go and look at when they want to.

Jessamyn: I’m gonna add a cautionary note, though, I do think people appreciate resources, but you can also overwhelm them with resources, when people are stressed and cognitive, you know, have a cognitive overload. And here comes Jessamyn like, here’s just five books you should read and two webinars you should attend and come to my workshop next week. I’ll have people that are like, “Uhhhh, guess what, I’m gonna ghost you now [LAUGHTER] and I’m gonna just avoid the whole thing, because it looks too overwhelming.” So, it’s an overused word, but I curate, like I really, really carefully curate before I send out any recommendations. I’ve cut way back, even on providing things through my site to people, because it got overwhelming. Again, campus culture really matters, but I would curate carefully.

Chris: Yeah, we have just at the Center for Professional Development, we do have a faculty development playlist on our YouTube channel. So if you just look up SUNY Center for Professional Development on YouTube, and faculty development playlists, we do have a bunch there, everything that we do gets tagged that way. The POD google group is a good thing. What I usually do when I’m looking for something is I do a Google search for whatever I’m looking for and then I look to see if it’s on a Teaching and Learning Center website. There are some that are really good, Vanderbilt is good. I know that there was maybe some issue of some of those resources being taken down. I hope they’re not. Carnegie Mellon, I know, has a lot of great resources. So there are a few teaching and learning centers that put a lot of time and effort and energy into curating great faculty development resources. So that’s what I would do. That’s what I do. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: I’m gonna throw out another kind of maybe radical idea for the attendees here at CIT. I think webinars can be very valuable, but I also have seen and in my personal experience, building our pedagogical toolkit often happens conversation by conversation, or seeing somebody do something. So at a conference that we’re at right now, a lot of the presentations, sometimes it’s the content, and sometimes it’s just what somebody did while they were presenting the content, or the conversation I had with you… it could be via Zoom or it could be an email, but an interaction that flips a switch, “Oh, I could do that.” It seems like a lot of pedagogical learning, like all learning happens incrementally, it takes a lot of practice and hearing it many times and trying it out. Webinars definitely have a place for sure, especially for Brightspace-a-zation… [LAUGHTER] Brightspace-a-size, yes and LMS stuff for sure. But some of the things that we do in our classroom, it’s less about being buried under content and more about connecting with someone else talking about what’s working, what’s not working, repeat.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for wonderful advice throughout our panel today. But we always wrap up by asking: what’s next?

Judie: Well, I can answer that one. Jessamyn said some phrases that I’ve never heard on our campus such as yearly action plan, and monthly activity reports. And I thought, “Oh, my goodness, this is a thing.” So maybe we could, as we’re trying to add more staff into the Online Learning Office this fall, I’d like to try to come up with things like that and have a more predictable approach, perhaps for the, you know, from the faculty side, of what sort of professional development opportunities we might be aiming for. And when they can expect them to happen. I like that idea.

Chris: And I’m always thinking about how to connect folks across SUNY who do this work so that they can share with each other because I do think there are unique things about working within SUNY that would make it so worthwhile for folks in SUNY to connect to our supporting faculty. POD is great. It’s an national and international network, but I do think there’s lots of affordances of just talking occasionally amongst ourselves.

Jessamyn: Well, I knew this question was coming. And I am going to take this opportunity to give the world premiere of my working title for my next book project that I am working on this summer. It’s called Snafu edu:Teaching and learning when things go wrong in the college classroom, and I’m working on a manuscript, it’s for West Virginia University Press in their teaching and learning in higher ed series. And I know nobody in this room, nothing ever goes wrong in your classroom, but for the rest of the people who teach, things go wrong.

Rebecca: Snafu.edu?

Jessamyn: Snafu edu.

Rebecca: I like it. I like

John: Have you grabbed the web address yet?

Jessamyn: I have. [LAUGHTER]

John: Okay.

Jessamyn: I have.

Rebecca: Well, thank you, everyone. We appreciate you participating today.

Jessamyn: Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca.

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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.

[MUSIC]

179. It’s Been a Year

A year ago, our campus announced that it was shutting down for a two-week pause so that the COVID-19 pandemic could be brought under control. To help faculty prepare for remote instruction, we released our first episode of many on March 19, 2020, with Flower Darby. We thought this would be a good moment to pause and reflect on this journey.

Show Notes

  • Flower Darby (2020). “Pandemic Related Remote Learning.” Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 126. March 19.
  • Todd, E. M., Watts, L. L., Mulhearn, T. J., Torrence, B. S., Turner, M. R., Connelly, S., & Mumford, M. D. (2017). A meta-analytic comparison of face-to-face and online delivery in ethics instruction: the case for a hybrid approach. Science and Engineering Ethics, 23(6), 1719-1754.
  • Means, B., Toyama, Y., Murphy, R., Bakia, M., & Jones, K. (2009). Evaluation of evidence-based practices in online learning: A meta-analysis and review of online learning studies.
  • Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do about It. Basic Books.
  • Linda Nilson (2019). “Specifications Grading.” Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 86. August 21.
  • Susan Blum (2020). “Peagogies of Care: Upgrading.” Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 145.  July 22.

Transcript

Rebecca: A year ago, our campus announced that it was shutting down for a two-week pause so that the COVID-19 pandemic could be brought under control. To help faculty prepare for remote instruction, we released our first episode of many on March 19, 2020, with Flower Darby We thought this would be a good moment to pause and reflect on this journey.

[MUSIC]

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.

[MUSIC]

John: Our teas today are:

Rebecca: I’m drinking English Afternoon for the first time in about a year. Because I’ve been home, and working from home, I’ve been drinking pots of loose leaf tea instead of bag teas. And so I’m bringing back the comfort of a year ago.

John: And we still have in the office several boxes of English A fternoon tea, but they are wrapped in plastic. So I’m hoping they’ll still be in good shape when we finally get back there …once this two week pause that we started about a year ago, ends.

Rebecca: Yeah, when we recorded that Flower Darby episode was the last time we saw each other in person.

John: Well, there was one other time…

Rebecca: Oh, when you dropped off equipment.

John: I dropped off a microphone and a mixer for you so that we could continue with this podcast. Actually, I think we saw each other from a distance because I left it on the porch because I had just come back from Long Island where infection rates were very high.

Rebecca: Are you drinking tea, John?

John: …and I am drinking Tea Forte black currant tea today.

Rebecca: A good favorite. So John, can you talk a little bit about where you were at mentally and just even conceptually, in terms of online teaching and things,when the pandemic started a year ago,

John: We were starting to hear about some school closings in other countries and in some cities in the US where COVID infection rates were starting to pick up and it started to look more and more likely that we’d be moving into a shutdown, in the week before we were to go to spring break. I was teaching at the time one fully asynchronous online class and two face-to-face classes. When it was looking more and more like we’d shut down I talked to my face-to-face classes about what options we’d have should we go online for some period of time. And I shared with them how we could use Zoom for this. And we had already used Zoom a few times for student presentations when students were out sick or had car trouble and couldn’t make it into class. Because they were actively using computers or mobile devices every day in class, anyway, they all had either computers or smartphones with them. And I had them download Zoom and test it out, asking them to mute their mics. And very quickly, they learned why I asked them to do that. I wasn’t very concerned because we’ve been doing workshops at our teaching center for many years now with remote participants. And we’ve been using Zoom for at least five years or so now. So I wasn’t really that concerned about the possibilities for this. And I thought the online class would go very much like it had and the face-to-face classes would work in a very similar way… for the short period that we were expecting to be shut down. I think even at the time, many of us thought that this would be somewhat longer, but I wasn’t terribly concerned at the time, because infection rates were still pretty low. And I think we were all hopeful that this would be a short-run experience.

Rebecca: And also maybe the fact that you’ve taught online before didn’t hurt.

John: Yeah, I’ve been teaching online since 1997, I believe. And so I was pretty comfortable with that and I wasn’t concerned at all about the fully online class, I was a little more concerned about the students who were used to the face-to-face experience adapting to a Zoom environment.

Rebecca: I had a really different experience because I was on sabbatical in the spring working on some research projects related to accessibility. Because of that, I was able to quickly adapt and be able to help some communities that I’m a part of, related to professional development. So I stepped in and helped a little bit with our center and did a couple workshops and helped on a couple of days with that. And I also helped with our SUNY-wide training too, and offered some workshops related to accessibility and inclusive teaching at that time. And the professional association for design locally, we had a couple of little support groups for design faculty.

John: I wasn’t too concerned about my classes, but I was a little bit more concerned about all the faculty that we had who had never taught online. And so, as you just said, we put together a series of workshops for about a week and a half over our spring break helping faculty to get ready for the transition to what we’re now calling remote instruction.

Rebecca: At that time, too. I had no experience teaching online, I’d used Blackboard and things like that before, but not to fully teach online. So for me, it was a really different experience. And I was helping and coaching faculty through some of those transitions too, not really having had much experience myself. So I had the benefit, perhaps, of seeing where people stumbled before I had to teach in the fall. But I also didn’t get any practice prior to fall like some people did with some forgiveness factors built into the emergency nature of the spring.

John: I think for most faculty, it was a very rapid learning process in the spring and instruction wasn’t quite at the level I think anyone was used to, but I think institutions throughout the country were encouraging faculty to do the best that they could, knowing that this was an emergency situation, and I’m amazed at how quickly faculty adapted to this environment overall.

Rebecca: One of the things that I thought was gonna be really interesting to ask you about today, John, was about online instruction, because you have such a rich history teaching online, and there are so many new faculty teaching online, although in a different format than perhaps online education research talks about. Many people taught asynchronously for the first time, but there’s also a lot of faculty teaching online in a synchronous fashion. There’s a lot less research around that. How do you see this experience impacting online education long term.

John: I don’t think this is going to have much of a dramatic impact on asynchronous online instruction in the long term. Online instruction is not new, it’s been going on for several decades now. There’s a very large body of literature on what works effectively in online instruction. And under normal circumstances, when students are online and faculty are online because they choose to be, online instruction works really well. And there’s a lot of research that suggests that when asynchronous courses are well designed, building on what we know about effective online teaching strategies, they’re just as effective as well designed face-to-face classes. However, a lot of people are trying to draw lessons from what we’re observing today. And what we’re observing today, for the most part, does not resemble what online education normally is, primarily because the students who are there, and many faculty who are there, are there not by choice, but by necessity. And one of the things that has come up in some recent Twitter conversations, as well as conversations that we’ve had earlier, is that many online students in asynchronous classes have been asking for synchronous meetings. In several decades of teaching online, I’ve never seen that happen before, and now it’s very routine. And I think a lot of the issue there is that, in the past, most online students were there for very specific reasons. So they may have had work schedules that would not allow them to sign up for synchronous classes. Some of them are in shift work, some of them were on rotating shifts where they couldn’t have fixed times of availability. Some of them would have large distances to commute and it just wasn’t feasible, or they were taking care of family members who were ill, or as part of their job, they were required to travel. In most of the online classes I’ve had in the past, there were some students who were out of state or out of the country. I had students during the Gulf War who were on a ship, the only time they missed a deadline was when their ship went on radio silence before some of the attacks down there. They simply would not have been able to participate in synchronous instruction in any way. And I think a lot of the people who are now taking asynchronous classes, strongly prefer a synchronous modality and are disappointed that they’re not in that. And I think a lot of what we’re seeing is a response to that and I think we shouldn’t ignore all the research that has come out about effective online techniques in light of the current pandemic, because this is not how online instruction normally has occurred. And people are in very different circumstances now in terms of their physical wellbeing in terms of their emotional well being and just general stress.

Rebecca: Yeah, during the pandemic, many more people are in isolation, and might really be craving some of that social interaction that they might not expect out of an online class traditionally, especially if it’s an asynchronous class. But if you’re just alone, and you’re not going out of your house, there might be more of a desire during this one moment of time …this one really long moment of time. [LAUGHTER]

John: During this two-week pause? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah. One other thing, I guess, is important to note as we’re talking about research and what evidence shows is that hybrid can be really effective with the combination of in-person instruction complementing some asynchronous online instruction. And of course, in that traditional research, hybrid really means this in- person and then asynchronous online, this synchronous online thing wasn’t really a thing prior to the pandemic. [LAUGHTER]

John: Right. And we can’t really draw too many conclusions about this giant worldwide experiment that’s being done in less than optimal conditions without really having a control of normal instruction to compare it to. And yeah, several meta-analyses have found that while face-to-face and asynchronous online instruction are equally effective, hybrid instruction often has come out ahead in terms of the learning gains that students have experienced. Certainly, we know a lot about hybrid instruction, face-to-face instruction, and asynchronous online, but not the modality that larger of our students are in. One other factor is that when people signed up for online classes before, they did it knowing that they had solid internet connections, they knew they had computers that were capable of supporting online instructional environments. They had good bandwidth and so forth. That’s not the situation In which many of our students and faculty are working right now, because faculty and students often do not have any of those things. And they’re often working in suboptimal environments that are crowded, where there’s other people in the household sharing the same space. And it makes it really difficult to engage in remote asynchronous or synchronous work as they might have when they chose to be in that modality.

Rebecca: I do think that, during this time, though, into kind of forced online instruction, although there are certainly people who don’t like that they’ve been forced to be online, and they prefer to be synchronous or in person, I think there’s a cohort of people who thought online education wasn’t for them, both faculty and students, who have discovered that it actually really does work for them. And even me, although I teach web design and do things online, you’d think online education would seem obvious to me. But in the past, it hadn’t really occurred to me. Our education tends to be in person, and you tend to replicate what you’ve experienced. [LAUGHTER] And although I have taken some online courses related to design and technology and coding in the past, it hadn’t really occurred to me to consider some options. And I think what we’ve discovered is some of our courses work well in this modality and some don’t. Some of our courses are better positioned to be potentially online or work well in that format, and could help with some collaboration pieces, or some other things that we might be doing. It might support the work that we were already trying to do in person.

John: And I think now, all faculty have gotten much more comfortable with a wider variety of teaching techniques and teaching tools than they would have experienced before. For many faculty, just having dropboxes in the learning management system was something new, moving away from paper assignments was something very new. And suddenly, faculty were asked to use a wide variety of instructional tools that they had been very careful to avoid doing in the past. And one of the things that struck me is how many of the people in our workshops who’ve said that they were perfectly comfortable teaching in a face-to-face environment, and they just didn’t see the need for, or they didn’t think that online instruction could work for them. And now that they’ve tried all these new tools and these new approaches, they’re never going to go back to the traditional way in which they were teaching. So I think there are going to be a lot of things that people have learned during this that they’ll take back into their future instruction, even if it is primarily in a face-to-face environment.

Rebecca: It may also be some changes in technology policies in the classroom as well related to just seeing how helpful technology can be for learning, but also where it can be distracting. So I think there’s some reconsideration of what that might mean.

John: While there haven’t been so many things that I’ve enjoyed during the pandemic, one of them is that this whole issue of technology bans have pretty much fallen to the wayside. I’m not hearing faculty complaining about students using computers during their class time now. And that’s a nice feature, and perhaps faculty can appreciate how mobile devices can be an effective learning tool. And yes, there will have to be more discussions such as one we’re having in our reading group this semester, where we’re reading Jim Lang’s Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What We Can Do About It. There’s a lot of discussion about when technology is appropriate, and when it’s not in those meetings. But I think faculty have come to recognize how ed tech can be useful in some ways, at least in their instruction, whether it’s in person or whether it’s remote.

Rebecca: I think it’s also important to note that how some of the synchronous technology, video conferencing technology like Zoom, has some advantages, even if our class is not synchronous online. It could just be an in person class in the future. We’ve seen the power of being able to bring guests in easily without having to deal with logistics of traveling and the scheduling considerations that are often involved with that. We don’t have the disruptions and education related to snow days and illness, both on the faculty and student side. Obviously, that depends on how severe the illness is, right? [LAUGHTER] Professional development has worked out really well online, although we’ve done online or had a Zoom component where you can kind of Zoom and being all on the same platform at the same time has been really great, being able to take advantage of breakout rooms and things like that. We’ve seen record numbers attend, and then also with advisement and office hours. It can be really intimidating to have to find an advisor’s or a faculty member’s office and you have to physically go there. And then it’s kind of intimidating. What if the door’s shut? What if they’re look like they’re busy? [LAUGHTER] There’s all these things that can get in the way that online or Zoom calls can just remove some of those barriers and also allow for more flexibility because now you don’t have to plan for walking across campus which might take some time. Or you might be able to squeeze in something at a time you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

John: And a lot of our commuting students are commuting from 30 to 60 miles away, and it was not terribly convenient for them to have to drive up to campus at a time that was convenient for their professors just for the chance of sitting there and talking to them for a few minutes. So, the access is much easier using Zoom or other remote tools.

Rebecca: We should also get real. Zoom fatigue is a real, real, thing. It’s about 4:30 right now that we’re recording. We’ve both been on Zoom calls since early this morning. And kind of constant. Our students have been as well. There’s no let up, there’s no breaks. We don’t get the little stroll across campus to the next meeting. [LAUGHTER] There’s none of that. One of the things that I am experiencing, as someone who’s definitely introverted, is this performative nature of being on camera all the time. And I know our students are too. And John and I were talking about this a little earlier today, that, in the fall, I had tons of students participating with their cameras on and their microphones on, and even in the beginning of the spring, but there’s something about the dead of winter in Oswego, that kind of Doomsday nature of it, it’s gray here. And then the black boxes just kind of emphasize it further. And they’re not as visible as they had been before. And I think it’s partly because it’s so performative, and you’re being watched all the time. And it’s not necessarily not wanting to participate or feel like you’re present. But really, it’s just a little much.

John: And neither of us pressure our students to turn their cameras on. We welcome that, we invite them to do that, but we know there are some really sound reasons not to, because people are often working in environments that they don’t want to share with their classmates or with their faculty members. And they may have bandwidth issues and so forth. But it is really tedious to be talking to those black boxes. And as Rebecca and I talked about earlier, both of us are also creating videos. So, we get to talk to our web cameras a lot, and then we go to class, and we talk to our students. Most of our students, I think, turn their microphones on. So we get to hear them one at a time. But it’s challenging to be talking to people you can’t see all day long.

Rebecca: I think it’s particularly challenging for faculty, because there’s more of an expectation for faculty to have their cameras on both in class and in meetings than students. So I think there’s an extra level of fatigue that’s happening with faculty and staff, because it’s more performance more of the time. Some days, I really feel like I wish I could be a student and I could just turn my camera off.

John: I have a night class that meets for about three hours. And typically when we met face-to-face, we’d take a 7 to 10 minute break in the middle of that. I asked the students if they wanted to do that the first two weeks, and each time they said “No.” I said, “Well, if you need to get up, use a restroom, or walk around, please do it. But what I wasn’t considering is the fact that, while they were doing that, I was still here interacting with them the whole time. And that three-hour session can be a bit challenging by the end of it, particularly if you’ve been drinking a lot of tea.

Rebecca: That’s actually important to note that, kind of unusually, John and I are both teaching three-hour classes, that’s probably not the norm for most faculty. I’m teaching studio classes. So for one class, it’s three hours of time, two times a week, and you’re teaching a seminar class, right, John, that’s three hours?

John: Yes, that meets once a week.

Rebecca: These longer sessions, we can break up by physically moving around the classroom and things when we’re in person, it becomes more of a challenge online. And I know that I’ve been thinking more about the orchestra of it all and changing it up in my classes. So we might do something in small groups then may do something as a big group, we participate in a whiteboard activity, then we might do something else, then we take a break, then we try to do something that’s off screen for a little bit and then come back. And so I’ve tried to build in some opportunities for myself as well to be able to turn my camera off at least for a few minutes during that three-hour time or take a little bit of that time during breakout sessions or whatever, because I need a break too. Our good friend Jessamyn Neuhaus has mentioned this to us many times before, that we’re not superheroes, and we should stop trying to be superheroes. And this seems like a good moment to remind ourselves of this as well. I know for me, it’s like I need a snack, I need to go to the bathroom, I need a drink. I would do that in a physical class. I take breaks then. So I’ve been making sure we build it in, and actually even padding it a little bit and giving people longer breaks than I would in person.

John: And our campus, recognizing the challenges that faculty faced with this last fall, put in two wellness days where no classes were held, and people were encouraged to engage in activities to give them that sort of break. I’m not sure about you, but I ended up spending about seven and a half hours of that day in meetings that were scheduled by various people on campus.

Rebecca: Yeah, and students also said that they ended up really needing that time to just catch up, because the workload in terms of student work hasn’t reduced, but being on screen has increased for most people, and you just need some time away. So, it ends up taking more hours of the day, just in terms of logistics, if you actually going to give your eyes a break and things. I did a little survey of my classes and they said they spent a lot of that time kind of catching up, although maybe the pace of the day was a little slower.

John: Going back to the issue of cameras being on, one of our colleagues on campus did a survey of the students in her class asking why they chose not to have their cameras on. And the response seemed to indicate that a lot of it was peer pressure, that as more and more students turn the cameras off, they became odd to leave them on. So I think many of us have experienced the gradual darkening of our screens from the fall to the spring,

Rebecca: I found that there’s some strategies to help with that as well. One of the things I did last week was invite students to participate in a whiteboard activity online indicating what they expected their peers to do so that they felt like they were engaged or part of a community. What should they do in a breakout? And what does participation look like in an online synchronous class? And they want all the things we wanted them too. They said, like, “Oh, I want people to engage.” And we talked about what that means, that it might mean participating in chat, it might mean having the cameras on, and things like that. And that day, right after that conversation, so many people during that conversation turn their cameras on. So in part, it’s about reminding, or just pointing out that it’s not very welcoming to have not even a picture up.

John: And this is something you’ve suggested in previous podcasts to that, while we’re not going to ask students to leave their cameras on to create a more inclusive environment, you could encourage students to put pictures up.

Rebecca: Yeah, we feel as humans more connected when we see human faces. So we feel much more connected than looking at black boxes. [LAUGHTER] So I’ve definitely encouraged my students. On the first day, I gave instructions to all the students about how to do that. And then when we had our conversation the other day, when I was starting to feel the darkening of the classroom and more cameras came on, I also just invited and encouraged everyone else. If you can’t have your camera on, or you have a tendency not to be able to put your camera on, that’s not a problem, but we would really welcome seeing your face or some representation of you as an image.

John: What are some of the positive takeaways faculty will take from this into the future?

Rebecca: It’s been interesting, because we’ve had far more faculty participating in professional development opportunities, initially out of complete necessity, like “I don’t know how to use Blackboard” and starting with digital tools and technologies, and then asking bigger and more complicated questions about quality instruction online as they gained some confidence in the technical skills. So there’s some competency there that I think is really great. And that’s leading to faculty wanting to use some of these tools in classes, it might mean just using Blackboard so that the assignments are there, and the due dates are more present, and just kind of some logistical things to help students keep organized. But also, there’s a lot of really great tools that, as we mentioned earlier, that faculty have discovered that they want to use in their classes. So maybe it’s polling and doing low-stakes testing in their classes during the class. I’ve discovered using these virtual whiteboards, which actually logistically work better than physical whiteboards in a lot of cases in the things that we’re doing, because everyone can see what their collaborators are doing better. So there’s a lot of tools that I think faculty are going to incorporate throughout the work that they’re doing. But also they’ve learned a lot more evidence-based practices. And maybe you want to talk a little bit about that, John,

John: At the start of the pandemic, the initial workshops, were mostly “How do I use Zoom?” But very quickly, even back in March, we also talked a little bit about how we can use evidence-based practices that build on what we know about teaching and learning. In the spring, there wasn’t much faculty could do in the last couple of months to change their courses. But we did encourage them to move from high-stakes exams to lower-stakes assessments to encourage students to engage more regularly with material, to space out their practice, and so forth. And at the start of the summer, we put together a mini workshop for faculty on how to redesign their courses for whatever was going to happen in the fall. And it was basically a course redevelopment workshop, where we focused primarily on what research shows about how we learn and how we can build our courses in ways that would foster an environment where students might learn more effectively. Our morning sessions were based primarily on pedagogy and then in the afternoon, we’d go over some sessions on how you can implement that in a remote or an asynchronous environment, giving people a choice of different ways of implementing it. By the start of the summer, people were starting to think about doing things like polling, about doing low-stakes testing, or mastery learning quizzing, and so forth. And people started to implement that in the fall. And then we had another series of workshops in January. We normally have really good participation, but we had, I believe, over 2000 attendees at sessions during our January sessions. And during those sessions, we had faculty presenting on all the things that they’d learned and how they were able to implement new teaching techniques. And it was one of the most productive set of workshops we’ve ever had here, I believe. And what really struck me is how smoothly faculty had transitioned to a remote environment. At the start of the pandemic and during spring break, we were encouraging people to attend remotely and yet faculty mostly wanted to sit in the classroom with us, and we wanted to stay as far away from those people as we could. But about half the people attended virtually. Butwhat’s been happening as people were getting more and more comfortable attending remotely and we’ve been offering the option of people attending virtually since I took over as the Director of the teaching center back in 2008, I believe. However, we rarely had more than a few people attending remotely. And it was always a challenge for people to be participating fully when they were remote while other people were in the same room, which gave us some concerns about how this was going to work in the reduced capacity classrooms that many colleges, including ours, were going to implement in the fall. And we knew we didn’t really have the microphones in the rooms that would allow remote participants to hear everyone in the room and vice versa. Once we switched entirely online, where all the participants in the workshops were in Zoom, it’s been much more effective to have everyone attending in the same way, so that we didn’t have some people participating in the classroom and others attending remotely. And I think that, combined with faculty becoming more comfortable with using Zoom, has allowed us to reach more faculty more effectively.

Rebecca: One of the things that I saw so powerful this January, in our experience on our campus, was all of the faculty who volunteered to do sessions and talk about their experiences and support other faculty experimenting with things. And I think it was just this jolt that caused us all to have to try something new, that was really, really powerful. We all get stuck. Even those of us that know evidence-based techniques, we get stuck in our routines, and sometimes just allow inertia to move us forward and replicate what we’ve done before because it’s easier, it saves time, and we have a lot on our plates. And it’s really about being efficient, because we just have too much to do. So it was nice, in a weird way, to have that jolt to try some new things. I heard some great things from faculty that I’ve never heard from before I learned some things from some other faculty. And it was really exciting. And the personal place in my heart that I get most excited about, of course, is how many faculty got really excited about things related to inclusive pedagogy, and equity, and accessibility. We offered, on our campus a 10-day accessibility challenge that we opened up to faculty, staff, and students as part of our winter conference sessions. And we had record accessibility attendance… never seen so many people interested in accessibility before. But that came out of the experience of the spring and the fall, and people really seeing equity issues and experiencing it with their students. They witnessed it in a way that it was easy to ignore previously. And so I think that faculty, throughout this whole time, have cared about the experience that students have and want students to have equity. They just didn’t realize the disparity that existed amongst our students. And the students saw the disparity that existed amongst students, which was a really powerful moment, really disturbing for some students who had to share that moment with other people, but also a really useful experience for faculty to really buy into some of these practices about building community, about making sure their materials were accessible. And all of that has resulted in a much higher quality education for our students.

John: It was really easy for faculty to ignore a lot of these inequities before, because the computer labs, the Wi Fi, the food services, and library services, and lending of equipment provided by institutions, compensated for a lot of those issues, so that disparities in income and wealth were somewhat hidden in the classroom. But once people moved home, many of those supports disappeared, despite the best efforts of campuses in providing students with WiFi access with hotspots or providing them with loaner computers. And those issues just became so much more visible. It’s going to be very hard for faculty to ignore those issues, I think, in the future, because it has impacted our ability to reach a lot of our students. And it has affected the ability of many of our students to fully participate in a remote environment. But going back to that point about people sharing, I also was really amazed by how willing people were to volunteer and share what they’ve learned in their experiences. Typically, when we put our January workshop schedule together, we call for workshop proposals from people. And we typically get 5 to 12 of those, and they’re often from our technical support people on campus. And it’s rare that we get faculty to volunteer. And normally we have to spend a few months getting faculty to volunteer so that we get maybe 20 or 30 faculty to talk about their experiences. We had about 50 people just volunteer without anything other than an initial request, and then a few more with a little nudging, so that we ended up with 107 workshops that were all very well attended. And there were some really great discussions there because, as you said, people were put in an environment where the old ways of doing things just didn’t work anymore, and it opened people up to change. We’ve been encouraging active learning and we’ve been encouraging changes in teaching practices. But this pretty much has reached just about everybody this time in ways that it would have been really difficult to reach all of our faculty before.

Rebecca: It’s easy during a time like a pandemic to just feel like the world’s tumbling down. And there’s no doubt about that. But it’s a time where I’ve also been really grateful to have such great colleagues. Because not only have we seen faculty supporting each other and using new technology, the advocacy that they’ve demonstrated on behalf of students who really had needs has been incredible. Likewise, for faculty, we’ve witnessed some really interesting conversations amongst faculty about ways to reduce their own repetitive stress injuries and other accessibility issues that faculty are also experiencing, equity issues that faculty are experiencing, caregiving responsibilities that are making things really challenging for faculty. But there’s a really strong network of support amongst each other to help everyone through and there’s no word to describe what that means other than being grateful for it, because people have been so supportive of each other. And that, to me, is pretty amazing.

John: Faculty have often existed in the silos of their departments. But this transition has broken down those silos. It’s built a sense of community in a lot of ways that we generally didn’t see extending as far beyond the department borders. There were always a lot of people who supported each other, but the extent to that is so much greater.

Rebecca: So we’ve been talking a lot about this faculty support. John, can you give a couple of examples of things that faculty have shared that have worked really well in their classes that they weren’t doing before?

John: One of the things that more and more faculty have been doing is introducing active learning activities and more group activities within their classes in either a synchronous or asynchronous environment. And that’s something that’s really helpful. And as we’ve encouraged faculty to move away from high-stakes assessment, and many faculty have worked much more carefully about scaffolding their assignments, so that large projects are broken up into smaller chunks that are more manageable, and students are getting more feedback regularly. Faculty, in general, I think, have been providing students with more support, because when in a classroom, you were just expecting students to ask any questions about something they didn’t understand. And sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. But I think faculty realize that in a remote environment, all those instructions have to be there for students. So in general, I think faculty are providing students with more support, more detailed instructions, and often creating videos to help explain some of the more challenging parts that they might normally have expected students to ask about during a face-to-face class meeting.

Rebecca: I think previously, although faculty want to be supportive, they may not have been aware of some of the mental and emotional health challenges that students face generally, but have been amplified during the pandemic. Students who might experience anxiety or depression and how that impacts their ability to focus, their ability to organize themselves and organize their time, all of those things have become much more visible, just like those equity issues. And so I think that faculty are becoming more aware of that emotional piece of education and making sure that people feel supported so that they can be successful. And even just that kind of warm language piece of it, and being welcoming, and just indicating, like, “Hey, how are you doing? I really do care about what’s going on with you.” And having those chit chat moments sometimes even in a synchronous online class, open up that discussion and help students feel like they’re part of the community and really help address some of those issues that students are facing.

John: And I think a lot of the discussion is how can we build this class community when we move away from a physical classroom. So there have been many discussions, and many productive discussions, on ways of building this class community and helping to maintain instructor presence in asynchronous classes, as well as helping to maintain human connections when we’re all distanced, somehow.

Rebecca: I think that also points out the nature of some of our in-person classes and the assumptions that we made, that there were human connections being made in class when maybe they weren’t, or maybe there wasn’t really a community being built, because students may also not know each other there. So I think some of the lessons of feeling isolated maybe themselves, or seeing their students feel isolated, has led faculty to develop and take the time to do more community-building activities. So that there is that support network in place sp that students are able to learn, the more supported they feel, the more confident they feel, the more willing or open they’re going to be to learning and having that growth mindset.

John: And we’re hoping that all these new skills that faculty have acquired, will transition very nicely when we move to a more traditional face-to-face environment in the fall.

Rebecca: …or sometime ever… [LAUGHTER]

John: At some point, yes. [LAUGHTER] But one thing we probably should talk about is something I know we both have experienced is the impact on faculty workloads.

Rebecca: It’s maybe grown just a little, John, I don’t know about you, but there’s some of it that has to do with just working in a different modality than you’re used to. So there’s some startup costs of just learning new techniques. Then there’s also the implementation of using certain kinds of technology that are a little more time consuming to set up than in person. So, the example I was giving to someone the other day was, I might do a whiteboard activity in person that requires me to grab some markers and some sticky notes. That’s my setup. But in an online environment, I need to have that organized and have designated areas for small groups. And I need to have prompts put up. And there’s a lot of structural things that need to be in place for that same activity to happen online, it can happen very seamlessly online, but there’s some time required to set it up. So there’s that. We’ve also all learned how low-stakes is so great, and how scaffolding is so great, but now there’s more grading. And somehow, I think there’s more meetings.

John: Yes, but in terms of that scaffolding, we’re assessing student work more regularly, we’re providing them with more feedback. And also going back to the issue of support materials, many of us are creating new videos. And when I first started teaching, it was very much the norm for people to lecture. And basically, my preparation was going into the cabinet and grabbing a couple of pieces of chalk and going down to the classroom and just discussing the topic, trying to keep it interactive by asking students questions, giving them problems on the board, having them work on them in groups. But I didn’t have to spend a lot of time creating graphs with all the images on my computer. I didn’t have to create these detailed videos and these transcripts and so forth, that I’d share with all my students now. And there’s a lot of fixed costs of moving to this environment, however, we’re doing it. That has taken its toll, I think, on all of us, as well as the emotional stress that we’re all going through during a pandemic.

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I’m concerned about is the ongoing expectation of time commitments that are not sustainable… period.

John: It’s one thing to deal with this during an emergency crisis. But this has been a really long emergency crisis.

Rebecca: And I think we’ve all seen the gains that students have had or felt like it’s worth the time and effort to support students. But it’s also time to think about how to support faculty and staff who have been doing all of that supporting and we need a reprieve… like, winter break wasn’t a break, summer break wasn’t a break, there isn’t a spring break, wellness days weren’t a break. Everybody just needs a vacation.

John: Yeah, I feel like I haven’t had a day off now since the middle of March of 2020.

Rebecca: I think one of the next things we need to be thinking about is: we created a lot of things that we could probably recycle and reuse in our classes, and so there were some costs over the course of the year. But perhaps they’re not costs in the future because we’ve learned some things. There may also be some strategizing that we need to do about when we give feedback or how detailed that feedback is with these scaffolded and smaller assignments so that we can be more efficient with grading. We’ve talked in the past on the podcast about specifications grading and some other strategies and ungrading. So maybe it’s time to think a little more or more deeply about some of these things now that we have them in place. How can we be more efficient with our time and work together to brainstorm ways to save ourselves time and effort and energy and still provide a really good learning environment?

John: Specifications grading is one way of doing it. But having students provide more peer feedback to each other is another really effective way of doing that. We’ve talked about that in several past podcasts, but that is one way of helping to leverage some of that feedback in a way that also enhances student learning. So it’s not just shifting the burden of assessing work to students, it’s actually providing them with really rich learning opportunities that tend to deepen their learning.

Rebecca: I know one strategy that I’ve implemented this semester, that definitely has saved time, although I just need to get more comfortable with my setup, but just I need to practice it, is doing light grading and the idea of having a shortlist of criteria. And then that criteria is either met, its approached or it doesn’t meet. And it’s a simple check box. And essentially, the basic rubric is what it looks like to meet it. And either you’ve met it or you haven’t. And that’s a much more efficient way of…

John:…either you’ve met it, you’ve almost met it, or you haven’t…

Rebecca: Yeah. And so that’s worked pretty well for me this semester. And I think it’s helping me be a little more efficient. And then I say like, “Okay, and ‘A’ is if you have met all of the criteria, ‘B’ is if you’ve met a certain percentage of the criteria, and approach the rest,” that kind of thing. The biggest thing for me is just getting used to my new rubrics and not having to like “Wait, what was that again?” when you go to grade it. But, I think, with practice, next time I go to use them, it’s gonna be a lot faster.

