215. Resilient Pedagogy

The global pandemic resulted in rapid and dramatic changes in instructional practices. These transitions were supported by many resources created and publicly shared by teaching centers and instructional designers. In this episode, Travis Thurston joins us to discuss a superb open access resource on resilient pedagogy that he and his colleagues created with contributions from many thought leaders in higher ed.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: The global pandemic resulted in rapid and dramatic changes in instructional practices. These transitions were supported by many resources created and publicly shared by teaching centers and instructional designers. In this episode, we discuss the creation of a superb open access resource on resilient pedagogy created by one teaching center with contributions from many thought leaders in higher ed.

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

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John: Our guest today is Travis Thurston. Travis is the Director of the Office of Empowering Teaching Excellence at Utah State University. He is also one of the creators of and editors of Resilient Pedagogy: Practical Teaching Strategies to Overcome Distance, Disruption, and Distraction. Jessamyn Neuhaus, the Interim Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at SUNY Plattsburgh, the author of Geeky Pedagogy, and a frequent guest on this podcast will be filling in as a guest host. Welcome, Travis.

Travis: Thank you so much for having me.

Jessamyn: Hi, Travis.

Travis: It’s great to be here, thank you.

John: Today’s teas are… Travis, are you drinking tea?

Travis: I am not, but I am drinking a lovely orange citrus Mountain Dew Kickstart.

John: Very good.

Jessamyn: Do you need a little burst of energy, Travis? [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Like I always need a little burst of energy. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: I’m drinking some kind of wild orange tea, I just finished it. Really getting wild over here in Plattsburgh. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a Tea Forté black currant tea.

Jessamyn: Fancy.

Travis: Very nice.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss Resilient Pedagogy, an open-access anthology that’s designed to assist faculty in addressing the disruptions and challenges associated with a global pandemic and other forms of social stress. How did this project come about?

Travis: This really came about because right at the start of the pandemic here in the United States, this was March 2020, I got really sick after attending a regional Teaching for Learning Conference here in Utah… got home and went to my local clinic here, and it was before we even had COVID testing available in our area. And it ended up being about the same week that our university shut down operations and shifted to emergency remote teaching. And I ended up getting really sick, and I was out for over three weeks. And so I actually missed all of our transition to emergency remote teaching, which I know that actually seems like a good space to be [LAUGHTER] given what most of us experienced. But for me, as someone who has been an instructional designer and supports faculty regularly in their teaching, it was a moment for me where I felt like I wasn’t able to do my part. And so into that summer of 2020, as folks were discussing what we can do moving forward… Jessamyn and I are connected on Twitter, and there’s such a fantastic presence with folks on Twitter. I definitely lean on my community in Twitter. But I saw folks like Josh Eyler discussing this concept of resilient pedagogy, and it really resonated with me. We were in the process of teaching our faculty how to do blended learning for those who hadn’t. And so, as I was thinking about these terms and thinking about how we could support our faculty, we started talking with a few of the folks here at our university, specifically Chris González, who’s a faculty member, and Kacy Lundstrom, who is in our library here. And we decided to take on this project, this idea of putting together the book, as a way to share these strategies that can support faculty members, and ultimately can support our students.

John: A very timely project. [LAUGHTER] You more than made up for your absence right at the start of this. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Travis, how did you find the authors for this collection?

Travis: Yeah, great question. Speaking of Twitter, we put together a call for chapters, and we pushed that out on our social media channels. And we had dozens and dozens of fantastic chapter proposals. And so we went through a process of just blind reviewing all of the proposals that we received, and then selected the 15 that ended up publishing in the chapters. And so we landed with about five of those chapters coming from authors here at USU and 10 of those coming from folks external.

John: And you released this as an open-access text. We really appreciate the fact that you did. [LAUGHTER] Why did you choose the open-access format for it?

Travis: We decided to go the open-access route for a few reasons. One, it was a way for us to get these ideas out in a timely manner, of course. But really, it ties back to our purpose in putting it together in the first place, to try to share it with as many folks as we could. And we felt like an open-access volume would help us to achieve that.

Jessamyn: So the first section of this text deals with theory and foundations. What are some of the major principles of resilient course design?

Travis: That is a perfect question. And I think it’s actually quite pertinent because as we jumped into putting this book together, we challenged the authors not to just stick with one idea or one definition of resilient pedagogy. We kind of left it up to each of them to parse out what they thought resilient pedagogy meant. And so you’ll see in, like, chapter four, Rebecca Quintana and her colleagues there, they had been doing a MOOC on resilient pedagogy in the summer of 2020, taking a lot of these ideas of resilience from other fields, and then applying them to education and what we do with course design. So, in their chapter, they talk about these three principles of extensibility, flexibility, and redundancy, which we see in architecture or even in environmental fields, where we’re trying to support and sustain whatever it is we’re engaging with. So for me, when I start thinking about resilient design and resilient pedagogy, those three concepts definitely come to mind. How can we extend what we’re doing into different modalities that also ties into things like Universal Design for Learning, specifically with our students? How can we provide for multiple means of engagement or multiple means of expression within our courses? The idea of flexibility, I think, is something a lot of us have ran with the last 18 months or so in finding ways that we can not only be flexible with our course design, but also be flexible with each other. And what I mean by that is with our colleagues as we’re working on courses and with our students, as we’re thinking about the requirements that we have. And then I think a great one is this redundancy, which is not only helpful in general as a practice in the learning science of adding in redundancy. But as Jacob Fortman pointed out—he’s another author of that fourth chapter—he was teaching a course on virtual reality, which they typically have resources for within a brick-and-mortar face-to-face setting, and can provide support and troubleshooting. But when they started teaching that in a remote setting and they’re sending this equipment out, they can’t necessarily sit down and troubleshoot with every student. So they started developing additional support materials that can be used for students at a distance. So to answer your question, when I start thinking about resilient pedagogies, resilient design, those three concepts really stand out to me as a starting place for us.

Jessamyn: I always thought redundancy had negative connotations. But I must say, now, the more reminders I get, the more calendar shout outs I get to remember where I was supposed to be, when “Oh, what was I supposed to do here, there?” The more the better. So I definitely incorporate that into my teaching as well.

John: That example you mentioned about moving from a brick-and-mortar institution to online with classes, reminds me of a general issue that came up, in that it was fairly easy to ignore the inequities that our students face when they’re all on campus, when they all have access to computer labs, to the campus network, campus printing facilities, the library, and so forth. But when people moved online, the inequities that our students face in their day-to-day lives became much more visible to faculty. What are some lessons we should take forward from this period of remote teaching that we can use to help create a more equitable environment going forward?

Travis: There’s a couple of things that our institution ended up doing that I think, as we’ve been discussing it, are things we’re going to continue doing. Which when we talk through them seem like, “Well, why weren’t we doing this before?” Like, “Why weren’t we providing these things before?” And they’re things as simple as checking out laptops to students that don’t have technology. Our institution is the land-grant university here in Utah, so we have over 30 campuses across the state. So, for example, at some of our campuses that are in rural Utah, we actually had to set up Wi-Fi areas for students to be able to come and even access the internet to be able to be online doing their work. So there’s really simple things like that, in providing access to the technology, to the infrastructure, that is like a basic necessity to even be able to start doing this work. So from that standpoint, then when we even start thinking about how when students are maybe a little bit cautious to turn their camera on, to show their surroundings, or they keep their mic muted because they’re engaging in childcare while they’re trying to attend class. Or things like this that, like you said, John, are things that were easy to overlook when everyone was coming into the same space. But there are things that we should be thinking about and that we should be providing accommodations for our students and really adapting what we do to fit the needs of the students that we have.

Jessamyn: Switching away a little bit from the student-centered, I have a question. As the pandemic drags on, I’ve started to hear from faculty who are feeling overwhelmed and unable to do any new thing. The returns on their big pedagogical learning, the new things they’re doing are kind of small. And as a thought leader in education, Sherri Spelic, recently tweeted, “I’m tired of being resilient.” The word itself might be taking on some negative, toxic positivity. So how can we encourage faculty to do this to make their courses more resilient without placing a big, additional burden on them or resorting to rose-colored glasses?

Travis: I think I saw that tweet myself, and I may have retweeted it. [LAUGHTER] Because I think it really is pertinent right now for us to think about. There are so many demands on our time. And there are so many inequities and things that we could be trying to account for and trying to adjust for that, yes, we are tired of being resilient. So one of the things, as we were producing this book, I reached out to Jesse Stommel, who again is a fantastic person to follow on Twitter, because he had a tweet over the summer of 2020 with his list of words that he hopes he never hears again, one of which was resilient. [LAUGHTER] And so, I actually asked him if he would be willing to write the foreword for this book, to really play with that term and talk about those differences. And one of the points that I love that he makes in that forward, is that when we talk about resilience, it’s generally coming from a perspective of privilege. That we have the privilege to be resilient, which sometimes gets pushed onto our students, “Well, you know, if you just try harder.” But I think the same can be said with our faculty, and I think that’s why a lot of us have felt that the negative connotation to that term is because we feel like, “Well, you know, just keep doing what you’re doing and be resilient and you’ll get through this.” That was a long preface to my answer here. But for me, what we can do is just continue to make those small steps, make the small changes. For me, I try to emphasize this with the faculty that I support here at USU, that teaching excellence really is a journey. And so we’re just going to keep taking one step at a time as we keep moving forward. And sometimes, yeah, we’re gonna have to step off the trail and take a breather, and that is okay, that is okay. The other thing that I try to remind our folks here is that they don’t have to go at it alone. We have a robust community here—librarians, instructional designers, multimedia professionals, folks here in faculty development like myself—who really care deeply about teaching and learning. And I care deeply about our instructors and our students. And so, making sure that they are able to connect with those people that can lift them up and can support them when they are tired of being resilient.

John: During the period of emergency remote teaching many people were offering classes in this online synchronous manner, and some of that has continued into the following academic year. That differs quite a bit from what two of the authors on chapter three of this anthology, Noffs and Wilson, refer to as optimal online learning. Would you say that this transition and this form of emergency teaching gave some faculty and students a somewhat false sense of what constitutes online learning?

Travis: In a short answer, yes, I do. [LAUGHTER] And we’ve seen this in articles in The Chronicle or opinion pieces here and there, where folks are like, “Well, we tried online learning and it didn’t work.” And for someone who has studied instructional design, and specifically online course design, and has worked designing courses for years and years, what the majority of us were doing during that time was not what we would call “optimal online learning.” [LAUGHTER] And as my kids would remind me, research on this topic was going on back in the 1900s, as my kids would say, we had research on online learning back in the 90s. And a lot of that was, at first a lot of it incorporated synchronous engagement, where we were getting on some sort of technology and engaging with our students, probably with giant headsets. In fact, here in our building at Utah State where our office is located, we’re in the distance education building. And there’s this one particular hallway that has all these pictures of what distance learning looked like before. [LAUGHTER] And so there’s one picture down the hall that has the picture of some professors that they call the “Flying Professors” that would literally get on an airplane and fly to different campuses across the state to bring distance learning. There’s this other great picture of a professor putting this giant laser disc into a machine. [LAUGHTER] And then our very first real interesting innovation was that they had this trackpad that they could write on that would transmit the image to another location, all these interesting innovations. And so I look at things like that and then I look at what we were doing with emergency remote teaching during COVID, and I think exactly that. Like, we just had the wrong sense of what online learning is because there are mountains of research on what good online courses and what good online teaching looks like. And so, for me, and for us, the work is to continue to share those principles, not only as we are starting to shift back to face-to-face. But pre-pandemic, one thing I would always sit down with faculty members and say—when they’re coming to me and they’re going to be designing an online course for the first time, they’ve never taught online and they’re worried about it, they’re concerned about it—I would just tell them, “Good teaching is good teaching. And so it’s going to look different, it’s going to feel different in an online setting. But you have support, and there are strategies and there are ways to get to know your students that have been working for years, and we’re going to help you get there.” And I don’t want to be too critical of our approaches, because we literally were on the fly trying to change modalities. And typically, when we design a new online course, we spend months in development of that course, and training, not three days or a week. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Not three days, while your brain is about to explode trying to cope with a totally unprecedented situation.

Travis: Exactly. All the trauma of a worldwide pandemic, and social justice movements, and all the things going on in the world. Not to mention, I forgot to mention this earlier, but we have students who are food insecure or housing insecure. And so, yeah, of course these things are not going to take precedence, and shouldn’t, we’ve got to take care of each other. But yeah, there are definitely principles and things that we can do that are more effective than some of the emergency remote teaching that happened.

Jessamyn: Following up on that, can you give us some examples of some specific things, some steps that faculty can take, to design courses that are more equitable and more resilient to changing conditions?

Travis: One of my favorite suggestions comes from chapter one with Lindsay Masland. And she begins by giving this great self-determination theory approach to teaching and learning. And an aspect of that is that, as humans, we have this need for autonomy. And for this sense that we have some control and that we’re agents of our own learning. And so we can actually build those things into our courses. And so I would definitely start small with this, there are ways that you could build this into an entire course, but I would start small with an assignment. Look at one assignment and say, “Is this an assignment that I could allow for some choice?” And what I mean by that is: If this is traditionally a written assignment, does it need to be a written assignment? Or have we just always done it as a written assignment? Are there other ways that students could demonstrate their knowledge or understanding for this particular concept? So I would start small with something like that. We actually looked at this pre-COVID because we work closely with our Center for Student Analytics here at Utah State University. So I kind of look at it as a 360-degree type thing. We look at what’s working well for students, and then we think about… How can we enhance that by providing faculty development that helps folks to incorporate these things that are helping students more into their course? And then again, we kind of just cycle through and see what’s working. So one thing we found that was working really well for students was providing simple navigation in their Canvas course. We use the Canvas LMS, and for instructors who were using the tools we have to put in a syllabus to organize some topic or weekly modules, we actually found that, overall, students had an increase in persistence at the university when they were taking one of these courses. But more interestingly, we found that first-gen students who took those courses had almost a 3% bump in persistence when they were engaging in a course where an instructor had taken the time to organize the course well. So we know from the literature and research that when students’ cognitive load is reduced, like, they’re not trying to find where to go or what the assignment is, they can spend more of that effort, more of that brainpower, on the actual learning in the class. So yeah, there’s some small things we can do.

John: And that reminds me of the findings that Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan found in terms of the importance of providing students with more structure in reducing the achievement gaps for first-gen students. There’s quite a bit of research showing that that’s very helpful.

Travis: Absolutely.

John: Section two of the anthology focuses on reflection and practice. You’ve talked about some of the practices that could be helpful, but what are some other specific practices suggested by authors in this collection?

Travis: There’s too many to choose from, honestly. But some of my favorite ones… one comes from Jenae Cohn, who’s fantastic. I love her work outside of this book, but in this book it’s great too. [LAUGHTER] Specifically, she talks about the need for us to build digital literacy skills directly into our courses. So this isn’t a new concept, but I love the spin that she takes on it in saying that, “As more of these courses are using digital elements, we need to be teaching our students how to engage in effective ways with those resources, and building those skills and those supports directly into the course.” So, for example, we have this myth of the digital native, who they were just born to know exactly how to click on the right button in our course. Like, that’s just not a thing.

Jessamyn: No. [LAUGHTER] Have yet to meet one. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Exactly. So I love that she points out that there are very specific scaffolds, this kind of goes back to that structure thing, there are very specific scaffolds that we can build in, and things we can do to get to know the students in our courses and provide what they need to be successful in our class. So that’s a great one. Another one that I really like is Kevin Kelly and Rebecca Campbell, they talk about what they call “VHS,” which for someone in my age group resonates well. They talk about VHS as a virtual homework sprint. And again, this kind of builds off of what Jenae’s talking about, where you build in time to your course to help students work on projects, and to be productive in what they’re doing. So they frame this in a way that you actually can get together in a synchronous way. You provide some time and space to get to know each other, exchange what’s going on in your life, those types of things. And then you set out with a specific goal, like, “This is the thing that I want to accomplish in the next hour.” And then from there, you can break into small groups, you can break out individually. I kind of picture this… for me in Zoom, I can throw folks out into different breakout groups. And then as the instructor, I can jump around and see where they need help, where there’s some additional support that they could use. And then about halfway through that time period, we come back together, we say, “Great, what progress have you made? What barriers did you hit that you still need support?” And then you kind of go through that cycle again, similarly to what you might see in a work sprint in a tech company or something like that. You provide that scaffolding, that time and support. And really, it’s modeling how to be efficient in getting some of that work done, and how to feel, and giving students access to the help that they need.

Jessamyn: I love that example of how to use Zoom strategically and effectively. It could be very, very effective used that way, I think.

Travis: I know, because sometimes I get caught up in this, “Well, I need to push them into breakout groups for a discussion thing,” and… Well, why don’t we actually focus on some of the work that we need to do and give individualized feedback as we go? So I love the recommendation for that VHS.

John: Not Betamax, it has to be VHS. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Now we’re aging ourselves, John. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Help, I’m trapped in a Squadcast room with two very nerdy tech guys.

John: And that’s coming from the author of Geeky Pedagogy. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: I love it. Another one… again there’s so many… but my last one I’m going to point out comes from Miriam Moore, and she talks about this idea of getting out of the PPR box with online discussions… the prompt, post, reply box… that we get stuck in. This is something that we see quite often with online discussions. It’s not a new thing to the pandemic, this is common in general. And one of my favorite ways to picture this came from a 2016 article. It’s actually an idea paper by Shannon Riggs and Katie Linder, and they talked about it in terms of an architecture of engagement which I think is just so perfect. But they do this setting, like, picture yourself standing in front of this lecture hall—this small lecture hall, 30 students or something—and you’re teaching this face-to-face class and you want to have a discussion. You would not ask the question, and then go through one by one and have every single student respond to the exact same question. And then you would not, further, go through and want every single one of them to comment on something. I love the visual they created with that because it feels so ridiculous. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Oh, it’s so awkward. The awkwardness is making me nervous. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Exactly. So that’s what Miriam’s talking about with this kind of getting away from that PPR box, thinking of ways to engage students in real discussion where they can co-create some of these things within the dialog. And so, I talk about this a little bit in the digital power-up strategy. I won’t go too deep into that, but it’s the idea that rather than using a specific question, that you give students different prompts as entry points into the discussion. And it allows them to make the post relevant to themselves, bringing in their own personal experiences, their different backgrounds, into the class. And my colleague, Dr. Mitchell Colver, he kind of describes this as if our online course is a box, a cardboard box if we picture it that way, when we invite students into that box, it should change the box. And so that’s really what we’re trying to do with our online discussions. We want them to be a space for dialogue, for co-construction of knowledge. And we want it to be a space where students can really work with each other and grow and learn along the way.

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

Travis: Yeah, I really love that question actually, so I’m glad you ask it on your podcasts. For us, what’s next with Resilient Pedagogy is really continuing the work. A lot of us were doing this work of teaching and learning before the pandemic, and really, it just continues. Again, one of the points that Jesse Stommel makes in his foreword of this book, is he calls out this line from Lindsay Masland in chapter one where she says, “Do we really need a thing such as resilient pedagogy?” And I love that Jesse says, “We probably don’t.” [LAUGHTER] Because what we actually need is just everyone to continue thinking about teaching in a reflexive way, trying to teach the students we have, and find ways that are going to help us to be successful as instructors and as students. And so for us, it’s just continuing to build those communities and those supports. And so for me, what I really hope comes out of this book that we were able to put together is that it continues to spark ideas, and continues to spark conversations about the things that we can do to continue to improve teaching and learning.

John: It’s a wonderful anthology. I really enjoyed reading it and I’ve shared it with our faculty on campus several times in the past and will continue to do so. Thank you.

Travis: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much.

Jessamyn: Thank you so much, I really enjoyed this conversation. Two of my favorite guys in faculty development.

Travis: Thanks Jessamyn.

John: It was great talking to both of you today.

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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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189. Teaching with Zoom

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an explosion in the use of remote synchronous instruction, a modality that was rarely used until March 2020. In this episode, Dan Levy joins us to discuss the affordances and the challenges associated with this relatively new modality. Dan is an economist and a senior lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University where he teaches courses in quantitative methods, policy analysis, and program evaluation. He is the author of Teaching Effectively with Zoom, A Practical Guide to Engage Your Students and Help Them Learn, which is now in its second edition.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an explosion in the use of remote synchronous instruction, a modality that was rarely used until March 2020. In this episode, we discuss the affordances and the challenges associated with this relatively new modality.

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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 Dan Levy. Dan is an economist and a senior lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University where he teaches courses in quantitative methods, policy analysis, and program evaluation. He is the author of Teaching Effectively with Zoom, A Practical Guide to Engage Your Students and Help Them Learn, which is now in its second edition. Welcome, Dan.

Dan: Thank you very much, Rebecca and John.

John: We’re looking forward to talking to you.

Dan: Thank you.

John: Our teas today are… are you drinking tea?

Dan: I love Moroccan tea. My family’s originally from Morocco. And that’s the tea that I normally drink when I drink tea.

Rebecca: Today, I have Scottish afternoon, John… we’re coming back, coming back with the good stuff.

John: And I have two teas here, actually. I have ginger peach green tea and a Moroccan mint tea.

Dan: Oh, wow.

John: That worked nicely.

Dan: Yeah.

Rebecca: I don’t know if I’d drink them quite at the same time, but… [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, they’re sequential.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Teaching Effectively with Zoom. Could you talk a little bit about how you started this book project?

Dan: Sure. So in March of last year, when we all had to go quickly to remote teaching, I had spent the better part of 10 years trying things surrounding online learning at the Harvard Kennedy School. But I had never spent much time with synchronous online teaching. And so when we had to move to remote teaching, my first instinct was to go and observe as many instructors as possible to see what they were doing. And what I discovered then was an incredible wealth of people who were just doing incredible things, they’re being very resourceful in the way that they were trying to use the platform to accomplish our pedagogical goals. I didn’t set out to write a book at that time, but I was just learning a lot. And at the same time, I was observing my daughters, in high school, receiving online learning instruction. Around mid-May, I sort of had the feeling that in the fall, we would be teaching online still. And I felt that there was a lot being written online, in Twitter and blogs and all of that. But I felt, gosh, this is overwhelming. And so I felt the need to have in one single place, what I thought would be useful gui e for instructors who were saying, “I need to do this, I want to do it well.” And I thought that I had gotten a lot of ideas from the colleagues that I observed teach… which by the way, observing colleagues teach is one of the silver linings of the pandemic, because it’s now easier than ever, and it’s an incredibly powerful way of learning. So in any case, at that point, I said, “I want to write this book, I’ve never done anything like that. And I want the book to be ready by July 1, because that’s how it’s gonna be helpful to people in the world, given the academic calendars.” And on July 1, a book was ready. And then on July 2, we put it out there to the world. And then because so much happened in the fall, I released the second edition based on everything that I had learned since then, from my own teaching and that of colleagues. And it was very rewarding to see people from all over the world who had engaged with the book, also contribute with some of their examples.

Rebecca: I think I need to get one of those magic wands you must have to turn around stuff that quickly.

Dan: Well, no. Thank you. I think there’s nothing like a deadline… [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: True

Dan: …and a deadline that I really felt it was important to meet. And I have a good friend who I sent the book, he is not in the education world. And I said, “Here it is.” And then he told me, “Then you lied to me. You told me that you wrote the book in a month and a half. But I know from previous conversations with you that you have been writing this book in your mind for the last 10 years.” And I thought that was an interesting way of putting it because I’ve been thinking about a lot of these issues, but I never sat down to write any of them.

John: It was extremely timely, and I know many people adopted the book last summer or picked up the second edition in January when that came out. There weren’t a lot of resources other than lots of Twitter posts and lots of blog posts on specific aspects. But the book blends together a nice discussion of the technical details of how you do things with effective pedagogy, which is a resource that was very much needed and is still very much needed for many people as we move forward. Because this is an area that people had not really done very much with until this sudden transition.

Dan: Yes, thank you so much John.

John: What are some of the most effective ways that you’ve seen faculty using Zoom in their classes or that you’ve used Zoom in your classes yourself?

Dan: One observation that I had throughout this year… and the book is a little bit organized in this way, but it didn’t crystallize to me until later in the last year… which is that if you conceptualize the way students can engage in your course and think about the different channels… in the book, I describe five main channels, they can speak, they can vote, they can write, they can work in groups, and they can show their work. One of the things that becomes very obvious, at least to me, is that for default, in in-person teaching, tends to be verbal, we speak to each other. And what I realize in live online learning is that of those five channels, the one that most degrades when you go from in person to online is precisely the verbal one. And I think, my sense is that of recognition that that’s the case for many, many reasons, is what I think has made some instructors particularly successful at doing this because they are not wedded to verbal as the main or default channel of communication. So that’s kind of like an overall message that if you think about in which ways can your students engage in your class, and in which of these ways do I want for this particular pedagogic purpose my students to engage with, my sense is that that tends to be a winning combination.

Rebecca: When I was looking at that organization of your book, Dan, it really struck me and was really helpful way of thinking about it. And, in your description right now, made it really clear to me why it was actually very easy for me to switch to synchronous online learning [LAUGHTER] because I don’t really prefer the verbal. [LAUGHTER] So it was nice to engage in these other spaces as an introvert, like I could use chat in other places that I’m actually much more comfortable. [LAUGHTER]

Dan: It’s interesting you say this, Rebecca, because the same thing that you said, is true for students. So introverted students now have different ways of engaging with us that we might not have even heard from them before. And I think if we leverage those ways, we’re going to end up being in a better place. And most importantly, they’re going to end up being in a better place.

John: One of the nice things about written communication and chat is you’ve got that delete key, which, when people are feeling a little more introverted, perhaps, they’re less confident about saying something where they can’t take something back, rephrase it on the fly. And having that delete option, lets them be a little more thoughtful in their participation, and can lead to a much more inclusive environment in many ways.

Dan: Absolutely. The other thing that it does is that you can take your time to compose a message that you write, whereas, when you’re called to speak, you might have perhaps practiced this message in your mind, but you feel like on the spot, you have to now deliver it at that point. And then the introverts tend to have more difficulty with that. And I say that as an introvert. I don’t want to be too binary in the definition. But I say that as an introvert.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about why the verbal channel degrades a bit in a Zoom situation? Because I think that might actually be really helpful for people to think about.

Dan: Sure. So one way in which it does, and I wish the podcast was a video podcast, but one way in which it does is right now we are with this software, and the three of us can see each other. But right now, I’m looking at you, Rebecca, and you think I’m looking down somewhere and not at you. Like you have no idea that I’m looking at you. And you’re like, “Why is this person looking down? I’m speaking with him.” And John right now also thinks I’m looking down. So he doesn’t even know that I’m looking at you and not at him. And if I wanted to give you, Rebecca, the impression that I’m looking at you, I would have to point my eyes to a camera, and I no longer have any nonverbal feedback from you, I have no idea of what’s going on with you. And not only that, now John thinks I’m also looking at him, and I’m not looking at either of you. [LAUGHTER] So, that’s kind of one simple level and I’m optimistic that maybe we’ll have technology that solves this. The other day, I saw a Kickstarter campaign that a friend of mine forwarded to me for this idea that I kind of have been having for a while but it seems like someone actually created a product for a video camera that is in the middle of your screen, rather than at the top or at the bottom. So, in any case, that’s one aspect of it, but another, I think, important aspect… and people have written about it… is that the communication is just not as effective. You cannot signal in the same way non-verbally as you can signal in a classroom. In a classroom, you have your whole body to express, you can use physical distance with the students, to approach, you can move, there are so many other things at your disposal. And the one to me that still becomes the most important one is that you cannot hear the classroom. People have to unmute… if you have a big enough classroom they have to unmute, and that is just much less natural. There’s no “click this” reaction item to sort of say how you’re feeling. No, you just see it automatically. So in any case, those are some of the ones that I have felt myself, I’m sure that you as educators have also other ones. But of all the channels it’s the clearest one in which in-person seems to me better than online.