John: Going back to the point you made before, a lot of people have developed a whole series of videos that can be used to support their classes. Those can be used to support a flipped face-to-face class just as nicely as they do in a synchronous course, or a remote synchronous course. So a lot of the materials that faculty have developed, I think, while it won’t lighten the workload of faculty, can provide more support for students in the future without increasing f aculty workload as much as it has, during the sudden transition when people are switching all their classes at once to this new environment we’re facing. I know in the past, when I’ve normally done a major revision of my class, it’s normally one class that I’m doing a major revision on. And then the others will get major revisions at a later semester or a year. But when you try to dramatically change your instruction in all of your classes at once, it’s a tremendous amount of work.

Rebecca: I think another place where we’ve seen a lot of workload increase is also an advisement. There’s a lot of students that are struggling, many more students have questions about what to do if they’re close to failing, whether or not they could withdraw. what it means to leave school or come back to school, we’ve had the pass/fail option. So that raises a lot of questions. There’s a lot of those conversations that certainly we have, but they’re just more of them right now. And I would hope that as the pandemic eventually goes away, then some of that additional advisement will also start to fade away as well. We’re just drained. We imagine that you’re all drained too.

John: We always end these podcasts with the question, “What’s next?”

Rebecca: God, I hope there’s a vacation involved. Our household is dreaming about places we can go, even if it’s just to a different town nearby, as things start to lighten up, just to feel like we’re doing something… anything.

John: The vaccines look promising, and the rollout is accelerating. And we’re hoping that continues. And let’s hope that a year from now we can talk about all the things we’ve learned that has improved our instruction in a more traditional face-to-face environment.

Rebecca: The last thing I want to say is I hope everyone has, at some point, a restful moment in the summer, and we find the next academic year a little more revitalizing.

John: I think we could all use a restful and revitalizing summer to come back refreshed and energized for the fall semester.

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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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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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146. Lessons Learned Online

Faculty new to online instruction often attempt to replicate their face-to-face learning activities in the online environment, only to discover that they don’t work as well in this modality. In this episode, Alexandra Pickett joins us to discuss evidence on effective online teaching practices, gathered from a quarter century of experience in a large public university system. Alex is the SUNY Online Director of Online Teaching and an Adjunct Professor in the Education Department at SUNY Albany. Previously, she was the Director of the Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching and prior to that the Associate Director of the SUNY Learning Network for over 12 years, and has directly supported and coordinated the professional development of over 5000 online SUNY Online faculty.

Transcript

John: Faculty new to online instruction often attempt to replicate their face-to-face learning activities in the online environment, only to discover that they don’t work as well in this modality. In this episode, we examine evidence on effective online teaching practices, gathered from a quarter century of experience in a large public university system.

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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 Alexandra Pickett. Alexandra is the SUNY Online Director of Online Teaching and an Adjunct Professor in the Education Department at SUNY Albany. Previously, she was the Director of the Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching and prior to that the Associate Director of the SUNY Learning Network for over 12 years, and has directly supported and coordinated the professional development of over 5000 online SUNY Online faculty. Welcome, Alex.

Alex: Hi there. Thanks for having me.

John: We’re happy to have you here.

Alex: It’s so cool to be able to sit here and talk with you both and I’m just really excited to be here.

John: Our teas today are:

Alex: I drink only Darjeeling tea… organic, of course. It’s the most delicious tea. I just can’t drink anything else. That’s what I drink.

Rebecca: I have my very last cup of Scottish afternoon tea. All gone. Last one.

John: And I am drinking Tea Forte black currant tea.

Alex: Wow, that looks interesting.

John: It really is.

Alex: Does it have caffeine in it?

John: It does. It’s a standard black tea with a really wonderful blackcurrant flavor, and it’s in this nice little silk pyramid-shaped object with a little wire leaf at the end.

Rebecca: It’s nice and light too. It’s a good summer tea.

Alex: Well, I used to use tea as my sugar and cream delivery system. [LAUGHTER] But, I have, over the last year and a half or so, cut sugar out and so I still use it as a cream delivery system. But, I just love my Darjeeling tea… at night… I usually have that at night.

John: Yeah, I’ve been using a lot of black teas in the mornings and early afternoons and then switching to green tea and herbal teas later in the day, with a lot of iced tea on the warmer days.

Alex: So, that’s never bothered me… the whole caffeine thing. Like I could drink whatever caffeine right before I go to bed and not a problem. My husband I’m not sure he agrees with that, because he thinks I stay up too late. [LAUGHTER] But, I don’t feel a problem.

John: You’ve been involved in online education for as long as I’ve known you. I think the first time I met you was at one of the Sloan-C conferences in Washington back in the mid- to late-1990s, when I was first getting involved and you were already working with the SUNY SLN network. So, what are some of the major lessons that we’ve learned since the early days of online instruction?

Alex: I was the first Online Instructional Designer in SUNY starting back in 1994, and have been working in this space for that entire time. We’ve learned a lot over the last 25 years, or whatever it is. I think when we first started, we were in a period of time of research and development and thinking about what works. We then spent some time thinking about: Will it scale? How do we scale it? and synthesizing our models and our processes: the procedures, infrastructure, support services, thinking about all those things. We then had a period of time where we were kind of in full-scale production, and this is SUNY Learning Network that I’m talking about, and then somewhere around 2006 to 2009 we really were in a process of transition and migration from our homegrown learning management system to ANGEL. And then right when we finished our migration with ANGEL, Blackboard bought ANGEL, and so we immediately started another migration. And so we have had these different phases of proof of concept to scalability to institutionalization to today where we are, which is continued evolution and scale. We have continued to grow and to learn and to scale over the many years that we’ve been doing it and we went from the SUNY Learning Network to Open SUNY and now from Open SUNY to SUNY Online. And at each of those evolutionary stages, we have shifted in either technology or focus or thinking or certain initiatives. And so today, the transition has to do with scale… and though by many measures, one would say that the SUNY Learning Network was large. At one point, we were one of the three largest online asynchronous learning networks in the country, and Open SUNY certainly continued that scaling trend. But the scale today that we’re talking about has to do with really focusing in on online degree programs that are specifically identified to support the needs of New York State and the needs of adult learners in the workforce and to increase the ability to serve larger and larger numbers of students.

So, things we’ve learned… I think, over the years, we focused on things like the models that we used, and learned a lot of lessons about having peer trainers and having interdisciplinary cohorts of people, and using our experienced faculty to help and mentor our novice faculty, we interspersed face-to-face training and online training and mentoring and one-on-one work with instructional designers. We integrated and developed templates to quick start online faculty into really effective research-based course environments so that they could just focus on their discipline in their content rather than the wrapper. We implemented courses for observation, which helped novice faculty actually see and visualize what an online course could look like. And we then began, as the numbers increased of existing experienced online faculty, we started to devote energy and efforts and professional development towards the growing group of experienced online faculty. So, support was another thing that we developed and have learned how to do better over time, and really focusing on supporting the instructor, supporting their course, supporting instructional designers, which was not a role that existed back in 1994. That’s evolved over time. I mentioned courses, faculty, IDs, and students, obviously. So, that has changed and evolved and grown over time. In terms of our approaches, we’ve learned a lot of things, and shifted that as we have done scholarly work to understand how people can teach and learn well online. Having access to large groups of faculty and large groups of students, we’ve been in a unique position in the SUNY system to really use it as an organic petri dish of research to continuously observe, to continuously apply interventions, and study the effects of those, and then to learn from those, and feed our learnings back into this sort of organic process that we have. And then, of course, we’ve always had a focus on quality to inform and influence course quality and developing things that allow us to better do that, I guess I’d say. We build into the processes, into the models, opportunities to integrate research and our lessons learned to extract information from students and from faculty and to build in time for faculty to reflect on their own experiences so that they can then infuse those lessons learned into their own ongoing course design, and their evolving pedagogical practices.

Rebecca: What are some of the most important things for faculty to do in online courses? You have such a rich history of experience, what advice that you have for faculty moving online?

Alex: Somebody just reminded me the other day of this paper that I wrote and did some presentations, and I can’t remember when it was, but it was quite a while ago, and it was called “A Series of Unfortunate Online Events and How to Avoid Them.” And it was all written in sort of the style of that story, A Series of Unfortunate Events. So, I had things like the “atrocious assumption” and the “bad beginning” and the “purloined pearls” and the “dreadful design” and all kinds of… [LAUGHTER] the “dilatory dawdler…” it was hilarious. All of these were tongue-in-cheek in terms of the style that it was written, but all trying to focus on things that faculty either should do or shouldn’t do. And all of this, I have to say, I learned directly from faculty themselves, from looking at their course designs, from looking at what students reported and said about their experiences in online courses. And because we started doing research pretty much right from the first day, we have a tremendous bird’s eye view over thousands of courses and hundreds of thousands of students to really see some trends. And so, one of the first things that we learned was the quantity and quality of interaction with the instructor is the thing that influences student satisfaction and learning the most. And so anything that you can do to improve the student’s perception of interaction with the instructor is gonna help that particular finding. it’s going to support that particular finding. And so one of the first things that I did in our template was to add a simple discussion forum labeled “Ask a Question.” And in that “Ask a Question” discussion, the expectation is that students will be able to ask any question that they have, and the instructor would monitor that area and answer it in one place. Because if one student has the question, it’s likely others have it and then over time that evolved to our understanding of teaching presence that extends out to students, and it allowed for students to express their teaching presence, so that they could help each other out, because the second most significant effect on student learning and satisfaction is the quantity and quality of interaction between students. So, the first one with the highest impact is between the student and the instructor and the second one is between the students. So, by having students help each other out in the “Ask a Question” discussion forum, they were able to support each other, express their teaching presence, and attend to that particular finding as well. It’s a simple discussion forum just labeled “Ask a Question” that meets those needs. And that is underpinned by the research that we did. The other thing that I added to the template was an “Ask the Professor” question area. So, it’s distinct, between the straight up “Ask a question” where the students interact with each other, or the expectation is that they can and will, and this is when a student wants to hear specifically from the instructor. And so, this supports that interaction between student and instructor. Interaction, I think, is one of those things that instructors need to pay particular attention to, it’s particularly important.

Another is, for example, setting expectations very explicitly and very clearly. I think that sometimes for novice faculty, they underestimate, because they’re so used to being in the classroom where someone can just ask a question, it can be quickly answered. In the online environment, the only thing that the student has is whatever you have actually typed out or recorded and put into your course. And so any sort of question that they have, you sort of have to anticipate what questions students are going to have, and then respond to it somehow in the design of your course and have it be findable. One of the things that we found, and that there is research to support, is that findability is an incredible predictor of satisfaction or of not satisfaction in an online course. So, if a student has to spend a lot of clicks, and a lot of time… and by a lot of time we don’t mean like an hour, right? [LAUGHTER] Like it’s just really having trouble finding the piece of information that they need in that moment. When they have that experience, their satisfaction goes down. Actually, in this particular study by Kent State on findability, they found that the student’s perception of the course was not only lower, but they also had a perception of the instructor as not being qualified to teach the course when they couldn’t find something. So, setting expectations for the course, and making sure that those are in a very visible place… not like buried somewhere in the syllabus… but in a very visible place that is easily findable by the student. So, things like how to contact the instructor, how they’re going to be assessed, what types of activities are going to be required, what the percentages of how they’re going to be evaluated, those kinds of things. They want to be able to find those things very easily. And while all instructors no doubt have those in their syllabus, it’s important, how it’s communicated, and where, and that it be easily findable for the students, I think the main areas that online instructors need to think about are how they’re going to present content effectively and efficiently, how they’re going to facilitate interaction and collaboration between students, with the students, with the content, and how they’re going to provide feedback and authentically assess the students. What kinds of activities they are going to design and how they’re going to facilitate the feedback and the assessment of those activities and really understanding that they need to pay attention to. And in some ways, this notion of backwards design is critical for faculty so that they can really understand: What are the objectives of the course? What are the activities that they’re designing that are targeting specific objectives? What’s the content that’s necessary for that? And then how are they going to assess and give feedback on those specific objectives? And that formula is a magic formula for an online course because it immediately helps faculty understand how much content they need. That’s a question novice faculty always have. Without this kind of a formula, faculty will end up creating a course and a half. So they put everything and the kitchen sink into the course because they don’t want their students to miss anything and they know a lot about their discipline. And so they want to make sure that everything is in there. And then they also, because they don’t really know how to judge the amount of work that the students should do, they end up having a course and a half so the students become overwhelmed and it could potentially be very disorganized. And so that backwards design really is a magic formula to help faculty really hone in on what the specific content is that’s necessary, what the interactions need to be in order to address those objectives, and then what specific feedback or assessment they’re going to be doing in order to address those.

Rebecca: Alex, based on your experience, where do students struggle if they’ve never had an asynchronous experience before? Obviously, you’ve hinted at things that faculty can do to make that online experience better. But, if you’re not used to controlling your own destiny, in an asynchronous environment, what are some things that students really need support in, that we don’t always think about?

Alex: There are definitely behaviors that successful online students have either intrinsically or are able to adopt. They need to really understand how to set goals for themselves and how to plan. And so students who are not good at that are going to struggle. They need to have some kind of approach to organizing their study materials and their work. They need to have a stable, structured environment in which to work. And it’s not like they have to have like an office…that’s not really what I’m saying… just that they have to have a sense that when they go to school, online, when they go to class, that they’re in a setting where they’re comfortable, where they have what they need, where they can have access to the stuff that they need in order to not be struggling. They need to be willing to ask for help, which is not always something that students know or… there’s this wonderful thread this week from a first-generation student in Twitter, talking about all the things that she didn’t know or didn’t understand that was assumed that she did. And asking for help was one of them. And in some cases, they don’t know that the help is available. In other cases, they are self conscious about asking for help and appearing stupid or deficient in some way. And so I think successful online students are willing to put themselves out there to ask for help when they need it, and they also are aware of where the different help sources are, and how to approach them. And assumptions that faculty might make are that students already know this or should know this. So, I think it’s kind of like faculty can support student success and students need to understand what helps them be more successful. I think being able to self monitor… like checking the gradebook, for example, checking how they’re doing in terms of the progress of the course, with the deadlines of the course… simple strategies like not typing their paper or their discussion posts straight into the discussion forum where if you lose connection, you lose your post. A simple strategy of drafting your responses in Word, for example, where you can spell check, or in Google Docs where there’s auto backup, before you post it into the forum. These are strategies or behaviors that students know somehow, but many, many do not. Another thing in terms of supporting success is self reflection and metacognition, thinking about what’s helping you learn, thinking about what’s hindering your learning, making checklists or using rubrics if they’re provided. That notion of student self-efficacy is another one that you want to develop these self-regulated learning strategies to help support your belief in yourself, that you are able to achieve whatever it is that’s being asked of you. Obviously having goals, that whole notion of self-motivated student. And this is often something that is talked about, or that characterizes the difference between pedagogy and andragogy or heautogogy, that is the notion of motivation. In children or young people, the motivation is sort of forced on them… they have deadlines, and they have things that sort of scaffold them and that they don’t have to do a lot of that pushing of themselves, because they’re kind of just going through the motions with everyone else. As an adult learner or a non-traditional learner or a post-traditional learner or an online learner, I would argue, you really have to find that motivation to go to class because there is no one point, one time, one place where you’re going to meet on a certain day, at a certain time, with everybody. You have to actually get yourself in there, understand what is being expected of you, and be able to produce it In an effective way, in a high quality way, and in a timely way. And so there’s a tremendous amount of self pushing that needs to happen. So, those are some of the strategies or the things that students stumble on, and the strategies that successful online students need. And like I said, I think that this comes both from the student and from the faculty and from the course design, all of those things can work in concert. I have heard recently with the influx of tons of new novice online faculty, and I remember hearing it when I was working with cohorts of novice faculty, there is this tendency to feel, from the faculty perspective, this is like babying them or hand holding them. And while that might be true, I’m not going to say whether it is or not in a face-to-face environment… although I have an opinion about that… it’s definitely not true in an online environment. I think because of the nature of the environment. It is different when a student only has the computer screen in front of them, it really needs to be crystal clear to them… what they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it, how they’re supposed to do it… and any supports and any efforts to help the student understand what’s going to help them be most successful is going to help them. And ultimately, at the end of the day, we want students to have successful and positive experiences, and faculty to have successful and positive experiences, in an online environment. So, anything any of us can do to support that, I think, is particularly important. And when you think about students who are disadvantaged in any way, whether we’re talking about first-generation students, or whether we’re talking about COVID-related students who come from such varied backgrounds and who are not opting to learn online, it’s being foisted on them like it is on all of us, it’s particularly important to pay attention to anything that will help them be as successful as possible.

Rebecca: I think what you described is a bit onboarding method that needs to be done for students, especially if they weren’t expecting to be online, and now that they are.

John: And I think faculty probably underestimate the amount of cues and support they provide in face-to-face classes. At the beginning and end of the class, they’ll talk about what needs to be done… they’ll talk about deadlines. When they see problems occurring in student work, they’ll provide immediate feedback. And that just doesn’t magically happen in an online class. explicit instructions need to be provided so that students online get the same type of instructions they’d have an in-person class.

Alex: That’s exactly right, John, and the immediacy of it… one student may be there at 12 midnight, and another student may be there on the weekend, and another student may be there at some other time. And it is at any moment in 24/7 time on any day of the week that a student needs to be able to find the answer to their question right then. Otherwise, there’s a boulder in their way from moving forward in their learning. And so I always say that faculty should try to first, make no assumptions, which is difficult to do, because sometimes you don’t know you have an assumption, but to try and anticipate every question or any question that a student might have, and have something in the course that attends to that question. And it’s not an easy thing to do, because the assumptions are insidious there. And if you’re coming from a face-to-face environment, you have a lot of assumptions. And this isn’t intuitive, that teaching online is not an intuitive exercise. And it doesn’t just happen magically. There is effort and energy that needs to go into the design of the course, the sequencing of the course, the pacing of the course, the content, the interaction, the feedback, the assessment, all of that needs to be thought through, given the environment. So, you’re not thinking about it in a face-to-face way, you’re thinking about it in an online way with the lens of online students who only see what’s in front of them on the computer screen. So, it’s just a different way of thinking. And it’s not rocket science or anything, but I think faculty need to see examples of it, to have some of the foundational research understanding about it, and to be guided, maybe mentored, in some ways. It’s not like the first time you teach an online course you’re going to be a master at it. It’s the practice of teaching online, also. Practice means you keep doing it, and you keep getting better at it, hopefully, and keep improving. To me, it’s a practice in iteration. You do your best the first time when you’re dealing both with the learning curve of the technology and the learning curve of the different types of pedagogies required. And so the first time you do it, you’re dealing with these two major things. So, your first online course and online teaching experience, you’re going to learn a lot and your course might be somewhat vanilla. Nevertheless, it can be a really good tasting vanilla and then you can add some sprinkles and chips, and whatever, some sauce, as you continue to improve your ability to use the technology and your understanding of how you’re using the technology in pedagogically effective ways. What’s cool and wonderful about it is that faculty starting today have the benefit of 25 years of faculty who have been doing this and 25 years of research and best practices and lessons learned from all of us who have gone before, so they don’t have to invent the wheel the way that some of us did back in the early 90s.

John: Going back to that issue about providing explicit instructions in a face-to-face class, faculty often make assumptions, as you noted, about what they want students to do that may not be clear to students. In a face-to-face class one student will observe that, will raise a question, and it will be answered for everyone. If you don’t have that degree of explicit instructions in an online class, you’ll get some work that isn’t quite what you expected from students or you’ll be getting, perhaps, dozens of students asking the same question. So, having explicit instructions is not only helpful for the students, so that they know what you want them to do, but also it’s helpful for the instructor so you don’t have to explain the same thing to many different people. So, if you do get a question from a student online class, it’s probably good to use that to improve your course, as you said, in an iterative way to deal with that, so it becomes clearer in the future.

Alex: I totally agree with that. And it’s actually a practice that I have encouraged faculty to adopt, because you will know immediately in your online class where there’s something that needs improving. Because if you get a ton of questions on the same thing, then you know, you have to address that somewhere, either in the design of your course or in the information that you’re providing. You know immediately and so that “Ask a Question” area is specifically to address you know, those kinds of questions that one student has that likely all students have, so you can do it just once. But, it also is a pointer as you suggested to things that you need to shore up in the design of your course or in the information that you’re providing. Instructions come up all the time. If it’s unclear, you will know that immediately and you know that you have to fix your instructions on something.

Rebecca: We have a lot of faculty preparing to teach online as they’re preparing for the uncertainties of the fall with COVID-19, or the explicit decision to be teaching online this fall that maybe they didn’t plan for. And so the planning and development time might be much shorter than it would be traditionally for an online class. What are some priorities? We already talked a lot about priorities. But is there any tip that you might have in this situation, which is a little different than a regular online class, to get faculty going?

Alex: That is a great question. I would say, in March, when everything shut down, it was an emergency situation where we all had to pivot really, really quickly. And many, many…I think the statistic I read was 98% of the faculty and courses across our country… went from being face-to-face to online in some flavor or another, it was a traumatic period of time for all of us, faculty, students, administrators, the country, academically, professionally, socially, very, very crazy. I would argue that even though we have time now to prepare for the fall that we’re still in a state of thinking about remote learning rather than online learning, because we still have uncertainty about the fall… number one. So, there are still folks and campuses and administrations and states who are still grappling with what they’re going to do in the fall regarding education. And is it going to be fully online? Is it going to be partially online? Is it going to be synchronous online? Is it going to be hybrid or HyFlex? Are they going to do things like changing the curriculum to, instead of semesters, be quarters are they going to have freshmen and sophomores come for the first seven weeks of the semester and then juniors and seniors come for the next? We’re still in some uncertainty about this. And even though we have some time to prepare, the problem is that we have many, many, many more faculty that are needing to think this through and prepare than there are people to support. In an online program or environment, you have 16 weeks, you are selected, or you get told that you’re going to teach online. You’re assigned an instructional designer. You have a process that you go through. And this is if it’s a well thought through developed program. You have a faculty development program that helps you with course design and then transitions you from course designe to effective online teaching practices. And so you get a full professional development period of time in advance of your first delivery of your course. And that’s really how it should be done in a well thought through environment and program. But what we have right now, even though we have time before the fall, we just have many more faculty than there are resources and because of the uncertainty of the modality for the fall, there is uncertainty in terms of the designs of the courses. And many, many institutions are not prepared, unless they’ve been doing online teaching and learning historically. My daughter’s school, for example, is a small liberal arts residential college that doesn’t do online teaching and learning. And so they like many schools, and even some within SUNY, are not as prepared as others who have been doing it for some time. So, I think we’re still in this stage of remote teaching where there are some unique circumstances for faculty and for the people who support faculty. So, I think for faculty who are trying to be flexible and anticipate different scenarios for the fall, I think the important things for them to think about are things like: prepare for whatever the most online scenario might be, and you have to take your cue, I think, from your state and from your administration, but if it’s likely that you’re going to be online for even some of it, thinking through what the course might be for all of it would be prudent so that you are better prepared, and so it’s a little easier to roll that back, then to start from scratch and have to develop it all. So to prepare for the fall, thinking about what pieces of your course absolutely would have to be face to face. So, I think there are some courses, lab courses, hands-on courses, things that require specialized equipment that might have to be face to face or they couldn’t be done, or couldn’t be done well. But there are courses that can easily be done in a fully online way. And so thinking through the nature of your course, the nature of your discipline, and what the assessments or evaluations are going to be so that you can understand what pieces might have to be face to face if they do and whether or not any or all of it can be online, and then thinking that through in terms of how you would lay that out and plan that out. I think thinking about your students, as a first step in your considerations for what you’re going to be doing in the fall is really, really important and not making any assumptions. And again, this is an area where there’s a lot of uncertainty because we don’t know what the Fall is going to look like for other aspects of life. Will the K-12 people go back to face to face, because if not, the kids are home. And if the kids are home, there may be burdens on the family regarding child care… whether or not students have safe and secure places to live, whether or not they have access to the internet… whether or not they are able to either financially or physically do synchronous components to a course. If you’re assuming that you can do a three-hour lecture once a week with your students at a specific time, there’s a lot of assumptions in that: that your students are in the same timezone, that your students are available at that time, that they have a data plan that will allow them to do that, and so forth. So, I think you need to think about things in terms of your course from those perspectives as you think about the planning and the design of your activities and how you’re going to go about it. For remote faculty, I think reviewing your syllabus, revising your syllabus, reviewing your objectives and articulating them in ways that are measurable, in ways that are really thinking about Bloom’s and what you’re targeting in Bloom’s, depending on the level of the course, the discipline, and really thinking if any revisions are necessary there so that you can do some of that backwards design that I mentioned earlier. Really starting out with a good solid set of objectives will help you do that backwards design, that magic formula, in a really effective way. I think thinking about the types of learning activities is a good exercise. I always say that it is impossible to duplicate what you do in a face-to-face classroom online, you actually have to reconceptualize your online activities, your online interactions, you have to reconceptualize those things for the online environment, given the options and limitations of the online environment. And that’s not to say that online environments… I mean, face-to-face environments have options and limitations as well. I guess my point is just to say you need to be attentive to what those are in an online environment in order to design activities that are going to be as maximally effective and engaging as possible. I think you need to pay attention to accessibility. You need to pay attention to your feedback and your assessments. You need to be attentive to developing a sense of class community and how you interact and where you interact and where you scaffold and support student-to-student interaction. I think you need to know and understand best practices in synchronous interaction or asynchronous interaction if you’re doing either of those or both of those. And accessibility is another one you need to pay attention to. Accessibility is an important thing because those courses where you see everything and the kitchen sink… it could be PDFs that you’ve had for years, or it could be a favorite video, or it could be that cartoon that you like to post from the New Yorker… whatever it is, you just need to pay attention to the fact that, in an online environment, there are issues and especially for those who are differently abled, let alone copyright permissions and so forth. But you do need to pay attention to making things as universally accessible as possible. And so the Universal Learning Design principles are really helpful in that regard. And if you plan for an inclusive, equitable, accessible course from the get go, you address all of those things without having to go back and retrofit which is super, super hard and annoying. So if you do it right from the beginning, it makes it a better plan.

John: And for those who are working towards preparing for the uncertainties of the fall, knowing that there’s a good chance that at least some of the semester will be spent online in some form, you’ve worked with other people to create quite a few online resources that perhaps we could talk a little bit about. One of those is the SUNY Online Teaching Effective Practice video series. Could you tell us a little bit about that? And some of the other resources?

Alex: Yeah, sure. I’d love to, I would love to have people check these resources out. In our YouTube channel, and over the years, we have sort of on an annual basis, I guess, now created a series of videos that have themes, and typically I collect these at our annual summit event. So I’ll have a theme and we will interview guests and participants around that particular theme. And so some of the collections that we’ve put together… =We have an effective practices series for example. We have advanced topics in online learning. We have faculty questions, there’s 23 videos in the collection on questions that faculty typically have about online learning. We have some ideas for new online faculty. We have recommendations for experienced online faculty, we even targeted topics that were targeting instructional designers and questions and issues that they have and online learning administrators, topics and themes that they would be interested in. There’s 12 videos in that collection and 21 videos in the instructional designer collection. There’s one collection that is about relationships, both with students and with instructional designers. There’s one about assessment. We have an ideas for engagement series that talks about helping faculty to think about how to create effective and engaging environments and all of these videos are beautifully produced by my friend Jeremy Case at Monroe Community College, who is a fabulous instructional designer and videographer and he has been my partner in crime here on all of these videos over the years and has done a fabulous job, so I need to give a shout out to him. In that “Ideas for Engagement” series, for example, we talk about things like assignments with real-world applications, using case study, critical thinking, teaching leadership through self reflection, preparing online tests, making team projects work, incorporating service learning, teaching in scientific method through example, using Wikis. So, there’s a lot of depth to these videos, and you can go and look at each of the playlists and they’re very well described, and they’re well titled, so you can just hunt for one within the collection that you might be interested in, based on the topic. Or you can just listen to them in an ad hoc way. There’s multiple people that are interviewed in each of the videos from varying perspectives, varying disciplines, various sectors of institutions (from community colleges to research institutions). So we have a really wonderful video collection that I would love people to know about and to explore.

John: Another resource that you’ve worked with is the online teaching course. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Alex: Sure. So I developed this self-paced online course that is really basically just a website and it is the “Interested in Teaching Online?” self-paced course or resource. It’s designed like a course, so it has modules, and it has three modules. And every module starts with an overview. So you have some objectives for the module, there’s some presentation of content and it’s either in video or in text, and there’s several sections for each of the modules, and then there is a check your understanding self test at the end of each module. So, you can go through the content from start to end in order or you can look at it like a website and just browse to the topics that are of interest to you. You could just go in and take all the little self assessments if you wanted, just to check your understanding of the content if you already know things about online teaching. This really is intended as a prerequisite to any online teaching activities. So before you start getting trained by your campus to teach online, this could be a prerequisite to that to help everyone establish a common lexicon, for example, about what the common words are, that are used in online teaching in SUNY and beyond. It also helps to establish what we mean when we use the word online teaching, which does not mean a MOOC in this particular case… not to say that there aren’t MOOCs in SUNY or anything about MOOCs. It’s just that in this context, we’re talking about a different type of online teaching and which is now called traditional online teaching, [LAUGHTER] interestingly enough. So you can use it in a variety of different ways, like a website or like a course. You can earn a badge if you’re interested in completing all of the activities and submitting the evidence for the badge. There’s also optional interaction that you can have. You can join an online networking group with other people who are taking the course and interested in online teaching and interact with them around the course and around topics around online teaching. And so there’s a variety of different ways you can use it and a variety of different activities that you can do. There’s a lot of videos in there and a lot of good information. One of the pieces, kind of the first step, is the online readiness section of the course which is kind of like a mini course in and of itself, and it presents some checklists where you can self assess on things like your computer skills, word processing skills, your email skill, so all of the technical skills that are necessary to have a good foundation to take the next step to teach online. Because if you really need some of those technical skills, it’d be best if you get that shored up first before you start thinking about teaching online. And so there’s a bunch of information presented in that readiness section of the course. And this thing is just set up in WordPress, so there are little checklists that will retain your checks from session to session in the same browser, but it’s maximally open and it’s also openly licensed and freely available for anyone to use or adapt in any way that they would like. And it has been used and adapted and adopted in a lot of different ways across SUNY and beyond. So, I try to openly license and make freely available all of the tools and resources that we produce in the SUNY Online teaching unit. I’ve taken that open that we had when we were Open SUNY really to heart and I’ve been doing open pedagogy and being open since before it was a thing, because I feel very, very strongly that we just happened to be where we are because of luck and the position in which we sit, which is at the top of an enormous system with many, many years of experience in this. And these are public funds that have been used for the benefit of the people of the state of New York and beyond, I would argue, and so I’m very, very committed to openly licensing everything that we do. And so you will see that on all of the resources. And I love to hear from people who have adopted and adapted our tools and resources because I’m a learner too. And I want feedback. And I want to improve the things that we have created. And I want to know about things that others have created based on our things, so I can point to them and recognize them and talk about them and learn from them. So yeah, both of these resources, the readiness set of inventories and the teaching online course, are openly licensed.

Rebecca: You also have the remote teaching checklist, which might be really important right now.

Alex: Yeah, when all of this started happening, I thought it was really important that faculty who are novice and instructional designers who are in a position all of a sudden of having to deal with many, many more faculty than they anticipated, to have a little bit of a framework and a guide to help them. And so I did develop this checklist, and it starts out with helping faculty to think about what’s first, what things should they think about first. So putting the lens of the student on is a good first step, checking their syllabus, revising their syllabus, thinking through their activities, checking their accessibility and thinking about the modes, are they going to be primarily synchronous? …so some stuff online asynchronously, like their syllabus and materials maybe, like a paperless situation, but primarily, they’re going to be meeting synchronously with students either through Zoom or through Collaborate or WebEx or some sort of a synchronous tool like this one, or are they going to be primarily asynchronous or are they going to be hybrid in some way. So some face to face and some online and maybe that online is a mix of synchronous and asynchronous or maybe it’s totally asynchronous. I know some campuses and faculty or programs are playing with this HyFlex notion that allows maximum flexibility for students, which allows them at any point to determine or decide whether they’re going to be face to face, synchronous, or asynchronous. I think that is going to have to depend on the campus, because if the campus is not supporting face to face, then the HyFlex is not part of the equation because the whole point of HyFlex is giving students the option of face to face, online synchronous, or online asynchronous at any point. So I think remote faculty need to think about how they’re building community, whether they’re doing that in a synchronous online way or an asynchronous online way. They need to know and understand the effective practices of interaction either in a primarily synchronous or primarily asynchronous or combination kind of a way. And so this checklist gives them lots of resources to mine and suggestions and tips for all these things that I’ve been mentioning. Online assessment is another thing they’re going to have to think about. And this is an area where, with some time, it will be better than if you’re trying to think this through right before you have to deal with it. So I would really recommend that as soon as you are able to start thinking through some of these things. Because, as I said, you want to reconceptualize, you can’t duplicate. If you think you’re going to duplicate you can, you can duplicate, but it won’t go well or not from the students’ perspective, right? [LAUGHTER] …and you’ll be frustrated and the students will not be happy and your evaluations will not be good. So you really need to think about assessment and if you’re super, super concerned about online cheating, you need to put a lot more energy into this because you need to reconceptualize the multiple choice test that is 50% of the grade, mid term, is a way to assess something. But in an online environment, I would argue that that is not an authentic assessment, really, of much. And we could talk about what I think about that for a face-to-face class as well, [LAUGHTER] but I’m focused on online. So you need to really think, how is it that you are going to understand how are the students making their thinking and their learning visible to you? What opportunities are you giving students to do that? And then what feedback and ways of assessing them are you able to give? …and it takes some time to think that through. I would also recommend for remote faculty to take as much advantage as possible of any instructional design support that you might have on your campus. And always, always check with them first because there are standards. If your campus does online teaching and learning, they have a learning management system already… they have, potentially, templates for you to use to Quick Start your course design so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They have training and supports and resources to help you think through all of these issues, and they may have things that are required in some ways ,or approaches or methods that they’re recommending for the fall that you need to know about and your students need to know about. So I would recommend very strongly that you check with them first before you start doing anything on your own so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and get down the road aways when you learn that you have to start over again and do something differently. Oh, the other thing I want to make sure that they think about is how they’re going to end their course. So, this has to do with class community and teaching presence and social presence and so paying some attention to how you wind down your course and end your course, I think, and being deliberate, intentional about that. I always have a discussion group at the end of my online course that allows students to reflect on things, to say goodbye to each other, and where I say goodbye to them. And so there’s lots of different ways to do that. So, similarly, I don’t think I said at the start, you want to think about how you start your course… thinking about how do you create a sense of class community? How do you acknowledge that you’re about to embark on this journey together, in some cases, both instructor and students for the first time in different modes, and acknowledging that and saying, we’re in this together and breaking the ice so that you can immediately sort of break through that two dimensionality of the computer screen so that you can begin to establish this sense of learning community, this sense of class community, establish trust, get to know the students, get to know their names, have them get to know you. So, icebreaking, I think, is also equally important. And that’s not something that just happens. Anyone can say, okay, introduce yourself. But if you’re more deliberate about it, and think through how you might be able to create an engaging, interactive activity that is more authentic, that really gets people to know each other. And I have a list of 50 plus different icebreaking activities that we can put in the links for folks to mine for ideas for that.

John: We’ll include all that in the show notes along with links to the resources you refer to.