John: Are there any other ways in which remote synchronous instruction offers some advantages that we don’t have in the classroom?

Dan: Yeah, for example, writing… we were talking about writing. We can use writing in the classroom. I think many of us have shied away, we’re nervous about having our students with their laptops in the classroom and so on. But writing feels to me such a powerful tool, not only for doing the kinds of things that Rebecca was saying before, that you can bring introverts, or the things that you were saying more generally, John, that you can have more inclusive teaching, but you can do what some people might describe parallel processing instead of serial processing. So if you ask students in the classroom, can you give me an example of X, please write it in the chat, within 30 seconds you have 20 examples if you have 20 students, whereas if you had to do it verbally, you would take one at a time. And that, I think, is much less efficient in that sense. So I think there are many, many reasons why chat, even though it’s controversial, can be powerful. And I know one of the favorite ones that I’m sure you’ve all used is this one-minute paper, where you tend to distribute this piece of paper where they write it and they give it to you. And I’ve always had the intention of using this in my physical classrooms. But many times, it seems like the last minute of class there’s something more urgent that I need to do and then there are logistics there. But with online live teaching, it’s very easy. You can do something as simple as “One minute left in class, please everyone write down what was your main key takeaway from today.” And within a minute, you have a lot of information of what happened in that class.

Rebecca: So a lot of faculty also seem to be under the impression that by being physically in the same space, somehow community is automatically formed. Can you talk a little bit about how community does build in an online synchronous space?

Dan: To me, this was one of the biggest positive surprises I thought of all the aspects of online teaching, this would be the one where it would perform the worst. And I do think that there’s something special that happens when human beings are together in the same space. There’s no question for me about it. But I observed many instructors doing things that I think helped create community in the classroom in ways that I was very surprised. And if I had one general guidance to give is that you just have to be a lot more deliberate about creating community than you are when you are in the same physical space together. And people do it in all sorts of ways. But I think just being deliberate and being intentional about it goes a long way. And just to name three very practical things. One is, if you can open your classroom before class starts, in some way that simulates what you would do in a regular class anyway. Second, if you can stay in your online class for a few minutes after to speak with students. It’s another way of doing it. And then there are of course, things you can do that in a physical and in an online classroom that I think are good for creating communities. If you can learn about your students, so that they know that you know them, that you’ve taken a personal interest in them and that you can bring that to the classroom, that I think is just as true or nine as it is in person. Then there are many other things, there like music lists, and many, many things that people have been very creative about. But those are three that come to mind as fairly easy to do.

John: One of the things I really like about your book is you start by emphasizing the use of a backwards design approach in classes. And you suggest that that be done at the level of individual class sessions or individual activities. Could you give us an example of how you might apply that in a synchronous online session in Zoom?

Dan: Many, many people that listen to your show, I’m sure have heard of backward design and subscribe to it in their own teaching. I think in some way, it’s not that different online in the sense that you think about what are two or three things that I want to make sure that students are able to do at the end of this learning experience. And when you plan your class, you organize it around those things. And one of my biggest challenges as an instructor is time management, it’s like, “Oh my god, can I manage time to do this?”… but what has been very helpful to me is I might have a class plan that says part 1 – 15 minutes part 2 – 23 minutes, and so on. And as I look at the clock, I know where I am in the class plan relative to the time, and knowing what are those two or three things that you want to make sure that everyone gets at the end, allows you to make choices in the class that I think become more likely to succeed. So for example, if you feel like you’re running behind, and there is a particular topic that you think is useful, but not crucial to those two or three things, you might decide to skip it, or you might decide to go a little bit faster, or you might decide not to pause for the discussion that you were planning to have. So, having a concrete set of what you are trying to achieve. I know it sounds obvious, but it wasn’t to me when I first started teaching. I conceived of teaching like, “Well, we need to cover this, and this is what we’re gonna do.” And I still remember attending a one-hour session when I was a PhD student at Northwestern University, from the Director of Teaching and Learning Center at the time, Ken Bain. And I remember him introducing this idea. And that was totally revolutionary to me. Again, I know for many of us, it’s not anymore. But that was more than 20 years ago, and has guided my teaching ever since.

Rebecca: You know, Dan, I certainly subscribe to backwards design, both as a designer and also as a teacher.

Dan: Yeah.

Rebecca: … but I did find myself doing synchronous online being really specific about time chunks, because it’s like, “We need to mix this up, otherwise, we’re just staring at a screen.” And being even more intentional about that. I’d have an agenda and the students can see me going in there like, “No, we’re changing this agenda. [LAUGHTER] on the fly is like “No, this conversation’s good, we need to do this instead.” [LAUGHTER]

Dan: Yes, I guess they’re seeing your design as you are executing it.John, you were asking about some of the advantages of online. I hate to mention this as an advantage. But the reality is, we now have screens, and we can put to the side of the screen things that we want to remember in a way that’s harder to do in a class. So this is like a super tactical tip, but you’re interested in teaching inclusively in the classroom, and you’re worried about voices that haven’t participated that much, you can do something as low tech as: before your class, you write the name of say, three to five students that you want to call on in a piece of paper. And you tape that piece of paper to the right of your screen, right where the participant, the Zoom participant list normally is, or Zoom or whichever other software. And when you see the participant list and you see a few hands up, you look at your paper list and sort of see is one of the hands up belonging to one of the students that I want to call on. And that seems like a simple thing. But it is helpful. I don’t know if you know, but I co-created this application called Teachly, which allows you to track participation and help people teach more inclusively and effectively. And this makes the use of this app even easier, because once you have that participant list, you just put it next to the participant list in Zoom, either electronically or physically. And you have that as a way to do it.

John: And if I remember correctly, on your companion website, you have a picture of a list of names taped to the side of the screen.

Dan: Yes.

John: And we should also mention that there is a really great list of resources associated with the book. We’ll include a link to that in the show notes.

Dan: Thank you. Yeah, the website. Victoria Barnum, I work with her, she put it together. And it was again, a very quick way to try to put resources out there that would be helpful for people. And there’s one page for each chapter of the book.

John: You mentioned rearranging things to make sure you get to the end result. And that’s something I’ve noticed I have to do a lot more with synchronous remote sessions than I did in the classroom. I think partly because I was so used to doing it in a classroom, I had routines where I could get the things more or less quickly with a whole set of activities. But maybe I’ve been over-preparing, but I have a big list of things I want to do. I do polling in the classroom, I have some group work where they’re working in breakout rooms, and I never can get all them done. So I’m constantly, as I’m going through each day’s session trying, “Well, which of these is most important to getting them to that goal,” which is a way I never really had to think about quite as extensively as I do now.

Dan: Yes, though I will say that I was having those same struggles before online teaching, but I also share your experience that they have become more prevalent, and to the extent that it has forced that conversation on all of us. And “Okay, what is the essence of what I want to make sure that students are able to learn in this class?” I think that’s a positive development. One of the things that I discovered very early on in the process of writing a book is that many instructors, and maybe John, this applies to your experience, were saying that compared to their in-person class, when they try to execute that plan, they generally were only able to do about 80% of what they were doing before. Now I don’t know how much of that is still true today. Maybe as we get better with teaching online, we can get that number closer to the 100%. And I don’t know the extent to which it has to do with Rebecca’s questions about verbal communication degrading and making it harder to communicate. But to the extent that that number is even in the ballpark of being true, it does explain why most of us are feeling that need to interrogate more our class trends.

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Rebecca: Maybe it’ll also make us a little more empathetic to students who have time management issues, we’re sure. Zoom has really evolved quite a bit since March, there’s new features and new capabilities and things. Can you talk a little bit about how your own teaching using zoom has evolved over the past year,

Dan: I think as all of us practice has allowed me to become better at it, I remember the first few times, I couldn’t even imagine being able to check the chat at the same time, then I was teaching, I was like, there’s just too much going on here. Now, I won’t say that I can handle any number of comments in the chat. But now I can do it in a way that I couldn’t do it before. And so in some way, teaching online live sessions is an exercise in multitasking, you have to pay attention to a lot of things that are happening in your students in your screen, and so on. And frankly, with as much practice you get better. And I think that’s one thing that’s useful in terms of zoom specific things. I think one feature that has come out relatively recently, which to me opens a whole set of possibilities is the fact that now in breakout rooms, you can set it up so that children’s can choose the breakout rooms. And I think that opens up many interesting possibilities in that perhaps students can choose according to a particular interest that they have, perhaps they can choose relative to position that they might have in a debate relative to a vote they have had in a poll. And that I think, in some way, is incredibly powerful. So that’s one way in which I’ve just began to explore. And I hope by the way, there are other ways of setting up the rooms in the future, that might be good. The second thing, which we haven’t talked too much about the breakout rooms. But I think breakout rooms combined with collaborative documents, such as Google Slides, or jam board or mural, whatever other tools we have, can be incredibly powerful for group work. And that has been an area of constant experimentation for me and many of my colleagues. And that is one area where I think we can make even more progress. And my sense is that we’re going to bring some of that into our physical classrooms, when hopefully someday we come back to our physical classrooms.

Rebecca: I’ve experimented a lot with those new breakout rooms more recently, as well. And even with some mastery learning activities, where we’re doing exercises, and as they complete one, they can move to the next one and moving to different breakout rooms depending on what they’re working on. So they can help each other out and collaborate. And that’s been working really well. And I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from students about how that’s actually really helpful to like community of people who are actually at the same moment of their learning. So there’s a lot of possibilities there.

Dan: Many, many you can have different themes. There’s one thing we experimented recently, I don’t know if any of you co teach a class, but we were doing this in a program in executive education, we to try to create a more intimate environment, we divided the class into two groups, and each of the group was with one faculty member. And we had asked each of these faculty members to be available for an hour. So for the first half hour, Group A with with the first instructor group, he was with the second instructor, and then at the half hour marked, we swapped them and we thought about Okay, how can we do this easily without people getting lost? And all we did was to swap the instructors from one room to another and all of a sudden you basically had students who are staying with one hour in a breakout room, were able to have a more intimate experience with two instructors. With that, I think would have been hard to do in the physical world.

Rebecca: Nice that we’re getting to the point where we’re appreciating some of the digital rather than scrambling all the time.

Dan: Yes, I think there’s some things that actually worked better.

John: And certainly that ability to mix up groups easily and quickly in different ways. Either having persistent rooms where you have persistent groups working in the same room regularly or mixing it up for different topics or again, doing the self selection gives you a lot more variety and how you mix and match activities.

Dan: It does. My colleague Terry serranos was experimenting with this and I thought that was an interesting use. If you have a teaching assistant and you have your students work on an activity during class, they three or four minutes in silence work on this you can open a couple of breakout rooms and one of them has a teaching assistant and if you would like help from the teaching assistant go to breakout room one if you would like to work alone in a virtual room go to this other room. So I think we’re experimenting in ways that I think are conducive to good learning experiences.

John:
One of the other in recent addition, cism is the ability to let co hosts set up and establish the breakout room. So if you do have a teaching assistant or multiple instructors, if you’re presenting on something, or if you’re working with a group, you don’t have to do the back end arrangement while you’re also trying to do other things. So if that makes it a whole lot easier,

Dan: I totally agree. And sometimes you can multitask. But if you can have one less task to do, that’s probably helpful.

John: You also talk quite a bit about the use of Paul, and could you talk about some of the ways in which people might do Pauling and how polling might be used effectively in instruction,

Dan: I want to first say that I started using polling many, many years ago in my physical classrooms inspired by one of my mentors, Eric, Missouri in the physics department, at our end, I do you have a bias towards using them. But I would say a first approximation, polling allows you to learn what your students are thinking in a very efficient manner. And I’m struck by the number of times where what I think my students are thinking is not what my students are thinking. And so for me, it has been very, very useful tool to center me in the reality of what actually is happening in the classroom. There’s this wonderful book by Derek Braff, he wrote it years ago before the pandemic head, but I still think it’s very applicable. In that book, he describes many, many uses of it. But just in the interest of time here, one way in which I use it is to check for understanding Another way is when I, particularly when there are questions in which I think students might not be so willing to express verbally how they think about something, I want to be able to allow them an opportunity to do that. And then the nice thing about polling is that it can be combined with other things like think pair share peer instruction, or other things that depending on where the poll results, you can take in one direction or the other. So I’m a super, super big fan of it. And if you have listeners who haven’t tried, no matter what your field, I actually highly recommend that you try it. And the best way to do it, it’s just try one or two polls in one of your next classes and see what you learn from it.

John: And it not only helps you understand what students understand or where students are, it also helps students understand what they know, and they don’t know. And it gives them that immediate feedback that would take longer to do in pretty much any other way.

Dan: Absolutely. It also allows them to commit to an answer. So that allows them to more actively participate. The other thing that I find is that I think it emboldened some students to participate. If they my response has 30% of people who voted for the same response, then there’s something here that I’m not going to be the only one defending this use. So I’m going to go out and defend it. So I’m a big fan of it.

John: And once they commit to that, and you tell them they’re wrong, they want to know why. And that’s not something we always say that committing to that answer is really effective. It is it is Dan Ariely. And one of his books talks about a similar experience where he said he presented these results that he did not find very intuitive. And he gave a talk at some firm. And people would say, Well, yeah, that’s exactly what we’d expect would happen. And then he started pulling them, because then you actually got to see what happened rather than them saying, Oh, yeah, that makes sense. That’s what I would have said anyway. But once you got them to commit to it, all of a sudden, they were objecting they were discussing, and they were engaging with material. And I know Eric Mazhar gave a talk at our campus. I mentioned this on past podcast, but he basically asked people to make a commitment deciding what happens to the hall and a plate of metal when you heat it up. And he went through that whole process where students voted, then they discussed it. And then they voted again, he started to go on to the next topic. And people were angry because they wanted to know the answer at he’s used this example at many places. But one of the things he said is, if I was to give a lecture on what happens, the whole and a plate of metal when I heat it up, it would be about the most boring lecture that you could imagine. But now you all want to know the answer. And so motivating curiosity through these types of things and having that engagement and discussion is a really powerful technique.

Dan: There are several components there, right one is questioning for teaching. The other one is, as you said, the commitment that comes from the poll in the other one is the wanting to know aspect that the whole experience created. The other thing about using poll through technology and about paper that we published some time ago with a student Josh Yardley, and one of my mentors at the Kennedy School Richard Zack Houser, where we compare voting outcomes when students voted by raising their hand versus with at the time, we use this clicker devices, and we discovered big differences in the raise of hands versus the polling devices. So I think another advantage of polling electronically is that they tend to reveal more truthful and it sounds like your story from Dan Ariely reveals that more truthfully how tos actually think

Rebecca: it’s probably that anonymity behind the technology, you have to raise your hand. Now everybody knows whether or not you’re right or wrong. Exactly.

Dan: And also, you are seeing other hands being risen. So you might want to side with the majority in a way that you wouldn’t have if you had to do it electronically. I think

John: this is one of the areas where it seems to take me longer when I’m using zoom. Here, we have a campus adoption by clicker, but this works with any type of boring software, students vote on it, then I send them to breakout rooms. And it takes just a bit longer to do that, just because of the time it takes them to go in and out, then it would in the classroom. So I’m not able to get quite as many clicker questions. And so I have to choose them perhaps a little more carefully than I do. And I’m not using the think pair share quite as actively as I would in a classroom, because it’s really easy to say find someone nearby who has a different answer and debate it for a few minutes. And you can pretty easily see when it’s done in breakout rooms, it’s a little harder to do that. So I generally will, depending on the type of question, I’ll pick the time, which should be enough for everybody, but just the time it takes to get them there and back just adds a little more overhead. But on the other hand, I think it’s still working really well. And maybe by being more judicious in which questions I’m asking that might compensate for the additional overhead costs? And

Dan: I’m not sure yes, and it’s interesting you say this, John, because I have had the same experience. And I wonder if one of the drivers of this is that in a physical classroom, the students tend to know the students who are nearby. So by the third or fourth time you do this, they don’t have this awkward bore you. And my sense is that while the default, and probably a good default that we use in zoom to assign students is random. My sense is that part of what’s driving students taking more time is that they’re often put in this breakout room with someone they’ve never met. And the degree to which they can collaborate quickly on your question about the minimum wage, or whatever you’re asking them to collaborate on probably is not as good as if they had already interacted a lot with each other. So wonder, it does have some disadvantages. But I wonder if you might gain some advantages for those quick questions to always assign students to maybe not the same other person, because then if they all have the same answer, we won’t work but maybe a group of three, this is something that I’ve been surprised by as well. In writing the book, one of the things that became clear is that students tended to like break out rooms by enlarge. But the two main problems they saw with them, his instructions, were not always very clear. And that I think is on us as instructors. And then the second one is, we didn’t give them enough time. And I think you’re right that in a classroom, you can sort of see when the sound is dwindling down. But in the virtual world is a little bit more difficult. I think if you use a collaborative tool, like a Google slide, or something like that, you would be able to sort of see where each group is. But that’s for longer breakout rooms,

Rebecca: That’s definitely my feature request is being able to have more information about what’s going on in a breakout room, even working on little activities or projects, I teach longer extended classes. So they might be working on a project for a period of time. It’s like if I was walking around the classroom, I would just know what they’re doing. Sometimes I can see their files and depends what they’re doing. But sometimes we’re doing code projects or things where it’s not quite as easy to do that.

Dan: I think if you had a Google slide that you can see, but sometimes the word doesn’t lend itself to Google Slides. But you’re right, I think it would be great if they could signal that we’re about 80% down. Here’s prejudice. But I don’t know maybe there’s a future version which we can pull students when they’re in breakout rooms. That might be one way of see Yeah, even

Rebecca: being able to chat with the breakout room would do that. In my class, we ended up setting up slack. So we had that kind of better chat experience while they were in breakouts.

John: That’s certainly been an issue. I know my students are getting much more adept when they’re working in breakout rooms for a longer period and summoning me for help. But it’s really common to get called to one of the breakout rooms I’m talking to them. And then they got another call from another group. And it looks like I’m not being responsive, but I’m really just trying to finish a topic in one group. And it can be a bit of a challenge hopping from group to group because the communication ability to break out rooms, as you both said is limited at this stage.

Rebecca: I’ve had people jumping back into the main window for help. And that works better because then if another group or something jumps back into the main window, they can see that there’s a queue.

John: At least then it’s visible. One of the concerns that many faculty have expressed is that they’re interacting with students who they will see typing in chat and they will hear their voices but they never actually seen the students because most of the time, they have to keep their cameras off because there’s other family members around them. Or they’re connecting to Wi Fi in a parking lot next to a fast food restaurant, or they’re working on a mobile device with limited data plans. So that’s perhaps more of a challenge for faculty than it is for the students themselves. But a lot of faculty suffered Warzone fatigue, when they don’t actually get to see their students. Do you have any suggestions on how people can perhaps get past that?

Dan: So when I wrote the book, initially, I was well aware that I was trying to be helpful to as wide of an array of instructors as I could, but I was well aware that different international contexts might make some of the recommendations harder than others. I think, for the reasons that you suggested, it is hard, in some context, to be able to sort of say to students, please use your camera. So even in my environment, I tried to note them to using their camera, but there are legitimate reasons why they might not use the camera. But what I have discovered, I think you might have discovered in your own faculty meetings, and so on, is that sometimes the issue is not the kind of issue that you pointed out for bandwidth connection or anything like that, is that sometimes you just want to be listening without your video showing off. And what I understand that I think that what we do in our teaching at the end of the day can be profoundly human. And I find it to be very hard to create a human learning experience. If most cameras are off my standpoint, it feels like no one is there. But it’s not only from our standpoint, right? It’s even from the standpoint of the other students in the class. I’m the first one who understands about zoom fatigue. And so I’m not above sometimes having a camera of so I can take a break. But I do feel like to the extent that we can motivate that, and perhaps try if we can to reduce the stigma, use a virtual background, do whatever you can, I think it’s better. But again, I’m not at a place to say everyone should do it, I just be like, the experience can be more human and more effective. If we had most of our students on video,

Rebecca: there seems to be a peer pressure component to that classes have personalities. And if there’s a lot of people who tend to have their cameras on all the sudden there’s more cameras on and if it’s a class that just shuts down, everybody’s in shutdown mode, and breakout rooms, where they’re talking to each other tend to make more cameras appear on from my experience.

Dan: Yeah, I suppose there’s a tipping point, I once gave a I think it was kind of like a webinar where it was on zoom. And you know how on zoom, you have 49 little squares, and then you can go to the other 49 and go on in the videos tend to go on the first. So I think they were like 400 people. And they were like 12 with a video on. And to me that just was very, very challenging. And then I’m not expecting people to put their video on because it’s challenging for me, but I’m expecting that it’d be better experience for everyone. If we can look at each other.

John: I agree, it provides more of a sense of humanity, when you can actually see people, it’s not just that array of black boxes. I know in my own classes, and I think many people on campus have suggested that there’s been that sort of peer pressure to have fewer and fewer cameras all the time. And I think that’s made it a little more challenging for everyone perhaps to have that same sense of engagement, encouraging it is certainly valuable. I think,

Dan: I wonder if this is just speculation on my part. But I wonder if in those contexts to the extent that one of the reasons driving it is I just need a little bit of time off the screen. I wonder if maybe there will be periods in the class where you don’t think that video being on is this critical, and you designate them as camera off period. And the default is camera on. I’m not sure whether that would work. But that’s one idea that just occurring to me.

Rebecca: I’ve experimented with things like that a little bit, Dan, in my longer classes, because he wants to be on camera for three hours. I certainly don’t. That’s right. So like between a mix of breakout rooms, and then little activities that they might do on their own. We do have periods where it’s Hey, we’re gonna have a conversation now it’d be really great to like see, you win an invitation to turn them back on but then also for doing something that’s an independent activity, like we’ve established what behavior of the default this camera off so that people aren’t staring at you while you’re writing something down or whatever. And I also turn my camera off and signal that now’s a good time to turn your camera off and then turn it back on.

Dan: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Sometimes we will just need a break in some days, not even a video break. Last semester. I remember there was a class where I can I mean, I cannot feel it in the same way that I feel it in a physical classroom, but I could feel that the students were tired. And so one of our teaching assistants I knew that she thought yoga. And I was like, Alright, I know that this is not going to be the end all. But we’re going to do one minute yoga poses for just one minute to just reset. And even that can bring a little bit of energy to the class. And so my short answer to your question, john, is that I don’t know how we solve that problem. But I do think that it is a better experience if we can to have more students most of the time by video, and I like Rebecca’s gentle now it’s a good time to have the video on as a way of signaling when it’s important.

John: Earlier, you mentioned teacherly as a tool to help track engagement. Could you talk a little bit about teaching?

Dan: Sure. So digital is an application, we created that Harvard University group of us to help faculty teach more effectively and inclusively. When you’re in a class you call on different students. And what you see happening very quickly during the semester is that some voices start dominating the classroom and you don’t even realize it. And then you don’t even realize which voices you’re not hearing from. So the way that teacherly works is very simple. You basically have someone record every time that a student participates. And then the students, all they need to do is to fill in a student profile that information about themselves. And as an instructor, then you get access to the student profiles, which allows you to know more about your students, which allows you to search their profiles to see if there are things that you want to incorporate into your next class. And the other thing that it does is it gives you dashboards, about your participation patterns. And so you can see which students have tended to participate the most which students haven’t participated. And most importantly, you can take action to redress any participation patterns that you want to redress. It’s a tool that’s freely available to anyone who wants to use it, the website, it’s teacherly.me. And you adopt the version, there are two versions, the main version is the one that allows you to have student profiles and so on. And it’s been used at Harvard for the last four years, we have over 100 faculty members using it. And last year, we launched an open version so that anyone anywhere in the world can use it. And we’re very happy to see people from other universities started adopting even people from high schools have people at UC Irvine, we have people ideal, we have people in Chi in Costa Rica, and we have people at different places using it. So if you’re interested, go ahead and try it out. I hope it can be helpful in your efforts. I always cite as an example, the fact that before I started using it, I had 46% of students in my classroom one year identify themselves or female students, and only 36% of the comments in the class were coming from female students. And that was a total shock for me, because I didn’t think that that pattern had emerged in my classroom, but it had and this allowed me to take corrective action, where easy to see where you need to take action. And now I’m proud to say I’m not the only digital user who would say that, but I have at least a gender equitable classroom, I no longer have that pattern that I didn’t even know I have, until I started using it.

Rebecca: We’ll make sure that that link to teach Lee’s in the show notes. And that’s a really powerful way to remind us how much data can actually help us that technology can help us in a lot of different ways,

Dan: knowledge and data can help us my colleague studies, we’re owners and Victoria Barnum are also behind this effort. And many of us will be happy to hear from anyone who’s using it,

Rebecca: That leads nicely into what are some of the things that we can take away from this year of technology exploration, as we hopefully start moving back into physical classrooms?

Dan: So this is a question I’ve tried to give a lot of thought, because there’s an aspect that I think is very natural for most of us, we just want to go back to our classrooms, and all of this stuff of assigning race and all of that, but we just want to be with our students in the space. I think for many of us, there’s so much lost that we felt when that environment was in some way taken away. And there’s so much longing for that environment. Again, having said that, I would say that there is so much that we learned about eating during this time that it would be a pity, if we just go back and only adopt nominal change to what we’re doing. My sense is that most of us will now explore using Office Hours through zoom or a similar technology. My sense is that a lot of us created videos for students to engage before class and we might reuse those videos. And I think that’s all great, and maybe the biggest change is that I think Because of this crisis, a lot of instructors were questioning what they were doing in the classroom much more than they did before. I’m sure you see that in your teaching and learning center. And perhaps that questioning and that rethinking about what they did, will translate back into the classroom. But old habits are hard to die. So I think there’s one risk. My sense is that the risk is that we want leverage enough of what we learn in the online environment. And so here are just a couple of things that I’m thinking would be great to think about. One is that I would love for us to try to reimagine or physical classroom in light of what we learn, what is it that frankly, you’re now saying, Wow, this was better in zoom than in person? And how can you go back to your physical classroom and see if there’s a way to leverage that in your physical room? For me, the things that I’ve discovered in breakout rooms have been incredibly powerful. And I don’t mean, just as zoom breakout room, I mean, how can we make the work of groups visible? And how can I be able to see that and leverage that in the discussion? So there’s no reason why when we’re in a physical classroom, we couldn’t use some of the things that we did with Google Slides or jam board or whatever technology we use collaboratively, and try to leverage them in the same way that we did before. That is one concrete example where it’d be a pity to think oh, no, I did that in zoom because of X or Y. No, I think we can do some of that. I know it’s probably for most institutions is too early to think about it. But I do wonder if there are changes we should do in the infrastructure, both technology and otherwise, of our classrooms that might help us teach more effectively. I don’t know about you, but the fact that in so more teams, so whichever technology use, you had the name of each student in front of you in such a clear manner was super helpful to learn their names. And at the Kennedy School, we use name tents. But those name tents are physical. And I wonder if in the classroom of the future, we could imagine digital ones that had more information than just a student name. By the way, I think a lot of changes should also happen in the online technology. Like why is it that the only thing we see is the student name? Why can we hover and see something about their background or their whatever, it should be overlaying so much information that we currently don’t have very case, those are just some ideas, I’m sure that you have many, many more, and that your listeners have many, many more. But if I could leave with one note of encouragement to all of us is to think about what we learned and what lessons were helpful in the online experience and bring it to the in person classroom, perhaps in the different manifestations, but I still think could be helpful.