Alex: Yeah, I guess I would say that there are as many ways to teach online as there are faculty. And there are some effective practices, there are some things that will work better, that will work best, that you should know, that you need to know, in order to have good experiences,your students to have good experiences, to be effective. There are some things that you need to know and there is technology that you need to master and can leverage in a variety of ways. But I think that within that there is so much flexibility and there is so much innovation and so much freedom to do things outside of the four walled classroom box that I’m hoping that faculty will be able to experience, and even though we’re constrained by the limitations of the rush to figure out what to do in the fall with the remote teaching being pushed into things that we may not be ready for. I’m hoping that people will be open to the possibilities that are there. It’s kind of limitless in some ways,

John: We always end our podcast with the question. What’s next?

Alex: I am not sure what’s next for all of us in general, I’m waiting along with the rest of us to understand what COVID is going to do and how that’s going to impact us in August or in September. And I am coping professionally and personally the way that everybody is, and in terms of work, I am working on continuing to develop tools and resources to help instructional designers be more effective, have their lives be easier so that they don’t have to recreate wheels and tools and resources and supports for online faculty as well. We have, like I said, the benefit of years and years of experience, years and years of knowledge, years and years of things that actually already exists that can be leveraged or adapted for this moment in time. And so coming up with tools and resources and supports that make people’s lives easier and better, given the circumstances is what I do. And I always get up in the morning convinced that I can impact the quality of online teaching and learning in the State University of New York. It’s what motivates me and what I love doing. And so I feel very grateful that I am able to do that in my position, and to be able to share that with the folks in SUNY and beyond, and to be able to continuously learn and showcase and turn the spotlight on amazing things that are going on out there from our campuses, from our instructional designers, and from our faculty within SUNY who are doing amazing work. I feel very grateful to have been able to be where I sit, to be able to be witness to all of that, and to observe it. and to learn from it and be able to share it out in multiple, multiple ways. So, maybe that’s what’s next, I think. That’s what I would say.

John: It’s been a pleasure working with you and learning from you over the last couple of decades

Alex: Ditto, John, ditto. [LAUGHTER] Thank you, Rebecca, too.

Rebecca: Thanks so much for joining us and sharing your knowledge and experience, lots of experience.

Alex: You’re welcome. It’s been so much fun. Thank you so much for having me. I love having a cup of tea with you and chatting about this stuff that I really, really love to talk about.

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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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143. Pedagogies of Care: Creativity

Is creativity something you value in the work that students produce? In this episode, Natasha Haugnes and Martin Springborg join us to discuss ways to spark, motivate, and support creativity.

Natasha has served in faculty and curriculum development at the Academy of Art University and as an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College, Natasha and Martin both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project and are two co-authors (with Hoag Holmgren) of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts.

Show Notes

  • Haugnes, N., Holmgren, H., & Springborg, M. (2018). Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. West Virginia University Press.
  • Pedagogies of Care
  • Haugnes, N., & Russell, J. L. (2016). Don’t Box Me In: Rubrics for Àrtists and Designers. To Improve the Academy, 35(2), 249-283.
  • Haugnes, N., & Russell, J. L. (2008, 2014) “What do Students Think of Rubrics? Summary of survey results: Student Perceptions of Rubric Effectiveness
  • Sawyer, R. K. (2011). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation. Oxford university press.
  • Deci, E. L. (1972). Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic reinforcement, and inequity. Journal of personality and social psychology, 22(1), 113.
  • Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation in education: Reconsidered once again. Review of educational research, 71(1), 1-27.
  • Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future. WAC Clearinghouse.
  • Nilson,. Linda (2019). Specifications Grading. Tea for Teaching podcast. August 21.
  • Tharp, Twyla (2006). The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life. Simon & Schuster
  • Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT)

Transcript

John: Is creativity something you value in the work that students produce? In this episode, we discuss ways to spark, motivate, and support creativity.

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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 guests today are Natasha Haugnes and Martin Springborg. Natasha has served in faculty and curriculum development at the Academy of Art University and as an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College, Natasha and Martin both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project and are two co-authors (with Hoag Holmgren) of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. Welcome Natasha and Martin.

Natasha: Good to see you. Yay.

Martin: Thanks for having us.

John: Our teas today are:

Martin: I’m drinking coffee this morning.

Rebecca: Always… Always the rebels.

Natasha: Well, I had my two cups of coffee and now I’m on to Wild Sweet Orange Tea…

Rebecca: That sounds good.

Natasha: … and it’s delicious. Yeah.

Rebecca: I have iced Scottish afternoon tea

Natasha: Afternoon? Huh…

John: And I am drinking Tea Forte Black Currant Tea. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Natasha’s contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project and your joint work on Meaningful Grading in the Arts. Natasha, could you start by telling us a little bit about your contribution to the project?

Natasha: Sure. “Nurturing the ‘aha moment’” is the topic of the video made. And it was based on one of the tips in the meaningful grading book that I co-authored with Martin and Hoag. This video focuses on the “aha moment,” or that moment of insight in the creative process, and how to really nurture students and invite them into that moment. I focused on the “aha moment,” which could also be called the moment of insight in the creative process because it really is associated with kind of joy and happiness and magic. And there are a lot of cultural myths around insight and creativity in general, but especially these magic moments. People think they come out of the blue, that they’re come down from God, that they’re somehow related to some innate ability. And research shows us, and people who are creative practitioners know, that this is not entirely true. So, I just decided to kind of hone in on that moment. In my work at the Academy of Art University, I have worked with a lot of students and a lot of instructors who are often drawn to creative fields because of the joy and they really want to engage in that, the joy of the creative process. But then when the students get to school, and when the new instructors come to teach, they often get really drained. And they find that there’s so much hard work and there’s so much stress in the classrooms, even in things like painting and graphic design and moviemaking classes, students seem to get really rundown, and they don’t connect with those moments of joy. So, this results in frustration. At my own school, we were seeing pretty high dropout rates of students at a certain point and I actually ended up working with at-risk students in my role as the Resource Center Director at the Academy of Art University many years ago, and that taught me a lot about working with students and engaging them in their creative process. A lot of the students I worked with, they were sent to me by an instructor who would say “This student is just not engaging. They’re really sloppy in their work. They’re really lazy. They’re not putting the time in.” And when I talk to those students, I would find patterns that really ultimately meant that they weren’t understanding their creative process. They were doing things like brainstorming a whole bunch of ideas, and then trying to finish one, but then getting distracted and thinking, “Ah, I’m going down the wrong path, I’m going to do this other project, I need to take this other approach…,” and they would go down another path, and then they would abandon that path, and they would take yet another approach and pretty soon it’s time to go to class and the project they’re presenting for critique looks like it was done at the last minute. Again, this is really frustrating for the student and the instructor. And I realized I needed to learn a lot more about the creative process in order to work with these students and help them connect to that joy, help them understand how the hard work connects with the joy, and help the teachers understand how the hard work connects with the joy. I think it’s really imperative that our faculty understand creative process and define it so we can teach it to our students. And this is especially important for students whose livelihood depends on creativity, like a game designer, a graphic designer, even an illustrator can’t just go to work and hope that insight comes, they need to learn how to have some control over that, not only for their own work, but just so that they continue to enjoy what they’re doing.

John: It sounds like part of the problem is that people think that creativity is just something that people either have or don’t have, and they don’t see that it involves a process that includes a lot of work. What types of things can we do to nurture students in making the connection between the work that they do and that aha moment to get them to that point, so that we don’t lose them on the way.

Martin: One thing that I talk about quite frequently with faculty, no matter their discipline, but especially in the creative fields, and one thing that we go back to quite a few times in Meaningful Grading, is rewarding failure and grading process versus grading that final product. If you value the development of a creative process and you value your students diving into the waters that they’re sort of murky, they cannot be afraid to do that. And at the same time, they should also be aware that you’re rewarding that effort and their engagement and what can be kind of a scary process for them, especially if they consider themselves non-artists or unable to do art because they don’t have some innate knowledge of it. So, as you develop grading systems, making sure to work into those grading systems those things that you truly value about that process and about your course.

Natasha: I think it’s really crucial. And something that I try to point out in the videos is breaking it down, scaffolding the process for them, breaking it down into small accomplishable steps and explaining to them: “No, this is not creativity, this is not your whole project. This is what you need to do now. And here’s what you need to do, and you need to put the work in to do it. And then you can move on to the next step.” I think that’s really important, and it’s just really important for the instructors to do that. We often have the overview, we understand the process, we have faith that they’re going to get there, but the students don’t, necessarily, and so that’s kind of what leads to those patterns of procrastination that we see with the students who aren’t doing so well. They put things off, they don’t understand the importance of that early hard work that you really have to just put in in order to get the payoff at the end.

Rebecca: What are some ways that you recommend building in experimentation or risk taking into the grading system? Because those are often things that we value in creative fields, but are harder things or things that we don’t always build into our evaluation systems. We might focus more on the principles of design or something technical, [LAUGHTER] because those are easy to measure.

Natasha: You’re a graphic designer, aren’t you, Rebecca?

Rebecca: I am. [LAUGHTER]

Natasha: I think graphic design is actually a really great example of a place where you can get really bogged down with rules, right? I mean, you can approach graphic design almost as a mathematician and just kind of go “ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink” and you can create stuff that follows the rules, but doesn’t really have a lot of creativity to it. And I guess one piece of advice, this goes to a recommendation that I’ve included in the video, but really simplifying criteria. Again, if you can break down the steps and have each step just be assessed on one or two criteria, that allows students to kind of say, “Okay, I’ve met the goal, now I can do what I want. I’ve done what that teacher needs to see, [LAUGHTER] and I’m going to pass, and now I can really play with it.” In some research that I did with a colleague of the Academy of Art University quite a while ago, we did this big study, twice actually, called “Student Perceptions of Rubric Effectiveness.” We found a common pattern in students’ responses, the students that really liked the rubrics said that they liked the rubrics because it told them exactly what they did have to do. And then once they checked off all those boxes, they could just run with it, and that was very freeing to them. We can talk later that a rubric is not always perceived that way, for some students, it kind of acts like a creative constraint. But, I think if we can keep the criteria to a minimum, that can allow students to know what they have to do and then have fun with it.

John: One of the things I noticed in reading through your book, and also in what you were just talking about in terms of giving stories scaffolding, is so much of the advice that you give could apply in pretty much any discipline. While your focus is on the arts, students don’t have the same expertise that we do. And the tasks that they’re facing are much more challenging and require much more processing. And they don’t always come in with that growth mindset. Much of what you’re talking about basically, is how to help students move from this binary view that they’re either good at it or they’re not to recognizing that learning is work, and that they can get better as they develop. And it was nice to see how closely this was aligned to the advice we try to give in so many disciplines.

Natasha: I totally agree, John, and actually I was in a conference at the University of Missouri where they actually viewed this video, and the person who was facilitating the workshop that I was lucky enough to be able to attend from the comfort of my own home office here, she’s a scientist, and she actually put up a map of the scientific method and said, this is the creative process and this is not the exclusive domain of artists and designers by any stretch of the imagination. So, I love having those cross-disciplinary conversations. I actually teach writing and ESL, and so I see some crossover there. I guess I’m just reluctant to offer a lot more advice to teachers of physics and math and economics and things like that, simply because I don’t have as much experience with those instructors. I’ve been exclusively art and design skills for a really long time. Martin, maybe you can speak to that. You have a lot more majors at your colleges.

Martin: Especially in those foundational courses, you’d certainly get students coming in at a variety of levels. So, they have past experiences, or they don’t, and those with past experiences sometimes come in with quite a bit of knowledge or experience in the arts. So, they’ve had a lot of high school experience, for example, that puts them at a different level than the other students in your class that are truly beginners and don’t have any prior experience and consider themselves very much non artists. So, one thing that’s important to do, just getting to the practical here, if you’re in an arts course teaching at that foundational level… or really going back to your comments about this crosses disciplines, no matter what discipline you’re in, if you’re teaching that foundational level course, getting everybody at that same base level at the beginning. Purely speaking from past experience here on this one point, I taught photography for about 20 years. And in my intro courses, I would frequently have students come in that had high school experience, and they had learned something and could demonstrate that thing. But, at the same time, they learned it in a, I’m not going to say the wrong way, but in a bad way. They picked up some poor practices from their previous education in that, and so you have to make an effort to untrain that a little bit and get them to that same process that you want everybody to engage in, at that very beginning level. So, that step and that effort also makes those students who are truly coming in as beginners and don’t have any previous experience realize that “Oh, yeah, this is something that I actually have to learn and that everybody has to learn and these students who come in with previous knowledge, it’s not just some inherent skill or ability that they have in the arts. Another thing that I found really helpful, in sort of leveling the playing field and making it apparent to those truly beginning students, is using my past beginning students who have come into my courses with no experience, using their products as exemplars when I’m talking about how I want somebody to do something. So, if I’m talking about an assignment, I’m using examples from, and I’m pointing out the fact that these students came in from like, say, they’re nursing students or their automotive students, or this student came in with zero knowledge, and this is the thing that they produced, and it’s actually an ideal example of what I want you to produce in this assignment. So, using that, and going back to those examples shows those students who come in as true non-native or true beginners, that that level of achievement is possible.

John: I think that was an interesting point, too, that also shows up in other fields. I know people teaching computer science often will note that it’s much easier to teach people who are true beginners than those who had been self taught or perhaps picked up something in a course, where perhaps not an optimal pathway was given to them. The importance of unlearning things, perhaps, or breaking down the structures that people have and replacing them with stronger structures, can be as much of a barrier as people who are struggling just to get to that initial level. And that I imagine is particularly true in the arts.

Martin: Yeah. And going back to what I mentioned earlier about valuing process, maybe they do produce a product, that’s roughly the same result, like if they come up with the same result, but the process that they engaged in to get to there is so much more complicated and convoluted than what you’re trying to get everybody to engage in. So, they do need to go back and learn process. They do need to be at that same level as everybody else in your course.

John: One of the issues that often comes up in discussing creative fields is the importance of intrinsic motivation. Could you elaborate a bit on how we can help develop intrinsic motivation for students in these fields?

Martin: So, another thing that we talk about or that we bring up in Meaningful Grading frequently is the building of a community in an arts classroom and how important that is. That community is the intrinsic motivator. For example, if you make that a primary goal of yours in a course, you would then grade heavy on participating in that community at the beginning, knowing full well that the goal you have is to make that a more intrinsic reward for students and to back off on the grading or drop it all together, that participation component. So, that they not only learned that after they leave your course and after they leave an arts program that an arts community is vital. Like you can’t develop work in some sort of vacuum. As an artist, you have to be engaging with others, but also within your course, it’s just showing them and it’s creating that intrinsic value. Like, what’s bringing me back to this class day after day is not the grades that I’m getting from my instructor, but the vast resource that I have in these 30 other classmates that are able to give me feedback and support. And that also show me what they’re working on… that give and take. So, that’s one example of building in that intrinsic value.

Natasha: Correct me if I’m wrong, Martin, but a huge part of that community is critique. It’s critique discussions, right?

Martin: Exactly, hours and hours of it.

NATASHSS: …and helping students to understand that just getting that conversation, it doesn’t even have to be feedback, but a conversation, and engaging people to talk about your work does build intrinsic motivation. That’s the big payoff that we’re working towards.

Martin: And if you don’t have that tight community in that class, when you get to the middle or the end of that class, when you really want students to be engaging honestly in critique, it’s going to be like pulling teeth. You have to foster that community so that students feel comfortable, that they can open up, they can give opinions about other’s work, and accept opinions about their own work.

Natasha: I kind of want to get into a little bit of that intrinsic/ extrinsic motivation research. And I guess one of the things that got me into this field, and my obsession with grading and creativity, which people kind of look at me and they say “You talk about grading in art school, shame on you.” But the thing that was so confusing for so many of these at-risk students that I worked with before was they were engaging in those conversations, or they thought they were, with their instructor and their instructor would say things like, “Yeah, you know, you’re doing great, keep going.” And that can mean “Keep going. You got to keep working. ] 3 handclaps] But you’re not there yet.” But the student was hearing it as “Yeah, I’ve done it. Good enough.” Right? And so that student would say, “I got a D+, I don’t understand. Like, what’s going on? The teacher likes me…” or “the teacher said I was doing great.” And so they weren’t able to suss out the actual evaluation in those conversations, especially these new students. So, this is where it is so important to actually have grading systems that align with those conversations and that reflect those conversations. Keith Sawyer, he is like the creativity guru who I follow. He’s amazing. He wrote this book called Explaining Creativity. And there are a couple of pages in this book, Explaining Creativity, where he does essentially a synopsis of all the research on the effects of reward and grading on creativity. And there’s some things that we can look at here that are kind of important… that yes, we can extinguish intrinsic motivation with grades, we can do it by giving As for everyone. We can do it by just throwing grades that are completely unconnected to the actual conversations we’re having in class. And we can do it when we grade students and use a whole lot of really judgmental language and convey that judgment. That will all really decrease intrinsic motivation and creativity. But a lot of that early research on intrinsic-extrinsic motivation goes back to the Edward Deci studies, I believe, and he actually did more work on this later. And there’s a more nuanced conclusion that he came to later that when grades and rewards are perceived as information, when these grades and rewards are based on the quality of work that students are turning in, that can actually enhance creativity, and it can really build intrinsic motivation. But even when you’re using grades well, they shouldn’t be emphasized too much. This is the conversation that I often had in faculty development when I was working with new teachers. Oh, come to class, you’ll get five points. Five Points, that’s not why you come to class. You should not be coming to class to get the five points; you should be coming to class because the conversations are important. That’s why we want you here… and just changing the script in how we talk about grades. You need to have a grading system that has a lot of integrity. But, we should not be banging that over our students’ heads all the time, it should be kind of in the background just running along in the background. And what we communicate to students is the intrinsic rewards of all the work that we’re having them do.

Martin: And that’s why your grading system has to transform a little bit over the course of a semester, going back to that grading heavily on participation at the beginning of the course, where you have to get the students to the course to participate in the beginning for them to realize that there’s value in those conversations. If nobody shows up, they aren’t going to have conversations, but then that can change and it can evolve over the 16 weeks or 10 weeks or whatever length your course is.

Natasha: Yeah, and there are those students who really do care about grades I find in art and design school, there’s a certain subset of students who really don’t care, and that’s fine. And so they’re kind of on their own path, and they’re often doing well. But there are those students who really care and there are the students who are on the verge of failing out of school so they have to care. And I find that just understanding that, instructors need to leverage that knowledge to convince students to do stuff that we want them to do… that we know will do them good anyway, right? So if I say, “Okay, you’re going to be really a grade grubber… you want an A do these things,” and they’re the things that they need to do anyway. It’s a way of kind of tricking them into doing what we want. If you’re grading what’s important in your course, it’s going to work out, it’s going to work out for the students who really care about the grades, for the ones who don’t as much, hopefully, they’ll just be intrinsically motivated to understand why they need to engage. But grading what’s important is really crucial in that, I think.

Rebecca: One of the things we’ve talked a bit about is scaffolding and helping provide structures. So if we were to provide structure for faculty who are thinking about the idea of building a grading system that has the values that we’re talking about, things that really they care about or are important to their class, what are some of the steps you would recommend they go through to actually develop that system so it actually does reflect the values that they want?

Natasha: Well, [LAUGHTER] my answer to that is it’s ultimately working towards a rubric. And again, that can be kind of a bad word. I’m the one who’s been walking around the art and design school for 25 years saying, “Let’s build rubrics. And let’s do normings.” And I had a photography teacher tell me one time “Natasha, you gotta understand when you say “norming” to an artist, I mean, that’s like death, you know?” So I’m like, “Ah, sorry.”

Martin: There’s a reason why we don’t have assessment in the title of our book.

Natasha: Yes.

Martin: That was on purpose.

Natasha: It was by design. Absolutely. For the really grade-averse instructors, I start with a conversation. And I usually start with grading because that’s a really good entryway. And I’ll just say, “What are you teaching? And what does that look like? And what does it look like when a student does it? And what does it look like when a student doesn’t do it?” And really, that’s where you start. And then I think the next step is really getting real student work in front of this instructor or this department or this cohort of instructors who are teaching the same course… different sections of the same course. They need to look at the student work and they need to say, “Well, yeah, that one meets the criteria for this course that doesn’t.” Why? Why not? Having those conversations, that’s like the best investment that I think any department or any instructor can make into really focusing their teaching and to improving assessment is just think about how you’re making what you teach visible. And then what does it look like when it’s acceptable and when it’s not acceptable, when it meets the goals and when it doesn’t meet the goals? And then it just moves on from there. And if what you think is important, the quality of the color print in your poster, or the resolution on your screen of your logo, or whatever the heck you’re talking about, it might be process. So again, what does that look like? Well, I want to know that they’re listening to the feedback and really taking it in. Well, how can we make that visible? Maybe I have them do a little recording or do a short paper saying here’s all the feedback I heard, and here’s how I responded. “Joey told me I should change the concept, but I didn’t like that idea because…, so I’m not going with that…” and actually have them make that thought process visible. So, it takes some, again, creativity on the part of the instructor in the field of the teaching and learning. But usually, if there’s something really important that you’re teaching, you can have a way to make it visible and figure out what you’re looking for. And what does it look like when there’s evidence that the student has done what you need them to do? And what does it look like when that evidence is not there yet?

John: I usually meet with new faculty and generally ask them what would they like to see workshops on and, about six or seven years ago, one thing that was requested was a workshop on evaluating creative work. So I reached out and we got four people from different departments. We had someone from art, someone from music, someone from theatre, and someone from English. And they put together a presentation of how they evaluate creative work. And one thing that was in common was they all used rubrics, and they all talked about how there are certain fundamental skills or processes that students have to follow. And that’s what they embed in the rubrics and it surprised a lot of people in STEM fields who were attending because they were much less clear about what they were expecting from students and They expected something that would be much less well defined. And so one of the things they also emphasized, and you’ve talked about is that it’s telling students exactly what they’re expected to do and what types of things they need to demonstrate in the work before they can embellish on that. And that was a really important feature in all of their discussions, the same arguments show up in your book. That surprised many people outside of the creative fields.

Natasha: Oh, those are my tribe. That warms my heart to hear that, John. That’s exciting, yeah.

Martin: One of the added benefits of using rubrics is that time saved as well. Faculty time is a precious commodity. And if you can convince them or just show them how much time will be saved by simply having that rubric available, and using it as a guide, as you’re going through the assignments that are piled on their desk, it’s a convincing argument.

Rebecca: So, we talked a lot about building in values into our evaluation system. Can you talk about some of the things we should avoid doing.

Martin: I can speak to that a little bit. So, one thing that I’ve seen a lot of arts faculty members do… from a student perspective. So, coming up through the arts, one thing I’ve seen a lot of, and heard stories about, is the instructors bringing their personal bias, their own career and background, and that subjectivity in general, to the process of evaluating student work. So I’ve heard some pretty bad horror stories about that. For example, I’ll just go into one story quickly because I think just every faculty member who’s hearing this should know that this is never something that you want to repeat. So all the work, as you can imagine, all the prints, lining the board during critique and the instructor just, without words, just going across the board, pulling work down and throwing it out the window. Like if he doesn’t like it, right… if it doesn’t meet his criteria, which are a mystery, by the way…

NATASHAS: I’ve been in those classrooms. I’ve seen that.

Martin: Tell non-arts people about these stories, and they’re like, “no.” Yeah, it really happened. So remembering that you got to check your personal bias and your personal preference for art at the door and rely a lot on, or more on, having students engage in self evaluation, like did they feel like, and how do they feel like, they have made this, or communicated this, through their work, this issue that they think is important through their work. And if it doesn’t, like if you’re not understanding, then engage in a conversation about it. Like how they feel they’re getting there and where you think they’re not getting there. So using that as a starting point instead of your own, “I am the authority on art, and this is why this does not work.” That’s a huge demotivator.

Rebecca: I think one of those biases that a lot of faculty might bring to the door, is the history of white art created by white individuals.

Martin: This is the history of art, it’s all white male.

Rebecca: If students are creating their work from different cultural perspectives, and the faculty member is not up to speed on other cultural perspectives, we’re enforcing essentially a white supremacist point of view and system. So how do we engage in those moments in a way that’s productive, especially if we don’t understand the cultural background that something is based on?

Martin: Yeah, if students can’t place themselves in the history that you’re talking about, you’re referring to, how are they to imagine themselves in that world in the future?

Natasha: I’m gonna offer just one little tip here because yes, I hear you, Rebecca, and we see it everywhere in the overwhelming influence and sort of self-perpetuation of the white colonialist culture, even in our art classes. Something that we found when we did our rubrics research was that students, in general, really love rubrics, it helps guide their work. But what they really loved… even more than the grid of language… was samples, examples of work, examples of work that span the quality. Here’s an example of something where somebody tried really hard but they didn’t quite hit the mark. Here’s some examples of passing work. Here’s some examples of work that really hits it out of the park. And it’s really important not to have one example, especially in a creative field, because what happens then? The students who are not very competent will copy. Here’s an opportunity to allow for many different interpretations and really show those to your students. Consider using student work from previous semesters from a diverse range of students with diverse content. And that gives students something to connect to, it helps them see themselves in the class, it helps them understand that you, as an instructor, see them and value them. And that even though you have these criteria, there are many ways to reach those goals and reach those marks, those criteria that you’re putting out.

John: And so, by including a range of examples too, from different genres or different approaches, so that it does not become just a Western culture, perhaps. In recent podcasts we’ve done with Kevin Gannon, for example, he talked about decolonizing your syllabus and just suggesting that when you’re putting together your syllabus or searching for examples or exemplars, you could just do a little Google search on decolonize your [insert subject matter here] syllabus, and you can often find some good discussions of that with some good resources that you can build in.

Natasha: Yeah.

Martin: Yeah.

Natasha: This is incredibly important. In my work at California College of the Arts, there’s a very active group of instructors. They’re working on decolonizing the classroom, anti-racism, anti-racist pedagogies, and I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been in teaching there. I haven’t been there for a very long time. But I guess there’s a book called Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future by Asao Inoue. And he speaks quite a lot about assessment. And the point he makes about assessment is he says, in order to really decolonize your classroom, we need to be careful how we talk about quality, because quality so often is really culturally loaded. It’s so loaded that it is really hard for us to even untangle what we see and what we look for. And as a response to that, he really emphasizes grading on labor, grading on the work. And this, again, relates to some of the topics that are in this little video I put together although I don’t really call it this by telling students and taking all that quality judgment away from your rubric and from your assessment and just saying, create 50 of these things, [make 50 taglines, make 50 photographs, write five different thesis statements for your paper or write five different opening lines for your paper and just do that. And that’s the way of just asking for labor. You’re just saying do this work and it doesn’t have to look a certain way or be a certain way. But if you just put some effort into this, you will do well. This is a way of assessing work that actually pans out much better for students of color, students from cultures that are not traditionally represented very well in the faculty at colleges and university. So this is something I’ve been really taking to heart a lot. And in my writing class, I’ve actually, at CCA, where I teach freshmen composition to non-native English speakers, everything is graded on pass not passing yet. And so that really emphasizes the labor. If they’re not passing yet, the implication in that not passing yet grade is that you will do it again. Just do it again. Do it again. Nope, still not quite right, do it again. There have been a few students who have redone their essays four or five times, and it’s painful. But wow, they learn… they learn. And again, the trick is in not having five pages of criteria, but having a pretty narrow band of criteria that we’re looking for here that doesn’t get really niggly about the quality.

John: It sounds like it’s a specification grading system that you’re using. And it’s also building in something much more explicit than the “keep going” message that can be misinterpreted. So giving students the opportunity to try something to not quite get there, but to encourage them to continue working on it more explicitly than perhaps students always hear.

Natasha: And I’m glad you mentioned specifications grading, Linda Nilson has been a huge influence on the way I think about teaching and grading. She’s got a lot of really good thoughts out there for sure.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s really easy to evaluate is something that’s technical that has a right or wrong answer. How do we evaluate in a rubric format, things that are more qualitative, like the amount of experimentation or risk taking or other things that we might value in terms of creativity? Can you give us a concrete example?

Natasha: Actually, we have a a whole tip in our book about risk taking. There’s some really interesting ideas about ways you can really force students into making some mistakes and talking about them. There’s so much that comes up that seems, at first, like it’s going to be really hard to describe it in a rubric. But again, if we just get instructors and people who teach these disciplines together, talking about things, usually they can come up with something much more concrete, even if it’s not a cut and dry technical skill. Concept is one and I have some examples of like before and after for rubric wording. And often when we first write out a rubric, we might use some really sloppy language like “The concept is sloppy. It’s lazy. It just doesn’t work.” That just doesn’t work, right? [LAUGHTER] And so that might be the first draft. But then you start looking at some student work and talk with your colleagues. And you’ll find some more precise language will come out. Often when we talk about concept… I’m talking about the context of maybe an advertising campaign. But the concept is predictable. That’s a concept that is not acceptable is predictable. It’s the first thing that comes to mind when people think of this product. So, that is not a good concept. So there you go. Now we’ve made something a lot more understandable to the students and to the instructors when they’re using this rubric to grade later. And it can help you move forward in a way that that judgmental language won’t. It just makes the students feel bad. It makes the teachers frustrated, because we’re like, “Oh, it just doesn’t work.” But actually taking the time to look again at a range of work that doesn’t meet or that does meet the expectations for this thing that seems really nebulous at first usually you can manage to articulate it, and if you can’t, then maybe that’s not something you’re actually teaching in your class and maybe that’s outside of what you’re assessing. This is another tip that we come up with quite often. I think oftentimes instructors who fear grading, they think that they need to grade the art and you can’t grade art. No, you can’t grade art. You can’t say Picasso was better than Twyla Tharp. You can’t compare people and grade artists in a holistic way. Your grades should be based on what you’re teaching, and the objectives for your class. And we can communicate to our students, this is what we’re looking at here. You’ve also done this other stuff really well, but in our class, we’re really looking at this, so this is what your grade is based on. And that’s a really important factor in this whole endeavor, as well. One other little trap, I think, that faculty members can fall into when we talk about assessing grading or assessing creative work is that when we sit down to write our criteria out often the first thing we want to talk about is that incredible piece that that student two years ago did, it was amazing. It was mind blowing, it was so good and students need to see this and you get into those conversations. And that’s fun to talk about with your colleagues and you pull up that student’s work. And you talk about how great they were and what they’re doing now. Yes, that work should be shared with other students, that’s exciting. We have to celebrate those moments. But for the student in the middle of the pack in your class who’s kind of struggling, we need to think about what’s acceptable. That’s why it’s really important to really focus on that line between what meets expectations and what doesn’t meet expectations, because there are some students that just really need to work on that. [LAUGHTER] There are others that are going to blast through that and do really great things, but the ones that need our help are usually the ones that are hovering around that middle area.

Rebecca: So, we’ve talked a lot about rubrics and grading and evaluation, kind of assuming that we’re living in a perfect little world in some ways. But as we all know, right now, in this moment in time, there’s a lot of extra stress of COVID-19, protests related to Black Lives Matter, and any numerous other health things that are coming up because of COVID-19, remote learning. [LAUGHTER] All of these things, there’s lots going on. And so students are under more stress than normal. Students are often under a lot of stress, but this is like extra stress. So in these moments, what are ways that we can help promote creativity and also help our students really feel supported and being able to learn whether they’re on this point in the spectrum or they’re finding being creative really therapeutic and helpful, and all the way to students who just feel like they’re frozen because there’s so many things going on in the world, they feel like they can’t move forward.

Martin: I think now is a great time to be engaging students in creative process. It’s what gets us unfrozen. I’m speaking purely from my location at a Community and Technical College. If we can get students to engage in those often elective courses outside of their major or area of focus that allow them the opportunity to dive into those things that they are feeling a lot of stress about or anxiety about. It helps students be more successful in those courses that they do have to get through as a matter of course for their program of study.

Natasha: Oh, boy, these are hard times. I think, just most immediately from the video, the nurturing the aha moment, I think that it’s even more important than ever to break down our projects into small steps and help make those steps really kind of distinct from each other. I think that’s something that’s happening for students now, and for us, is we’re sitting and we’re staring at the screen all day long and it can become this big blob of existence where one thing bleeds into the other. And if we can really make the steps a little bit distinct, including a few steps where the students just disengage from all social media and anything online where they can actually be alone, without all of the electronic stimulation. I think those are things that can really help nurture their creativity. And also just I think there’s this funny paradox right now that we’re all alone. We’re all isolated. And yet, if you’re sitting there on your TikTok and Instagram and all day long you’re connected and that can be really, really stressful… and so convincing students to take a break from that, telling them we’re going through another step now. [LAUGHTER] And keeping things again really simple so that they can have that opportunity to use what we’re doing in our classes as a springboard to express themselves. Encourage them to incorporate what’s going on in their own life into the work that we’re doing, including examples and acknowledgments of what’s going on in the world. Really important. And it’s a fine line. I’ve just talked about this with my co teacher about how we’re going to be discussing Black Lives Matter, the latest George Floyd protests, and the Black Lives Matter protests, and the defund the police protests with our students who are mostly from Mainland China. Where do we even begin with that discussion? How do we do that without completely stressing them out, but also using it as an opportunity to feed their curiosity and acknowledge their own stress around these issues? So we need to let them know that we’re a safe space for everybody to engage and really help them break down things into small packages and celebrate their achievements. And again, let them keep working if they’re not quite there yet. Let them do it again. Let them do it again, let them do it again, I found myself being very forgiving on deadlines,

Martin: We also have to help faculty realize that they’re safe to engage in those redesigns and those conversations, and that comes from at that administrative level, engaging this at a college or institutional level. So that you aren’t leaving faculty to figure this out on their own. At my two colleges, for example, we have this new initiative that will run all the way through next year, and actually, for the next three years, probably called Equity by Design. And so we’re starting with a team comprised of administrators, directors, faculty, helping each other understand what this effort is going to be at a college level.

Rebecca: One of the things that you’ve both emphasize is kind of these small steps. And I think a small step for an expert might be different than a small step for a beginner. [LAUGHTER] Can we just take a minute or two to describe the differences between what an expert might think of as a small step and what might be in practice an actual a small step for a student.

Martin: One thing that we have been engaging in at my colleges is the TILT framework of Transparency in Learning and Teaching by Mary-Ann Winkelmes and her team. Mary-Ann came to one of our colleges in January and actually spoke and I’ve been facilitating communities of practice at both colleges on this topic this year. And in that work, there’s a realization as faculty review each other’s assignments and each other’s syllabi that you’re not starting at square one, you’re actually starting at square five, because we have to so often take a step outside of our disciplines to realize that, like you just said… So, what’s complex or complicated to one student is not for another and vice versa. So that transparency effort helps us to really outline the steps of an assignment, even those small steps. And so I’d encourage any family member struggling with whether or not to start at this point or that to review that transparency literature a little bit to engage with their colleagues, share assignments, and ask their colleagues whether or not they’re starting in the right place.

Natasha: That’s such a good question, Rebecca. The expert/novice thing is just something we grapple with all the time as instructors, especially if we’re teaching a new course… something that I’ve had to do in my own class… I was just thrown into a very new course for me a couple of years ago. And we did a new project on public service announcements this last semester, and I start something in class, I told the students “Now, choose a topic from this list of public service announcements that you’re going to create. And first thing you have to do is do some research. So let’s look at some websites.” And by having them do that in class and seeing what they come up with, I start to say, “Oh, right. [LAUGHTER]] They’re going to TikTok, you know, they’re going to these kind of places I didn’t even anticipate, and that allows me to then say, “Okay, I need to actually really scaffold this down.” I don’t want this to take two weeks of my time, I want them to find a credible source and then I ended up giving them a list of basically five places they should look. And you might say that is oversimplifying it, but again, this was just a step in the process of a larger PSA that they needed to make. So I needed to really like clamp that down. But I think if we can have students start in class and actually watch what they do, that gives us a lot of information about how big a step they’re willing to take on. And again, the little creative process chart that I put in the video that I created, I think a lot of creative practitioners, people who are really established, they’ve internalized this process, and they even don’t even want to put it on the line. They’re just like, “Oh, you bounce around, you know, you go back and forth and it’s not a linear thing.” And that’s not actually helpful to a new student who’s really nervous, who’s really stressed, who’s in school for the first time. They’re paying a ton of money to go to art school and their grandparents are really pissed because they should be an accountant. That’s intense. And so these students really need things broken down. And I think that just an awareness of our own expertise is a good starting point, and taking our cues from the students.