John: Those sound like excellent ideas. And it does remind me a while back, one of our first podcast was with someone who is developing an augmented reality app to do facial identification for students in her class. So that way, she would be able to get that sort of information popping up in a physical classroom, certainly, I will miss having all the names visible for each student, particularly when I’m dealing with a class of three to 400. Students, it’s so nice to see the name when they participate right on the box, where you see them speaking in a classroom, it would be a lot harder to remember all those names.

Dan: We’ve been discussing everything about what will we do when we go back to the physical classroom, but certainly one thing that I hope we’re going to do is embrace online learning as part of four ways of being able to teach. And I’ve always been a big believer in the power of blended learning of using each medium to its comparative advantage. And I hope that this puts us in a better position to do better blended learning than we were a year and a half ago, when most of us had not done much of this.

Rebecca: Yeah, many faculty up until this point really hadn’t experienced online learning as a student or a teacher. And so now there’s just a lot more exposure. So those conversations can be more concrete. So we always wrap up by asking, despite the fact that we already kind of asked you this question in a different way. We always wind up by asking what’s next?

Dan: Before I respond to this question, and I should have done this at the beginning. But I just want to thank both of you, john and Rebecca for what you do. I discovered your podcast not too long ago, and I’ve gotten tremendous value out of it just to name a few episodes not to name favorite children or any of that. The episode on using Google Apps was incredibly eye opening and helpful to Even though I have been using Google Apps in my teaching, I still learned it on the episode on statistical simulations was super helpful to me it statistics. And that was a wealth of great ideas. And the episode where you took on the workload issue and how students were perceiving that the workload was greater. I had heard other things on this topic. And this was the best of everything that I’ve heard. So I just want to first just say thank you for what you do, and for the service you provide to the people like me, who are trying to teach more effectively everyday. Thanks, Dan. Thank you, in terms of what’s next, I don’t know. At a more personal level, I want to say that writing this book was a totally unexpected thing. For me, I’d never thought about writing a book about teaching. And this in some way has opened my eyes to sort of another world out there that I wasn’t that much in touch with, and has allowed me to feel a great deal of satisfaction when I hear from someone who said, Oh, I use this in the book. And it was very helpful in my learning. So even though I’m super passionate, and educator, and every time that I see a light in the eye of my student, that’s like the most rewarding thing that I can drive for. I think writing the book gave me a different venue with which to see some, I think positive effect of some of what I was doing. And that was interesting surprise. It’s not like I have three books that are in my queue or anything like that. But I discovered that as an interesting thing. And I’m right now writing another book. Again, I haven’t written anyone before, then this one is not about teaching. And that process has been very, very helpful to me, in terms of teaching what’s next, I would really like to see how we can leverage what we learned during the pandemic to do the best we can to help our students learn. That’s my hope. We’re all of us.

Rebecca: Thanks, Dan. This has been a fun conversation. I feel like we need to follow up in a year and see what happened.

John: I would love to do that thing. And also how many new books come out.

Rebecca: Your turnaround time is really, really good. So between the magic wand and the crystal ball, you have I think your setup well.

Dan: I think that deadline helps quite a bit I have to say but thank you.

John: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed talking to you and we’re looking forward to hearing more

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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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185. Model Online Teaching

The Society for the Teaching of Psychology has identified 6 evidence-based criteria for model teaching. In this episode, Aaron Richmond, Regan Gurung, and Guy Boysen join us to discuss how those principles translate into effective practices in both physical and virtual environments.

Aaron is a Professor of Educational Psychology and Human Development at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Regan is the Interim Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. Guy is a Professor of Psychology at McKendree University. They are the authors of A Pocket Guide to Online Teaching: Translating the Evidence-Based Model Teaching Criteria (2021) and An Evidence-Based Guide to College and University Teaching: Developing the Model Teacher (2016).

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The Society for the Teaching of Psychology has identified 6 evidence-based criteria for model teaching. In this episode we discuss how those principles translate into effective practices in both physical and virtual environments.

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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 Aaron Richmond, Regan Gurung and Guy Boysen. Aaron is a Professor of Educational Psychology and Human Development at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Regan is the Interim Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. Guy is a Professor of Psychology at McKendree University. Welcome, Aaron and Guy, and welcome back, Regan.

Regan: Thank you, John.

Guy: Thank you.

Aaron: Thank you.

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

Guy: I’m drinking coffee black tea. I guess that’s coffee. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So I heard.

Aaron: My coffee is Dunkin Donuts coffee, kind of a guilty pleasure every morning. Currently on water. It’s a little bit late for me to be drinking caffeine.

Regan: Still pretty early here in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon. So, coffee it is.

John: And I’m drinking chocolate mint oolong tea

Rebecca: I was ready for you to say chocolate milk or something. I was like, “Alright, there’s no tea here.” [LAUGHTER] I have Irish breakfast today, heavily caffeinated.

Regan: Timely this week with St. Patrick’s Day and all that. So, yeah.

Rebecca: I try. It just happened to be the one open.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your new book together, A Pocket Guide to Online Teaching: Translating the Evidence-Based Model Teaching Criteria. A few years ago, you had written an Evidence-Based Guide to College and University Teaching to help faculty apply the model teaching characteristics that were developed by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. In the new book, you shift your focus to online instruction. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this new book?

Regan: Aaron, you can do the whole origin story since really Aaron, being Chair of the task force that first kicked this off, can give us the whole etiology. So give us the origin story, Aaron.

Aaron: Well, of course, the origin story starts with Regan, [LAUGHTER] as almost every story starts with. And so Regan was coming on as the Society of Teaching of Psychology President which is a division of the American Psychological Association Division Two. And he had like 105 taskforce that he created for us to do. And I was in charge of somehow more than one, it wasn’t just the model teaching competencies. But in terms of this project, he really wanted us to create a committee or a task force to really kind of get at what is it that the model teachers are doing. They originally started in psychology, but then branched out into other disciplines for sure. But really, the call was, what are people doing? What’s the evidence behind what they’re doing that is going well and is doing great work, and all facets of education and Guy was instrumental in that it actually ended up spanning two presidencies, almost three, because it was such a colossal task and ask where that committee was a really good working group. We met twice a month, I think, there for a while. And then we were meeting once a month for two to three years, basically. And so after much, much research, much of it spearheaded by Guy, the task force came up with the model teacher competencies, and we published a couple of articles on it, a kind of a white paper for Division II STP. And then that was the catalyst for Guy, Regan, and I jumping into the first book, the model teaching competency book.

Rebecca: For those that aren’t familiar, can you just talk about what the model teaching competencies is?

Guy: I will say that my memory of how this came about is a little bit different. I kind of envisioned it as almost like a survivor Island type of deal where we were initially this huge task force, and then it turned into an article and a few people dropped off, and then it turned into a book and it was just the three of us. So it’s kind of like we were the people with the endurance to keep trying to push these model teaching competencies down people’s throats until they would sort of accept them. But we think we’ve got good stuff here. And that’s why we stuck with it as we really do believe in these competencies. Basically what we did on that task force is we tried to say, if you’re going to be a good teacher, what are the key things you need to be able to do and so we said, part of that is just being trained. You have to have a little bit of training behind and know some pedagogy. You have to have some basic instructional methods that you use. You have to be teaching content that’s relevant to what you’re doing. And you have to assess learning related to that content, put together a syllabus that’s reasonable. And then also just be asking students how you’re doing, so using teaching evaluations, both formative and summative. And those are the areas we agreed on. And then we defined it by breaking it down a bunch of different ways. And so, I think, to get back to the original question, I think we realized that these things work in the online format, but in our first book, we didn’t really talk about that context very much. I think if you pull out any sentence from our first book, it applies to online teaching, but we certainly didn’t talk about online teaching or LMSs or some of those specific things that would specifically speak to online teachers. So that’s part of the origin for the new book, I think.

Regan: To add to that, not only did it apply, but we didn’t make the connection. I think on the other side of the coin, there’s just so much that goes on in online teaching that is in addition to what normally goes on as well. So, there was a clear cut need for “What does this look like in an online context?” So even though we have six, there’s a nice number to wrap your heads around, there are six model teaching criteria. And you look at all six of those, and yes, they can apply to the online, but it’s a whole different thing when you say, “Okay, let’s actually start from online teaching.” And that final pragmatic piece as to how this came about is we were actually approached by the publishers to do a revision of model teaching, of the original. And this happened to just, if I remember correctly, when the pandemic was kicking off. And I think that’s important, too, because we were all thinking a lot about what does it mean to teach remotely? What does it mean to teach online? And we quickly convinced them or they convinced us and I think it’s more the latter, they quickly convinced us that, before a second edition, maybe if we could address online teaching explicitly, that would be better. And hence, the Pocket Guide. It’s not the full blown, it’s the “let’s explicitly look at online teaching and see what we can say.”

John: At the beginning of this book, you talk about how, at one point, each of you was somewhat skeptical of online instruction until you actually worked with it. I think that’s true of many people who went through the transition to remote or online instruction in the spring of 2020. Could you tell us a little bit about your own transition to online teaching, as well as how your courses were modified as we move to remote instruction in the spring of 2020.

Aaron: I had been teaching online for a very long time. And so I think the pivot for both Guy and Reagan was a little bit different than mine. I had other stressors associated with the pandemic, namely, having five people in my household full time, and kids learning on, and my wife learning online. But for me, I’ll let Reagan and Guy answer the question, mostly because I started teaching online in graduate school as a way to build my curriculum vitae and built my teaching experience. And so it wasn’t as big of a quote, quote, pivot for me, as it is for a lot of my colleagues.

Regan: Yeah, I think I will go in reverse order this way, because I think I’m sort of next up with somebody who had done some online teaching. I had taught online before the pandemic, but hadn’t taught it recently. And I think to fine tune your question, John, personally, it was just more of a question of not having done it as much. In fact, I think I’ll go on record as saying that if you asked me 15 years ago, what I thought about online teaching, before I actually looked into the literature, I had a very different take on it then after I looked into the literature, and then after I really did it. So, it was much more of a question of had done it, but hadn’t done it to the extent and hadn’t looked at the research on it to the extent that I’d wanted to, but that changed very quickly.

Guy: And that’s totally accurate to say that I was the least experienced, I’m fully capable of admitting that. And we have a fully online psychology program at McKendree, and I had designed courses, and I had been trained in the basics of online instruction, but I’d never done sort of a deep dive into the literature like I did when we were preparing to write this book. It was interesting, since in the last year, I’ve taught literally face to face, I’ve taught online, and I’ve taught various versions of hybrid. And then I taught whatever the heck last spring was, as well. So, I’ve gotten a taste of everything in this last year. And so I’ve learned a lot, both writing the book and having to teach in ways that I hadn’t taught before. So I had done the design component of it, and been trained a little bit, but had never actually pulled the trigger and taught a fully online course as an instructor before the pandemic,

Aaron: What I loved about the three of us, and I always love working with these two other folks. But we had this strata of experience with online education. And poor Guy even had the wonderful opportunity to learn a brand new learning management system like two weeks before the start of the fall semester. And when we talk about online education, chalk is chalk, right? But learning how to do certain grade things in an LMS, Guy was really kind of a little bit of a guinea pig, and it was nice to have those three levels of experience because I think we could get fresh perspectives for the book. I’m Quality Matters certified, which is one of the national certifications for online education, and then Reagan and then Guy with not as much experience, and so I think it was a really serendipitous opportunity for us because of that.

Regan: And just along those lines of serendipity, I think one of the things that the pandemic did was had many of us have more conversations with the experts on online teaching on our campuses. Here at Oregon State or e-campus program is one of the top five in the nation with our psych program being number two in online psych majors, which was great, which meant I could go in… actually, I was gonna say go in but during the pandemic, there was no going in anywhere but I I had all these conversations with wonderful people and shout out to Shannon Riggs and Kate Linder, wonderful people who’ve done a lot of work already on online teaching. And we have these conversations, great email exchanges back and forth that really informed, I think, what we then went and talked about.

Guy: I would be interested in hearing, we’ve never had this conversation, whattyou all think, Aaron and Regan, about whether people during the pandemic are actually doing the type of online teaching we’re talking about in our book, or if they’re doing something that’s more of like an emergency remote teaching, because I’ve noticed in my institution, there’s a lot of people who are basically teaching the same class, it’s just that it’s over a Zoom meeting.

Regan: [LAUGHTER] We could probably do a whole podcast on remote teaching versus online teaching. I’ll just say, in brief, Guy, you are absolutely right. What I have seen is the entire spectrum of instructors who are, somewhat alluding to what Aaron said, trying to make sure they can keep teaching. And I think everybody’s circumstances vary. And I think that resulted in a lot of variance in what those courses look like. Some of the courses would look like, I think, what we’d call online teaching, and what we talked about, and then there are others that are very, very quite clearly remote, emergency, doing the best “giving it all I’ve got, Captain” kind of stuff that are working towards it. And of course, now, literally one year later, I can actually see courses that have made that transition that were here spring term, that were here fall term, that were here the next winter term, and so on and so forth. But you’re absolutely right, Guy, it’s not. When you talk about online teaching, and in these conversations, I try very hard to keep remote teaching separate from online teaching.

Rebecca: The visual description of Regan’s hand was moving up, as he was saying here, here, and here. [LAUGHTER]

Aaron: Thank you. Guy’s trying to get us in trouble with our colleagues. I think that the short answer from my department, and we’re a large department, we have over 25 tenure track faculty, and then a whole army platoon of affiliates. Luckily, within our department, because we had a program that was Quality Matters (QM) certified, we had had a lot of core courses that were already certified. And then they were shells given to faculty members. And so in those scenarios, you had what we are talking about in this book, we had a really good pedagogy, a really good online teaching situation. But there was also other classes where, frankly, some of those instructors didn’t know what LMS stood for, had never used an LMS, a Learning Management System, didn’t even use PowerPoint, didn’t use a computer, like literally still wrote on the whiteboard. And so they had to rise to the occasion. And I think it’s more along with what Regan is saying, some of those folks were really just remote teaching, or doing some sort of synchronous teaching, and then some sort of asynchronous teaching that probably wasn’t the best practices. But that’s why we wrote the book.