Rebecca: This has been really interesting. We always wrap up by asking what’s next? \

Natasha: What’s next, Martin? [LAUGHTER]

Martin: What’s next for me is to finish this book I’m working on with Cassandra Horii. We’ve been doing this project together for the past decade or so. I’ve been making photographs at colleges and universities across the country. We use those photographs that I make in classrooms in faculty teaching to help faculty think about their teaching practice. So we do this form of photo0based teaching consultation. So we’re putting those thousands of thousands of photographs together into a book. And we’re working with the same press that Natasha and I were with, West Virginia University Press, on that book. As far as my other life as an administrator in higher education, what’s next is figuring out what fall semester looks like. How are we engaging students? And in what space are we engaging them? Are courses going to be offered HyFlex, we don’t know? Are any courses going to be conducted face to face? Some of them have to be. You can’t teach arc welding at a distance. There’s some of that that has to be hands on. So figuring out exactly how we’re engaging students in this next phase is what’s next for me.

Natasha: I’m going really micro because these are really big questions. I’m going to keep working on the curriculum for my ESL class. I am now not in faculty development officially anymore at my university in an official role. My current role is that I coordinate and write the curriculum for one level of the English for non-native speakers at the Academy of Art University. And it’s exciting. So I’m working on actually integrating more of the anti-racist ecologies. I’m working on incorporating even more creative process readings and practices into my ESL course in the new zoom world, also really trying to figure out how to get students conversation practice in zoom. That’s the really tough one. So, I’m very much just kind of looking [LAUGHTER] about two feet in front of myself right now. And boy, as far as the bigger issues go, I don’t know. Let’s check in again in the fall. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think that’s fair.

Natasha: This afternoon, I’m going to make a creative genealogy for myself. I’m making a creative family tree, because I’m having my students do this next week when we start class and I’m going to do it for myself as a sample for them and also just to see what it’s like to go through that process. So that’s actually been really fun. That’s my fun thing that I’m doing.

Rebecca: It’s all about balance.

Natasha: Yeah.

John: Well, thank you. This has been fascinating. I really enjoyed reading through your book, and I’ve enjoyed your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care, and it’s been really great talking to you. Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Natasha: John and Rebecca, it’s been a really fun conversation. Thanks so much for inviting 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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142. Pedagogies of Care: Equity and Inclusion

This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Dr. Cyndi Kernahan and Dr. Kevin Gannon join us to discuss what faculty can do to foster an inclusive and equitable class climate for all of our students.

Cyndi is a Psychology Professor and the new Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. She is also the author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Class: Notes from a White Professor. Kevin is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a Professor of History at Grandview University. He is the author of Radical Hope: a Teaching Manifesto. Cyndi and Kevin are both participants in the Pedagogies of Care project, created by authors in the West Virginia University Press series on Teaching and Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we discuss what faculty can do to foster an inclusive and equitable class climate for all of our students.

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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 Dr. Cyndi Kernihan and Dr. Kevin Gannon. Cyndi is a Psychology Professor and the new Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. She is also the author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Class: Notes from a White Professor. Kevin is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a Professor of History at Grandview University. He is the author of Radical Hope: a Teaching Manifesto. Cyndi and Kevin are both participants in the Pedagogies of Care project, created by authors in the West Virginia University Press series on Teaching and Learning. Welcome back, Cyndi and Kevin.

Cyndi: Thanks.

Kevin: Thank you. Great to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Kevin: Mine is no tea. I’m drinking Diet Pepsi in a large cup because I need my caffeine in bulk today. [LAUGHTER]

Cyndi: I came prepared, I have apricot black tea.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good.

Cyndi: It’s very good.

John: …and I have a Tea Forte Black Currant tea.

Rebecca: I’m rocking iced tea today because it’s 90 degrees. [LAUGHTER]

John: I’ve had many iced teas already earlier today. Is it that warm? [LAUGHTER] Okay, I knew it was getting a little warmer here. We’ve invited you here to talk primarily about your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Cyndi: Yeah, this collection was started by one of the authors in the West Virginia University Press series on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education that I know you all have had several episodes about. It’s edited by Jim Lang, there’s several contributors. And so we were all asked if we would like to contribute something that would then be provided during all of this time of pivoting to online and uncertainty as sort of a way to provide some quick educational development materials for folks.

Kevin: Yeah, the intent of it was to have it be open access, creative commons license, freely available. And in this time of pivot, there are so many resources out there about how to use this tool, how to do that tool, how to move on to Blackboard in 90 seconds or whatever that may be. But, the larger issue of “How do you do this in a way that acknowledges student needs and your own needs and how do you still keep the type of learning space that’s so important for student learning at least relatively intact, given all of the upheaval?” And that’s what I think the real strength of the collection is, this idea that we need to understand things like tools and techniques. But, we still need to be coming from a larger perspective of care, of empathy, of affirmation of the fact that our students are in just as much of uncharted territory as we are.

Rebecca: in this podcast that you share as part of this collection, and in your other work, you both focus on maintaining productive relationships in the classroom community. And although this is always important, it seems really important right now. Can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies that we can use to maintain productive classroom conversations, especially dealing with difficult issues?

Cyndi: Well, this is something I’ve thought a lot about and I know Kevin has too, because, especially right now, with all the protesting that’s happening, I know that there’s a lot of questions about how to address this or whether to address this in the classroom. So, maybe we can get at the when you should later, but I think having a good connection with your students is always really key. If you’re going to talk about difficult issues, it’s really important. I mean, that’s one of the things I’ve discovered in teaching this and one of the reasons why I want to write about it, because I feel like there wasn’t a lot of writing about the importance of having a good strong connection to your students. And part of that, I think, is about bringing an attitude of compassion as much as possible to your students and to the classroom, seeing them as people, developing a relationship with them, because then that’s going to engender the trust that you need to have those sorts of conversations. And that’s difficult to do. But it really does start on the first day with a lot of the really, I guess, sort of simple things that we think about when we think about a good classroom climate. So, introducing yourself to your students, making sure that they know who you are recognizing them as people and human beings as much as possible. There’s a lot of specific techniques that we could talk about that I have in terms of like how to do it, but I guess I would just say for now, one of the main ones that I keep coming back to is the focus on structure, so having the classroom discussions as structured as possible. There’s a lot of pieces to that. But that’s sort of the overall thing is like having a plan for how you’re going to do it, having a structure for how you’re going to do it. So that then that makes students comfortable to share things. You just sort of open things up to a broad “let’s talk about the protests, “you’re not going to get a lot of participation, because the students are not going to know what to do. They’re not going to know how to behave in that environment, and especially if you don’t have an existing relationship with them where everybody feels seen and valued, then I don’t think that’s necessarily going to work so well.

John: In both of your books, and in our past interviews with you, you talked about setting ground rules for discussions. That’s fairly easy to do and comfortable in a face-to-face environment. Will the same type of procedure work as well if people are starting classes in a remote setting?

Kevin: Yeah. And I think it becomes even more important in a remote setting. So, the things that Cyndi is talking about in terms of structure, in terms of expectations, in terms of an environment where it’s a known quantity of what the discussion is about, and what its purposes are, and have we been transparent with it… all of that is so much harder to do in an online environment (or mostly online environment), whether you’re talking synchronously or asynchronously. So, I think some of the things that are useful to do in an online environment… the discussion forums tend to be a real staple of online teaching. Discussion boards are sometimes where discussion goes to die, certainly in a learning management system. So, I think the first thing to think about is “What tools are we using to engage with students and are there ways that we can get away from just the simple discussion board? Can we do blogs? Can we do messaging apps like GroupMe, or something like that? Is there a Slack channel? Are there other sorts of interfaces where this will work for students?” I’m a big fan of the tool VoiceThread where students can record video and audio, but you need an institutional or a personal license for that, so that may not be an option for everybody. But I think the key to it is how are we building presence because in a face-to-face class, of course, there is the literal presence, the physical presence that we have with one another. In an online class, the research on it talks about… they frame it as social presence as one of the key facets of creating a community of inquiry in your online class. So, how are we building social presence, where we are real people with one another in this course? And so even if we’re discussing things asynchronously, we’re still discussing with people, not screens. And I think that’s a really important thing for us to be able to do. It takes a lot of effort, certainly in the first part of the course. One thing that I would certainly recommend instructors who are teaching remotely do is your first discussion with a class you know, a lot of times it’s an introductory post or something like that… consider having a discussion about discussions; ask your students what’s worked, what hasn’t. We all have experience with this now from the spring. So, this is a good way to kind of process some of that. What helps you learn? What helps you discuss? What gets in the way of that? What expectations do you have towards this space? How can we collaborate in setting those sorts of expectations for all of us? Those are really good ways to start in any class format. But, in an online format in particular, that’s a great way to start building that community and presence right away.

Rebecca: I’d like to circle back to the idea of structure a little bit more, because I think that a lot of faculty think they’re very structured. We all have a structure and it makes sense to us. [LAUGHTER] In a face-to-face classroom or something that’s synchronous, there’s the ability to improv. And it’s a performative kind of thing that happens that’s not as easy to do in an asynchronous environment, or just a different thing to do in an asynchronous environment. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by structure and the kinds of things that really need to be in place?

Cyndi: Yeah, the examples that pop to my mind for structure, and I know there’s a lot that’s been written about this particularly in inclusive pedagogy too, so there’s a lot of ideas, but what I mean is that you first make sure students are looking at the content outside of the class, getting familiarity with it, writing their thoughts, either in a blog post or in comments or questions, that’s frequently what I do is have them write those first so that I can see them and that way, I have something to work with. I sort of know what they’re doing and then I have a structure when I come into the class of how I’m going to use that and they know how that’s going to be expected. So, they know I’m going to call on students based on what I’ve read. And even within that, you can also do… I know there’s a lot of good work that’s been done on something called inner teaching, and also reading group roles, where you give students very particular roles to play. And so in that way, you’re setting up the expectations of what they’ll be doing and how they can expect the class to feel every day. And so if you’ve done that, those are just a couple of ways you can do it. So the discussion comments ahead of time, or like I said, the very specific roles or posts that they make, so that then they know it’s not just going to be this open discussion, but there’s going to be that piece to it. So that’s one way in which I sort of think about structure.

Kevin: And in an online format, one of the things that might be useful to do is to think about the prompts that you use to start a discussion, sort of open-ended questions like “So. what do you think?” …you’ll get a wide variety of things, but it might not be the stuff that anyone’s looking for. It’s also worth considering what role students might be able to play in this so might students be taking a lead and be responsible for posting the prompt and sustaining the discussion for that particular week or that particular module. One of the things that’s useful to think about in that regard is working with students explicitly on like, “Hey, what makes this work? What’s a good question? What kind of questions do we really want to be asking here in terms of not just getting at particular content or answers, but in sustaining a conversation?” …and one little tweak I made, I use blogs as my principal form of discussion when I teach online, is when a student is writing their, what I call the lead author posts or the leader for that particular week, I encourage them to end their posts with a series of questions just like we might see at the end of a section in a textbook. So, we’ll have some thought questions, “What do you think about these things in your assessment? What might be the most important factor?” …etc, etc. And so they’ve written a post, they’ve started to elicit ideas, but then they’re providing that direct springboard for other students to jump into the conversation. And I found that to be a really useful way to get discussion started much more quickly in an online environment because they have that cue and that signpost, like, “Here are the specific things that I can start responding with.” And then the conversation can go from there.

Cyndi: Yeah, just one more thing, too. I was thinking like, do you do that in small groups? Because I was thinking that can be another structure piece too, especially online. I know, one of the complaints that I heard a lot in the spring was I have to read everybody’s posts, and they’re so long. And you know, I don’t know. And so it seems to me like having folks in groups, and we will certainly do that in the classroom face to face when we have them. So having those sort of breakout groups where they’re just responding to a few people seems like that might be a good structure piece to to transition to online.

Kevin: Yeah, coming from the small college environment, my classes are all 30 people or less, so it’s a little more manageable. But you’re right. In a larger group, that would be the strategy I would recommend is creating groups. And you might have those be consistent throughout the course or you might change them up. But that way, it’s not an overwhelming thing. And you’re not just clicking through discussion posts to respond because then you’re going to get the stuff that’s just sort of pro forma, almost resentful, replies. So keeping that cognitive load manageable, I think is a really important part of it.

John: You mentioned VoiceThread a few minutes ago, and I’ve used voice thread, I’m not using it right now, but I’m probably going to be switching over to Flipgrid. But one of the things that happened there is I had two discussions going each week one was done in VoiceThread one was in text. And one of the things I noticed, and students commented on this at the end of the term, too, is that when they were reading the text discussions in the other forum, they were hearing the voices of the people there. So it created much more of a sense of presence, you got more of a feel for the people, they were no longer just words on the screens, you already learned more about their personalities. And it made the discussions much more alive than the typical discussion board.

Kevin: Yeah, again, social presence, the degree to which the other people in the course are actual real human beings. And VoiceThread is a great tool for that because it adds exactly that, you hear the person, you see the person, you have that image associated in your head. We use Blackboard as our learning management system here and the threaded discussions… Instructors would come and “I just can’t sustain a discussion,” and I couldn’t and I’ve been teaching online for six, seven years now, and It finally dawned on me that if you look at the actual interface of those discussion boards, they don’t look a thing like what our students encounter when they engage online with other people. They actually look like, I’ll date myself here, but in the early 90s, when I was an undergraduate, the old BBS’s, with the sysmod and the thread, you know, that’s what a Blackboard threaded discussion looks like. That is ancient history for students, [LAUGHTER] in terms of how they’re engaging online. And so I moved to a WordPress blog, because it looks like Yelp, it looks like social media, it looks like things that they’re already used to engaging in. And so I do think one of the things we could do to create presence is add media, add video with a tool like VoiceThread. But even the interface itself is a place that looks like a place of engagement for our students. That’s a really important consideration, I think.

Rebecca: I use Slack for a similar reason, because it allows for asynchronous conversation, but it also has the ability to be immediate in a way that threaded discussions don’t feel that way. And you can @mention people… [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: Yeah.

Rebecca: …like the things that students are used to being able to do.

Kevin: Yeah I have some colleagues here who run a graduate program in athletic training and it’s cohort based. In each cohort slack is the main tool they use throughout the program. And they’ve been super successful with it.

Rebecca: I wanted to follow up a little bit on the difference between the spring and the fall in that, in the spring, many faculty were in a face-to-face environment, and they had established relationships in person with students and then moved to an online environment, which is really different than if a group needs to start online and maybe move to face to face later or maybe stay online. So, can you talk a little bit about establishing that community when it might have to start remote especially for faculty who aren’t as familiar?

Cyndi: I have less experience with that. I have not taught a ton online but I think the social presence idea is super key. I mean, in the courses that I’ve taught online, I find that to be useful. So, using as much short video and voice as much as possible so that they get a sense of who you are as a person and asking them to do things that are personal and low stakes in terms of like just getting to know you. I know sometimes when I’ve taught, like having them post pictures of their dog or cat or things like that. I have not gotten outside of the LMS as much as it sounds like Kevin, you have, but it seems like using other tools that allow for, like you said, it to look more like what they’re used to seems like it would be a useful thing. One quick thing I would add that I’ve been thinking about a lot is, again, I teach about pretty difficult topics often, particularly when I teach about race and racism. And so something I’ve been thinking about a lot is like how to create that presence when I’ve never taught that class online until this last March when I suddenly was, but I was grateful that I had those established relationships. And I think going forward one thing that I’ve been doing the last couple semesters, especially for my students of color, and especially I think, given the environment now, I always reach out to sort of let them know that while I have a lot of expertise around racism, because I’m a white person I don’t have the same sort of lived experience that they have of race and racism, and I don’t expect them to answer exactly, but I just sort of say like, “I want you to know that I recognize this,” so that you see this. And I’m thinking that that’s going to be especially important teaching in this format going forward over the next year, I’m gonna want to make sure that I’m definitely reaching out to students, particularly students of color to let them know that, because I know that that’s an important piece of making them feel a part of the community. And I’m going to be trying to develop as many other techniques as possible, because particularly in that class, and in a lot of what I teach, I think it’s just going to be super important to develop that sense of belonging and compassion. And that’s going to be harder to do, in some ways, without being able to see them so often.

Kevin: I would echo Cyndi’s emphasis on the idea of presence and ways that people can be seen for themselves and students can be seen for themselves as opposed to just sort of avatar pictures or even generic avatar images. Sean Michael Morris has a great thing that I’ve seen him write a bunch in his work on online in critical digital pedagogy where he says we need to be teaching through the screen, not to the screen, and such a simple way to put it, but I think that’s really the difference. So one practical tip on that line is video is great… short, quick, they don’t have to be super fancy produced. I record intro videos with my phone in selfie mode. And in fact, having them a little rough around the edges actually, I think, kind of helps in terms of being authentic. Someone who I think is really good at this and has a lot of good ways to get started with videos in online teaching is Mike Wesch, W.E.S.C.H. And a lot of people have heard of him. He’s been doing a lot of stuff since our online pivot. But I really like his approach to the use of videos. And I really like the way that he talks about if you haven’t done this sort of stuff before how you might get started, and what you might think about doing and de-complicating it for us. So, a Google search will bring up his website and he’s got some great resources and materials there. And I’ve spent a lot of my faculty colleagues look in there who have had questions about effective use of videos. But again, to what degree are we real people in an online learning space? Anything that we can do to raise that. And regular communication is so important too as Cyndi talks about, whether it’s with individual students or the whole class, you know, check it In emails. It requires a lot more monitoring maybe in terms of are people in the space and, not… you don’t want to turn into like a surveillance tech or anything like that. But, by the same token, it’s very easy for students to drift away in a class that’s mostly online, and we need to be really cognizant of that.

John: One of the factors there that makes a difference is economic inequalities, where students in low-income households may not have the same access to high speed WiFi, to computers, and other tools. What can we do to try to maintain an equitable and inclusive environment when students have very different resources for connecting to classes?

Cyndi: Yeah, this is so challenging. I think one thing is just to know for sure that that is a problem. And so I know a lot of us in March did little surveys to find out where the students’ at, what sort of access do they have? Are there any issues that we need to be aware of? I know on our campus, there was so much concern that students not having access wouldn’t even know because they wouldn’t be getting an email, that we sent out postcards to every student just in case, to try to make sure that we caught all of them. So, those are some things. I think also really pushing your institution as much as possible to provide resources because a lot of this, it’s so upsetting because it’s so disempowering, or at least that’s how I’ve experienced it, because I know that there are students who have very simple needs. I was talking to one student on the phone, one of my advisees, I was doing advising over the phone in March or April, and we have a fair number of rural students from Western Wisconsin, and she was talking about living in a house where there were mice that would chew through the cord so that then their WiFi, you know, they would lose it. And it’s just like, “Oh, that’s such a terrible problem that I don’t know how to fix.” Like, “I don’t know how to fix that.” And so like really pushing our institutions to provide as much as possible to those students to find out who they are, to make sure that we’re providing them with a laptop, at least something loaner, some sort of hotspot, maybe, that they can use for WiFi. I know lots of campuses did that. We tried to do that. But really pushing administration in our campuses to remember those students and to help them, because at the faculty level, it can be really difficult to solve some of those problems. I mean, sometimes you can, but it can be difficult if there are those sort of material problems.

Kevin: Yeah, at a small school like mine, it’s easier to do those sorts of things. Because most of us know the students well, and it’s easier to communicate and you know, touch base with one another. But at larger institutions, this is imperative, right? Because oftentimes, it’s going to be the faculty member who’s probably most aware of where the lack of access or spots are in our own particular course. So, what’s the communication channel to try to get those things resolved? So, every institution, their faculty need to know who do I approach to help problem solve this? What’s the protocol? How are we going to figure this out? So many institutions got access to CARES Act money, for example. So, emergency grants to students, little Chromebooks and things like that, but we can’t guide those resources efficiently if we don’t know where they need to go. So, “What’s the communication plan?” is the biggest one and then as Cyndi points out, how are we finding this from our students? So, a quick survey about, not just access, but availability, like there’s a difference between access to WiFi and ready availability of WiFi. If the public library is still closed, does this person still have access, right? [LAUGHTER] Or is it still available? So details we can get in terms of where you’re at right now? Do you have steady access to internet? What’s the connection like rate it from zero to 10, with zero being the mice have chewed the cords and 10 being I can stream three things at once, right? …and try to get as much of a sense as we can, because then that informs the choices that we make. There’s a lot of online practitioners right now who are saying in the stuff we’re designing online, make it so students can do it on a phone. And I’m a big proponent of that. If we’re going to be moving into remote instruction, this is not what most students signed up for. And so we need to make sure that they can still access. So, don’t have students uploading and downloading large video files, for example, be conscious of how we might be forcing students to use parts of their data plan. So, streaming things might work but what platform are they streaming it through? Was it something thing that has a good mobile app, for example? If you’re using Zoom, is that a good mobile app as opposed to Skype? And then reach out to your colleagues, if you’re not quite sure what the answers to those things are, because those are important considerations in those sort of routine choices we make in creating learning spaces, especially if we’re in for a remote fall.

Rebecca: I think along those same lines, and those same surveys asking about that availability in terms of caretaking jobs like actual time, because they might have signed up for a class at a specific time, but that might not actually be their availability. There’s, I think, a lot of assumptions that faculty might make that we shouldn’t be making.

Kevin: Right. I think one of the things that folks really struggled with this spring was the expectation that we could just continue classes synchronously as normal. And I think, very quickly, a lot of folks learned that that is not the case. And if we end up this fall with maybe some in person, but some online, and I think that’s the best-case scenario. For the students who are online, we can’t expect synchronous, we just can’t if they’re not on campus. So we need to be thinking really hard about what the pathways to learning are and are those equitable are those inclusive… the equivalency of an in-person versus online synchronous versus asynchronous. Those are some really important decisions that need to be made. And they need to be made from a, I think, planning for the worst as opposed to the sort of magical thinking that everything will go away. It will be normal in August because I don’t think it’s responsible for us to approach our planning that way. He said pessimistically… [LAUGHTER]

John: Realistically.

Cyndi: Yeah, realistically. Yeah, I feel like that synchronous/asynchronous is such a challenge too in terms of thinking about our own classes. I mean, it seems like, yeah, that is difficult, I think sometimes to get folks to understand from an equity perspective, that really, if you are online, even if you have to suddenly pivot to it, or you’d plan for this, but then it’s going to be mostly online, which is, like Kevin said, I think probably most likely, just really understanding and helping your colleagues to understand that that really does need to be asynchronous. And I know that’s really hard for people. I think there’s a lot of maybe grief is the right word around sort of like having to give that up. And there’s also a lot of focus on “Well, if we just get the right cameras, and if we get the right kind of technology, then somehow we can still do it synchronously.” But all of that assumes, first of all, that the students can like download or have all the bandwidth for that to be able to, like livestream that or whatever. But it also assumes that they can be available during those times. And I have a lot of fear because, just because it’s on the schedule, let’s say right now, like we’re registering new students right now, I’m doing that all day tomorrow. So, there’s this expectation that somehow they should be able to do that without really thinking through what it’s like for those students. So, I feel like that synchronous, asynchronous is a real thing that a lot of us need to focus on and help other people understand better.

Kevin: And even with the synchronous piece too, not to say we could never do synchronous stuff, but I think when we’re requiring students, if you’re needing participation, you might want to rethink that as a strategy. And then, what kind of opportunities might be available for students? Are there different windows of time where they could drop in, as opposed to only at Monday from 1:00 to 1:50 and that’s more work on the faculty side, plain and simple, but if you want to preserve that part of a course then you have to put in the extra work to make sure that it’s accessible for all your students. And I think in some cases, that’s a perfectly appropriate strategy. And for schools like mine that are doing the HyFlex model of preparation, there is a synchronous element to it. But it’s heavily modified from what our usual expectations are. So, I think we need to really think through that clearly, before we start making design choices.

John: So, the HyFlex model can be pretty challenging for faculty, because basically, you’re developing the equivalent of two courses… where you’re developing some activities that are synchronous, and then equivalent activities that are asynchronous. How are faculty reacting to that? I know we’ve done a series of workshops here, and that was not a concept that appealed to all faculty at this point, having come right off of this spring semester.

Kevin: And that’s the thing there is that sort of sticker shock to it, where you look at it, and you say, “Oh, this is a lot.” …and it is. And so what I think what administration needs to do is to acknowledge it and affirm that effort. Are there ways that you can support that faculty or even if you can’t be handing out money left and right are there ways that small stipends can be given? What kind of faculty development support are you giving faculty? How are you going to help guide and mentor them through that? I think one of the things about the HyFlex model that is appealing is one of its core principles is the idea of reusability, that there are learning activities and artifacts that could be used across these different modes. And I think that’s something that we could really take advantage of. One of the things that I think could work really well is that the students who are attending asynchronously online doing equivalent learning activities, might those activities be leading a discussion online that involves the whole class. So, the whole class is still participating, but there’s a little bit of a level up in terms of the effort and the direction that’s coming from students on the asynchronous side. So, they’re doing equivalencies, you’re still building community, you don’t have students who are in separate tracks and never meeting. The HyFlex model to me seems to be most effective when we’re able to braid these things together as much as we can. But, you’re right. It’s not like you’re designing three separate courses, but it’s certainly more than designing one course. It’s somewhere in between there. And what that means is work, plain and simple, and I think administration, the people who are cutting the checks, need to realize the scope of effort that goes into that, in particular with what we’re asking our part-time colleagues to do in terms of preparing for the fall, because I think it’s a perfectly reasonable response for an adjunct faculty member to say, at the same rate of pay as a normal semester course, that I can’t do that for this. And so what are we going to have in place, because a lot of times in institutions, it is our adjunct colleagues who are teaching our hundred-level courses or courses that really intersect with a large number of students. And if you’re not supporting adjunct faculty anyway, you’re doing it wrong. But certainly in this process of HyFlex, we really need to be paying attention and directing resources to that group in particular.

John: One of the things you mentioned is an argument I’ve tried to make to faculty here, which is to focus your time on activities that can work in any modality and have most of the graded work done asynchronously, so you don’t have to spend as much time creating completely separate assignments and then create things that support instruction in any way and then you’ll have them if things get back to normal in semester or two or three or four. And that seemed to help a little bit, but people were still not entirely convinced.

Kevin: The one thing about the HyFlex model too is if we do have to go fully remote in October or whatnot, if you’ve already created that pathway, that’s going to be a lot easier to do than it was in the spring. And I think one of the things that I really saw in the spring that kind of gladdened me was there was a lot of extending of compassionate grace to faculty and to students, that we’re all figuring this out together. I don’t think that’s going to be the same case for the fall, there is going to be this like, “Okay, y’all had some time to think about this.” If there is this sort of pivot that has to happen, hopefully, we’re a little bit better prepared. And so John, I think your ideas about the way to structure those assignments and to have them asynchronously and have those things that work across modalities. Those are some of the key strategies to that kind of preparation.

Rebecca: I think we talked a little bit earlier about the ongoing protests related to George Floyd’s death and the unrest related to that in addition to COVID-19. And so faculty are feeling concerned about that and wanting to make sure that they’re addressing all kinds of inequities, not just the ones that bubbled up from COVID-19, despite the fact that those are the same inequities that existed before COVID-19… they just became more visible. Can you talk a little bit about ways that faculty might better prepare themselves for dealing with these kinds of issues and these kinds of conversations in the fall? We’re getting a lot of questions, especially from white faculty, about not feeling prepared to address issues of racism, for example.

Cyndi: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of like, a lot of people are putting out statements, for example. So, institutions are putting out statements often coming from Chancellors and Presidents. And I’ve been thinking more about, rather than doing things like that, actually doing the work of trying to make your classes as inclusive as possible. I think sort of a cliched way to put it, but what matters is what you do, not really what you say. So, I keep thinking about a couple things. There’s like two pieces to this in my mind. There’s like the inclusive pedagogy piece of it, which is the work that may not be the talking about difficult ideas, but you’re addressing the actual inequity, right. And so really thinking about, and there’s a lot of good guides on inclusive pedagogy. I know Kevin’s written about this Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan had a great advice guide in The Chronicle and their book will be coming out soon-ish, I think… not sure exactly when, but they have a lot of good ideas and have written a lot about it. But actually doing that work and really thinking about your class in terms of being as inclusive as possible. Because, when you’re doing that, then you are doing that equity work, whether or not you’re making a statement about it. So, that’s one thing. I think the other thing too is that if you do want to talk about it sort of being as prepared as possible, and this gets back to this idea of structure, but it really doesn’t go well. If you don’t know a lot about these issues from your discipline’s perspective, I think it’s a good idea to find out. So, let’s say you teach a course where traditionally you don’t think these issues would come up. I have a good friend who works here who’s a mathematician who talks a lot about the idea of math and white privilege, which is really a foreign concept to a lot of folks, but like he’s done the work to understand that even though it’s not his specialty area, and he talks about it in class, and it’s hugely helpful for those students. In addition, you could also just look at your field overall, in terms of, and I know, Kevin, I’ve heard you talk about this, like looking at who are your textbook authors and then just making that visible to your students like, “Here’s who these authors are. Here’s how this field has been inequitable. Here are some ways to think about this field overall and look at the resources that I’m sharing with you where I’m trying intentionally to be equitable.” So, really just doing the work less about statements and more about actually doing that work of trying to find ways to bring it in that are relevant and understanding it really well before you try to talk about it. Because when you know it, and you have a plan for how you’re going to talk about it, and a plan for helping students make sense of it, like this is why I’m talking about this, this is why this matters in this particular field, you’re going to be a lot better off than if, say, you just sort of wanted to open it up and ask people to talk about their feelings about it. You could do that. But I think you have to do that in a context where you’ve already done a lot of work to prepare them for that. So, I think it takes some effort to get ready for that but it’s certainly doable and definitely worth it because it helps those students to feel seen and to feel a part of the class in ways that they probably usually don’t.

Kevin: And in terms of the work that we need to do as faculty members as well, now is not the time, for example, to email one of your black colleagues and say, “Help me learn about anti-racist work.”

Cyndi: No, no, no.

Kevin: That’s sort of let’s put that out there. I’m a white man. For those of us who identify as white, there is an onus on us to do the sort of work to interrogate, not just inequities, but whiteness and how whiteness works at the university. And so the questions we need to be thinking about already are certainly heightened now. Does our faculty and staff at our institution, does it look like our student body? The answer to that is probably no. So, what’s being done about that? How are we addressing that as an institution? What am I doing in the classroom to promote a sense of belonging for all of my students? Belonging is key. And again, in an online or mostly online environment, it becomes even more important. How do I belong in this class as a learner? Am I seeing ways that I can personally connect with the course material the instructor, my peers in the classroom. So, how do we foster that sense of genuine belonging and welcome. That doesn’t mean that you do the equivalent of sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya for the first class. But, it does mean students are not just brains on sticks. [LAUGHTER] And students are coming to us just like as we’re coming into this work, it’s been a hell of a few years. Our bandwidth is weird, our attention spans are weird. There’s anxiety, there’s ambient stress. So, let’s recognize that and acknowledge that for our students when we think about the choices that we make when we’re designing our learning spaces. Even if we may not think our material is political, or has to do with race, the lives that our students are living are political and have to do with race, for example, and they are not coming to us from a vacuum. And I swear we didn’t pre-plan this, but I will promote Cyndi’s book in this regard. It’s been super useful. And again, for those of us who are white, I found it really helpful and thinking about the ways as a historian that I’m approaching the subject with my students, but also as a faculty developer and working with colleagues too. It’s a great book full of concrete suggestions about how to do this kind of work, especially if it’s not a type of work that you’ve been doing or felt like you’ve been asked to do before. So, that’s one good starting point.

Cyndi: Thanks!

John: And I’d like to throw in that we regularly promote both of your books with our faculty because they really do a nice job talking about creating an inclusive environment in classes, which is something we all have to worry about.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s a teaching and learning conversation. Do all our students have the equitable opportunities to accomplish the goals for the course? If I create course goals, these course outcomes, Dee Fink calls them the significant learning experience, if not all of my students have the opportunity to get the same significance in the learning experience, then that’s a problem. We are breaking promises that we made to students when we admitted them to our institution. So, yeah, it’s all of our work to do

Rebecca: To follow up on something that Kevin said about this isn’t the time to reach out to our faculty of color for advice. Instead, I’d like to recommend, if it’s a topic that you don’t have a lot of practice talking about, is to work with a few colleagues who also need to practice, and practice with each other. Open up the conversation and give yourself the opportunity to practice before you’re practicing in front of all your students.

Cyndi: And there’s so many resources like that’s one of the things in this moment. Like there’s tons of lists of books going around. Right. And really good podcasts. I mean, I certainly have no shortage of recommendations. I’m sure Kevin does, too. There’s lots of stuff out there where you don’t need to ask people individually, you can read about people’s lives, you can read about their experiences and take them seriously. And the more you do that, and the more you listen in that way, the more prepared you’re going to be. But, I love the idea of practicing too. Let’s practice talking about these awkward topics. It’s an excellent suggestion.

Rebecca: We want our students to practice, right? So, we might as well practice, too. [LAUGHTER]

John: One topic that came up in our earlier podcast with Kevin was the notion of decolonizing your syllabus and one of the issues when we address that idea with many faculty is that there may not be many voices from other groups. One of the questions that comes up often is, might it be effective just to address the systematic exclusion of those other voices in the classroom, to at least address the issue and recognize that it’s a problem.

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. getting students to critically interrogate the silences in our disciplines at our fields, I think is really important decolonization work. And it’s an easier thing to do in a discipline like history where you can sort of trace who got to write the history when, but I think it gives us a chance to talk about what are ways of knowing what type of knowledge claims are valued? …the western emphasis on so-called rational objectivity? That’s a very culturally specific product. And so if that’s the dominant paradigm in let’s say, a math course, then what does that mean? Is that the only path? And when we think that we’re learning something that’s true with a capital T, objective with a capital O, chances are it isn’t. And if there aren’t other perspectives, then yes, absolutely, let’s have those conversations about why that’s the case. I think sometimes the silences are more powerful of a learning tool than anything else and getting students to look for those silences, to look for those spaces, and understand that they’re there, that by their absence is a really effective way to get at some of this larger work.

Cyndi: Yeah, that’s part of what I meant about bringing it into classes where you might not think it fits or whatever, because you don’t normally talk about it. But, you can look at the field in a meta way and say, like, who’s in this field and who’s not who’s being published and who’s not. And over the weekend, there was a great series of tweets, I forget the hash tag on it, but it was like, people were comparing their book advances, you guys might have seen this. And so it was like this comparison of white authors and black authors. And you know, the discrepancies were very large. And usually people don’t talk about what their book advances are. And so this might be a way let’s say, if you’re teaching literature, where you could show like here, look at this field, look at whose voices are being heard, who’s being published, in a meta way. And again, what that does, and the research is pretty clear on this, is by pointing out those discrepancies, you’re often validating the students of color in your class who know that there’s this discrimination there, but they maybe don’t have the data or the information and then by providing it, you’re validating that experience for them and helping them to feel seen and belong in the class. So yeah, that can be super useful.

Rebecca: I think it’s also sometimes faculty don’t know how to find out about other scholars in their field. And I think that at one point, I felt that way, too. I didn’t know who they were, they weren’t in my community, because I wasn’t including them in my community, right? [LAUGHTER] And my community wasn’t including, but finding a couple of voices, you only need a couple, follow them on social media, and then follow the people who respond. All of a sudden your social network and the people that you follow and the voices that you hear expand greatly, and it can really help in terms of just knowing what’s going on in a bigger picture. Something as simple as that can actually expand your knowledge really quickly.

Kevin: Yeah. What are you consuming in terms of your intellectual work? And asking yourself that question, and then what am I consuming and where am I getting it from? And what is the production of that intellectual work look like? Then making changes accordingly. As white scholars, it’s very easy for us. In fact, almost always, we default into communities of white scholars, given the structures of inequity that are in place. This isn’t something that will happen by accident. It’s the diversification of our intellectual work and our intellectual world, the consumption of knowledge and the production of knowledge. We have to make the mindful effort to do that. It’s not something that’s just going to happen because social media is a thing. It’s how we’re using these platforms and tools, it’s so important.

John: One of the things you emphasize in your Pedagogies of Care project is that it’s more important to focus on learners rather than content. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Kevin: The mantra that I always use is covering content is what instructors do, not what students do. So, if your strategy is revolving around, I’m going to cover X. Okay, great. I know what you’re gonna do in this course, but what are your students going to do? And when we think about it that way, then we start asking some of the questions that’ll lead us to, I think, more effective choices.

Cyndi: Yeah, that’s what I love so much about your book. Kevin, and what was so great about it was like, I already felt like I was focused a lot on the relationship because I don’t think a lot of learning can happen without the relationships, but your book really helps to like flip that lens to think about that piece of it… like, what are the students doing? Because if it’s just about content, it gets into that classrooms of death concept that you talk about really nicely in the first chapter. Because, yeah, it’s not there.

Kevin: Yeah. And it’s not to say that content isn’t important…

CYNDI… Oh, yeah.

Kevin: …that we should just get rid of, but everything in a balance. And right now, a lot of the classes that we teach don’t have that balance. And it comes down to what do we want our students to be able to get out of these courses? They’re not going to remember all the content within a year. So, that seems like an enormous waste of time, if that’s our exclusive focus.

Rebecca: I think one lesson that I’ve noticed faculty have taken away from this spring. And of course, I’ve been mostly an innocent bystander, because I was on sabbatical, is that faculty were slashing content as a way to pivot and recognizing that maybe all this isn’t necessary… so that you can focus on some of these bigger ideas, like the way that a discipline works, or ways that we connect or work together as scholars in a particular field.

Kevin: Yeah, and nothing exploded… [LAUGHTER]

Cyndi: Right.

Kevin: You know, the world didn;t end. Although it does seem like it did end on some days. [LAUGHTER]

Cyndi: A little bit.

Kevin: But, all of a sudden we realize what’s been possible that we had thought wasn’t the case. And I think those are really important lessons for us to take from this spring going forward.

Rebecca: I think the language that you use in your book, Kevin is about being an ally for students, can you talk a little bit more about ways that we can be better allies and what we shouldn’t be doing?

Kevin: So, I’ll use an example actually, from a conversation that probably happened in a lot of places this past spring with our online pivot, and it certainly happened at my institution, and that comes with online proctoring for exams. All of a sudden, as students are taking tests online, we need to proctor them, and if you look at the way that these proctoring services work, Shea Swauger wrote a really good critique of that in Hybrid Pedagogy several weeks ago, but this is surveillance tech. This is really kind of creepy stuff, and just objectively speaking, and it costs a lot of money for resource-poor institutions like mine, this is a significant investment if we’re going to do these things. And I think what happens as we immediately went into this place where we assumed that given any opportunity to game the system, that that’s exactly what students would do; that that would be their default reaction. I think if you look a lot of the rhetoric about, well, how do we make sure they’re not cheating? And how do we make sure that we’re fair to everybody? And how do we prevent this? And how do we prevent that? That’s an adversarial position, we’re assuming that our students are adversaries by default, and they know that. They hear us when we treat them like that. And students want the same things that we want out of our courses. They want meaningful learning, they want the course to be a good experience, they want to get something out of it, even if it’s a course they’re taking to check a box as they see it. Students want their courses to not suck, as opposed to suck, and I want my courses to not suck as opposed to suck. So, we have a confluence of goals. So, I think we need to be really careful about the narrative that we construct of students because it is very easy to default into this adversarial outlook. And as we’re really grappling with all sorts of sort of new questions and materials and tools in online teaching and learning, this is a real problem. So, we need to really think about the choices that we’re making institutionally as well as in our own class at what those choices are saying, either implicitly or explicitly, to our students.

Rebecca: The first prompt of the semester: How do we all make this not suck?

Kevin: Yeah.

John: We should have said that explicitly in that workshop we gave to faculty for the last couple of weeks. [LAUGHTER] It’s really good advice.

Kevin: I mean, I hate to use all sorts of technical language there, but sometimes you gotta chime in. [LAUGHTER]

John: We always end with the question: What’s next? …which is something we’re all thinking about these days.

Cyndi: I think two things for me. One is, like I said, I really want to make sure that I’m teaching about racism and prejudice online as strongly as possible, because that is new and I’m going to be doing that again. So, that I think is going to be one focus. The other focus is going to be the brand new Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning that we have at River Falls, which I’m very excited about. But boy, the timing is strange. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Impeccable, really.

Cyndi: It’s amazing. So, I accepted that position, like at the very end of February, beginning of March. And then of course, the world sort of changed and upended and ended and so figuring out how to help my campus instructors as much as possible. So, that’s gonna keep me busy.

Kevin: Yeah, about the same for me, we’re working a lot of intensive training this summer in particular with HyFlex course design and teaching as well as everything, sort of the nuts and bolts of here’s how to use this particular tool to the larger kind of bigger sessions on things like course design and integrated course design and things like that. So, I’m getting good at a lot of tools that I had sort of known about, but hadn’t used before, because I’m field testing a lot of things for faculty and making tutorial videos. So, that’s what’s next is the next module in this training I’m building. But also, I’m currently teaching a course on teaching African-American History online. And so that course is in a much different place now than it was even when it started earlier in the summer. It is the first time my institution has offered a course in African-American history. Our curriculum needs to be decolonized in many ways. And so what’s next for me is building on what so far has been a really, I think, kind of powerful set of experiences with the students who are enrolled in this class and thinking about how we take that work and sustain it as opposed to have it just be a summer course that goes away.

Rebecca: No shortage of big tall demands. [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: None whatsoever and it definitely keeps me off the streets and out of trouble.

John: Well, thank you both. The last time we talked to each of you things were a little more calm. I think Kevin was the last podcast we had when this was just getting underway, and before most campuses closed, and it’s nice to follow you and to see how things are going and all the great things that you’re doing and thank you for your wonderful work.

Cyndi: Thank you.

Kevin: and thanks for having us.

Rebecca: Thanks for having 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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141. Pedagogies of Care: Students as Humans

This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Sarah Rose Cavanagh and Josh Eyler join us to discuss how we can enhance student learning by designing our classes to provide a strong sense of class community and using immediacy cues to maintain instructor presence.  Sarah is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing Education with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World, and numerous scholarly publications. She is the Associate Director for Grants and Research at the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, the Co-Director of the Laboratory for Cognitive and Affective Science, and also Research Affiliate at the Emotion, Brain and Behavior Laboratory at Tufts University. Josh is the director of Faculty Development, and a Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. Josh is the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective Teaching.

Show Notes

  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2019). Hivemind: The new science of tribalism in our divided world. Grand Central Publishing. (We used her original title and not the one that the publisher assigned in the discussion.)
  • Eyler, J. R. (2018). How humans learn: The science and stories behind effective college teaching. West Virginia University Press.
  • Pedagogies of Care Project
  • Christopher Emdin
  • Costa, K. (2020). 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos: A Guide for Online Teachers and Flipped Classes. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Kathleen Matthews
  • Cavanagh, Sarah (2017). “All The Classroom’s a StageThe Chronicle of Higher Ed. June 27.

Transcript

John: This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we explore how we can enhance student learning by designing our classes to provide a strong sense of class community and using immediacy cues to maintain instructor presence.

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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 byJohn 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: We are very pleased to welcome back our two guests today: Sarah Rose Cavanagh and Josh Eyler. Sarah is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing Education with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World, and numerous scholarly publications. She is the Associate Director for Grants and Research at the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, the Co-Director of the Laboratory for Cognitive and Affective Science, and also Research Affiliate at the Emotion, Brain and Behavior Laboratory at Tufts University. Josh is the director of Faculty Development, and a Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. Josh is the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective Teaching. Welcome back, Josh and Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you.

Josh: Thanks very much.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Sarah, are you drinking tea?

Sarah: I’m not. I’m quite thirsty because I was going to be drinking seltzer but I left it downstairs.

Josh: And I have some basic cold H2O here.

Rebecca: Yep, yep. We know how it goes with this with the two of you. [LAUGHTER] Uh hmm.

John: Just not cooperating, but probably half of our guests don’t, so that’s okay. And I’m drinking ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: …and I have black currant today.

Josh: Nice.

John: We’ve invited you back today to talk about the project you created for the Pedagogies of Care project. In our three previous podcasts, we’ve talked to other people in the project. So, we’d like to hear a little bit about what you jointly contributed to this project. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Josh: Sure, definitely. As you know, this is part of a larger project with West Virginia University Press authors. We wanted to kind of approach this topic of Pedagogy of Care from the social angle and in both of our books we talk about sociality and the overlap between sociality and emotions and I thought it’d be a lot of fun to collaborate with Sarah. We’ve talked about some of the same topics in different and complementary ways in both of our books. And we really wanted to bring some of that research to bear on how we create classrooms that honors students as human beings in ways that really advance the work of learning.

Sarah: And I would just contribute that there it was a lot of fun to collaborate with Josh on this, and also that it was his idea to team up. And I might not have done it because I was feeling kind of lazy. [LAUGHTER] And so, when we first started talking about the possibility of some of the authors contributing to this project, I didn’t know if I would join in, but then when Josh invited me, how could I say no?

Josh: And I just want to note that nothing is further from the truth then Sarah being lazy. [LAUGHTER]

John: Without giving away too much about your contribution to the project, could you tell us a little bit about what your focus is in this?

Sarah: Sure. I think, as Josh noted, we really focused on emotions and sociality, because that is kind of the touchpoint between our two bodies of work, and we really wanted to communicate in a pretty brief format. As you’ve probably heard from the other contributors, the intention was that these be easily digestible, short, accessible pieces that different Centers for Teaching Excellence or educational developers could use in their own work with their own faculty. So, we wanted to just briefly touch on the fact, and convey the message, that is really important for educators to realize and communicate in their own classrooms that they themselves are a person with their own unique style and flair, that they know that their students are people and see them as individuals, and that you tend a little bit to the community of your classroom. And so those were some of the major points that we wanted to convey in a very brief format.

Josh: Yeah, and I think that’s absolutely right. And it’s also true that we wanted to model a little bit about what we were talking about. So, we wanted to keep it light, we want to inject a little bit of humor. We wanted to make it more of a conversation, to capitalize on ways that faculty can do that in their classrooms as well.

Rebecca: We’ve talked a little bit before about how faculty don’t always think about tending to that community piece as much as we need to, especially in this moment. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of adjustments the faculty might need to make to attend to that community piece a little bit more?

Josh: You’re right to pinpoint this moment particularly, because especially if you started out teaching face to face, and then having to suddenly shift into an online format, that can be jarring, especially in terms of how you continue the community you developed in the face-to-face environment, and how you also heighten and maximize it. And they’re just different things that you need to do. One is, and we do mention this in our project, communicate with students as often as possible, let them hear from you, let them see you through video as much as you can. And to focus on what I think really matters most about social interaction, and that’s collaborating with other human beings. And there are lots of great ways to do that, even asynchronously,but you have to look for them and spend some time, I think, figuring out how to implement them effectively.

Sarah: And, I think, on my campus, we’ve been talking to students in a couple of the different offices on our campus, like the Student Success office has been polling students and interviewing students about their experiences this spring. And one of the things that we heard from a lot of our students was that they missed the in-the-classroom experience, not even seeing us and learning from us, but the interactions with the other students. And that one of the things that they thought that some faculty did really well in the remote switch, and some did less well, was create opportunities for them to engage with each other still. And to have that experience, whether it is in breakout rooms in Zoom or on the discussion boards for collaborative projects that they’re working on, where they still got to interact with each other and their fellow peers.

Josh: One of the things that, I don’t think we mentioned it in our project, but social media, which is where all the four of us have interacted, that’s asynchronous social interaction. I mean, I may see a tweet from eight hours ago that I’m responding to and so, definitely ways to make it meaningful. But as Sarah was saying that there’s so much of what students value is talking to each other and being with each other.

Rebecca: Wait Josh, you don’t interact with me at 5 am [LAUGHTER]? That’s when I do most of my tweet interactions. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: Right. I do a lot of late tweets as well. [LAUGHTER] I’m not an early morning tweeter.

Sarah: I follow an unusual number of people from the United Kingdom for some reason. But I always noticed this, that the whole ton of my social network will be posting about going to bed and a bit late, what? Or the day being done.

Rebecca: It’s funny how that jars our experience a little bit. I wanted to follow up on something that you started with Josh, which was the moment of starting in person and moving to online, whereas in the fall, we might have the opposite experience, where we might start online and move to in person. Can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies that faculty could consider to establish that community when it wasn’t already established from that in-person engagement.

Josh: A couple of things about that. I think that some of the strategies we were just talking about, forging community in the online spaces early, and often, will be key. I also think that one key difference between now and the sudden emergency shift is that our institutions have a lot more time to be able to at least try to solve the problem of access to technology, which opens the door for more synchronous elements that we couldn’t necessarily do because of equity issues. I know rural Mississippians, this is something we were thinking a lot about at my university, how do we get students the capabilities? But now we’ve had some time and I think it’s possible to do a little bit more synchronously, keeping it optional, hopefully, again for equity reasons, but more ways to do that. Now when we move to face to face, I think this is really important. It’s not going to be the same face to face that it used to be, right? I really have been talking to a lot of people about the psychological impact of faculty walking into a classroom for the first time in a mask, seeing students in masks and trying to manage community and the social dynamics of the classroom in a very new and emotionally fraught situation. And honestly, when I think about that setting, I turned to Sarah’s book immediately because it’s a good guidepost for how we might navigate that.

Sarah: I don’t know if you all saw this, but on social media there are a lot of people were talking about Purdue, I think it was, University was talking about putting up Plexiglas between the professors and the students. So, not only masks, but actual physical barriers, perhaps. And I think those are very wise points that Josh made, this is going to be a new normal, as everyone keeps saying, not back to normal.

John: One of my favorite responses to that was Robin DeRosa’s, who suggested that it’s basically making the person two dimensional. It’s like they’re on a screen, on this two-dimensional surface. And then she suggested, maybe there’s other things we could do if that’s how we’re going to do it. So, it was a nice suggestion.

Josh: I also think that virus particles can travel over Plexiglas. It’s a strange solution to me. I don’t know.

Rebecca: …not to mention, it reinforces hierarchy. And so, if you’re trying to establish a flattened space…

Josh: Right.

Rebecca: …where you have more of a community that certainly is not going to work, if one person is behind a wall, and somehow everybody else doesn’t deserve a wall.

Josh: Right.

Rebecca: I don’t know if I want a wall, but…[LAUGHTER] Speaking of odd equity issues.

Sarah: And I think that faculty are also going to have to be very intentional if we start online, as online faculty probably have always been intentional about getting to know our students, about designing parts of the online community where students are recording videos or talking about their likes and dislikes. It’s very easy to get to know your students in that interstitial five minutes before class and at the end of class where you just chat a little bit, and the online environment doesn’t have that built in. And I think that we’re going to have to build it in very intentionally,

John: I’ve actually found, because the two classes that I was teaching that were not online were face to face. And there was a little bit of a cushion there, when with one of them, it looked like we were going to go remote. And then the other one, the decision had just been announced that that was going to happen in a few days. So I asked them, in both cases, and they at least claimed initially that they all had technology and good WiFi connections, and they preferred remaining synchronous. So, my classes continued to meet synchronously, although more activity shifted to online activities and we cut down on some of the actual contact hours a little bit in both of the classes. One of the things that happened was I’d log in a few minutes early and invite students to stay after the session ended. And there were a whole lot more interactions before the class started and at the end. As long as you build in opportunities for that interaction before and after class, it can work pretty nicely and you no longer have that podium in the way between you and the students as you might in a large lecture hall.

One of the things that’s common to the approaches you take in each of your books relating to teaching and learning is you focus on the importance of focusing on the human beings in the classroom and not the student per se, that students are not just recipients of knowledge, the role of emotions is really important, the connections they have a really important. Could you talk just a little bit about the importance of focusing on the people in the classroom?

Sarah: Yes, I think that part of that is something that we’ve gotten across a little bit already in our conversation is just attending to a sense of community and that human beings are so social, and so motivated by our own sociality. But, I think a new point I’d like to make is that we also need to think about, in the classroom, the idea of co-creation and what Chris Emdin calls “co-generating dialogues” and the idea that we are all learning together and that we are all creating this learning environment and the learning that occurs in that learning environment together, both the instructor and the students, and that they are learning from each other as much as they’re learning from us. And we’re learning from them. And so I think that they should have some say in shaping the work of the classroom and shaping the direction of the discussions that are occurring. I’m a big believer in autonomy and choice in terms of the format of some of the assignments, the structure of some of the course…the topics even. And I think that when you think about the classroom as a social setting, that brings that to the surface, that idea of co-creating the learning environment.

Josh: Building off of that we’re all humans in this room. And if anyone’s ever had the experience in the classroom, where a student came up with a point that you’d never thought of before and you have that kind of epiphany, or there’s something that moves the students and you in the classroom, it’s just so clear that the classroom is a vibrant, human space. And I also really truly believe that teaching is one of the most human professions, that there’s a real vulnerability in a student saying, “I need to learn something, will you teach me that thing?” And the same is true for the person in front of the classroom to admit when we don’t know something, or to admit that we’re wrong, or to work through something that we haven’t really thought completely about. And so I think that that makes the classroom such a place that’s alive with activity. And so I think that, you know, our sociality is part of that, but it’s one piece of this larger equation.

Rebecca: Related to this idea, I’ve heard a lot of students concerned about the social experience of being in college that’s beyond just the classroom and how that feeds into their classroom participation and being a member of a community, and really faculty too, like those spontaneous moments where you interact with someone that you weren’t planning to because you bumped into him in the hallway or you see them somewhere on campus. Can you talk a little bit about some of those differences and ways that we might help, not really compensate for that, but just kind of care about that those things are missing and that there’s a loss of that and maybe facilitate or create new opportunities that would be different, but something that would allow for some community in a different way to form.

Josh: That’s a really pertinent question because I see a lot of discussion about “What is the value of being all together on a college campus? What does the face-to-face experience really mean and why does it matter?” And a surprising variety of thoughts about that question. So I think that we really need to be thinking about opportunities for students to engage and collaborate and talk together about things other than just the courses that they’re taking. We might learn lessons from the coaches on our campuses who are doing this very thing. They’re bringing their teams together. Sometimes they’re reviewing films, sometimes they’re just having community building events online, you know, watching a movie together and there are ways that even a college’s residential life staff could engage groups of students in doing something like that. I mean, we’ve seen for years faculty doing live film viewings with their students using hashtags and things like that on Twitter. I think Facebook now has a watch together feature so that you can all watch and make comments. So yeah, I think there are lots of opportunities that we just need to explore a little bit.

Sarah: Yeah. And my campus is exploring a lot of this and not necessarily the faculty groups, but the residential life and student success groups, and I know athletics, and they’re all trying to brainstorm “What are ways that we can create those moments?” And they’re trying to explore Zoom parties and the co-watching and town halls and everyone bring breakfast. [LAUGHTER] It’s really tricky because I think it’s a lot easier to do the teaching and learning bit online and I think that we have a lot of leaders in online learning who have developed wonderful techniques and there’s lots more we can explore. I think that’s the harder piece at residential colleges. Lots of students are commuting and don’t have a lot of those experiences. But, those who are at residential colleges, that’s what they’re there for. And they’re not used to having to be home with their parents or in these other scenarios. And they’re really hungering for that face-to-face connection. And I think that we have to come up with some creative solutions, such as the ones that Josh noted, but I think it’s a trickier business than the teaching and learning, actually.

Josh: I agree.

Rebecca: I think one thing that strikes me about the role that a faculty member could play in something like that is if something comes up in discussion, where you could connect a student to other students that are even in other classes that you have, or other faculty or other members of the bigger college community, that might be a way to help them make more of those spontaneous connections [LAUGHTER] that they’re not gonna make in another way, it’s almost they’re facilitated, but we might need to be a little more on our game about trying to help people make those connections.

Sarah: That’s great.

Rebecca: I know I got a random email from a colleague I hadn’t seen in a long time, just saying like, “Oh, I haven’t seen you in a long time.” And it was really nice. It felt spontaneous actually. [LAUGHTER] It wasn’t expected. So, I think if we take those moments and try those things, both with our colleagues and with students, it might help a little bit to make people feel connected, but also spark something exciting in a moment of excitement or a moment of care.

John: I was fortunately able to see the video before it being officially released. And I really enjoyed the format, the humanity that you display, and the really nice storytelling that provides some nice sense of narrative and some nice connections. Could you perhaps share one or two of the recommendations you provide for faculty in addressing the near future of teaching?

Sarah: One point that I tried to get across is this concept of immediacy and immediacy cues and this was something that I was struck by when researching The Spark of Learning, that there were so many different research studies and the research, really they were in different topics. They were investigating extensive student learning: did the students enjoy the course? Did the professor enjoy the course? Self ratings?… all these different variables. But, for so many of them, the professor using or not using immediacy cues was really important and what immediacy cues are are just simple, often nonverbal, ways of communicating that you are present and in the moment… so, things like eye contact, gestures, varied vocal tones. And I think a lot of these immediacy cues are easier to do face to face than they are online. But, I think when you translate immediacy on to online environments, a lot of it, and Josh mentioned this already, is frequency of responsiveness, just dipping into that online community a lot and responding to students, I think, is a way that, even though you’re not in the shared space with them, you’re demonstrating that you are present and that you are available to the students.

Josh: One of the other things we were talking about was the nature of care itself as kind of the intersection between our social natures and emotions, and that this crisis has really revealed in ways that I don’t think we’ve talked about very well in higher ed, how important it is to create a caring learning environment. It’s not easy to talk about emotion in higher ed. As soon as you broach the subject, suddenly, people are like, “Woah, that’s not my job. I’m just the expert.” And of course, that’s not true. But, I think that this circumstance really brought to the fore how important it is. And it’s also really important to note that caring is affective labor and has been disproportionately done by women and faculty of color. And so, this moment is an important moment to underscore that this is part of the work of teaching, it should be shared by every single person who steps into a classroom. And so I think that was another thing that we tried to wedge in to a lot of what we were saying.

John: Going back to the concept of immediacy, one of the things that your video demonstrates is, if we are teaching remotely or teaching online, how videos can be used to create a nice sense of instructor presence. Because watching the video, you’ve got a nice sense of humor there, you’re making points effectively, and people are seeing you there, which provides a little bit of a connection, not necessarily the same one as in the classroom, but much more so than if it was just an email being sent to the class. And I thought that was really nice modeling of perhaps how we could do that effectively.

Sarah: Thank you.

Josh: Thanks, John. I very rarely hear that I have a nice sense of humor. So, I appreciate that.

John: I didn’t mention the name. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: Right. Oh wow… Just cut me…

Rebecca: This is supposed to be the Pedagogies of Care, John…[LAUGHTER]

Josh: Right.

John: That came through for both of you and I think it was done really well. And one thing I’d like to recommend is Karen Costa’s book on 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Videos.

Sarah: If you didn’t, I was going to plug that book as well. I have actually two copies because I got mad at Amazon because it didn’t ship me it fast enough, and everyone else had their copy. And so I ordered another copy direct from the publisher, which is probably what I should have done anyway. So I have two copies on my bed stand.

John: I have it both on Kindle and in front of me, actually, I had to look over to my computer just to get the title right.

Josh: Yeah, it’s a great book, it’s important to have by the side of the computer at this point.

Sarah: And I think it’s going to require a lot of learning. I just wrote an essay that I don’t know if it will go anywhere, [LAUGHTER] about the fact that we expect our students to be lifelong learners, and we talk a lot in committees, especially about liberal arts education, and that we want our students to be agile and think lightly on their feet and be able to respond with new learning when there are crises or technological or societal changes. And I think we instructors need to do a little bit of that right now. And so I am going to be exploring new technologies and digging through Karen’s book and I’m not someone who knows a lot about video or recordings or any of that, but I am going to spend a good part of my summer trying to learn new things so that I can be a more effective teacher because we’re probably going to be disrupted in one way or another for a while.

John: Now is not the best time to talk about the wonders of living through a pandemic, but it does provide a nice example of faculty modeling the process of learning, because certainly this spring, everyone had to learn some new skills, no matter how proficient they were with either online or face-to-face teaching, their courses were not designed for the sudden shift. And there were some major adjustments, and it did remind students of the fact that we’re all learners in this together in ways that might not always be transparent to students.

Sarah: Love that.

Josh: Yeah, that’s true. And I think students get a lot of credit for being good sports about it, and being patient with that learning process, especially with faculty who were honest and open about the fact that we were learning as we were going.

Rebecca: I wanted to follow up a little bit on the modeling of videos, because one of the things that both of you are excellent at is telling stories and not all faculty are as proficient or have as much experience as storytellers, or even think of themselves as storytellers. But, I think it’s a really good way to connect people together is through story. Can you talk a little bit about advice that you could give faculty on how to use story as part of their teaching methods?

Josh: Well, I guess one piece of advice is that faculty know their disciplines inside and out. And they’re always stories behind the major discoveries, the major players, the “true Hollywood story” of the discovery of x, right? And faculty know that. And so that’s not a personal anecdote. So, they don’t want to reveal that and it’s not content that they have to generate. It’s deeply embedded in the material they’re already teaching. And so I’ve worked with Kathy Matthews at Rice and she’s a beloved teacher and scholar there and she was just so brilliant about teaching through story. She’s a biologist, and when she talked about DNA, it was several class periods of hearing about all the stories that went into Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin and all the things that led up to that. And students loved it. And they learned a lot through it, so we can find the stories that we already know, that’s a part of the lore of our discipline, and share those.

Sarah: I love that. I agree. And I think that one of the things that we faculty have, besides knowledge of these stories, is almost stories about the information that we’re sharing and how it all fits together. And that’s one of those big things, of course, that distinguishes novices from experts, is being able to see that overall pattern. And I think that when you tell that information in stories, whether it’s the big discoveries or something else, that the students can see those connections, it’s more easy for them to access that web of knowledge. And I think that my upper-level neuroscience class, I sometimes joke, is more like a gossip column. In a lot of fields, there are these huge arguments always going on and controversies. And I really try to people those, and I’ll put up people’s pictures from Twitter, [LAUGHTER] and describe those. And when those arguments are a little bit personalized, and they have faces, I think that it’s really engaging for the students to think about who they agree with more and things like that, rather than if it were just static knowledge. Also, one thing that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about, is the fact that we also engage in our own story, and almost the semester is a story, and that it’s important to get in there and interrupt the story a little bit. We were joking in the beginning of this interview, that I’m a bit of a control freak. And I think that one of the things that I fight against, in terms of my own teaching, is I really like everything to follow a smooth pattern, but I think that more learning occurs when you interrupt your own story and kind of throw everything to the winds and pass things up. And, again, let the students help co-create the story of the semester. And so I think that’s another way that I see storytelling and teaching weaving together.

Josh: Yeah, I love the idea and I completely agree. The semester has a narrative arc, each class period has a narrative arc to it, and capitalizing on a good beginning, middle, and end is a really powerful teaching strategy.

John: And I think this is something you addressed in your book.

Josh: Part of the Sociality chapter is about how storytelling is one of our first teaching behaviors, and something that I think we see in Sarah’s work a lot too. And she was just talking a little bit about this, that we process information better when we make it into a story. And I think that that’s a really important way of thinking about learning.

Rebecca: I think it’s just a good idea to keep stories in the front of our minds as some faculty who maybe are used to telling stories in person shift to being online where they might write in a more sterile way, where it might be a little more cut and dry depending on their discipline, and that they might need to weave some of that personality into what they might write or share or videos or whatever they make in an online environment that might not seem so obvious.

Josh: Right. In fact, they could imagine that the videos that they produce are the stories and that they can get the content and the facts through some other means.

Rebecca: As you both know, we always wrap up by asking: what’s next?

Sarah: Well, as I said earlier, what’s next for me is a lot of learning. So, I’m going to be exploring the world of online teaching. I’m working on the committee at my college to get our faculty all trained, they have a lot of varying experience with online environments. And we’re going to try to have the fall semester be even better than the spring semester. And in terms of me personally and things I’m working on, I’ve been working on a new writing project that has a lot to do with storytelling and interruptions and also improv in the theater.

Rebecca: You’ve got me intrigued. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: That sounds fun. Coincidentally, I’m on the same committee that’s Sarah’s on, but at my university.

Sarah: So much fun, isn’t it? [LAUGHTER]

Josh: It is. So, we’re deep in the weeds of helping prepare resources for faculty regardless of what kind of environments they’ll be in. And so, in that realm, one of the things I’m really focused on is getting some programming for trauma-informed pedagogy up and running at the end of July and August. So, just at the moment that people are designing their courses and thinking how I’m actually going to do this, they’re also thinking about that. Personally, I am still in the middle of writing a book on grades and grading and so still trying to plug along with that as best as you can, in a situation like this. So, keeping on with that.

Rebecca: It’s nice to have projects to kind of work on a little bit at a time, given that large amounts of time seemed completely impossible to me at the moment. Both of these projects sound really exciting. So, I’m looking forward to hearing about those. I know we’ll have you back to talk about them when their…. [LAUGHTER]

John: We will invite you back, at least. We hope you’ll come back. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I don’t know if you can stand us another time.

Josh: It’s always fun.

John: I am curious, though about the improv, though. Could you tell us just a little bit about that?

Sarah: Yeah. Well, I wrote a piece for The Chronicle years ago now on the interconnections of teaching and acting. And that’s actually a big part of one of the chapters in Spark of Learning is the extent to which teaching is a performance profession. But, this work’s a little more focused on the student perspective and the student mental health crisis and the lessons and growing that improvisational forms of learning can offer for students who might be struggling with those issues.

Rebecca: Sounds deeply needed right now.

John: It sounds fascinating, and a book on grading is something that a lot of people want, especially after what’s happened this spring, looking at alternatives to grades and the motivational issues associated with grading. I’m looking forward to both of these,

Josh: This became a little bit more relevant than I thought it would be. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Yeah! Relevance is good when you’re talking about writing.

Josh: Yeah, it is. [LAUGHTER] That’s right.

Rebecca: Well, thank you, as always, for joining us. It’s always great to hear your perspectives and think through things with both of you.

Sarah: Thank you.

Josh: Yeah. Thanks for inviting us.

John: Thank you. It’s great talking to you again.

Josh: Have a great day.

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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. Editing assistance provided by Ryan Schirano.

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139. Pedagogies of Care: Digital Reading

This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Dr. Jenae Cohn joins us to discuss concerns about, and the affordances that are associated with, reading in a digital environment. Jenae is an Academic Technology Specialist at Stanford University and the author of Skim, Dive, Surface: Strategies for Digital Reading in the College Classroom, which will be released by West Virginia University Press as part of the superb series edited by James Lang.

Show Notes

  • Cohn, Jenae (2021, forthcoming). Skim, Dive, Surface: Strategies for Digital Reading in the College Classroom. West Virginia University Press.
  • Carillo, E. C. (2017). A writer’s guide to mindful reading. WAC Clearinghouse.
  • Pedagogies of Care (Sneak Peek) – video trailer –  website
  • Plato (360 BCE). Phaedras
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Mueller, D. N. (2009). Digital underlife in the networked writing classroom. Computers and Composition, 26(4), 240-250.
  • Smale, M. A., & Regaldo, M. (2017). Digital Technology as Affordance and Barrier to Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Smale, M. A. (2020). “It’s a lot to take in”—Undergraduate Experiences with Assigned Reading”. CUNY Academic Works, 1–10.
  • Lang, James (2020, forthcoming). Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Basic Books.
  • Hypothesis
  • PowerNotes
  • Perusall
  • PowerNotes
  • VoiceThread

Transcript

John: This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we discuss concerns about, and the affordances that are associated with, reading in a digital environment.

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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.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Dr. Jenae Cohn. She is an Academic Technology Specialist at Stanford University and the author of Skim, Dive, Surface: Strategies for Digital Reading in the College Classroom, which will be released by West Virginia University Press as part of the superb series edited by James Lang. Welcome, Jenae.

John: Welcome.

Jenae: Thank you for having me.

John: Our teas today are:

Jenae: I have got a white and green tea blend with jasmine today. It’s really delicious.

Rebecca: That sounds good. I have Scottish afternoon tea

John: That’s a little bit stronger, isn’t it?

Rebecca: I like it. It’s good.

John: And I am still drinking English Breakfast tea.

Jenae: A black tea crew. I respect that in the afternoon… a little pick me up.

John: And it’s grading time here so I need the extra caffeine.

Jenae: Yeah, I get that. Makes sense.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your book, Skim, Dive, and Surface. Could you tell us what motivated your work on this topic?

Jenae: Absolutely. I have always found great solace and inspiration in reading. I’ve considered myself a reader for my entire life, and I noticed as a reader when I was in college that I largely depended on tried and true techniques for remembering content from reading: from highlighting and note taking in the margins to drawing little doodles and scribbles. And when I transitioned to graduate school, when I was getting my PhD, I was reading longer, more complex texts. And at that point, I really didn’t have the resources to be printing everything out hundreds of pages of reading a week, to do those techniques that had served me so well as a college student. So I think at that point forward, I started thinking a lot about how does our media, how do our spaces for reading, shape what we’re able to glean from a reading and how we’re able to orient ourselves to the really critical task of reading and being readers. And this became even a more acute kind of question for me when I started teaching first-year composition, and I saw my own students struggling in the same way that I was struggling as a graduate student with trying to get through really new and challenging complicated texts that were changing our orientation, not only to reading texts, but just being readers. And so I kept mulling over this for years and years, and my research kept dancing around it. And then by the time I got to my job at Stanford, it really struck me that it was the time to start writing a book that would help people recognize and see these real distinctions, but not from a language of a deficit model, and not from the language that was kind of coming out the 2016 moment that Google made us stupid, or that smartphones are bad for our brain, like those dialogues are still happening, much to my great dismay, but to actually provide sort of a more open and inclusive and, I think, kind of compassionate take on the possibilities of reading across spaces and finding promise and hope for readers to be more flexible in different ways of reading, especially when it comes to academic context.

Rebecca: I find your work really exciting because I was always an avid reader, even when I was young, but when reading academic texts, it’s a really different kind of reading, like reading fiction is really different than reading an academic text. And I remember when I was in sixth grade, I had an intervention because I was struggling with our Global Studies class because I had really poor reading comprehension on the topic. And I was lucky that a family friend happened to be the reading specialist and helped me out. But otherwise, no one had taught me how to read those kinds of texts, and I really struggled.

Jenae: Oh my gosh, I love that story, Rebecca, because it really speaks to how your context can shape your behaviors and how you approach that task. And I love that you’ve even worked with a reading specialist. I think we take for granted that if you can read in one space, you can read in another space. You are an avid reader and able to really dive into fiction, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily could read those more technical texts or texts that were speaking to different audiences and engaging with different purposes and it’s easy to take for granted, especially at the college level, that the students will have sort of equal proficiencies if they’re able to like technically read, but we know when we get to higher ed context, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Rebecca: So, like me, I think a lot of students don’t get training on how to read academic texts or critical texts when they’re in K-12. So what do you recommend? Or how do we help students transition to college reading?