Guy: Yeah, and don’t get me wrong. I’m not necessarily trying to criticize anyone in what they’re doing. But I do think it’s important to distinguish between what we ended up talking about in the book and what has emerged from some people who don’t have as much training in online teaching and what they’re doing, and are basically just trying to recreate their classroom in a synchronous video session.

Aaron: What we did in our department as well is we buddied up, in a sense, if there was somebody that had a lot of experience online, they would help build the course with the other instructor who had less experience or who needed more assistance, for sure.

Rebecca: I think one thing that you’re alluding to Guy that I wanted to ask about is the literature historically talks a lot about asynchronous online, and when we’re thinking about online education, that’s generally what we’re talking about, but there’s been a lot of experimentation over the last year with synchronous online, and it may or may not be trying to recreate the classroom, there’s a mix of people trying to actively use that environment to do active learning and these sorts of things, and then others that are perhaps resorting to lecturing at in a meeting kind of setting. Can you address that a little bit in terms of whether or not your book addresses the synchronous component, or if it really is focused more on this more traditional asynchronous aspect of online education?

Aaron: We do address that. Our book is organized by really three kind of different types of interactions: one is the student-to-student interaction, one is interaction with content, and then the other is interaction student to the instructor. And I was largely responsible for that section. And it’s a great debate. The whole synchronous versus asynchronous learning’s been debated for as long as we’ve had distance education. And so I think it really comes down to context and situation. For instance, students at Metropolitan State, typically 51% of them are first-generation college students. We’re a Hispanic serving institution, we have the largest military population in the state at our institution and over 60% work full time. And so we try to steer away from a lot of synchronous learning because they’re working full time… just restricting them to a schedule just doesn’t really work. But I think that really depends on the class, it depends on the institution, it depends on the department. And so it’s really contextually driven. And it’s really dependent on the situation. There’s pros and cons to both synchronous and asynchronous learning. There’s definitely engagement with synchronous learning. You could see this face to face, I just saw this meme, it was actually aTik Tok, and I’m not onTik Tok, but I saw a Tik Tok. [LAUGHTER] And it was basically the student walks into the college classroom, and they’re all wearing masks, and it’s like “Hey, professor.” And the professor kind of looks at him like, “Mmmm, I’m not making a connection.” And he’s like, “No, it’s John.” “…not making a connection.” And then he holds up a J in front of his face, [LAUGHTER] and he goes “Oh, John!” …and so there is this idea about synchronous learning and engagement that is really, really important, for sure. And having that one-to-one rapport and connection, but there are asynchronous things that you can do to also increase that rapport as well.

Regan: Well, I think that’s why this debate, not only is it a really interesting question, but like the three of us our motto is, “Well, what does the evidence say?” And I think we’re going to be taking a lot closer look at the evidence in the year ahead. Speaking of evidence, Fox and colleagues, there’s a 2021 report that just came out in January, that actually maps how the percentage of courses that were synchronous versus asynchronous, changed over last year from spring before and then to the next winter. And what you see is a lot of courses. And this is, of course, descriptive data, it’s not causal in any way, but what you see is a lot of courses that started off primarily synchronous, or exclusively synchronous, even remotely, started adding asynchronous components. So even though I think many institutions said, “Look, we were on campus, we’re going remote,we just do everything that we did remotely,” the context changes and you can’t just do everything that you did in a face-to-face class synchronously, remotely synchronously all the time. Now, how much of the time? Which classes? What can you do? Those are all the really cool questions that I think we are now taking a much closer look at.

John: Last March, a lot of people suddenly transitioned to either a remote or online format. But then many people, as we just heard, have been shifting to more and more asynchronous work. In your book, you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that people may face when they’re not experienced teaching online, could you talk a little bit about some of the adjustments people have to make to an asynchronous online environment, as well as perhaps some of the affordances, some of the advantages, that people have come to see, once they start teaching online?

Guy: Well, as the newest recruit to online, I guess I’ll start off here. And I would say my biggest challenge has been just the differences in immediacy between a face-to-face classroom and an online classroom. It’s just a completely different game to say something and make eye contact with students in different rows… front row, back row… and be able to tell whether they’re staring at you or ready to move on versus being online and you have to be reading a discussion board or looking at a quiz score. So it just doesn’t have that immediate feedback. And if you’re talking about the synchronous Zoom meeting type things, then really, it’s kind of soul crushing. I don’t lecture that much, but when I do lecture, and I’m lecturing to the empty space of blank Zoom tiles, it is truly crushing. It is just not an enjoyable experience. It’s just like talking to yourself. There’s some of that spark of immediacy that really energizes the classroom, I have found it difficult to recreate. But the engagement is just different, right? So the engagement might happen in a breakout room, rather than me talking at them in a full classroom. The engagement might happen on a discussion board or on a group project that they’re collaborating on using chats outside of things that I witness. So it’s different. But that’s the thing that was the most challenging for me, is the immediacy.

Aaron: I think I would add a couple things, too. I would definitely agree with what Guy said, I would think also, too, one of the difficulties in that transition is you have to be a little bit more cognizant about your time, and especially if you’re talking about asynchronous learning is like I grade a lot in the evening and at night, because that’s kind of my schedule, but my students, generally speaking, that’s when they’re doing most of their work, because they’re working during the day. So that’s one issue, I think. For a lot of new concepts, too, it’s really understanding time management. I think another thing is, and this is one of the things that Guy alluded to was, I have been teaching online for a very long time, and when I would have a student who had me as an online instructor first, and then took a face-to-face class with me, almost invariably, on the first day, they would come up to me after class and they’d be like, “Man, Dr. Richmond, you are not who I thought you were.” And I would say “What do you mean? They’re like, “Well, I kind of thought you were like this stick in the mud, but you’re kind of a short funny Hobbit.” And after that happened the first couple semesters, I became really aware of it. And really what Guy was kind of alluding to is how do we establish this rapport with our students? How do we establish immediacy which is actually nonverbal immediacy? That’s my hand gestulating, you know, all that kind of stuff, the visual things of teaching? How do we establish those things in an online environment. I think that’s one of the biggest adjustments that most teachers, when they pivot to online having never done it, struggle with, because they take all these face-to-face interactions for granted. They’re not cognitively thinking of how their body posture or the jokes they might use, or the eye contact as G uy was saying. And I still struggle with one of the most difficult things with online engagement rapport, and that learning alliance, as Rogers would call it.

Regan: Lets also add to that, in a face-to-face class, there’s that time before class starts, there’s that time after class ends, where you’re chatting, and you’re talking about stuff. But there are two very significant components to add, both in terms of teaching online, but also teaching remotely, it applies to both. I think the first thing is judging how much work is enough work or not enough work. And I think that’s a huge problem that we’ve seen, is the switch to teaching online or putting something into an online class. If you are not watching how much work you’re giving students, it’s very, very easy to have the tendency to say, “Hey, we’re not meeting for all this face-to-face time or synchronous time. Therefore, let’s have you do more assignments. Let’s have you do more of this and more of that.” And there are some really great time calculators out there right now that I think are important. Related to that, it comes back to there is such a great body of research and training done by instructional designers to help individuals with the management of how much to assign, but also, to get to what Aaron and Guy were saying, how to use all those different tools of a learning management system to try and do those things that you’re used to doing in a face-to-face online class. And there’s a wealth of tools out there in a learning management system. Yes, discussion boards, but even how you use discussion boards and all of that, and how you use chat, that you can do that. One additional thing, and this truly relates to synchronous versus asynchronous, not necessarily face-to-face versus online. But I think one of the things I personally discovered is how to leverage, you use the word affordances, how to leverage things such as the chat, and at first, I was extremely wary of the chat because I’m thinking, “Hey, I have 295 people in this class, is the chat gonna go wild and crazy?” And it went pretty wild, it didn’t actually get crazy. But on top of that, I can tell you what I relied on to look at and see in faces, I was now getting from comments typed into the chat. And I still want face to face. But I can tell you that having that chat open and monitored with rules of conduct, but students were responding in chat, the stuff I was talking about, that I normally wouldn’t see in a face-to-face class.

Guy: And just building off of that in terms of moving to strengths a little bit more. As someone who really loves assessment and appreciates data from students, my, there is a lot of stuff you can assess using the LMS. And I really appreciated being able to log in and see if my students had logged in and see what they had clicked on, and all of this granular information. I had a very small class, so I did not have to explore that too much. But in a larger class, being able to do that and set up agents to monitor them and email them if they’re not logging in, and all these different things you can do. It’s just a wonderful way to increase the engagement in a different way. So in some ways, it almost seems mysterious, now seeing a student every other day, in a face-to-face class, and not knowing whether they had to open their book or not. But if I was teaching a online course, [LAUGHTER] I would know exactly what they have done in between. And I could still have more LMS stuff in my face-to-face class, but it’s different than when it’s all based on the LMS.

Rebecca: So we talked earlier about the model teaching principles. Do they apply in online? Or how are they different in an online environment?

Guy: I said this earlier, but I would definitely say that you could pull out any one of our criteria, the individual ones from our original book, and not tell someone which format it’s in, and they would pretty much all apply. There’s gonna be a few things about teaching very specific teaching skills that might be kind of written in a face-to-face format. So I really do think, almost surprisingly to me, they really do generalize. Training is important in both. Intentional design is important in both. Intentional assessment of learning is important to both. Student feedback is important in both. And, if anything, one of the things I maybe found surprising was that actually what we were saying, however many years ago, eight years ago, nine years ago, when we first started this, is very similar to the stuff that the online quality matters and the instructional designers have always been saying about how courses should be designed before you jump into them. So I was actually a little bit surprised, I think, when I got into the online teaching literature, just how much overlap there was.

Regan: Absolutely. I mean a few words different. I look at a figure that I know normally use when I’m talking about model teaching criteria, and it says “classroom” in there, but apart from little words like that, everything holds. And actually one of the first things that three of us did was we took a look at our self-guided measure that we had created that was in the back of the first book. And we went through it and asked ourselves, which of these don’t apply? And most of them were in there.

Aaron: Yeah, principally, I think that it just holds water. And that’s the beauty of the model. I think you just tweak certain ways in which you accomplish those tasks or accomplish those competencies to the online space.

Rebecca: Aaron, can you give an example of one way that one of those needs to be adapted in an online space?

Aaron: I think the syllabus is a really good example. The online syllabus has changed dramatically in the last 18 months, it used to be a standard format, is you upload a PDF, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not speaking flippantly about syllabi, because that’s my bread and butter, I do a lot of research on it. But you might just load it up into the LMS. And “Hey, go check it out.” But now, I think we’re kind of deconstructing the syllabus a little bit. And really, a lot of people are doing it, where they’re really putting it to the “Start Here” module, and they’re deconstructing the syllabus to where it’s all these different components to it. You can still have a standard syllabus that somebody links on, and if they want to print something out, old school, and they can have, but you really are kind of reincorporating, that syllabus into a startup module, a “startup week one,” however, you want to organize your course. And you’re really kind of diving into it. So structurally, it’s the same, but functionally, how it’s delivered, changes. And I think that’s just one example of the principles there. It’s just how is it surfaced? How is it realized to the learner, it might take on a different form.

Guy: That’s really interesting, because even in I’m teaching in person this semester, and I found myself essentially designing courses, like online courses, where my syllabus is deconstructed to an extent. And I just put the pieces into various modules, so that students don’t have to necessarily go back and read the whole syllabus. So there is a sort of a weird transition, now, and this could be a positive of all this extra work that people are putting into transitioning remote and online is that people will take advantage of some of the things that are in LMSs is a little bit more. So if you wanted to make some money, you could probably start a company right now, or add something to Brightspace or Blackboard where you build the course in the LMS, and then it automatically builds the syllabus for you or something like that. That would be a great feature that I think teachers would love, you wouldn’t have to deconstruct one to make the other, essentially.

Regan: I wanted to go back to something that Guy said earlier that I think is really important in this context, and what Guy said was the overlap between what we all experienced when we read more of the other literature’s in online teaching. And I think far too often, many of us who only have taught in the classroom. And there are still many faculty out there who only teach face-to-face who haven’t taught online. They have missed out on a world of pedagogical practices that instructional designers have been really well aware of for a very, very long time. And so that overlap that Guy alluded to that we all saw, when we looked at that literature, I think, is just a great testament to the fact that there still needs to be some better coordination and communication between those people who talk about and train folks on what the better practices are. And right there when I say that, many individuals who teach online at most universities have to go through some kind of training, but few universities make people teaching face to face go through some sort of training. As somebody who works at a Center for Teaching and Learning, I wish there were more prescriptions to come in and take some guidance on pedagogical practices. So I think that’s a big deal there. Instructional designers have these things down that we could have used. And Guy, I had exactly the same experience about maybe 8, 8, 10 years ago, when I took a Quality Matters course and then immediately used all those practices for my face-to-face LMS. What a great world out there and we need to do some more cross fertilization.

Rebecca: Regan, I think one of the things that’s really interesting that you’re pointing out is we often think about the silos of higher ed as being disciplinary, but it’s also in terms of modality and between staff and faculty. So there might be research done by instructional designers, but somehow that lives in staff world, and it doesn’t live in faculty world. And there’s not a lot of integrations or conversations across those lines. And the pandemic has forced us all to talk to each other in these ways and troubleshoot more because we’re trying to solve some immediate problems. Being more aware of these treasures that are available in different silos that we don’t usually dip into can be helpful.

Regan: Absolutely.