Jenae: I think there’s a few ways we can begin. First, I think that what college instructors can really do is help demystify the purposes of reading. I think that a lot of instructors, and I’ve done this myself, assume that just if you say, “Okay, read chapter one of this book,” everyone will understand what the purpose is of reading chapter one of the book, but that’s not necessarily so, especially since in different contexts and disciplines those purposes for engaging with a particular chapter article might be really different. And I think as instructors too, we want to think about what we want students to get out of the reading. Do we want students to be reading for content? Are we trying to help them understand a particular concept and how that concept might be in dialogue with something from an in-class discussion or a lecture, or something else, or we want the students to read what we call reading rhetorically, or I want them to read to understand the strategies an author’s using to communicate a claim. So in writing classes in particular, rhetorical reading might happen when we’re trying to understand a particular historical context or moment that might be shaping how an author might be orienting to a topic, to kind of understand the context around that reading, or understand the writer’s writerly moves. So someone who’s also trying to read to understand a written genre might be another thing we need to help students understand when it comes to purpose. So, in the sciences, you might have students read a scientific article to understand: “This is standard format in the scientific article structure: the introduction, methods, description, results.” There’s always sort of a standard pattern to that. That’s all to say, I think just making our purposes clear is Thing number one, Thing number two, that I think instructors could do to help students really develop a stronger sense of being a reader, is to also help them understand different approaches to note take, and to think about how they glean important pieces of information from a context. And different students will do this in different ways. So I certainly wouldn’t recommend a prescriptive, like note-taking model that everyone has to do. I think that it over determines a certain kind of thought process. But there can be a moment, and I think a lot of instructors don’t think of themselves as having to teach academic skills, but it can be really valuable to make explicit: “Here’s the skill you’ll need to develop to do this work.” And to have an open discussion with students: What do you do? Why do you do these kinds of behaviors? How does this help you learn? And to make that really explicit. These are just starting points. The real expert on academic reading proper, I would point you to Ellen Carrillo, she has a great book for college students called Mindful Reading. Ellen Carrillo’s work about really bridging students to academic reading skills is like the best place to start for instructors who want to start at the foundation of what it means to help students read. I cite her a lot in my book because I think her work is really quite foundational to this thinking,

John: As you noted, the type of reading skills vary quite a bit by your discipline. Reading a chemistry article is very different than reading a math paper or reading a novel or reading poetry. Should each discipline include something about teaching students, what’s important in reading in that discipline early in a student’s career?

Jenae: Oh, I think that would be tremendously helpful if, in an intro course, that was a part of the unit. It would help students recognize what it means to be a professional in that discipline too, which can also help students I think, from the level of choosing a major and deciding what academic conversations they want to remain a part of in terms of their career. I think that many students, and I know I was this way in college, don’t tend to see the subjects as communities. We call these discourse communities: mathematicians, chemists, compositions, they’re all part of different discourse, communities that have different goals and functions and ways of communicating and behaving. So the more visible we can make those sorts of tacit understandings of how people communicate, the more we can demystify a bit of a hidden curriculum around how disciplinarity, how intellectual thought, operates. And I think that can be really exciting for students to see “Oh, people who are in math and chemistry, they have a way of talking. It doesn’t mean I’m stupid. [LAUGHTER] It doesn’t mean that I can’t get it. It just means that it’s a community that I don’t know yet, and that I want to understand better through accessing and unpacking what it means to be a reader or a writer in that space.”

John: You need to know the language of the discipline to some extent to be able to participate in the conversation.

Jenae: Exactly. That’s a great way to sum it up. I was like the “too long, didn’t read” version of what I just said.

Rebecca: I think another space where you’re switching contexts is between the physical environment and the virtual environment, which many of us are experiencing maybe more intensely now [LAUGHTER] than we had in the past. I know that while I was on sabbatical, doing research, I found myself doing a lot more reading online in digital format than I ever had before, because our physical library was closed. [LAUGHTER]

Jenae: Yeah, how was that for you?

Rebecca: At first, I was really resistant and I read every single physical book that I had first. So, I could take notes in the margins and things that I was used to and accustomed to doing. But I’ve recently read a couple of texts on my Kindle and really love that I can highlight and take notes there and then end up with a digital file that’s searchable. It’s actually way more useful, but I had never really been forced into trying a new way of reading.

Jenae: Fabulous.

Rebecca: So, I think it’s interesting to start thinking about how do we help students take advantage of some of the affordances that a digital environment actually has, rather than just the resistance. And one of that, for me, is like moving from reading from my computer to a Kindle, which has the e-paper, which is a little better in my eyes and it’s a little more comfortable of a reading environment, but then taking advantage of those tools and techniques that are built into some of the software that’s available.

Jenae: Absolutely. You’ve pointed out several really great affordances to digital reading, where you’re able to archive your notes in a particular space, organize them, create certain kinds of like topical categories for the notes that you’ve got from your Kindle. So, you’re already opening up so many of the wide world of possibilities, especially when it comes to academic reading, in your own experience of having the library closed up for you. So, I really enjoyed hearing your thought process around that.

John: But if students haven’t done much academic work prior to coming to college with e-texts, the skills that they had, as you mentioned in the intro to your book, in terms of dog-earing the pages and using highlighters and so forth, might not translate as easily unless they’ve perhaps learn to adapt with those. Rebecca talked about the ability to take notes and index them, but students don’t always know how to do that. And one thing that complicates it a little bit is they may get their books in different formats, some may be on a Kindle, some may be in Blackboard or Canvas or some other learning management system, and others may be PDFs. So how do we help students with that transition?

Rebecca: And also maybe faculty? Because sometimes I think that’s a barrier, too. [LAUGHTER]

John: I think that’s probably a more common barrier… we’ve had some people give us all sorts of interesting explanations of why books are better, most of them based on neuromyths that have been debunked for decades. But there is this perception that the tangible nature of a book makes it better in some way. Just as, you know, the book was seen as being bad when it was first introduced, because it weakened the need for people to develop their memories. I think people feel the same way about electronic texts. So how do we get past those barriers on the part of faculty and students?

Jenae: Right. Wow. Lots of good questions nested in that one question. And I will say that in the first part of the book, I talk about history, affect, and neuroscience as kind of categories of ways that instructors, in particular, might find their own resistances or anxieties, as I put it, reflected. John, when you mentioned that people once worried that the book was going to destroy memory. And Socrates and Plato had a famous dialogue about this in the Phaedrus. Right, that’s like an anxiety that’s just been really… there’s historical echoes actually all around the world that I detail in the book. That was a really fun section to write because I love history, too. But anyway, I’ll get to your question here, which is how do we help students make this transition? And again, I think we have to unpack that in a few different ways. And one is sort of starting with meeting both students and faculty where they are, engaging, I think, in some dialogue around “Why do you like a paper book? Why do you like to use a physical highlighter? Why do you like to doodle in the margins?” We’ll learn interesting things, and in the book, I do a little bit of a lit review of some major surveys that have been done around faculty and student perceptions of reading on paper and reading on screen and I’ll offer the really like two-minute gloss version of that, which is that the stated reasons these surveys have found is that, for both students and instructors alike, it is familiar. And there’s a perception that it’s better for their memory and attention. And you’re right, John, too, that some of that comes from neuromyths. Some of it just comes from feeling. A lot of the surveys are about, again, to the affect point, “I like the way the book feels in my hand.” “I like the weight of the book.” People, and this is my favorite, would even say things like “I like the smell of the pages.” And that’s all about feeling, that’s about emotions and the cognitive work are tied, of course. And I actually thought really distinctly of Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s work about this, that we can’t unpack the emotions from the learning itself. So all that’s important. So I say you have to start the dialogue there with your own local community and there might be some echoes of that national conversation. And so recognizing why you feel those ways might also help you to see how those feelings or how those perceptions translate into lived experience. A lot of the studies on moving students from print to digital environments are also focused on the memory and retention. And studies have mostly found that students do tend to remember more when they read on paper, but it’s because they don’t actually have strategies for reading in digital spaces. So, something else we might do is, to return to the earlier part of the conversation in some ways, at least, make explicit that there are strategies they’re using in the first place: “Wow, you really like to use the highlighter? What are you doing when you use the highlighter? Oh, you’re pointing out the most important parts of the section? Why is it important to find the most important parts of the section? How are you doing that? What do you do with that information?” Once you find those most important parts, then once you isolate out those skills and what you’re doing with them, we can think about: A. not just how you replicate that in a digital environment, but what a digital environment does differently. So, this is also, I think, part of the conversation needs to include making explicit what the affordances are of a digital environment beyond the fact of it being on a screen, recognizing that paper is a technology. And just as much as that laptops’ are a technology, your Kindle’s a technology. The other technology that I’ll throw in where I think students are doing a bunch of reading these days as their smartphones, I’ve had instructors tell me, “Wow, I’m so horrified that my students are doing all the reading on their phone,” and my response is “Well, especially now on this COVID-19 moment, our students might not have access to laptops that work that are as fast as their 5G network on their phones.” So, I think now more than ever, we have to be really accommodating in thinking about where mobile, and where the affordances of mobile, fit in… What kinds of applications and tools are available across these spaces to, again, both replicate the great labor and thinking around print, but that also take advantage of the easy abilities to link content and connect content across different spaces, the ability to curate and create collections of information across different spaces, and that ability to tag and sort different sets of ideas to see relationships and connections between ideas. This is just sort of the tip of the iceberg in terms of possibilities. I will say I recognize the constraints, I think, of digital environments. We can’t ignore things like screen fatigue. Rebecca, you talked about getting tired, your eyes getting tired reading on a screen, I feel that too. The blue light that emits from screens is really exhausting for our brains. I think probably everyone’s experiencing this even more in our move to living on the internet and our COVID-19 moment. So, I think part of this is also figuring out what are the strategies for avoiding fatigue. And in some ways, this can be good for our learning too. It might inspire us to take more breaks, to work in shorter and more concentrated bursts of time and to recognize and have a clear purpose in mind by working within those shorter bursts of time as well.

John: We’ve just been talking about faculty resistance to reading on mobile devices. But, faculty also often seem to have a resistance, back in the days, a long time ago, when we used to be in the classroom at times. There used to be this resistance to students using mobile devices in the classroom. Would you like to talk a little bit about how students, perhaps, might be using mobile devices in ways that may not be as negative as faculty might expect them to be.

Jenae: Yeah. Isn’t it funny how like mobile bans and laptop bans feel like that was so long ago at this moment of recording? Yeah, there’s a big chapter actually in the book about laptop and mobile device bans, because I think that context might come back again. We’ll see. So anyway, yes, there are number of, I think, productive things students are doing with mobile phones in class. One is that students might be using mobile as really their faster internet connection. I will say that mobile networks tend to be a bit more reliable than even if you are face to face. On-campus Wi Fi networks can be very unreliable. And it can certainly be more reliable than students’ home networks. But in the context of class itself, it might actually give students a more stable connection, which can mean greater access. From a learning and engagement perspective too, what students also might get from mobile that I think is really exciting, is the ability to do really flexible note taking and archiving of work. So mobile apps have the real benefit of being able to use your finger or a stylus to actually draw and annotate and nimbly really respond and react in real time. I actually have an activity in the book where I even suggest that instructors create an assignment where they think of students working through their reading as they might create like an Instagram or Snapchat story, where they can take quick screenshots with like emoji reactions from different parts of the book as a way to engage with it. So I think that our students have found really creative ways to engage. They might not realize that those are creative ways to engage. There’s actually a lot of literature that shows that sometimes students get a little uncomfortable when instructors try to like make their class like “My class is cool, it’s like Facebook for learning.” So I don’t know if I would go that direction. But rather, it’s really saying, “Hey, here are tools you can use to do the things that are really good for your learning,” rather than saying, “Learning is just like Facebook,” which makes some students feel a little bit like their lives are getting too uncomfortably blurred. I’ll say one last thing about the mobile phones in class, which is that for many students who are either working from home or staying connected to the family, it’s important to recognize that students might be needing to connect with people outside the classroom during class. That might seem like a distraction, but for many students, if they are caretakers, for example, they might need to be reading off of their phone, to also be checking to see “Okay, does my parent need me right now? Does my sibling need me right now? Does someone else I’m caring about really need me to stay connected and engaged during class?” Some people refer to these behaviors as being part of the digital underlife. Derek Mueller has a great essay about this concept that I think is really valuable. Maura Smale, I should say, and Mariana Regaldo have done really great work on how students are thinking about mobile as sort of lifelines to the world outside. So, I think that the benefits to mobile happen both at the learning level, but also the access and connection and inclusion level. And I don’t know, man, I don’t think we need policing of how our students are engaging with devices in class, as part of the work of showing compassion, I think, towards our students, is trusting and recognizing good intent. And if students don’t want to engage, they just want to disconnect, even if you ban the devices, maybe they’ll doodle and zone out.[LAUGHTER] So, like there are lots of ways to be distracted and the device is sort of a red herring in a way for that, in my opinion.

John: I found many ways to be distracted as a student long before there were cell phones. So, I fully agree with that. And it can also be a good indicator, if the instructor is walking around and sees a lot of students doing things that aren’t related to the class, that maybe there’s not as much engagement there as you might like.

Jenae: Yeah, exactly.

John: One of the differences between an e-text and a book is that generally the book doesn’t have pop-up messages that might interrupt your focus and attention. Most mobile devices, though, do. What can we do to help students perhaps better manage the distractions that they deal with when they’re reading on a mobile device?

Jenae: So this is tricky, because our brains respond to novelty. And of course, mobile phones have been designed to be addictive. [LAUGHTER] With all those pop-up notifications and things that fire off our endorphins. There’s a concrete tip, right, like encourage students to disable notifications for certain kinds of apps. Not all of our students know how to do that. I think, there is often assumptions too about a traditional college-aged student, or I’ll put traditional scare quotes in the air that our students between 18 and 21 know everything about all digital devices, because they are… and I just love this expression… digital natives… not a real thing… it doesn’t exist. [LAUGHTER] Because even if you’re born when technology’s invented, it doesn’t mean that you are adept at it in every single context and environment. So, I think offering some explicit, just tactical, infrastructure advice around that. The other thing that’s not a technical piece, that’s a cognitive piece, again, to help students recognize their purpose in reading too. So when you veer away to check a notification from your reading, why? Is it because you’re bored? Is it because the text is confusing? Is it because you simply just want to read the notification? Just recognizing and making clear what your intentions are as you’re reading can also be a way of managing attention. The other thing I’ll add around distraction, I think it’s important to recognize that attention does not look the same for every student, either. There are some students who I think actually read really well when they’re multitasking, so to speak. The example I go to is when teaching composition I always have students who work with like 5000, tabs open, approximate number, and they’ll often sort of flip between those tabs, and as an instructor I often asked about students; workflow, cause that’s just of interest to me. And many students will share that they’re looking at Wikipedia for an encyclopedic explanation of something they’ve read, or they’re looking up a word in the dictionary, or they’re looking for an image that illustrates something the book described. So sometimes that ability to kind of flip between different things might look like distraction. It might look like it’s not on task when, in fact, it very much could be tied into the task. Of course, those tabs could also be, you know, the latest TikTok stream, or whatever students are watching right now, which of course, can divert attention and isn’t particularly good for memory. But, I think that mindfulness about why they’re reading and why they might click a notification, just making that explicit, right. And rather than just being some sort of a punishment for the sake of being a punishment, or a better way to put this is rather than just sort of deriding the action as a given… really unpacking the assumption that distractions always bad, and thinking through what does it really mean to be distracted? And I suspect Jim Lang’s newest book on Teaching Distracted Minds is actually going to be a really helpful complement to some of this conversation, too. So I think that’s another text I’m really looking forward to reading as part of this conversation as well.

John: We are too and we’ve actually scheduled an interview with him in a few months when it’s closer to coming out to talk about that book.

Jenae: Oh, fabulous.

John: We’re very much looking forward to it, and I think many faculty will be.

Jenae: Super relevant.

Rebecca: I think related to some of the distraction stuff that you’re talking about to is format, and that digital texts come in different formats. And the idea that students are not digital natives, that they don’t just somehow magically know how to use technology unless we’re showing them how to use it. I found that showing students how to take advantage of accessibility features and alternative formats and the ability to make their text reflow, and things like that, has really opened doors for students because they just didn’t even know that those features were available to them and really changed how they experienced texts or other media on their devices, because they could really change how they could actually consume it or interact with it.

Jenae: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought up accessibility features. Because, you’re right, that text to speech features, screen reading features, even the visual accessibility features that are part of digital technologies… even just understanding where the alt text is… and where, like, image descriptions might be, makes a difference for all learners. This is of course part of a universal design for learning philosophy, that when students are aware, to your point, Rebecca, of the technologies available to them, it’s all students who benefit from that because it gives them multiple models for engaging with those ideas. It gives them multiple models for potentially representing ideas themselves. And so the book really actually deals with UDL philosophies, at its core. I almost had an entire chapter dedicated to UDL. And then as I was revising it, it’s like, I can’t even have just one chapter. This has to be strung into every chapter in this book. And to me, that’s the most compelling reason to encourage students to read in digital spaces, the most compelling reason to encourage faculty to overcome, I think, sometimes resistant perspectives about what digital reading doesn’t offer is, think about the range of students you’re seeing, their ranges of circumstances, their ranges of thinking about the world. And when you open up all these new possibilities for reading in digital spaces, you get to include so many more people who maybe never thought of themselves as readers, right? Who weren’t those avid readers reading their paperback books in the bathtub at three in the morning. That was me. It might be just a different group that you get to bring into the fold and who get to maybe experience reading as they might have never thought of reading before. I found like a million think pieces that were like “Are audio books real books?” Does it mean something to read an audio book, and I did a little bit of like a forehead slap. “Of course, reading an audio book is reading a book. It’s still reading.” But when we disparage based on media, we just exclude so many potential people we could just bring into the fold of being readers and finding people who want to be excited about reading.

John: So besides the accessibility and the UDL nature of this, there’s also some advantages, I think in terms of perhaps the cost of digital readings. College textbooks have grown in price fairly dramatically over the last 30 or 40 years to become a much larger share of college costs. So, by encouraging that, aren’t we also perhaps making education at least a little bit more affordable?

Jenae: I hope so. And certainly the OER movement is really tied to these conversations about accessibility. So, yes, I think that the more we can point students to digital resources that might reduce those kinds of costs, we respond to a major faculty concern. Surveys from EDUCAUSE and the Babson survey group actually suggest that one of faculty members’ major concerns is this very question of affordability. So, if we could be more open minded about the ways that we teach certain academic skills, we kind of kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. We manage to kind of help solve the affordability piece, while also expanding out accessibility options. And I think OERs could be even more powerful as a resource, if we help students understand how to leverage them beyond the ways that they might just read a website, which if you look to research and usability studies and user experience, a lot of people read websites in what’s been called like an L-formation, like the eyes sort of scan only a portion of the page. It’s not really reading in depth. And that’s because people have certain behaviors or attitudes about what they’re trying to find on a website. And you can spend hours and hours thinking about the user experience of website and where you place the pieces to draw attention to the most important pieces of information. And so that’s a matter of training, right? We know that website genres invite certain kinds of reading. So, if we open it up to students, we say, “Hey, you’re going to be doing all your reading online in this OER, that’s a more affordable option. How will you identify the important pieces? What’s going to be your behavior through this text? This isn’t just like reading the website for the news. It isn’t just like going on your Twitter feed. This operates in a very different way. Here’s how we can leverage that and not just sort of feel like we’re following the same patterns we do with other pieces of kind of flattened out web content. So, I deviated a little from your affordability question, but it got me thinking about the UX side as well.

Rebecca: I think one of the exciting things that you discuss in your book, but also capture in the infographic that you are including in the Pedagogies of Care project are some really interesting ways that students can read in a digital environment that allows us to make connections and interact with other people and other texts. Can you talk about some of the ways that we can use digital texts that people don’t always think about.

Jenae: Sure. So, I have a framework that’s at the core of the book. I don’t call it the five C’s for digital read, I call this the digital reading framework, but it is the five C words. So, some of the strategies include connection, curation, contextualization, creation, and what I call contemplation. And so some things people might not think about is when I think especially with connection and curation. We’ll start with curation, that’s actually the first item in the framework. Reading is always an act of curation in many ways. When you take a text, unless it’s just something you’re reading for fun. I should say reading is always an act of curation in an academic or a learning context, because you’re trying to sort of parse out what pieces of information or what examples are the best examples to help me make a claim, remember an idea, draw a conclusion, whatever the case might be. And so with a digital text, what you can do is you can make that curation process visible by… and this is simple… this isn’t even high tech: copying and pasting parts of your text into a taxonomy of your own design that helps you to see “Oh, right, this collection of quotes is really about this topic that I’m learning about in my class.” “Oh, wow, this text A and text B are both speaking to content area one.” You can really bridge that much more easily than on paper when you might have to, you know, an old school technique would be to make like note cards, where you write down the quotes and their different paper books that correspond to these topics. It’s a great strategy, but pretty cumbersome and time consuming, and difficult to manage if you don’t have access to print books, like the moment we’re in right now. So, that might be one strategy that is exciting, I think, for a digital environment, especially. I’ll point to creation as another example. So one of the benefits of being in a digital environment is you can really manipulate text easily. And that goes to everything from modifying fonts, especially if you’re just reading something off of like, an HTML regular old website. You could copy and paste that text into any word processor, you could change the font colors, shapes, sizes, to create different kinds of taxonomies. and customize that more, even in text like a PDF document that you can’t customize the design of text itself, you can still lift parts of that text, you can convert it into different file forms to modify the appearance as well and create something new for you a different kind of map, that’s not just limited to highlighting and doodles, but is actually dealing with and manipulating the words themselves. You can’t lift words out of a print book. So it’s kind of cool to think about what could you do if you could take these words. In the creation chapter I give an example of an activity where you could even create like a visualization of the text itself or create like an audio guide through your text, or maybe you lift those words and create word clouds or mind maps to see relationships between ideas that way. I’m sort of riffing abstractly here because I think you would do this differently depending on different concrete disciplines and contexts. But I think that the framework itself offers lots of different options that I point out the creation and creation categories in particular because in many ways it is the most unique for the digital context and might be the most surprising to people who might think of reading as just a process of underlining, and maybe leaving notes in the margin. There’s a lot more ways to think about and play with the ideas you get from text than just like “This idea is cool” or like “I have a question here.” You could expand a lot more and do a lot more and do a lot more to make text dynamic, I think.

John: One of the things I’ve been using in a couple of my classes for the last couple years is Hypothesis, where I have digital versions of some readings, generally working papers and studies, within the LMS. And then students go through and annotate it and tag it, which kind of forces them, I think, to analyze things a little bit more deeply. And they can comment on each other’s and so forth. And it’s been a really useful tool, which wouldn’t work very well with a physical text.

Jenae: Yes, I love the collaborative component of a tool like Hypothesis, too. It makes reading social, which is something we also lose out on sometimes, unless you go to a used bookstore and you find like the treasure of a book that has someone else’s old annotations. That’s like one of my favorite things of all time. I miss used bookstores in our COVID-19 moment, I have to say. But, Hypothesis, it’s like getting to uncover that treasure of seeing how someone else thought of something, to make it clear that no one text exists in isolation, that you always necessarily need to have text together. I always feel reluctant to cite myself, but I’ll do it since I’m talking about my book in this podcast, anyway. I actually wrote a book chapter all about social annotation in an edited collection about marginalia, that I think speaks to exactly what tools like Hypothesis do. There’s actually a ton of great tools on the market now that do similar things. Perusall is also really good for doing what Hypothesis does. It’s a bit more of a closed system than Hypothesis. It doesn’t exist on the open web, it kind of locks it into a class community. I think there are pros and cons to that. PowerNotes is also a really cool tool that’s new on the market, where students can also collaboratively comment on each other’s. It’s not annotations tied directly to the text, but you comment on annotations in an outline view. So, it kind of privileges how students are rearranging ideas and building them into a topically formed outline. In the book, I have an appendix of tools that will be current as of the writing. Unfortunately, in any book about technology, the instant you publish it, some of it’s obsolete. So I tried really hard in the book not to get too tied to particular tools, because I wanted the concepts to be sort of translatable, because the sort of secret to this book is it’s about digital reading. But really, it’s more about having an expansive attitude to what it means to be a reader in the first place. And it happens to be responding to digital media as the technology that is most prevalent and most centrally part of our lives right now. But I think it’s really valuable to talk about particular tools to make this more concrete. That’s why there are tools in that appendix. And John, I love that you’re using Hypothesis. Have you tried out that too, Rebecca, or other kinds of annotation tools like that?

Rebecca: I haven’t, but I’m looking for an option that will allow us to also comment on images and layout.

Jenae: Yes.

Rebecca: So there’s some limitations to Hypothesis in the ways that I would want my students to use it. So, I haven’t quite found the best solution yet for what I’m hoping I can get in place for the fall?

Jenae: Yeah, I really would like to see a tool that does better image annotation too.

John: That might be an interesting application of VoiceThread, for example, where students can put the image on the screen and either put text notes to it or annotate the image directly, or just talk over it.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s really like Hypothesis and VoiceThread need to like talk to each other and make a tool that combines some of the features of both, [LAUGHTER] because I like the fact that you can go to an actual web page and interact with something in that space where it was designed, because the design piece of it is actually important to me, and it’s dynamic nature, rather than just taking screenshots. So, that’s where I’m finding limitations in the tools currently.

Jenae: VoiceThread is a great recommendation though, John for engaging with multimedia. I love that students too can comment with either text or audio or video. And this conversation’s really speaking to the importance of space and making options and opportunities available. And to Rebecca’s point about limitations, it’s also important from the instructor side to know… Rebecca, it sounds like you have a really clear sense of purpose, what you want your students to do. It sounds like you have that too, John, and that’s where we really want people to begin… this is my technologist side speaking… we want people to begin with their own pedagogical purpose, with their goals, before they start selecting tools. That’s the danger in this conversation about digital reading is that we start first with foregrounding the tool and don’t think about the why. So I always like to begin with that purpose piece. It’s important to go down the features rabbit hole, because part of how we shape the environment. But, we also don’t want ta decision to adopt novel things for the sake of adopting novel things.

Rebecca: I think the foundation of compassion in the work that you’re doing is really important too, because it really is a very inclusive perspective in who’s involved in reading, why we’re reading, and it’s against the deficit model. I really appreciate the idea that there’s like a future of reading that’s exciting and new, and we can all be a part of it, that really supports this moment today. And I’d like to hear a little bit more about some of the compassion pieces of your work if you would be willing to share them.

Jenae: Sure. So, I’d say put up like the UDL piece that kind of gets strung throughout. This compassion piece to me gets threaded throughout the book in the same way that I think my work on UDL, or grappling with UDL, gets threaded across the book, because I think a student-centered philosophy is inherently compassionate. If you’re thinking about who’s going to be a part of your learning experience on the other end, and recognize that students are really bringing good intent into the classroom… when you start from that space and saying, students are the ones experiencing this learning. And for the most part, we have to trust our students to want to come and and have agency in their learning experience. I think something that’s important when you center compassion is recognizing, too, that not every student is like you. I know for me as a really enthusiastic reader, it’s easy occasionally to feel disheartened when students don’t like to read, or don’t want to read, or don’t do the reading. At the end of my book, in my conclusion, I talked about hearing lots of hallway conversations as an instructor about “Oh, I’m so upset. My students never do the reading. They don’t like to do the readings.” and that can feel sad because we want people to feel as excited about what we assigned to them as we feel about it. A third thread in the book then is sort of saying, “Hey, when you can open up your practices, you also help students come at reading where they are.” a student-centered design philosophy says, “You’re going to find your own enthusiastic pathway in here.” And we also need to recognize as part of the compassionate philosophy, also a forgiveness side of like, “If you don’t like this, this isn’t what you like, that’s cool, too.” I was never a strong STEM student. And so I remember in college, I never put very much time… I took like the dinosaurs class for my science class, which I thought be like the easy science option. It was not. I’ll just say that. That was like one of the hardest classes I took in college was the class on dinosaurs. We had to identify dinosaur bone structures. [LAUGHTER] That was really tough, but I can still tell you the different kinds of dinosaur hips, just saying, if you ever want to know, that the dinosaurs have two different kinds of hips. So, I learned things but that’s not to say that like I did the bare minimum in the dinosaurs class to learn the dinosaur bone structures. And I think that we have to accept that our students like that our classes might not be the class, this might not be their major, this might not be what they’re passionate about. So, the more options that we give, to helping them kind of get into this, the more we can again, recognize, see, appreciate, where they are at different moments. One last thing I’ll say about compassionate courses in our current moment, where we’re all sort of forced to be remote, this compassion is even more important. So, I see understanding the possibilities of digital reading as yet another way to include students who might not have preferred to read on screen, but who find they’re forced to because they don’t have access to printers to make paper copies of their readings, they don’t have access to the library, because every library everywhere is closed. And so, a part of this is saying, “Hey, you can still get what you need. Do what is motivating you right now, even if you don’t have access to these materials, rather than kind of falling back to this model of ‘being online is deficient.’ ‘Reading digitally is deficient,’” and saying “Look, it doesn’t have to be, and it might not still be your preference.” I mean, I think lots of students at this moment are going to appreciate face-to-face instruction even more. Many might find a lot to love about remote learning, it’s going to be a range. But again, the more options we can give, the more we show compassion to the different circumstances and needs that might be shaping our student experiences. So, kind of a long answer to that question, but there’s a lot to unpack there too. I think.

John: We always end with the question, what’s next?

Jenae: So a few things are next, given that the book will not be out until sometime in early 2021, I am designing right now as workshops and webinars around components of the book that I’m hoping will make certain pieces sort of portable and accessible in the meantime, since as at the time of recording, a lot of colleges are deciding about remote learning options, hybrid learning options, HyFlex learning options, so I’m hoping to tie in some conversation about digital reading with designing in different course models and how we could design learning activities around reading and writing that might be aligned with some online course design work. So I’m really, really excited about thinking through those possibilities. Another component, and I don’t know if this is a piece of writing yet, or something else. But a big piece of the book that I had to cut was about how digital reading operates in the service of developing digital literacy. I’m really interested in thinking about how, in our moment of being more connected and more remote, how colleges can better support students in acquiring digital literacies of various kinds, whether this is using different kinds of software applications for learning, or whether this is just becoming sort of more aware and critical of the infrastructures and tools that shape our reading experiences. I have a chapter in the book that’s all about kind of the dark underbelly of EdTech and the ways in which, even with adopting new tools, we need to be mindful of the lifespan of digital archives as in things that are on the web live forever. [LAUGHTER] And there’s still a lot more awareness raising we need to do and questioning we need to do of people who design EdTech solutions to make sure that we’re remaining cognizant of student safety and privacy. And as instructors, we need to know how to ask good questions about data collection, even around work like reading that might feel like it’s sort of innocuous and not terribly invasive. It still could be, depending on what students are reading or what they’re commenting on. So, I do think that there’s more work, I would like to do that interrogates how we help students become more aware and more critical of the infrastructures in which texts are available to them. And on the instructor end, I’d like to help think about how instructors themselves might develop the literacies to also be able to question and adopt ethical solutions for reading as well.

John: I’m really looking forward to reading your book, and I’ll put it on pre-order as soon as it’s listed somewhere. And we will share a link to your infographic and any other things you referred to in our show notes.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m looking forward to reading your work and also your new work that you’re thinking about and ruminating over and also the workshops and things that you might do related to your book prior to your book coming out. Thanks so much for joining us.

Jenae: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

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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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138. Pedagogies of Care: UDL

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many reflections on the future of higher education and what we value and prioritize as educators. This week we begin a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Thomas J. Tobin joins us to discuss how the adoption of Universal Design for Learning principles can increase student motivation, engagement, and success. Tom is the author of Reach Everyone Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning. He is one of the contributors to the Pedagogies of Care project from the authors in the West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning book series.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many reflections on the future of higher education and what we value and prioritize as educators. This week we begin a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we discuss how the adoption of Universal Design for Learning principles can increase student motivation, engagement, and success.

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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&helliip;

John: &helliip;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 Thomas J. Tobin. Tom is the author of Reach Everyone Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning. He is one of the contributors to the Pedagogies of Care project from the authors in the West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning book series. Welcome, Tom.

John: Welcome, Tom.

Tom: Thanks. I’m glad to be here, and thank you for inviting me.

John: Our teas today are:

Tom: I’m drinking decaf black tea as always, nothing added, nothing, taken away.

Rebecca: Sounds perfect. I’m drinking strawberry grapefruit green tea today.

John: And I’m drinking a peppermint tea. I’ve had a lot of caffeine today, so I’m watering it down a little bit. [LAUGHTER] We’ve invited you here to talk primarily about your work with the Pedagogies of Care project as well as your work with Universal Design for Learning. Could you tell us about how this project came together?

Tom: I’m one of the authors in the West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning and it started with an idea from Jim Lang at Assumption College. He wanted to put together a series of books that wasn’t so much “Here’s all the research and all the bona fides and all the scholarship on teaching and learning topics. He wanted books that talked directly to practitioners about what those best practices are, in a way that’s easily digestible and practical and implementable. My co-author Kirsten Behling and I, we wrote the book Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education for the series. Jim is the editor of the whole series. We’ve got lots of other folks in the series. Michelle Miller is coming up. Josh Eyler just published. Sarah Rose Cavanagh. Kevin Gannon. A lot of the people that you see on academic Twitter. The public intellectuals among us are published in this series and that’s a credit to Derek Chrisoff, the series editor. A number of us who are or will be published in that series in the future, we were part of the emergency response teams at our colleges and universities when the COVID-19 pandemic came up. And we found that whether we were reading in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside HigherEd, Edsurge, we were reading a lot of, “Well, this is the time when we should be evaluating online teaching because now everyone’s teaching online” or “We should be guarding the ivory tower and defending against these rings of cheating students.” And almost everyone in the series thought these are reactionary takes that are getting published out there. And it’s almost the opposite of how we would advise people to go. So a few of us got out our trusty keyboards and we wrote response articles. I responded to a couple of pieces in The Chronicle. Michelle Miller in Inside Higher Ed. Derek Bruff went over onto Edsurge. And we wrote our responses up and people said, “Oh, this is really humane. This treats students like co-learners in the process Instead of adversaries. What else do you have? Do you have more?” And the answer was, “Well, Perhaps we should have more.” And Tori Mondelli from the University of Missouri, asked, “Why not envision and help to shape what the new normal of colleges and universities and higher education could look like post pandemic, if we’re just going back to the way things were, that’s an opportunity missed.” And so we decided to put together this Pedagogies of Care collection from all of the authors and soon-to-be authors in the WVU Press series. So a lot of things went into it. So it was conversations on the POD network open discussion group topic, Josh Eyler was especially active over there, academic Twitter, Kevin Gannon, Viji Sathy, Kelly Hogan from the University of North Carolina. We’ve been voices out there that people trust. We’ve been doing the research, we’ve been listening to our colleagues. And what we’re doing with this Pedagogies of Care Collection, is we’re trying to create a unified voice for what colleges and universities could look like, with the understanding that we have a huge budget crisis, that we only have so much in terms of people, money, and time to be able to implement things. So this isn’t really a rose-colored glasses utopian vision. But it’s a practical look at what we can actually accomplish if we’re working together, thinking together, and thinking in terms of student success.

John: In terms of the contributions, I understand it’s going to be a mix of different types of inputs. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Tom: Of course. As the Universal Design for Learning thinker among the group, we’ve got a few of us who are also fans of that idea, the initial prompt to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t “Please write an essay,” although I totally wrote an essay, but it was “Please respond in the way that you feel represents your ideas best.” And so for example, Cyndi Kernahan and Kevin Gannon decided that they wanted to, even though they wrote two different books, they wanted to get together and create a video podcast. For example, Sarah Rose Cavanagh decided that she wanted to put together an audio podcast along with a bunch of reference resources and handouts that people could take away. Jessamyn Neuhaus, the author of Geeky Pedagogy, she decided that she wanted to do a video log of different pieces of advice that she had collected and created. And a lot of folks went in lots of different creative ways. So the prompt was: respond how you like, and we got a really varied bunch of contributions from everybody. And we’re in the process of editing that right now as we’re recording this interview, and we hope that that’ll be coming out soon.