John: And I know a lot of faculty at our campus have been attending workshops at rates they never had before, because they started learning about all these new techniques and tools, and many of them have said that when they go back to a purely face-to-face environment, they’re not going to teach their class in any way, like they were doing before, that they’re going to port this over. And I know I had the same experience several decades ago when I first started teaching online. All of the tools I picked up and some of the techniques have been used in my face-to-face classes as well. Going back, though, to that discussion of the syllabus, one of the things you note in your book is that it’s really important to provide people with more detailed instruction in an asynchronous environment than it would be if you’re meeting with students synchronously, because students are working on their own and they need more information. And I think that’s part of the issue that you’re referring to with a syllabus, perhaps, by building more information into it. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Aaron: Yeah, I think there are several strategies. We’re always going to compare face-to-face to an online or even a flipped or hybrid course, you have these side conversations in a face-to-face course, like you might have this little 30 second “Hey, don’t forget to do this” and “I want you to really pay attention,” “Work on your APA style,” whatever the case may be. You don’t have that at all in the online setting. So you have to create opportunities for that. And so one strategy that I’ve seen pretty successful is making mini short tutorial videos. Just like a six-line email, students are not going to watch a video that’s more than six minutes. I haven’t quite seen the research on this, but I can almost guarantee you, to a certain degree, there’s this Sesame Street effect, their attention spans not gonna be that strong. Because it’s in a video format. It’s asynchronous. So there’s not a lot of interaction. So I’ve seen a lot of people do assignment tutorials, just generally how to take a quiz, how to do an assignment, how to actually have a discussion, not “Well, I met the minimum rubric criteria and I responded to two people and I cited in reference my work, which is actually to have engaged into a asynchronous conversation. And so you see a lot of video tutorials. And here’s another thing about how principally it works within the model teaching competencies face to face, it just looks a little different in online format. The beauty about all those too is they can be the transcript, they can do a video and if you do it through YouTube or whatnot, you can get closed caption, you can get a written version of it. And so that’s one example I think of having to, what I call, make implicit procedural knowledge. So somehow, you’re supposed to know how to do it, but nobody tells you. And so making it explicit. And so those types of tutorials I’m pretty big on. I was slow to come onto that train a little bit, because there is a lot of upfront work. But once you get good at say Loom (that’s the program I use) or Camtasia, or whatever the program is, you can get pretty quick at doing a three-minute video, posting it, and you can also monitor if they’re watching it, and that kind of stuff.

Regan: And I just wanted to add something else that adds on to Rebecca, to the question you asked, that’s relating to this, which is, what are the things that are different and varied? And I think when we teach face to face, we take just the power of presence for granted. And I think we more implicitly think about what can we do for a student to student interactions. And I know that was something when we were writing this book and thinking about the online nature, if you’ve never taught online before… and really, that’s where we geared this book towards, it’s people who’ve taught a lot of face to face, perhaps, but kinda need to start thinking about what’s different in online. And I think that’s one of those big things that’s different with online, is thinking about, you don’t have people sitting in the same room physically, what do you need to do to explicitly build that student-to-student interaction, so that it’s not just student-to-content and student-to-instructor? But, what are those things we can do to make it an engaging student-to-student environment? And that’s a really big challenge

Rebecca: Regan, you’re making a really good point. And also maybe assuming that students feel that connection with students in a physical face-to-face class that they may not actually feel. But just because they’re in the same space, we make these assumptions. I think that being explicit, maybe we’re learning it for online, but it certainly applies to going back into the classroom as well. [LAUGHTER]

Guy: Yeah, and just to connect a couple different lines here, just with the explicitness of it, the engagements, you even have to be explicit in how you engage what the rules are, what the minimal standards are. It’s something that in a classroom that’s face to face, you say, “Okay, turn to your partner and talk and you can watch and see and they have whatever, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it is, but online, you literally have to tell them, “Okay, your first comment is due by X, and then you respond by Y, whatever day it actually is.” And so there’s a little bit more of you have to be intentional about setting expectations and, I don’t want to use “moderating,” but really controlling… that’s not a better word is it?… [LAUGHTER]… facilitating the exact behaviors that you want. And I definitely learned that in the spring with the pandemic teaching and even a little bit with the online courses. If you allow students to post online when they want to it will be near the deadline and that’s not a great way to foster engagements. So, you have to design engagement. It’s really about intentional design. You can’t just walk into the classroom and wing it, like a lot of us who were experience teachers can do face to face.

Regan: And great use of the word design, Guy. And I think, really, that’s something that’s so important. Even when you’re teaching face to face, there is design. Teaching should not be an impromptu act, it needs thought, it needs forethought, it needs intentionality. Every once in a while I run into folks who go, “Hey, I really know my stuff well. What’s there to teaching? I step into the class and voila, there you have it.” No. Design, people. Intentionality.

Guy: Out of all the stuff that I picked up in the last year learning about online, the thing that has been most gratifying is this idea that your whole course is in the bag and ready to go before the first day. I’ve been doing that since day one of my teaching, and it’s so nice to hear reinforcement for that’s the way it should be done. And so I think that’s a message that, if we’re talking about learning from the experience of doing online in the last year, that’s definitely one that I hope gets generalized outside of the online environment, because it’s just so important for students and for the instructor.

Rebecca: As an interaction designer, I have to say, Yes, we should design experiences. [LAUGHTER]

Guy: Yeah.

Regan: I also want to be respectful of individuals who are in situations where, due to courseload, they cannot be as intentional as they would like, because of lack of training that they don’t know how to be intentional, I think it’s very easy to say that’s a good thing. But it’s really up to colleges and universities to help their faculty, to help their instructors be able to do those things.

Rebecca: It’s a heavy lift to be intentional.

Aaron: And I think I would add to that, as well is two things: one is that and maybe this is opening a different line of thought and questions, but the diversity, equity, and inclusion issue in online is real. And this is kind of related to it. I just read a couple different studies where they’re measuring, essentially in online learning, essentially what modality or what tools students are using, and it varies widely, but it’s somewhere between 40 and 80% of students are only using their phone to do an online course. I accept late work for partial credit and I do that because I don’t want to judge people’s excuses. That’s just not something I want to do. And I just got an email from one of my students that just said, “Hey, I’m going to be late, I understand the consequence, I’m sharing a computer with my roommate. I just got a positive COVID test, so I don’t think I should use this person’s computer…” which is like, of course, right? But I think we need to understand access, we need to understand bandwidth. When we pivoted in March of last year… our university uses Teams and to be honest, sorry, Microsoft, it sucked at the beginning, it was horrible. It took a massive amount of bandwidth. And if you didn’t have really high speed internet, you couldn’t engage in teams at all. So I purchased Zoom, ‘cause Zoom’s bandwidth was like I think a 10th of what Teams… and teams has cleared that up since then… but you have to think of things like those equity issues in what students have access to. And so I think that, in line with what we were talking about, in terms of intentional engagement, you have to realize that not all students can do those things. They just don’t have the opportunity or the access or the virtual bandwidth, the metaphoric bandwidth to do it.

Guy: I’m curious if anyone has read, if there is research on that, with online instruction, that students who maybe are coming in with some access issues if they’re as successful or less successful than students who don’t have those, because I think we’ve seen basically the same sort of stratification in terms of the health effects of COVID, the educational effects of COVID, I have friends who are therapists, and it’s the exact same thing for them, they have patients who are doing just fine, and they have patients who are doing really bad because of all kinds of other issues. But has anyone read research on that?

Aaron: I’ve seen a little bit on internet accessibility, but most of that stuff is in the K-12. My wife is a third grade teacher and teaches online remotely right now, and has the whole time during the pandemic. And she will literally spend hours with one student just getting them to upload a document. But I think that, going back to the original discussion about intentionality, you can build into your online courses, flexibility, and something that transfers from the MTC to the online setting, and whether that means “Okay, I have 12 quizzes, but I’m only going to take your best nine scores,” or “I have 10 discussions, I’m only going to take your best seven…” T here are ways in which you can build in DEI issues, if that’s related to it, where you’re flexible. You still have great standards and high standards, but there’s flexibility and autonomy within your course as well.

Regan: And I see a lot more sensitivity to the kinds of issues you brought, Guy, in online teaching that I see in face-to-face courses. Many online and e-campus programs do such a wonderful job of preparing students for the class. They acknowledge that the online course is different, and they do very different things. And I think, boy, just like faculty training, I think the more we can do to prepare students for face-to-face classes, the better. A long-term gripe has been: in college, we assume that those students know how to study. And one of my pet areas is study techniques and study skills, and all of the skills that we build. And I take a lot of time in my first few days of class to talk explicitly about how best to study for my course. And I think that a lot of folks who make the assumption that people know how to study, and I think together with the “how to study,” I think we need to be more aware of “Do you have access to the material?” Gosh, “Do you have access to food?” …is a big thing. Something that I think a theme that you’ve seen us mention many times that I want to underline is don’t take teaching for granted and don’t take online teaching for granted just because you’ve taught face to face.

John: We always end with the question, what’s next? And we’ve all been wondering that for at least a year now.

Rebecca: So please, please enlighten us. [LAUGHTER]

Regan: So I’ll tell you the writing that’s on the wall here, and I think what I can see in higher education. I think we’re looking at a new modality, remote teaching, and not just what can we take from remote teaching that can stay when we get back, but looking at that modality in and of itself, especially to get at issues that we’ve talked about, access and reaching people who may or may not be able to come in to some of our schools. I see the sweet spot in remote teaching that it unearthed new ways for us to connect to our students, new ways to share content, new ways to get engagement, that I think we need to capitalize on and fine tune and study so we can better use it. I think that’s what’s coming down the pike as far as I can tell.

Guy: Almost the same comment but maybe a little bit different terminology is, I posed the question is everything hyflex now? And so hyflex meaning that basically, you’re delivering all modalities at once to all students online, face to face, video, and the students can basically choose which of those modalities they interact with. And just to use an example is, for students who are in quarantine or what have you, this semester, we’ve been encouraged at my institution to zoom our classes. Well, that has expanded a bit in what students are expecting even in face-to-face classes to have accessibility to classroom videos. And so is that now happening for everything? Is that just something that students are going to expect from here on out? And is that necessarily a good thing? Because in small institutions, there’s not hundreds of students, it can be difficult to plan for a class, if you’ve got 15 students, and you don’t know how many are going to be there, and how many are not going to be there. And you maybe don’t have a classroom that’s set up to do both types of teaching. So it definitely is, I think, been useful for students who have to step away from the classroom for health reasons or for safety reasons. But I’m curious to see what happens if the student culture is going to change in terms of what they expect and if the teacher culture will change in what they’re willing to offer students who desire that type of flexibility.

Aaron: Yeah, one of the reasons that Guy and Regan and I work together a lot, it’s because we think very similarly. And we also have our unique perspectives on things. I think that higher education is gearing up for a paradigm shift. I think that there’s going to be massive differences in models in how we approach classroom instruction, brick and mortar versus a virtual environment. I think what the pandemic has done is, for some students, conditioned a new way of approaching their education. And I think you see this at the K-12 level, I think you see at this higher education level as well. And so I think that the schools and institutions that jump on this opportunity… we haven’t had a situation in which institutions can reinvent themselves in modern times, and I think this is definitely one of them. I think a lot of programs can reinvent themselves. And enrollment is up and down across the country. There are certain schools that are really getting hit. Community colleges are really taking a massive hit in the pandemic. And they’re having to reinvent themselves and figure out how can we do online instruction? How can we do this flex instruction? And so I think that, as a scientist, we are in a reinvigoration of scholarship of teaching and learning… how to do these different things. It’s going to be an exciting next five to ten years, I think, in higher education, from a teaching perspective, from the learner perspective, and from a scientist perspective about studying what’s going on. there’s going to be a lot of opportunities to basically treat the pandemic as a catalyst for change.

Regan: Absolutely.

Guy: In terms of opportunities, I think my response came off as pretty somber, but I would say there are some things I’m very excited about. So I’m the type of teacher who hates snow days. So I’m excited by the fact that we’re never going to have another snow day ever again. You never have to cancel a class ever again. Every single teacher knows what to do to replace a class that’s canceled for a snow day. And I’m really excited that more people who maybe would not have used an LMS in the past now are realizing the benefits of it. So, we’re going to have more people using those, which is, I think, only beneficial for students. And I’m hoping that more people are realizing that they can move a lot of the stuff that they used to just talk at students in the classroom, that they can move that online. So those are some of the things, as someone who’s still primarily a face-to-face teacher, that I’m excited about how online teaching will have a bigger influence as we move forward.

Regan: Guy said the word face-to-face teaching, and let me say something I’m excited by is that I don’t think there’s ever been as much scrutiny to teaching and learning as we’ve seen in the last year. And I love that. May that continue.

Aaron: I’ll second that.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing some insights from your book and getting us all excited about picking up a copy of your book and also really thinking forward to what is next for us as teachers.

Aaron: Thank you.

Guy: Thank you for inviting us.

Regan: Thank you, Rebecca and John.

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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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183. Student Workload

College students throughout the country have reported substantial increases in their workload during the 2020-21 academic year.  Few faculty members, though, intentionally increased student workloads during this challenging year. In this episode,  Dr. Betsy Barre joins us to explore some reasons for student perceptions of increased workload.

Betsy is the Executive Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University. In 2017 she won with Justin Esarey, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education’s Innovation Award for their Course Workload Estimator.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: College students throughout the country have reported substantial increases in their workload during the 2020-21 academic year. Few faculty members, though, intentionally increased student workloads during this challenging year. In this episode, we explore some reasons for student perceptions of increased workload.

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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&hellip

John: &hellipand 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 Dr. Betsy Barre. Betsy is the Executive Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University. In 2017 she won with Justin Esarey, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education’s Innovation Award for their Course Workload Estimator. Welcome back, Betsy.

Betsy: Thanks. It’s great to be back.

John: It’s great to talk to you again. Our teas today are:

Betsy: So, I’m not drinking tea. I’m having many cups of coffee today. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Well, it’s still warm&hellip

Betsy: Yes, that’s right.

Rebecca: &hellipstill warm, and still caffeinated. [LAUGHTER] I’m drinking Irish breakfast today.

John: And I have ginger peach green tea.

Betsy: Nice.

Rebecca: &hellipan old favorite. So we’ve invited here today to talk about your recent blog post that addresses the impact of pandemic instruction on student workload. Can you talk a little bit about how the pandemic has affected student perceptions of their workload?