Rebecca: Sounds like a very caring way to address everybody’s needs during COVID-19, including all the authors’. [LAUGHTER]

Tom: Well, absolutely. And the flexibility is almost the key here is that we’re trying to model, in our advice, the kinds of strategies that we’re asking people to adopt, and really the overarching idea is that students are coming to us from lots of varied circumstances. One of the things that the pandemic has done for everyone is shown that everybody has barriers to learning. And whether those barriers have to do with disability, whether those barriers just have to do with time&helliip; people are working, they have family responsibilities, their kids are home from school and they’re taking care of them. All different kinds of barriers. And if there are ways that we can address those barriers, help to minimize them, help to lower them, and help to reach out to our students as human beings first, that’s going to actually make our lives as instructors and support staffers, smoother, easier, and it’s going to mean that we’re not as bureaucratic about things as we might have been previously. We’d thought about a number of different titles for the collection, you know, “The road back from COVID-19,” and we didn’t really want to focus everything on the virus. We wanted to focus on the interpersonal dynamics, on the interactions, on the caring that we saw people engaging in, that emotional and affective labor that really marks the best teachers and instructors. And so I think it was Tori Mondelli who came up with the title of Pedagogies of Care, because that was the thread that ran through all of our approaches to this collection and to how we wanted to work with our colleagues at our individual institutions.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve appreciated about the conversations I’ve observed on Twitter and other spaces is how much the focus has been on humans: students as humans, faculty as humans, and that faculty and staff have barriers just like students do. And that’s something that hasn’t really been highlighted in the past in a lot of conversation about disability or universal design or any of these things that tend to be very student driven. And so it’s nice that the conversation has actually widened to be more inclusive.

Tom: Yeah, and this is the myth of the faculty super person, right? The students can have all these challenges but faculty members have got it together, right? We are super and awesome and always good and always on and always perfect, which is baloney. We’re human beings as well. And it’s actually how I got started in the field. Dial back 23 years, it’s 1997, and I’m at a two-year college in Pennsylvania. I’m a 27 year old kid with just about almost have my doctorate. And I’m tasked with creating online courses for this community college. I help them adopt Blackboard version one. That’s how long ago that was. Your listeners can’t see me, but all this gray hair, I earned it. And one of my business faculty members came to me, Marty, and he says, “I would like to teach online, not because I think it’s the next world beating thing or the thing that’s the best for me. But I see the handwriting on the wall. We’re moving in this direction. And I want to know how to do it.” And I said, “Sure, I’ll help you.” The only problem, Marty in his 40s, had gone blind due to complications from undiagnosed and so untreated diabetes. Now that meant that he didn’t, and I’ll put air quotes here, he didn’t know how to be a blind person. He didn’t walk with a cane. He didn’t touch type&helliip; couldn’t read Braille. And so I said, “Oh, the literature will save me.” And I went back to the literature and there was no literature. And so, by good grace and good luck, I got connected with Norm Coombs at Rochester Institute of Technology. Norm is a faculty member who has been blind since birth. He was a great big advocate for the rights of faculty members and instructors who have disabilities. And his advice was essentially “Good luck, kid.” But along the way, he also turned me on to a lot of different ways that I could help Marty, and we did actually get him to teach his business courses online. This is in the days before JAWS and screen readers, and we ended up getting some graduate students from a local university and using them as Marty’s eyes and ears. He memorized what the Blackboard interface, the LMS interface, looked like. And when his students would send him things or put discussion messages on the posts, the graduate students would read them out loud and Marty would say, “Here’s my feedback. Here’s the grade,” and the graduate students would put those things in there. It was wildly successful for about the three semesters before we realized we were violating FERPA privacy laws about eight different ways and we had to stop. It was that failure, though, that really caused me&helliip; and to your point, Rebecca&helliip; it caused me to look around and start seeing people who we weren’t serving well, or maybe not at all. People with those military deployments, those weird work shifts, the family responsibilities, the people who weren’t even in our classrooms because they couldn’t get there. And if I had my way I would teach all of my courses face to face. But that means that I’m leaving out a big number of people whom we could otherwise be serving well, and so I’ve been an advocate for using technology to lower barriers for years and years and years. So, thank you for letting me take off on a little bit of a side note there, but it’s actually the absence of scholarship and research about instructors who have various barriers. And it’s not just disability barriers. It’s instructors who are single parents, folks who are the adjuncts among us, contingent faculty members who are trying to put a life together by moving from among four or five different institutions. These are all barriers that we should be talking more about and surfacing. And that kind of advocating on behalf of, and trying to bring visibility to, a lot of people who aren’t really visible right now, that’s one of those driving impetus behind the Pedagogies of Care collection.

John: The timing of this seems very appropriate because as you suggested before, many of these barriers became much more visible both in faculties own lives and also being on a college campus makes it easier for those barriers to be invisible, that we don’t observe different socioeconomic differences in quite the same way because we’re in the same environment. Students on college campuses at least appear to have equal access to technology through computer labs and college provided WiFi. But there’s a lot of hidden barriers there, as you’ve talked about in many different ways, but I think now is a really good time to be providing these resources because people are thinking about them in ways that many faculty have been able to avoid.

Tom: You bring up a good point because it’s really easy to sort of hide inside the ivory tower, because you see students only in controlled circumstances. And with the pandemic, now everybody’s teaching remotely using Zoom and other remote instruction tools like that. And when you start seeing into students’ living rooms, and seeing how other people live, it’s kind of eye opening in a literal sense. And it also means that we’re at a moment where people are going in one of two different directions that I’m seeing. They’re either going in the direction of compassion, and understanding, you know, that my students are human beings just like I am and our goal for this course is to get them from “I don’t know yet” to “now I know.” But the other direction is also pretty prevalent where you’ve got instructors saying “Now is the time where I really need to tighten up and get hard and maintain my standards, because I’m in a situation that’s way beyond my control and unlike something that I’ve ever seen before,” and both of those are very natural reactions to a situation where you’re in unfamiliar territory. So, in this Pedagogies of Care collection, one of the aims of all of it is to help to show that that road of compassion is one that actually solves more problems for us as instructors. One of the biggest challenges that we’ve had as instructional designers and public thinkers for years is that we have the data to show that the best way to ensure academic integrity is actually to build a culture of academic honesty in your class, not setting up panoptical surveillance of your students and assuming that they’re cheating. But why do people still use those other methods of surveillance? Because there’s the promise of, there’s the illusion of, control. There’s the illusion of “I’ve got this all set,” and you’ve both been teaching for a while and so have I. If I go back to when I was first an instructor, I was the worst professor in the world because I had a legal pad filled with reminders to myself: “tell this story,” “make sure they understand this concept,” “do these things.” And I was so focused on the content itself, that I forgot to actually interact with my students. [LAUGHTER] It was just a big lecture, it was a bunch of information presentation. And I can’t tell you how many of the same questions that we all struggled with, when online teaching was brand new back in 1997 and 98. they’re coming right back up again, from people who didn’t think they had to pay attention to technology-mediated instruction, and now everyone must. So that’s one of the things that we want to address in the collection as well. So, I appreciate where you’re going with your thinking process there.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about UDL and what it is, and how faculty might start thinking about universal design for learning, moving into the fall?

Tom: Yeah, absolutely. There’s four different ways that I talk about UDL a lot, and one of them is the least helpful for most instructors. And that’s the neuroscience behind it. When we learn anything, and it sticks, we have to activate three different chemical pathways in our brains. So there’s the acetylcholine uptake pathway through the hippocampus, there’s the norepinephrine cycle through the frontal cortex. And then we have to stimulate the amygdala in order to reduce fear response and actually put things into long-term memory. If you go around telling people that their eyes glaze over or they run away, so I usually don’t start there. What I usually do is, the folks at CAST, C_A_S_T, the Center for Advanced Specialized Technology in Boston, they are the neuroscientists who figured out in the early 1990s that those three brain networks correspond to: the how, the why, and the what of learning. So they figured out that if you design learning interactions, to give people a “Why,” “Why am I learning this,” right? So if a pipe underneath your sink breaks at eight o’clock at night, it’s just around dinnertime, and there’s water gushing out, what’s the first thing you need to do? You need to turn off the water. If you don’t know where that shutoff valve is, you have to figure that out. Most people these days, they would turn on their phones if they don’t know, and they say “Where’s the shutoff valve?” Usually under a sink. But having that “why,” having a reason to learn something is the reason that we stay engaged. And if you can give people more than one way to stay engaged, that’s what the folks in CAST talk about multiple means of engagement, then having the choice that leads everybody to the same goal means that people feel that they can have a measure of control, have a measure of agency in their learning. So that’s one of the three principles. The next one is the “what” of learning. You need to have some content to learn, some information. And so if you’re teaching a microbiology course and you’re talking about the cellular energy transfer process, you might be talking about meiosis and mitosis. Well, people have to be able to experience what that looks like, or see a description of how that process works in meiosis and mitosis and the difference between the two of them. So, you have to have multiple ways of taking in the information. So, perhaps that microbiology Professor might have a video animation that the textbook publisher provided, and might also have a text-based description of each of those processes as well. So, students can use one, both, or make a choice about where they’re going to get the information and how. So, that’s multiple means of representing information. And the third part of universal design for learning, and this is the part that no one’s using yet, and it’s most powerful, is multiple means of action and expression. When we learn anything, we have to have a way to show what we know with which we are comfortable. And the way that we’ve been failing folks, that we’ve been letting them down, is asking everybody to demonstrate their skills in exactly the same way. Mark in the bubble sheets on this final examination. Write out your thoughts on the exam and tell us what you know, when a demonstration might be something that would be equally valid to show that someone has internalized the concepts for your course, but is not necessarily a written format. So, we’ve got multiple means of staying engaged, multiple means of representing information, and multiple means of action and expression – that’s allowing students to write out the traditional three-page essay, or it’s allowing students the choice to take out their phones and take the selfie camera and put it to good use and narrate what they would have said in an essay as though they were doing a news report. So long as you can grade both of those according to the same criteria, you have the same learning objectives, the same demonstration of skills, then give students the choices there. So, those three principles: multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representing information, multiple means of action and expression come together into universal design for learning. And you know what? That was a long explanation. And people’s eyes… well, they still kind of glaze over when you talk like that. So I and Kirsten, in the book, try to simplify it even further. And at its root… this isn’t the whole thing, but it’s a wonderful place to start&helliip; Universal Design for Learning is really just “plus one” thinking. Think about all the interactions that your students have. The interactions that they have with the materials, yes, but also the interactions that they have with one another, that they have with you as the instructor, with support staffers at your college or your university, and with the wider world when you ask them to go out and talk to people in the field. All those interactions. If there’s one way for it to happen now, make one more way. And that is a very UDL approach to things and then you can start getting into the details of the three different principles and how to apply them. But that’s a quick overview of UDL. And what I love about universal design for learning is that it is a mindset. It’s a framework. It’s not a set of practices that you do, it’s a way of thinking about the interactions that you create. So if you’re a fan of active learning, or the flipped classroom model, or any other specific way of teaching, you don’t have to change what you do, or how you do it. You just have to think in terms of being more inclusive and doing that “plus one” thinking.

Rebecca: How common are these UDL practices in higher education right now?

Tom: Ah, not common enough. The data that we have suggests that it’s about 10% of college courses that actually use any kind of inclusive design methods, including UDL. And we would love for that number to be higher. Because Universal Design for Learning&helliip; Yes, it does require work up front… it’s work that pays you back, many, many fold. So, when we’re thinking about Universal Design for Learning, that’s actually the hardest part of the conversation to have with a lot of college and university instructors. Because they say “Do I have to do absolutely everything and set everything up ahead of time?” And the answer is largely “Yes, there is work involved.” And once you design those choices for your students, you can start in three different ways. One: where are the pinch points in your course? Where do you… that microbiology professor&helliip; where do your students always get the concept of mitosis and meiosis confused and they send you the same email 700 times every time you teach the course? That’s a wonderful place to start doing some plus one thinking. Where do your students get things wrong on tests and quizzes, everybody, and you end up having to reteach, again&helliip; a good place to start doing some choices, or to give them information in more than one format to help reduce that reteaching load. And where do your students say, “Hey, Professor John, Professor Rebecca, that was a great lecture, but I still don’t get it.” And when they’re confused, that’s another good place to give them more options for engagement, more options for how they take in information. And if people start there, it doesn’t have to be “Oh, I have 30 half-minute videos in my course. And now I have to caption all of them.” It’s just looking for those pinch points, starting small and starting in the places where you already have identified things aren’t going the way that you wanted them to go. So, how common is UDL in higher education? Ah, right about 10% adoption right now. That number is climbing. It was a buzzword in higher ed, maybe a couple years ago, 2015, 2016. And I’d like to advocate that it not be a buzzword. It’s not like, you know, “my President went away to some leadership conference, and every year that person comes back with a new thing that we’re all going to try, and UDL was one of those new things.” [LAUGHTER] Instead, I’d like to say that Universal Design for Learning is one of those toolkit issues that everybody should have in their panoply of strategies that they’re going to use when they’re designing and when they’re teaching, because it helps with persistence, retention, and satisfaction for our students. Students who have choices and feel that their instructor is helping them to move through their own education with a sense of agency. We’ve got 35 years of data that show that students who have that feeling, they stick around better, so more students who are there on day one are there to take the exam. They retain better. More students who are with us this semester will come back next semester, and they’re more satisfied with their experience, they’re more likely to tell their friends, “Hey, come to this college or this university.” So, the idea of how common is UDL? We haven’t had as much of a head start, as the folks in K-12 have, it’s only really been a big thing in higher education for the past four or five years. But, we’re getting there. So I’m happy to be an evangelist for it. And I’m really grateful to see how people are applying it in small ways and then moving from those small beginnings into larger and larger iterations as word spreads. You’d be surprised, you’d be absolutely surprised. One person in a faculty meeting says, “Hey, you know, I made this one change. And now I don’t have to reteach the hard concept in our field every semester.” And then that person just sits back and is quiet. And everyone else in the faculty meeting goes, “What did you do? How can we get in on that? Help us, please.” And then UDL takes root. So, there are some good things coming out of it.

Rebecca: Tom, what do you think the biggest barrier is for faculty to get started with UDL?

Tom: The biggest barrier is really the investment of time and effort, as well as misunderstandings about what it is. So imagine for a minute&helliip; I’ll ask you and John a quick question. You both teach at SUNY Oswego. When was the last time that you had an accommodation paperwork from a student with a disability barrier?

John: I get them every semester.

Rebecca: I get them less often.

Tom: Ok.

Rebecca: But, I also teach in the arts.

John: I usually teach three to four hundred students at a time. [LAUGHTER]

Tom: Ah yes, but you’re both familiar with that paperwork, right?

Rebecca: Definitely.

John: Yes.

Tom: So, it’s usually “give this student extra time on a test” or “set up some individual accommodation for the student” that is different from how you treat all the other students. Because our disability services areas are often understaffed and overworked, that Disability Services paperwork often comes to you like in week two of the semester. And it’s almost always a surprise, right? And you think, “you know, I did all of my prep for this course. And now here’s this paperwork that says, I have to do all this extra work just for this one student.” Now, I’ll be charitable, I don’t think either of you, or any of your listeners hold that kind of mindset. But there’s a lot of people who say, “You know what? I’m mad about this. Is this student faking a disability? Is this a real thing?” I hear these kinds of questions from people and it kind of breaks my heart because the answer is these students are struggling and they’re trying to get a level playing field and they’re doing their best to be good students in your class. And that mindset of “Well, this accommodation paperwork is just a thorn in my side or it’s extra work,” that’s what people think about when we all say, accessibility. So, if I come to you and I say Universal Design for Learning, it’s easy to make the mental mistake of thinking, “Oh, that must be about students with disabilities and that accessibility paperwork, that’s a bunch of work” and it makes me kind of frustrated, and the emotions that come up for a lot of people are negative ones. Now Universal Design for Learning has nothing to do with accommodations, individually. It really has nothing to do with Disability Services. It’s all about constructing interactions so that we are reducing the effort and work that’s needed to engage in the conversation in the first place for students. Universal Design for Learning has the good benefit of reducing the need for individual accommodations. Fewer of your students will need that piece of paper to come to you and say treat me differently. It doesn’t mean we’ll ever get rid of the need for those accommodations, but it does help to reduce them quite significantly. Because, if you’re giving people information in more than one way, if you’re helping them stay engaged in more than one way, and you’re giving them options for how they demonstrate their skills in more than one way, then, by definition, fewer people are going to have to say, “You know what? I can’t write that essay because I have a physical disability barrier, or I can’t do this project because I have this time crunch and I have personal family care obligations, so please treat me differently.” But that’s the biggest barrier is people mistake UDL with disability accommodations. And so when I talk about Universal Design for Learning, I actually don’t&helliip; I know there’s lots of people listening, but don’t hate me on this one&helliip; I don’t talk about people with disability, not first, and not only. What I talk about is mobile devices. Absolutely everybody in college and university has a smartphone, just about. Now granted, there are lots of people who don’t, but the latest Pew Research and Pearson Research surveys show that between 90 and 95% of college and university students have smartphones. Does that mean that they all prefer to work on their smartphones? No. Katie Linder at Kansas State University now, when she was with Oregon State University, they did a huge nationwide survey in the United States and Canada, and found that by and large college students prefer to learn using their laptops or desktop devices. But, oftentimes they don’t have those or they don’t have access to those. So, they’re trying to learn using their mobile devices. With the COVID-19 pandemic, everybody got thrown into that same situation where everybody needed to be remote. And it was “Let’s be remote students with whatever devices and whatever connectivity we have at the moment.” So, the challenge there is with Universal Design for Learning, when I talk about students and their mobile devices everybody understands that, everybody knows how students are tied to their mobile devices. And it applies to everybody in the course. it’s not “Oh, this is just for those students over there, that small percentage of our population with disability barriers.” No, Universal Design for Learning is design that helps absolutely everyone in the class to lower access barriers, rather than just accessibility barriers. And in fact, I chop the end of the word off when I’m talking to people. I seldom talk about “accessibility” anymore, and talk just in terms of “access.” And that is what helps to address that main barrier, Rebecca, that you talked about.

John: For someone who wants to get started, what would be a relatively easy way of providing the thing that’s missing most, the multiple means of expression?

Tom: So, for example, when we talk about multiple means of action and expression, this can be as easy as helping people with drafting content. So, if I’m teaching a chemistry lab, and I would like for my students to understand how to mix reagents safely, I might create a video that shows how to mix these two chemicals together in order to create a component for a chemical experiment, and if my students are remote or they’re at home, they might not be able to do that process themselves. But, I still want to know that they know the process well. And in a single-stream course, I would say, “Please write up five paragraphs where you go through the five steps of this process and send it to me, and I’ll grade it based on how well you’re following the safety protocol and how you’re well you understand the process of mixing reagents.” In UDL, a plus one way to do that is to use the same criteria, you still want to see those five steps. But you might ask your students to take the choice: write it out in a word processing document, or do an audio podcast where you walk people through the process and describe all the steps of the process in that audio file. You’ll notice two things in that sort of first way of doing multiple means of expression. First, we’re using the same grading criteria or the same learning objectives for the activities. So that the instructor can give a grade or give feedback in the same way regardless of how the students choose to perform that activity. Second, and this is the fun part, the students still get to demonstrate their knowledge, but they choose how they do it. And both of the choices lead them to the same goal. You’re not giving choice just for the sake of choice, but the choice actually helps students to demonstrate needed knowledge or information so that they can move on to whatever is next. I teach English Composition courses. And it’s really difficult to ask students to demonstrate APA format in any way other than doing a word processed file. I cannot tell whether someone has Times New Roman 12 point font, double-spaced one-inch margins, all those things, unless there’s a word processed document. For those of you who really didn’t like English composition, I’m very sorry if that was just traumatic for you. [LAUGHTER] But, in that case, the format is the requirement. So I don’t give my students a choice. I say “On your final essay, you have to demonstrate that you know APA format by writing it correctly in APA.” Does that mean that my students don’t have any choices as they’re writing? No. When they’re drafting, when I’m not concerned about their APA format, but I am concerned about them being able to structure things with a thesis statement, giving details, evidence and examples, following a rhetorical mode. In those instances&helliip; writing instructors don’t hate me here&helliip;I don’t care whether they write that in a word processed format. What I care about is “Can they state a thesis statement? Can they demonstrate those details, evidence, and examples?” So, I give my students the choice between writing it in Microsoft Word or turning on the camera on their phone and just talking to me about how they want to compose a particular paragraph or a section of their writing. All the while knowing that the final product does have to be a word processed document. So, multiple means of action and expression can be something small, it can be a draft. But, wherever you have an opportunity to give students those options and choices that all lead to the same outcome, and you can grade them the same way, do so. Your students are going to feel like they have more of a choice. Like they have more control, like they have more agency in your class. They’re likely to stick with you better. And it’s an engagement strategy, par excellence. So, thanks for the question. It’s a really good one.

John: I’ve been teaching at this program for middle school and high school students at Duke for about 30 some years now. Unfortunately, I’m not doing it this summer. I used to have a final project, a capstone project at the end of the course, it was basically a college-level course in micro and macro economics. I had them do a policy debate at the end. And then after reading a little bit about Universal Design, I gave them a choice and said “Here are some options, but basically you can find whatever way works for you. If you want to write a song, you can do that. If you want to make a video. you can do that.” I even threw in the option, since at the time I had just seen some of the YouTube videos on dance your PhD, I said if you want to do an interpretive dance illustrating the concept, you can do it. But these are the things you need to achieve. And it was so much more fun.

Tom: They lit right up, didn’t they?

John: They did. And the quality of the work and their engagement was so dramatically higher. And it was so much more fun for me too to watch what they were doing. The additional creativity that that unleashed was really amazing.

Tom: But, and that’s actually one of the joys of Universal Design for Learning when it’s done well, is that you can start with that plus one mentality. And that’s actually speaking from a position of control, where I don’t want to give people lots of lots of choices, because then I’ve got to grade lots and lots of things. And so starting out small with that plus one mentality is a way to dip your toe into the water of Universal Design for Learning. But really, the goal of UDL is to create expert learners rather than expert students. We in the K-12 and higher education system have so structured things that we have created students who know how to take a test, rather than students who know how to do an inquiry and how to explore and learn on their own. The goal for Universal Design for Learning is creating those expert learning strategies. And think about it. John, what’s the hobby that you’ve enjoyed over your lifetime?

John: Music, I suppose, is probably the longest one.

Tom: What instruments do you play?

John: Mostly keyboard but also bass and guitar. At one point, I played drums back in high school.

Tom: Oh, fantastic. Rebecca, how about you?

Rebecca: I embroider.

Tom: Ooh, embroidery. So, hand eye coordination, those skills, that takes a lot of concentration and effort. That’s awesome. And when you were learning those hobbies, who graded you? What tests did you have to take to prove that you could move from one level to the next?

Rebecca: Nobody.

Tom: Nobody, right? And if someone tried to do it, you’d laugh at them. Because when you’re into something because you’re engaged with it, when you’re into something because you have a choice or you get to go and have some control or agency over it, it becomes rewarding. It becomes, dare I say it, fun, sometimes. And I don’t mean to say that every single college course that people take should be an exercise in fun. It should, though, offer a way for people to catch fire, to light up, to understand, to bring a little bit of themselves into the scholarship, and the research, and the curiosity that they’re expressing. And that’s what Universal Design for Learning is really about. And it actually brings me back into the Pedagogies of Care collection. The academic climate that we envision in the Pedagogies of Care collection is one that is more open, more equitable, and more just. It reaches more people who want to learn. It provides them with choices, voices, and agency in how they take a path through our colleges and universities. Now, at the same time, we’re all helping to keep the lights on at our individual institutions. We’re now in a time of catastrophic budget shortfalls. We need collectively to be thinking about the best ways that we should be serving students, to bring them in and keep them coming back. One of the things that we haven’t been able to really figure out in higher education is something called the freshmen cliff. And I imagine that some of your listeners are familiar with it. But what it means is, if at my university, if we bring in 2000 freshmen, we’re probably only going to get about 1400 of them back as sophomores. The number one reason why those 600 students dropped out among them, it’s financial, and we really can’t touch that with our instruction. But the number two reason is time. And we can definitely touch that with our instruction, with our design, with the way that we teach our courses. We can help students to manage and juggle among lots of competing priorities. School is usually down toward the bottom of the list if caring for your family, going to work, and putting food on the table are top of the list. And that freshmen cliff&helliip; If we can keep more of those students who are freshmen to become sophomores, that actually costs us less in terms of dollars, in terms of resources, in terms of time, in terms of people. For every $10 that we spend bringing a freshmen into our institutions, we usually only spend about $2 on upkeep and maintenance supporting that student in the next years. But every time a student drops out, and we have to go find another one, that’s another 10 bucks. So in terms of just keeping the lights on, being sensitive to our budget crises, that Universal Design for Learning helps more of our students, and all of the caring ideas in the Pedagogies of Care collection help more of our students stick with us, feel valued, and move through their education with us in a way that they feel they have some control and agency. And of course, Universal Design for Learning helps us to address exactly that. It’s a tool that helps us reach more broadly, teach more inclusively, increase students’ persistence, retention, and satisfaction. We’ve got 30 years of data to show that engaged and active students who feel that they have choices and a say in their programs of study, stick with us in higher numbers. So, it’s not just that we have our rose-colored glasses on. I’m talking to you: Presidents, Provosts, Chancellors right now, these are mission-critical efforts. While our collection speaks most directly to individual instructors and designers, the issues for which we advocate are those ones at the C-suite level. We’re trying to create a new normal at colleges and universities in order to find and serve new populations of students and then keep them with us better than we’ve done in the past.

John: We always end with the question, what’s next?

Tom: So the what’s next for me is I’m doing research on a book that addresses a problem that I’ve seen in terms of quality and it gets a little bit outside of my usual wheelhouse. We’ve all been to academic conferences where somebody who is talking to us about the latest way of keeping students engaged is standing there reading from a script and using a bunch of bullet points on a PowerPoint slide and reading them directly to us verbatim. Oh, my goodness, if I have to sit through one more of those. But that frustration is what is causing my new research in what are the real bare bones of how to give a good presentation? How do you present information? And it’s not just for people at conferences, it’s for instructors in the classroom. It’s for people who are doing research and grants. It’s for presidents, Provost, and Deans who need to share information with the people who are under their direct reports. So, I’m working on that book and it’s been lots and lots of fun doing the research. I’ve taken a bunch of photographs at conferences over the past couple of years here. And if you see me taking a photograph of your slides, it means one of two things: you are a rock star, or goodness, you need help. And it’s gonna be a fun book, I’ve been repurposing a lot of these things. I’ve been reading up on the literature of how to present information. And you can tell I’m an advocate for it. I did a little stint of radio voiceover when I lived in Chicago and really just fell in love with it. And I’m a big believer in communicating information in a simple way, that then helps people to get fired up and want to learn more about the details and the complexities behind it. So, I’m really grateful to be here on the Tea for Teaching podcast. And I hope that your listeners have enjoyed it. If you’d like to reach out to me, my website is just my name, ThomasJTobin.com. And I’d be happy to talk with you about whatever we’ve talked about here on the podcast or any other technology mediated teaching issues. So, thank you again for having me on.

John: Thank you. This has been fascinating, and we’ve long had you on a list of guests that we wanted to invite and this provided a nice convenient reason.

Tom: Splendid, awesome deal.

Rebecca: Yeah, we’re looking forward to seeing the Pedagogies of Care when it comes out.

Tom: We’re hoping that this will come out close to when the collection comes out as well.

Rebecca: Excellent. Thanks so much.

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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. Editing assistance provided by Brittany Jones and Savannah Norton.

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137. Developing UL Online (UL)

As colleges and universities plan for the uncertainties associated with the fall 2020 semester, it is fairly clear that faculty should receive more training in online instruction than was possible during the rapid transition to remote instruction that took place during the spring 2020 semester. Most professional development programs, though, are resource intensive and cannot be easily scaled given current college and university budget conditions. In this episode, Dr. Darina Slattery joins us again to discuss the less resource-intensive professional development program she developed in which groups of faculty complete two days of training to prepare them to efficiently transition their courses to online instruction.

Darina is the head of Technical Communication and Instructional Design at the University of Limerick. She is also the Vice President of the IEEE Professional Communication Society.

Transcript

John: As colleges and universities plan for the uncertainties associated with the fall 2020 semester, it is fairly clear that faculty should receive more training in online instruction than was possible during the rapid transition to remote instruction that took place during the spring 2020 semester. Most professional development programs, though, are resource intensive and cannot be easily scaled given current college and university budget conditions. In this episode, we discuss a less resource-intensive professional development program in which groups of faculty complete two days of training to prepare them to efficiently transition their courses to online instruction.

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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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Fiona: My name is Fiona Coll. I teach in the Department of English and Creative Writing here at SUNY Oswego, and this is my turn to sit in as a guest host.

John: Our guest today is Dr. Darina Slattery. Darina is the head of Technical Communication and Instructional Design at the University of Limerick. She is also the Vice President of the IEEE Professional Communication Society. Welcome back, Darina!

Darina: Thank you, John. And thank you, Fiona. It’s great to be here again.

Fiona: Today’s teas are… I’ll kick things off. I’m drinking Murchie’s Earl Grey Cream, which is my comfort tea.

Darina: Great. Well, I’m drinking traditional Irish tea, just black tea with loads of milk or cream as you say. So it’s just Barry’s tea. [LAUGHTER] I’m very traditional.

John: And I’m drinking an Irish breakfast tea, but from Twinings, so it’s a British Irish tea. [LAUGHTER]

Darina: That’s the one I would always get if I’m in the US having a cup of tea, yeah [LAUGHTER].

John: I do have Barry’s tea, but it’s up in the office, locked away along with most of our teas.

Darina: Okay. Okay.

John: So, we’ve invited you back again to talk about the DUO workshops you have created for developing blended and fully online programs. Could you tell us a bit about these?

Darina: Yeah, these are workshops that I first designed in 2014. One of our Dean’s needed a certificate program to go online in a very short period of time and the people who were going to be teaching on it were on-campus teaching staff. So, she wanted the program to go online. So she said, we need to have some kind of professional development for those staff. So I suppose I kind of took over a little bit in terms of I was very excited about this as it’s the kind of thing I do. This is what I teach, because I teach students how to design online courses. So, I was really excited at the prospect of developing some kind of professional development for my colleagues. So I kind of took over it in 2014, designed and developed it, rolled it out, and I’ve done about 13 of them since then, mostly to the faculty in my own university, but also one year, I rolled it out to an EU funded project where we had colleagues in five EU institutions who were going to try and teach their courses online together. So they all attended my DUO workshop. They actually came to Limerick to do the DUO workshop that particular year. So, essentially, it’s like a one and a half to two-day workshop. The length of it kind of depends on the group, it depends on how engaged they are, maybe what they’ve already done before, or if they have some experience or not. So I generally say one and a half to two days max. But usually by the afternoon of the second day, you know, things are wrapping up. And it’s mostly facilitation led, but there’s lots of activities I’ve built into it, then, as well over the years where I’ve tried to move it from being me telling everybody what to do, to them actually trying things out as they’re moving along, and that they can see some progress happening with their blended or fully online course. So, normally, it’s people who are thinking about moving a program online or developing a new online program, andthey don’t know where to start. So, they might have years of experience teaching on campus, but they’ve never taught online. So, that’s where then I’m asked, am I available? And when am I available? And we work from there.

Fiona: Can you tell us what DUO stands for?

Darina: Yeah, so I came up with the acronym. It stands for Developing UL, that’s my university, Online. So, I kind of liked the DUO idea as well because we’re on campus mostly, but now we’re going to be doing online courses as well, or online programs as well. I personally have been teaching online for a long time, but most of my colleagues only teach face to face. Well, they’re all teaching online now, but they weren’t teaching online a few weeks ago. [LAUGHTER] So, everyone’s an expert now. [LAUGHTER]

Fiona: Yeah.

John: Have you been doing a lot of these workshops recently to help people move online?

Darina: Not so much, because when the pandemic struck, it kind of happened really quickly. So, there wasn’t time to kind of plan the normal DUO where normally it’s a face-to-face workshop, where you have everybody from the program team in the same room. They’re all working on their laptops, you know, planning things, and then we do storyboards, which we can talk about shortly. So, what has happened was, because it was such an emergency, like this week, you’re teaching on campus, but next Monday, you have to teach online, the University came up with other forms of professional development that would just kind of get the urgent things out there, like how you would do a meeting online instead, or, you know, how you’d add audio to your PowerPoint slides and stuff like that. So, I’m part of another group, a forum in the university where we all rolled out lots of different webinars and things like that. But now, we’re starting to plan for the fall in case things are online, and that’s where now we‘ll start planning. And we can schedule things a bit easier then. It’s just there was no scheduling time at all. It was just panic really, [LAUGHTER]for a couple of weeks there.

John: We experienced something very similar here.

Darina: Yeah. Yeah.

John: But I would think that a one and a half to two-day workshop could be a really nice model for campuses that are uncertain about what’s going to be happening in the fall, to help faculty transition, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to talk about this in light of this transition and about the uncertainty that we’re facing in the fall. In these workshops, you help faculty develop learning objectives, based on Mager’s three characteristics. Could you define these characteristics for those who aren’t familiar with this approach?

Darina: Yeah. So, I suppose, to take a step back… First, when I initially started running these workshops, I used to talk about Gagne’s learning outcomes and the five components of a really good performance objective. That’s because I teach that kind of stuff anyway, and I’m interested in it, but I actually found it was nearly a little bit too much for faculty who, you know, they were coming in wanting to know what tools to use. And suddenly they were talking about what learning capability verb to use with their objective and stuff like that. And they kind of want to get past that. So, I had to kind of meet them midway and say, “Right, you don’t want to do all that stuff that I think is really important. But, I’m going to give you an easier version of it that will still kind of partially address that concern.” I was not going to leave out the objective side of things and the learning outcome side. So, Mager’s model, then, was the other model that I normally talk about, even with my own students, and that’s, I suppose, simpler and easier to understand, so he recommends that a really good objective would have three components, it mightn’t have all three but there are three possible components. It will always have a performance, which is your action verb, like “What is it do you want the person to do?” Then, it may have conditions associated with it. So, like you might say, “without the aid of a calculator, compute x, y, z” or it may have other criteria. So instead of saying “at the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to speak French” you might say “you’ll be able to speak fluent French,” or that you will do a particular task within 10 seconds, if you determined that the 10 seconds are critical to the performance of that task. So I’m just trying to get them to think more. Because, in my experience, I mean, I’m the only person of all the colleagues I’ve spoken to who actually have objectives for all my lectures. I have objectives for all my assignments. Most of my colleagues would really only have objectives on their course outline, at the very start, like “this is what we’re going to cover and at the end of the course, you will be able to do these things.” Whereas I’m very much about telling students the purpose of everything we’re doing, and that’s kind of good practice, but a lot of people just don’t know that. So, you know, we can’t blame them for not knowing that yet. So, I’m trying to kind of get them thinking that way, that everything that you get your students to do needs to be aligned with the learning outcomes; that you need to be very clear when you’re articulating what you want them to do. Because I think back to when I was in school or in college, and you got your feedback after an assignment and you’re kind of aggrieved that I didn’t know I was supposed to compare and contrast. “You didn’t say compare and contrast, you said discuss.” So I discussed. So, I used to remember feeling upset about those kinds of things that I didn’t know that’s what you wanted me to do, and I would have done it if I had known. So it’s our responsibility really as teachers to tell them what we want. Now whether they do or not is up to them. But if we haven’t articulated, clearly, there’s going to be a problem. So that’s why I give them that aspect of the objectives. And they seem to kind of grasp that and think about it a bit more. And I often notice they start revising their objectives and their outcomes because I talk to them about Gagne’s five learning outcomes as well. And most of them are teaching cognitive outcomes, but you know, some of them are teaching psychomotor skills and attitudes and so on. I’ve kind of noticed over the years, a lot of them are writing learning outcomes because they’re required to write them for program accreditation, but they have no background in it, they don’t know why they’re doing this, they’re maybe just kind of copying what colleagues have written for their outcomes and so on. So again, I kind of managed to sideline that stuff into the DUO workshop as well, because you see a lot of them thinking “Oh, I didn’t know we were going to cover this but actually that’s great to know that. I didn’t know that’s why we do it this way.” So Magers is the kind of softer version of Gagne’s five more difficult components, even though they’re probably even more accurate. So, the performance, the conditions, and the criteria are the three components you could have in a good objective. You won’t always have conditions. You won’t always have criteria. So, it’s really important as well that people don’t just add in something like “within 10 seconds,” if 10 seconds isn’t critical to the performance. So again, it’s just about being very clear to your students, so they know what you expect of them.

Fiona: I like the way in which this opportunity for faculty or instructors themselves to learn something new becomes the moment when they can actually articulate what it is they want students to do. So, I like that there’s a dual, I like playing on the idea of the duo. [LAUGHTER]

Darina: I’m really chuffed at myself that I came up with that name. [LAUGHTER]

Fiona: Yeah. And so it seems eminently useful to have this moment where faculty are really digging in and thinking not just about modality or technology or tools, but actual learning outcomes, real learning outcomes, and it also seems like a good moment to investigate the difference between necessary challenges for learning and unnecessary barriers to learning that might be leftover from how an instructor was trained themselves or what they’re comfortable doing or disciplinary habits of assessment or evaluation. And so can you tell us where this fits in? Where this reflective piece fits into your two-day structure? How do you lead faculty from this reflective moment into learning about the online experience?

Darina: Yes. So in terms of the structure, I kind of start with this stuff. I start with learning outcomes. I always have this kind of feeling in the pit of my stomach at the start of the workshop that they’re going to go, “Oh, this isn’t what I thought this workshop was about. I thought we were going to look at cool technology. Why is she doing all this boring theory stuff?” But, I kind of have to get them on board and say, “Look, bear with me, this is important that you do this.” Most participants you can see them thinking, “Oh, okay, that’s not what I wanted today, but actually there’s value in it and now I need to revise my learning outcomes and objectives.” So, I get from that and then I move towards things like Gagne’s nine events of instruction, which is kind of practical steps that you do when you teach. And then I move them a little bit more towards like, “What kind of resources, what might we find online that you could use with your teaching?” And then I move towards then, maybe coming up with ideas for activities they might like to do online, but they don’t know how they would do it yet. They don’t know how they would have class presentations online, but they’re hoping I’m going to tell them. So we get to that as well. So it’s kind of bit by bit moving towards what they came in for, which was “Tell me how my course can be online.” [LAUGHTER] That’s the only objective they have coming into the room. Whereas, I actually get a whole lot of other little treats in there along the way. But it does start with the pedagogy. And I’ve had the odd workshop where you get the vibe from the room that we kind of just want to get to that other stuff. And it’s an uncomfortable place to be but I’m like, “This is the right way to do this.” You know what I mean? And you need to bear with me and they always see the value in this by the end, but there’s been a couple of times where I thought “Oh, they really don’t want to hear this stuff right now.” But, you know, if you want to be a good teacher, a good online teacher, it’s important.

John: After people work on the learning objectives, what would be the next step in the workshop process?

Darina: Yes. So I have an activity that and, over the years, I’ve incorporated more activities, because at the start, it was more me teaching them how to teach online. And I knew there was a need for them to do more than listen to me for one and a half to two days. So one of the early activities is “What are your learning outcomes for the course you’re trying to move online?” The activities that you’re currently doing, if it’s a current on-campus course, for example, are the objectives and the activities aligned? If they’re not, how might they be? So, they complete a collaborative Google doc at the same time. Now, I have a hidden agenda for using a Google doc. I know we all use Google docs all the time now. But, a huge amount of people have not collaborated in a Google doc. Maybe they have in the last few weeks, things have changed a bit. In the last few weeks, a lot more people have been exposed. But, normally a lot of faculty wouldn’t have any need to do that. If they’re writing a paper with someone else, they’ll write their Word document, they’ll email it to someone. They’ll add their content, then email it back, and stuff of that. So, I want them to see how they’re all contributing to that document live during the workshop, and it’s up on the big screen, and how this is something that they could get their students to do and it doesn’t seem that difficult. So, I’m trying to introduce them to the technology that way as well. So, that’s an early activity, you know: What are your outcomes? Are they aligned? Then I kind of move towards the events of instruction. So, the events of instruction are really a simple list of nine events that you should try and carry out in any teaching, whether it’s face to face or online. And we do a lot of these anyway. So even if you’ve never heard of Gagne’s nine events, you’re probably doing them, as a teacher does. But there are a couple of them that you might forget about, or that you might not put much emphasis in. So I find it really handy to just think of those nine steps in my head. So, the first thing you need to do is get the attention of your audience. Also related to that, by the way, you have to maintain their attention, which we know as well is another challenge. The second thing you need to do is inform them of the objectives. That’s one that a lot of people leave out. They have their objectives on their course outlines, but that’s the end of the objectives until the semester is over. So, you need to tell them why you’re getting them to do this activity, what they’re going to learn in today’s lecture and why it’s important. You need to stimulate recall of prior learning, that’s something that I see a lot of my colleagues leaving out, they forget to say how this material is connected to what we did before or what you did in some other course. Then you’re obviously presenting the stimulus material, which is the course content. And there’s a whole world of theory about how best to present your content. The next step is providing guidance. So telling them clearly what you want them to do, where, when, how and so on. Eliciting performance is not the same as the formal assessment. That’s like getting your students to engage regularly, which we all know we need to do more often. Giving them feedback, then the formal assessment. And then the one that is often forgotten about the final event is enhancing retention and transfer. So, I’m sure we’ve all taken courses where, years later, we realize why that thing was useful, because the teacher never told us… But we’ve just done something and suddenly, “oh, it all makes sense to us.” So, enhancing retention and transfer is another one that people really do forget. They feel once they get to the assessment that they’re done, and that there’s nothing else to be done. So, I really like that list because I can use it in my face-to-face teaching and in your online teaching. And if you’re trying to think like, “Am I missing anything?”, have a look at those nine events of instruction. I’m personally a huge fan of Gagne’s work. So I kind of talk about Gagne constantly. He was very particular, very organized, very structured, and so on. If you’re like me, you will love that. Other teachers are a bit more freelance, maybe they mightn’t like that structure as much. But it’s great to know that there is a template there that if you’re not sure what to do that you can consult it, you know?

Fiona: It seems really useful to have something that crystallized, I suppose, about what you’re trying to do in this new environment. Are there any of those learning events, those events of instruction, that are especially challenging online?

Darina: No, I think, in lots of ways, some of them actually, I won’t say easier to do, but there’s more options for them. So, you know, like for presenting your content, you can cater to multiple intelligences easier, maybe online than you can in a classroom where everybody’s just sitting there looking at one screen, for example. In online environments, you can get them podcasts and video and standard slides and whatever else. Certain things will be maybe more complicated because there’s a technology layer in between. But, then there’s also more options because of the technology layer in between. So you know, getting people to perform. I mean, we know there’s a wealth of activities you can get students to do online, but you still have to devise all of those, you still have to come up with activities, and then have the technical skills, know how, or whatever. Do you need to pick the right tools? and so on. So, there’s a huge amount of decisions to be made before you can do some of those events online. But if you make good decisions, it will be possibly even richer than it might be in your class. Again, it depends on what kind of a classroom teacher you are. I mean, some people are excellent classroom teachers, and there’s nothing that needs to be improved. But, for a lot of us, there’s nearly so much choice. That’s kind of daunting when it comes to teaching online. Just tell me which tool I should use for feedback. Just tell me which tool I should use for my lecture slides. You know, it’s those practical, urgent needs right now that most people are concerned with, not maybe the bigger picture sometimes.

Fiona: I think one of the things we’ve been talking about in terms of this emergency distance teaching situation is how to manage cognitive load for students, right? They’re dealing with so many other things, let alone this complete shift they didn’t choose, they didn’t ask for.

Darina: Yeah.

Fiona: But it’s really important to think about that from an instructor’s perspective as well, that we too can be totally overwhelmed by choice, as you say.

Darina: Of course, yeah. And that’s something that I’ve really seen in the last few weeks and as somebody who’s been teaching online for a long time, in some ways, this was an easy transition for me the last few weeks, but in other ways, there were moments where I was really overwhelmed by the amount of resources that were being sent to me on a daily basis about “here’s how to do your online lecture,” you know, “here’s how to have a meeting,” “use this tool” or “use this tool.” There were days when I just thought, “oh my god, I feel so overwhelmed.” And I wasn’t even looking for that information, but it’s being thrown at me, you know, [LAUGHTER] and if I was looking for that, I don’t know, if you’d presented to me at the right time anyway. So, I’ve thought several times over the last few weeks, there must be people who must have just gone: “That’s enough. I’m just gonna go with the first tool that’s recommended to me or if Mary who used to sit beside me says she uses Microsoft Teams, I’m going to go with Microsoft Teams, or I’m going to use Zoom, because that’s the word I’m hearing about all the time.” And I think there is a problem with all of that as well, you know, and one would probably see those problems emerging over the next few weeks and months, where people just are so overwhelmed with choice and everybody trying to help, I mean, myself included. I was creating resources and sharing them with people as well. So, I’m just as guilty. But for most people, you have a problem right now. You just want the resource to solve this problem right now. You don’t have the headspace when this is thrown at you to go back and evaluate multiple tools and pick which one appeals to you personally, you know. You’re just going to go with the most popular tool or the one that’s supported by your IT department or whatever. So, the overwhelming thing has really been on my mind the last few weeks and how did people make decisions about what to do. For our university, Zoom isn’t actually officially supported by our IT department, but because Zoom was mentioned so many times in that first week, everybody said “Right, I’ll do Zoom” [LAUGHTER], you know. And then suddenly it was all over the internet that there were problems with Zoom and people started to panic. But you know, they’ve committed to Zoom and they didn’t want to undo Zoom, you know, two weeks later. So, there’s a lot of that, I’d love to get into that to find out, you know, what were you thinking at those times when we were throwing all these resources at you? [LAUGHTER]

Fiona: Absolutely. This might be a good moment to come back to the wonderfully mindful structure of the two-day DUO experience. So, you’ve described bringing instructors in with this theoretical framework for thinking about their teaching, and you’ve described some of these exercises. How does it continue? Where do you take them next?

Darina: Okay, so say when we’ve come out of Gagne’s events of instruction, and I’ve spoken to them about different types of assessment options that you have, including some of the traditional ones that move online, like essays are just as good online as they were in the classroom environment, but I start talking to them then about, for example, possible social media assignments you could do, e-portfolios, podcasting, reflective blogging. And I show them examples of those with my own students, that’s when they start to get kind of excited then, because they can say, “okay, I’ve heard these words e-portfolios or I listen to podcasts all the time, but I’ve never created a podcast. I don’t know what you would do, what software you need. Do I have to have to buy equipment? Really, most people are at that basic level. And I want them to know that that’s okay that most people are at that basic level. And when they realize how easy it is to do it, or you point them towards a good resource, they’re really excited how “Oh, so I could do a podcast for my lectures and make it freely available” and stuff like that. So that’s where the kind of relief starts to set in a little bit, that there are loads of options, but she’s been doing this for a long time, and she just does these options, and they seem to be acceptable and, you know, very good or whatever. I think people need a lot of reassurance about methods because like, I’m not using all the latest technologies in my teaching, I’m using kind of good, reliable, consistent things like discussion forums, and well thought out activities and structured course materials and everything’s organized and they’re the kind of key practices that I’m just doing online. I’m not using, as I said, the latest tools for everything because the latest tools might not exist tomorrow, there has to be a rationale for the technology you’re using. So when I start showing them example assignments, then you can see people thinking about how they could do that with their students. Sometimes they’ll think Twitter, social media, I have no interest in that personally. I’m not going to do that with my students, that’s fine as well. Then I mention to them about learning object repositories and MOOCs. A lot of them still wouldn’t have done MOOCs before. You know, they might have heard the word MOOCs but never engaged in a MOOC. Most people haven’t really heard of learning object repositories, so I show them some examples, and I try and customize the examples to what their discipline is. So I showed them some economics resources that they could use if they’re economics professors, and then suddenly it’s like, “Wow, we can use those for free in our courses and we don’t have to develop them. That’s good.” So that’s another activity they do then I give them a little bit of time to have a browse. Because I know myself, I mean, there’s so much material available online, but I don’t really have time, most of the time, to actually look for stuff. So I just end up inventing it from scratch myself. So I just give them a little bit of time to dabble. At least they’ve looked at a MOOC. And there’s two reasons why I get them to look at MOOCs. Number one is to make them aware of what MOOCs are, and that they could engage in professional development themselves or study something they’ve always been personally interested in, but also to see how someone else teaches what they teach, because you get great ideas when you see how somebody overcame some kind of challenge that you personally have in your class. So that’s moving in then to the online assessments I’ve moved into, here’s some online resources you can use that will help you. That’s kind of roughly where the first stage of the workshop ends. That’s the kind of course planning and design, like what could you do? What are the options kind of a thing. The second part is the course delivery part. So now you can know what you want to do. How would you do it? So I talk to them about Gilly Salmon. She has a five-stage model of teaching and learning online. So I showed them the different phases that learners typically go through as they’re studying online, like from being afraid to access the technology and not knowing what password to use, etc, to kind of maybe reaching out to some other classmates to then starting to share resources about the assignment they’ve just been given to then trying to solve problems and do knowledge construction right through to kind of developing as independent active learners. So, I go through that model as well and kind of try to reassure them as well as that, you know, you will have learners at different phases at different times. Don’t feel this is you doing something wrong, that there are different phases, this is well known, it’s well researched, and so on. So I’m trying to constantly say to them, you know, you’re going to encounter these different issues along the way over the coming years, and just know that they have been documented before as being common problems, because people tend to blame themselves immediately when they have a problem teaching with technology. They always say, “Oh, I’m really bad at technology, it must be me, it must be my setup.” And it’s often not. Like, I’ve had so many bugs and problems with software the last few weeks, and I’m quite technically capable. And I’m pulling my hair out sometimes with technology. So, I’m thinking if you’re new to this, you know, you’re just going to be blaming yourself or think, “Oh, I just can’t do this” or you know what I mean? You’re just going to pull out too soon. So, I talk about Gilly Salmon’s five-stage model. So, it’s kind of the practical things you can do to help learners as they move through the phases. And I also talked to them about Gilly Salmon’s e-tivities. So, the e-tivities are structured forum based activities. I think we did our other podcast on that.

John: We’ll include a link to the earlier podcast in the show notes.

Darina: So I won’t go through all that again. But they’re just basically activities that are structured a certain way and they’re usually housed within the discussion forum. And you can get students to do potentially anything in an e-tivity. Whether it’s collect soil samples, and come back and report on it or have a debate or whatever it might be. So, I showed them examples of those and how I use those as the ongoing assessments in my own online courses. And then I kind of wrap up that course delivery section then with kind of some best practice guidelines, kind of tips that I’ve learned along the way: do this, don’t do that or you should consider this as well as, you know, other people’s guidelines as well. So that kind of brings you then to the end of this is how you would design and plan how you might deliver it. And then the third part then is where I kind of get them to do more work. And it’s me relaxing a little bit, and then kind of storyboarding their courses. So the storyboarding then is when I tell them to turn off their laptops for a while, because they’re all probably answering emails while they’re listening to me at the same time. So they turn off their laptops. And so I’m basically following actually, Gilly Salmon. I’m going to mention her again. She’s not paying me, by the way for mentioning her or something. [LAUGHTER] But she has a course design approach called Carpe Diem, and it’s for designing online courses. It’s been around a while. So one of the features of that kind of workshop was the A3 flip chart paper, different colored post-it notes and markers, and literally drawing columns for each week of your course, writing in the topics you’re going to cover each week, discussing them in a group. I find that a lot of my colleagues, there might be an initial program design team meeting, but once everybody has been assigned their course they tend to go off and do their own thing. And there doesn’t tend to be like regular discussion about well what assignments are you giving your students and are you doing reflective blogging, that’s great, I can continue from where you left off. It tends to be everybody working in silos, kind of once the program has started. So this is a great opportunity, even though it’s at the start, for people to actually talk out loud about, “well, I would love to do this, or I’d love to do that. But maybe you should do it because it would make more sense in your course.” And they have that conversation over the course of several hours. And it’s something that doesn’t happen a lot. It usually might happen by email, but not in a room where everybody’s literally kind of brainstorming together about what to do and when. And that’s when they also plot out then when their assignments are going to be issued. And the various activities or e-tivities. So I kind of convert all my participants to e-tivity fans by the end it. So it allows them to use that kind of model because they know it works for other courses in other programs in UL. So really the kind of agenda behind the storyboard is that when you walk out of the room, you have a big sheet of paper with what you’re going to do every week, what kind of activities you’ve committed to, are you’re going to do blogs or podcasting or portfolios or standard essays via the LMS, whatever it might be, but they have a template ready. They know what they need to do. They have an action plan. They might not have tried all the tools out yet, but they know that they don’t need to focus on Camtasia. Or they don’t need to use Zoom for their particular cohort or whatever it might be. They know what is a workable model by the time they leave the room. So that’s kind of why I like to wrap up with the storyboarding side of things.

John: And you have that collaborative aspect because most of your development has been within individual programs where they’re all teaching the same subject. So there’s a lot of opportunities for feedback.

Darina: There is.

John: Would that work as well, if it was a more mixed group of faculty,

Darina: I’ve done them with mixed groups as well. So I’ve done some for my own faculty where there’s been lecturers in languages, history, politics, public administration, obviously, each discipline will have their own concerns. So the language teachers are going to be really concerned about how to do oral examinations online. The politics people might be more interested in debates and discussions online. So individual questions will be a bit more tailored to their disciplines, but it has worked, but usually when people come to me to do this workshop, it’s “We want to move this program online, can you do one of your workshops?” And then I say, “Right, this is on economics,” or the last one I did was on artificial intelligence machine learning for finance. So it’s a new master’s program that’s starting in September, hopefully. And they had one of the courses on that program that is already online on another program. But all the rest of them have already been taught on campus or not at all. So they’re designing new courses from scratch, as well as thinking about how to do it online. So they went through the DUO workshop as well. That was the most recent one I did. And all the discussions at least were about kind of issues that would be relevant to the people teaching those courses in terms of the kind of tools they would use, the kind of assignments that they would do and so on.

John: We’ve done reading groups on campus for about six or seven years now, I believe. And one of the things that people have often been surprised by is how, when people from different disciplines are sharing ideas, it often sparks some creativity.

Darina: And even for myself, I’d rightly be writing down “This is a good idea.” I didn’t think of doing this myself, you know, and we often learn from our students. And in my case, in the DUO workshop, my students are colleagues, but they often have great ideas about “could you do this” or “Well, actually, I’ve done this.” And they might even be people who think they’re really poor at technology, but they can surprise you the things they’ve thought of doing with their students. And you think I could adapt that and do that with my own students. So I usually come up with lots of ideas for my own courses as well, after the workshop.

Fiona: I’m a literature specialist. And so I’m still thinking about your storyboard finale to the workshop and thinking about the story part more than the board a little bit and just thinking of the value of having a narrative of your course that’s been generated in this collaborative way that allows for connections to be visualized, but also thought through. You mentioned that part of what you talk to with faculty in your DUO workshop is the idea of assessment. And you’ve encouraged faculty to use both qualitative and quantitative assessments for students. Would you be able to talk a little bit about those and maybe provide some examples of qualitative and quantitative assessment measures.

Darina: It’s funny because like when I initially mentioned talking about this in this podcast, this was before all the COVID-19. And everybody’s obsessed with assessment right now, because they’ve all had to come up with new ways of doing things. But say, before that, if you just go with my standard DUO workshop, what I talk about with people, that’s one of their big concerns, you know, they have a face-to-face exam that lasts for two and a half hours. And now they’re wondering, “Well, how would we do that online?” Or, you know, “That’s fine that you have that kind of activity, but how would I do this type of activity online? …and so on. So, there’s a lot of talk about different types of activities, and usually people kind of latch on to different ones. And then the next question is, “Yeah, but how would I grade that? That’s fine for you, Darina, you have 30 people in your course I have a hundred and fifty…” and stuff like that, or they don’t know yet that there are rubrics out there for grading podcasts, for grading discussion forums, for grading reflective blog entries, for portfolios, for everything. So that’s one of the things I try and highlight for them. I say “Look, actually there are lots of universities that post really good rubrics up there. So you don’t even have to come up with your own or you can just adapt one of these. So they’re always thrilled to find that out, because they think that all has to come out of their own minds, and that they have to kind of devise what an excellent podcast is versus an average podcast. So I showed them those examples. And I have my own list of resources online, where I have grading rubrics, a page for that as well. So I highlight some of those, but also, then I tell them to kind of look at what, and most people don’t know this, their learning management system, Moodle, Blackboard, whatever it is that you’re using, they all have learning analytics data that’s available to instructors. And people have heard that, but they never browsed around their interface to find it. So, I would just show them examples of the kinds of things you can find out about your students. So, let’s say you decide you want to have 5% or 10% going for online participation. They’re thinking, but how would I grade that? You know, that’s gonna be really tough. So I say initially start off with quantitative data. Look at your LMS, you can click on an individual student’s name, you can see how often they logged in, how many words they wrote in each posting, for example, how many files they accessed, all of those kinds of basic quantitative things you can use. And if it’s a low number of marks that you’re giving for online participation, the quantitative might be enough. So that stuff that they might have manually done, if you don’t highlight it for them, they would have possibly copied and pasted all the postings and done a word count inside Microsoft Word. So it’s really important to show people those kinds of things. Qualitatively, then, you can still use the LMS analytics data to do things like, well in my own LMS the one we use is Sakai, but it’s very like, say, Moodle, and what do you use in your university?

John: Blackboard.

Darina: Blackboard, okay. It’s very, like they’re all very similar anyway, so I can display students’ forum postings in context. So it’s one thing to know that John posted the required 100 words last week, but were John’s hundred words relevant to the topic of the forum? Was John actually answering the question that Mary asked him? So you can expand and view them in context so that you get a bit more qualitative analysis now, so you can tick the box that he’s done 100 words, but now you can see are they 100 useful words or relevant words or whatever. So that’s one kind of qualitative way of looking at it, to see do they post in the right forum, for example. You know, again, sometimes people can be very strategic about how many words they write and where they post them, but they might not know that you’re going to analyze it to that level and you’ll spot that they’re actually just repeating themselves or waffling or whatever they might be doing. You can have more advanced heuristics as well. So for example, qualitatively you might be interested in did students offer solutions to other students’ problems on the forum. So you know, I’ve said, “I’m really frustrated. I’m trying to do this assignment. I don’t know how to solve x, y, and Z,” even though there’s not officially any marks going for it, you might offer to give assistance to a classmate, for example. So that might be something that you build into your heuristics. Have they reached out to their classmates? And did they acknowledge other people’s contributions and so on, so all of these qualities of things could be incorporated into your rubrics and that’s just for kind of LMS participation. And as I said, then you have lots of rubrics for other tools they might use, like if they created a podcast, there’s rubrics for excellent, average, poor podcasts and so on. There are more advanced techniques then that some people who are interested in analytics research, myself included, like you can do things like cluster analysis or decision-tree classification. And so a lot of talk of, in the analytics field, is about trying to identify problem behaviors early on. So has a student logged in week one, or did they not log in until week six. If they don’t log in until week six, and they don’t access the week one lecture materials, are they more likely to get a bad mark versus those who do, and so on. So there are more advanced techniques you can use to kind of identify student behaviors, patterns that can inform when you intervene, or who you reach out to and so on. Obviously, the qualitatives are more time consuming. So it kind of depends on how many marks you’re giving. So I mean, I would usually have 10 to 15% going for participation, online engagement in e-tivities, and so on. So I’m looking at the quality of what they’ve written, but I’m also looking at the quality of their engagement and interaction with other students as well. Did they stay on topic? …all of the kinds of things that you would normally assess when students post something, but then quantitatively as well, I’m constantly keeping an eye to make sure that all my students are logging in when they should or, you know, if I haven’t received an assignment from John in a while, I’ll check to see has John been engaging with the LMS in the last few weeks? If not, maybe there’s something else going on with John that I need to follow up on. So there are some examples of the kind of quantitative qualitative techniques I would use with my students, it’s all very time consuming, but there is great data there, if you know where to look, you know.

Fiona: I feel as though time is the specter we keep coming back to in many ways. And it makes sense that the assessment opportunities you’re talking about can both save time in certain circumstances, but also involve time in other circumstances. And I know from the last few weeks, the one constant that seems to be coming up again and again, in conversations with faculty members is how time consuming this shift has been. And I know these are unusual circumstances, but do you talk to faculty about managing time and workload when it comes to online teaching?

Darina: I do. I think one of the most important things that I do in the workshop is I’m honest about what it involves. So like I’m teaching online for 13-14 years, and I still spend a huge amount of time every semester on like, I’m not just uploading the same podcast from last year I’m re-recording my podcasts. I’m spending hours in the forum at the start of the semester, setting up my discussion forums and the titles and the topics and changing privileges. Looking back over my notes for what I did wrong last year to make sure I don’t make that mistake this year. Coming up with activities and so on. It’s really time consuming for me and I have relatively small classes, even though they would be large online classes for our university, talking about 20 30, 35 students maybe, at most, taking a course it is really time consuming, but I suppose I’m lucky in that we fought over the years in our particular program to have it recognized that the work we do online is equivalent work to the work you’re doing on campus. So I might only have three hours of teaching on campus a week. But I’ve spent the whole rest of my week in my office, doing podcasts, answering questions on forums, doing live chat sessions, and so on. And that is recognized. So that’s something that I kind of emphasize when I’m talking to the program team, that this needs to be recognized. We’re luckier in recent years, I’m actually kind of envious of my colleagues now. Because the programs that I teach online, we’ve never had any ed tech support, educational technology support, everything that was done, all my courses are all done by me. You know, I don’t have somebody that I can say here on my slides, add my audio to it, [LAUGHTER] you know, that’s like a pipe dream for me. But in more recent times, like in the last two or three years in our university, there’s been more educational technologists hired for the individual faculties and in some cases, some programs have got their own educational technologist, which means then that person does a lot of that hard graft, you know, if you’re having technical problem and you’ve written your slides and you have your notes, but you don’t have time to fiddle around with software, there’s somebody who can do that fiddling around for you. So they have that advantage, I suppose. And in some cases in the bigger programs, they have tutors that they can hire if the number of students increases. Again, that’s something I’ve never had. That’s what the Open University has. That’s why they’re so good at what they’re doing as they have small groups dedicated to individual tutors, and they look after them all the way through. So the subject matter expert or the lecturer, the professor, doesn’t have to do all of those other things as well. And that is kind of what we should be doing. That’s the model we should have. But it really depends on the group I’m talking to. You know, some groups definitely have more resources than I do, for example, but I do emphasize to them that this isn’t easier. It’s equivalent, if not harder to what I do face to face. I mean, obviously, certain things have gotten easier than they were. But I’ve gone through lots of trials and tribulations and things working and not working. And I try a little tweak of an assignment and it all goes horribly wrong. And you say “Right, I won’t do that again.” And I think it’s really important that staff hear you say that because they assume because you’re teaching online for a long time that everything is easy for you, and it’s not, and it will never be easy, actually. It’ll never be easy. It will be very demanding, time consuming. But if you do it well, the rewards you get from your students and seeing what they produce, and so on, always makes up for in my eyes anyway, even though sometimes I think, “Why am I doing all these things, I don’t have to do it,” You know, there’s an easier way of doing this, I could do that. I could just throw out the podcast from last year and not customize it to developments this year. And they might not know any different. The students might not know any different but I would know, you know, and I would be worried that I made references in last year’s podcasts that are no longer relevant this year and things like that. So I probably make certain things more complicated than they need to be. But that’s just the way I am. [LAUGHTER] I’m a sucker for punishment.

John: I think I am too. I was thinking back when you were talking about how long you’ve been doing this. I started teaching online 24 years ago.

DARINA. Okay.

John: A lot of the tools have gotten better than they were back in those earlier years. But I’m still finding it takes at least as much time as it did when I first started back then.

Darina: In a way, you see you’ve so many more choices now. That’s a problem as well. I mean, it’s great to have a choice of technology in the sense that if you really dislike Microsoft Teams, for example, you can go and use something else. But on the other hand, you can invest a huge amount of time in that other tool and realize it still doesn’t do what you want it to do. So, like the other day, I was just trying to upload a video file that I recorded on my computer, my laptop at home, and it was on QuickTime because somebody told me the other day, you know what, if you have a Mac, you can use QuickTime, you can record yourself whatever and I said, “Great, I’m gonna use that now for this,” I had to install Adobe Premiere Rush to convert the iMovie to mp4 then when I played it, I discovered that my voice was not synchronized with my video. So then I had to download Adobe Media Encoder and convert it that way and then I had to do one other thing to be able to upload that video clip and that was a seven minute video clip. I’m thinking, I am pulling my hair out and I’m an expert and there’s “what is everybody else going through?” I think it is really important that people know that I have those moments as well. Because I do think when you’re encountering challenges if you know somebody else encounters those challenges, it makes it a bit easier.

Fiona: For sure.

John: Now that we’re nearly done with our spring semester, what should we think about in planning for the fall?

Darina: I have a huge concern about how we’re going to fix things that have gone wrong in the last few weeks. I’m usually concerned, like, I don’t know about your university, but I imagine it’s probably the case in most places that a lot of allowances were made for faculty to use whatever they could manage, and do whatever they can to come up with whatever assignment can reasonably assess the learning outcomes, and we’ll figure it out afterwards. You know, what, we’ll figure out how to grade them later, or whatever. And it was amazing, and also really exciting to think that universities could be that flexible when it really was needed. You know, it was really a big crisis, and it was needed. At the same time, I’m thinking right now, and I have seen other commentators mention this too, so it’s not just me, but a huge amount of people now think they’re online teachers. And this is where the language we’re using here is kind of important. This is where I’ve seen people refer to emergency remote teaching like you did, Fiona, at the start. I like that reference to it, rather than saying, I’m an online teacher because I’ve done a podcast or I’ve done whatever. We know, those of us that are teaching online, that to do well, it takes years of work. And every year it takes loads of work. It’s not just a thing you learn once and you’re sorted, it’s kind of another job on top of your teaching job. And I’m really concerned that the allowances that were made recently, that people will carry those through to the fall, and that when somebody says to them, Well, you know, I know we said you could use let’s say, I’m just picking Zoom as an example, just because it’s in the media all the time at the moment. I know, we said you could use Zoom in spring, but you know, it’s not safe. It’s not secure or whatever, you’re not allowed to use zoom anymore. And you will have a lot of people aggrieved that they’ve invested time and effort in technology that’s no longer supported. Or you have students complaining that technology didn’t work the way it should have, or they couldn’t do their assignments from home because you insisted on a particular tool that they didn’t have access to or they had to purchase or whatever. How are we going to get people to take a few steps back and say, “Okay, that was okay then but it’s not okay anymore.” And we’re now going to find time, somehow, between now and September, let’s say, to fix those things and to correct those problems that crept in along the way. And so that’s why I’m talking to my own faculty even, because apart from the whole university, even within my faculty, there’s lots of people to look after. So, within my own faculty, I’m thinking they need to be doing DUO workshops over the summer, you know, they need to kind of know, “That’s fine, you tried out these things, and you now know more than you would have six months ago if this hadn’t happened. But there are problems with some of what you’ve done.” There are brilliant things and they’ll have discovered things that I don’t know about myself and so on. I’m just worried about how would that conversation happen? How would we not sound like we’re being critical of people who did their best under exceptional stressful circumstances? So that’s kind of one of the research papers that’s floating around in my head at the moment, that the language we use will have to be very careful because they’ve been given permission to do it, whatever way they can manage. But does that mean we just let them do whatever way from now on? I don’t think so.

John: There wasn’t much choice at the time, but now there’s time to plan and I think on the positive side, faculty who have been teaching the same way for several decades, all of a sudden had to try some new things. And that might leave them open to think about how they might be able to use these tools more effectively in the future. And if it’s framed that way, I think it could be seen as a positive experience where if everyone gets together and talked about what worked, what didn’t work so well, and how those problems could be addressed, it’s an opportunity for people to bring in more effective tools, however they’re going to be teaching. And we don’t really know what that is going to be like for the next semester or two. But at least it will give us more time to plan and more people to reflect on their experiences and perhaps learn from those experiences so that it may not be seen as a constraint if there’s direction saying this tool was used, but perhaps there’s a better way of doing that, because I think everyone right now is questioning how this is working and what could work better.

Darina: Yeah, we don’t know yet how well it’s going to work. You know, our students still have to submit their assignments. We still have to grade them all. You know, we could be in for a big shock. We could be in for a pleasant shock. [LAUGHTER] We could realize that actually the students did so much better because of this other alternative way of teaching them and assessing them. So, there’s lots of exciting things we could find out yet. But it’s how we’ll have that conversation, how we’ll frame it, that will be interesting, because there will be people who did not want to use technology, who clearly never had plans on using technology who have been forced to use it, they’re going to look for any opportunity they can to dismiss technology as all useless and pointless and it doesn’t work when you want it to and so on. So, that’s one challenge. And then there’s all the other people in the middle who actually committed to doing a lot of really great things or they did their best, but maybe we might have to correct some of that. So it’s like giving constructive feedback to your students. This time, it’s to your colleagues. [LAUGHTER]

Fiona: It is. We’ve all become learners anew, whether we planned to or not in this semester.

John: By the time this podcast is released, some of those answers we’ll know about from how students have done because we’re recording this near the end of the semester in both of our institutions. We’ll have more answers,I think, by the time this is out

Darina: Great, interesting times ahead.

Fiona: Normally this podcast ends with the question: What next?

Darina: So if it’s what next for me, I have some papers planned when I get past some other deadlines about how institutions have supported staff and how would they could support them better moving forwards. Another thing I’m working on is, there’s a conference that I go to most years in North America, it was supposed to be on in Georgia in July, and like every other conference it has been moved, well, this one has been moved to virtual. So, I’m on the team. That’s the Professional Communication Society conference. So we’re now looking at what technology could be used to replicate a face-to-face conference, and how are we going to have breakout rooms and coffee breaks online and all those kinds of things. So that’s kind of exciting. It’s a lot of work for the team, but some work won’t be required, you know, that was required before when it was going to be a face-to-face conference. So it’d be great to see how that turns out in terms of moving that conference online, just this one year, hopefully. So they’re kind of my immediate things that I need to kind of get working on that research soon while it’s still fresh, and while people still have opinions about things and feel passionate about it, and so on. And in terms of DUO, a lot of resources were developed in the last few weeks to deal with the COVID crisis. So maybe some of DUO can be taken out, and we can point people to those other resources that were all developed under huge pressure, but really good resources were developed. So I might be able to repackage it a bit or maybe make it a bit shorter, or have the face-to-face component being just what needs to be done face to face and so on. So I’ll have to rethink that in the next few months as well, you know?

Fiona: That’s incredibly interesting and vital work. All the best.

Darina: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

John: Thank you. It’s been great talking to you again, and I’m looking forward to hearing more of how things are going in the future.

Darina: Great and the best of luck to both of you as well in your wrapping up your semesters and I hope everything goes according to plan.

Fiona: Thanks a million.

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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. Editing assistance provided by Brittany Jones and Savannah Norton.

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