Betsy: Yeah, sure. So this issue has cropped up for many of us. I’m sure anyone who’s listening to this podcast has&hellip maybe in the spring, but particularly in the fall… and I think that’s really interesting to that in fall it became an even bigger issue than it was last spring&hellip that we started to hear from students in our online courses, and in our blended courses&hellip not just online&hellip that workload was overwhelming, perhaps even double. And we heard it at Wake Forest. We started hearing it anecdotally. And then I would talk to my colleagues at other institutions who, of their own initiative would bring it up, that they had heard it anecdotally as well, we saw on Twitter folks talking about this. And then we at Wake Forest did an all student survey where we didn’t ask about workload&hellip we probably should have. But it was the number one thing that came up in their open ended comments when we coded those. And so it just reinforced this idea that clearly this is a universal challenge. And it was a challenge across our schools to, so it wasn’t just our undergraduate students, We were hearing in our Divinity School and our law school and our business school. And so something was going on. And it was really intriguing to me, because clearly students felt like the workload was overwhelming. But, and this is what we’ve all said. It’s not as if all of us just sat down and said, “We want to give students a lot more work this semester.” So I was fascinated by it, talked to a bunch of people about it, was thinking about it. I know you all have been thinking about it, and just decided to write some of my thoughts in a blog post. One of the great things in the response to that blog post is lots of folks have come up with other ideas that I think are just as plausible too.

Rebecca: Do you think faculty believe that they’re giving more work to their students?

Betsy: That’s actually a really interesting question, because that sort of premise of my blog post is that, and this was Jody Greene said “No one sat down to give more work to students.” But since I’ve written it and talked to some faculty, there are some faculty who are like, “Yeah, maybe I did, maybe I did give a little bit too much work.” And that’s worth noting. But there are just as many faculty, maybe more faculty who say “Actually I have given less work this semester, and I’ve tried to dial it back and lower the stakes than I have in the past.” And so the fact that there’s that large body of faculty that think they’re doing the opposite, and then the student perception is something different. It’s really interesting.

Rebecca: One thing that you just said, Betsy, about the lower stakes piece, raises an interesting question, because a lot of professional development about going online and using effective teaching practices talks a lot about low-stakes assignments and the ability to check in on things more often. But maybe they’re smaller assignments. Do you think that’s happening more?

Betsy: Well, I think it’s a good thing that it is. And my guess is, that’s part of what’s causing the problem or the challenge&hellip maybe it’s not a problem, but just is causing this sort of disconnect… is that our faculty, particularly many of our institutions, in the summer did a lot of professional development around good online teaching practices, and just good teaching practices in general. And also really emphasized&hellip at least at Wake Forest&hellip we really emphasize this is a pandemic, our students are struggling, let’s lower the stakes on things, let’s be understanding. And so one way to do that is by having smaller low-stakes assignments, so instead of a big midterm, you have multiple weekly check-ins. But of course, our students can interpret that as, “more work,” because if you’re just counting work by counting the number of assignments, then it is, by definition, more work. So, instead of one midterm, you now have five short assignments, that’s five times the amount of work. And so instead of counting in terms of how much time the assignments take, they could be counting and just the overwhelming number of assignments seems like more work. And I think that’s what’s going on, or at least part of what’s going on. And I’ve said to some people that this is actually a good sign that change did happen over the summer, because we didn’t hear as much about this in the spring. People kept their one midterm and their final&hellip at least I didn’t hear about it as much, maybe you two did, but I didn’t hear as much about it in the spring. But then they redesigned their courses in the fall. And the fact that we’re all hearing about this suggests that people actually did things differently. Now, again, it still could be better, but that’s kind of a good sign to me. Now, the question is, how do you dial that back? And how do we communicate with students about it&hellip all really complex, but I do think it’s that breaking big assignments into smaller assignments is part of a contributing factor here.

John: . And we know that students tend to do a lot of cramming, they tend to do mass practice, but we know that spaced practice is more helpful and that we know the benefits of retrieval practice. And that’s something I think that most faculty development centers emphasized with faculty. And I know at our campus, we had more faculty participate than we’ve ever seen. We had more people participate in professional development workshops than we generally see over a four- or five-year period. For the people who were resistant to professional development in the past, they were learning about the benefits of retrieval practice and space practiced, and learning about the benefits of using low- stakes exams, as you were just talking about, and I agree that that’s a good thing. But we know that the practices that students use to study tend to be mass practice, they tend to do repeated rereading, and now they’re being asked to retrieve information. And we know that students believe that that’s less effective, and it’s certainly more work for students.

Betsy: So your point about retrieval practice, and we know students believe it’s less effective to be engaging in this continual retrieval practice, I think is really interesting. And I think that’s what we’re seeing when our students say, “We have more busy work.” So it’s not just that there’s more work, but that’s actually more busy work. And part of what’s going on there is that they think that that practice that they’re engaged in is not valuable, if you are giving assignments that are about practice. And as students see it as busy work, that’s part of us communicating the value of this work, and helping our students understand how they actually learn, and how it will help them on the later exams, I think is really important. That’s not the only challenge. I think busy work isn’t the only kind of challenge. It’s also, I think, for those of us in the humanities, I think what we’re seeing is that the new tools we have available to us make it easier for us to hold our students accountable for doing all the reading, when typically, they wouldn’t do all the reading. And typically students wouldn’t say it’s busy work, but there’s more reading that they have to do than they ever had to do before. And so that’s one hypothesis as well. But I think another point about the busy work and the retrieval practice, moving one exam to 10 short assignments is, and I talk about this in the post as well, is that there is a sense in which that could be adding to your work, in that they have to keep track of it all. And I think our students are not used to having to keep track of so many assignments. So typically, as a faculty developer leading a teaching center, I may have a faculty member come to me that wants to redesign their course. And I make all these suggestions, and they do it and it’s fine. And the reason it’s fine is because, yes, it’s a little bit more work and a little bit more stressful for the students. But it’s only one course. But I think what we saw is that all of a sudden, our students were moving from five courses where there were three assignments to five courses where there are 15 to 20 assignments or more. And that was even more compounding the exponential growth that they felt. So I teach with lots of small assignments, I always have. Students would sometimes say this is more work than in a typical class, but they weren’t upset about it. They didn’t feel overwhelmed by it. That’s because again, it wasn’t five of their courses that were doing it. So it is a really interesting question of when we go back post-pandemic, do we want all of our courses to work this way? And how do we help our students readjust to this is the new workload? or this is going to be the new experience of the new workload? Or do we not want to do that? And I think that’s an interesting conversation for all of us to have moving forward.

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I’ve had in conversations with students, just anecdotally, but also in some of the formal research that I’ve been working on related to students with disabilities, is the time management piece and just trying to manage and organize all the moving parts that are on all these different platforms is complex, but also that moving with more materials online has resulted in more reading and writing&hellip

Betsy: interesting.

Rebecca: &helliprather than other modalities that we might typically use in a face-to-face class like face-to-face conversation, which to them seems really much more time consuming. And it may actually be more time consuming, especially if you have a particular kind of disability.

Betsy: Right. So there are a couple of things to say there. So I did say one of the things I noticed is when you read student concerns about this, they will often say things like “It took me this much time to do a discussion post.” And that’s, I think, really revealing for all of us to understand. We often think, “Okay, the discussion posts are going to take the place of the discussion in class.” But right now, I’m just talking to you two, and I’m not thinking very hard about what I’m saying. And in fact, if you created a transcript of this, which you guys probably will, I’ll be embarrassed to read it, because I don’t think it’s as coherent as I want it to be. And if I were writing a discussion post, I would think very carefully about how I formulate my thoughts and my arguments, and even proofread. And it’s gonna take a lot more time, if I’m actually writing it out. And I think that’s really important for us to acknowledge that discussion posts and a discussion are not a one-to-one replacement. Or if we want it to be a one-to-one replacement, then we need to tell our students, we expect you to treat it as if you’re not actually writing something that’s meant to be thoughtful, we just want to hear your opinions about this. So that’s one piece. But then in terms of your point about disabilities, I think it’s really interesting in that all the best practices for Universal Design for Learning, we can revisit, and I didn’t talk about this in my post, but I should have, so thank you, Rebecca, for sharing this wrrinkle. Because I think it’s an important part of it is that giving students options for how they can do this work will also empower them to do things that they think are most efficient for their time. So if they can do a VoiceThread or make a video, or one of the activities that some of our faculty have found very successful as an asynchronous replacement for discussion, is to just put students in groups and tell them, in your own time, you get together, have a Zoom discussion about the material, record it and send it to me ,that you’ve had that discussion. So they actually have a discussion. It’s just sort of asynchronously done. But in general, giving students options, it’s not going to solve every problem, but it does empower them to have choice, because there will be some students who prefer to write than to speak. But there may be something like “I’m tired of writing, I want to actually just speak.” And then in terms of the material, I think there was this recent meta analysis that just came out like last week about video versus text, which was really interesting. And as a humanist, I’m sad to see this, but it’s not surprising that sometimes video can be better for student learning than a text can be. Because I often think, “Oh, I’ll just give them something to read, and that will be the replacement for a lecture.” But maybe sometimes there’s a way in which they’d rather watch somebody talk about that material, rather than read about it.

Rebecca: Or by extension, just listen to the material, like in a podcast or something.

Betsy: Yeah, podcasts are a great opportunity. And we’ve heard students say, when I’m walking around campus, or when I’m working out, and it allows them again, to expand their schedule where they have more time to do things and no screen time, which is something they really appreciate because there’s so much Zoom fatigue, that being able to listen to something where they don’t read online and then have to watch online, they can just listen to it is a real relief for them. Absolutely. Unsurprising you all like podcasts.

Rebecca: Anything that gets us off the screen, actually, is something that I work a lot to do with my design students, because whether it’s a pandemic or not, we spent a lot of time on the screen.

Betsy: Yeah, fair enough. So you’re an expert at this. Yeah. You’ve thought about this. That’s great. Yeah, for sure and I think we need to think about that more.

John: But I know even for people who are teaching asynchronously before, some people have started using new tools. On our campus, for example, people who used to give students readings as a basis for discussions now are having students use hypothesis for the discussions, which means students actually have to open the reading [LAUGHTER] and actually respond to the text, which can take a lot more time than just skimming over the abstract and responding to it. And similarly, I’ve been posting videos for 20 some years in my classes, but now I’m doing it where there’s questions embedded in it, which means they actually have to watch them now for a small portion of their grade. So I think some of the tools that people are using may provide more learning, may provide more engagement, but also is going to take a lot more time than how people use them before. And you noted in your blog post that many students would be able to get by and coast to get the grade they want without doing a lot of the things faculty assume that they did. [LAUGHTER] But again, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. But it does require more time on average.

Betsy: Yeah, it’s a complicated question. It’s a self report, so it could be even lower than this, but just general self report on how much time students spend each week studying, it’s about 15 hours a week, on average, prior to pandemic, and that is for a full-time student. So imagining 15 credit hours they’re studying, it’s one to one, and many faculty assume or hope that it’s more than one to one. [LAUGHTER] But students are very strategic, they’re learning an important skill and figuring out what does need to get done and what doesn’t need to get done to be able to be successful in a course. And so certainly I appreciate that. But I think recognizing this disconnect is important because it helps us understand why faculty didn’t think they were giving more work, but students actually did have more work because faculty were mistakenly assuming that students were spending 30 hours a week studying when really they were only spending 15. And so being aware of that now helps us have a much more honest conversation about well, what do we expect the standards to be for students, and there are differences across different institutions and different programs. So our graduate professional programs are for folks who are working full time, have different sorts of informal expectations, I think, than others. And so it’s worth it for all of us to come together and to talk about that. But I will say I do think it’s just important to say&hellip I probably said this in the post… but we do know that the more time students spend on a task, the more they will learn. So it’s not just like we’re piling on the hours because we want to punish them or we think that’s just really what rigorous teaching is. It’s that actually we know you’ll learn more if you spend more time thinking about a text or practicing the problems, as you said, John, that this will help you learn more. So you obviously don’t want to expect so much that they can’t do other things they have to do in their life. So that’s the tension. I think my recommendation always be if you have to have a full-time job, you shouldn’t be a full time student, because that’s like too much work. So thinking about how do we calibrate the courses that students taketo how much time they’re actually able to put into it is really important. So yeah, I do think that that’s happening. It’s not the only thing. Again, I also think there are faculty who probably expect too much as well, because we’re not good at estimating how much time it takes for students to do things. I think Hypothesis is a great example. I use Hypothesis in my class, I love it. If you’re a humanist and you haven’t used, or if you have assigned readings and you haven’t used Hypothesis or Perusall go look it up and find it. It’s pretty amazing. But I think that remembering that, yes, it will make them read. So that’s extra time because they’re actually gonna have to read and they’re gonna have to read carefully enough to have good questions. [LAUGHTER] So they can’t skim it, as you said, John, but then all the time it takes to actually read everybody else’s comments, really remembering that and that’s where I as a newbie to online, that was like an aha moment for me when one of my colleagues who’s an expert in online teaching was like, “It’s not just the time it takes for them to write their own discussion posts, it’s also they have to read everybody else’s. There’s extra reading that’s involved.” It’s not just the text itself, but it’s also reading everybody else’s responses and so putting them in groups where they’re responding to fewer people or reading fewer people is a really useful tool. Again, I think probably all of these hypotheses are going on. And it’s worth us being honest about all of them, instead of saying, “Oh, it’s definitely the students,” or “it’s definitely the faculty,” it’s like we’re all in this together, and let’s figure out how we move forward.

John: A nice thing, perhaps, would be to give students information about how much time these tasks take. And it would be nice if there was a tool for that, [LAUGHTER] which I believe that you have created.

Betsy: So yes, we have a tool that actually we made pre-pandemic. But one thing I want to say, because a lot of people have used this tool, and I think sometimes people use it in ways that are asking you to do more than it was intended to do. And that it is very much an estimator. It is not meant to be a calculator, that is the exact amount of time that your students are going to spend on something. And it’s very broad. It was essentially just something that I was interested in creating as I was thinking about how much work I assign students in terms of reading and writing. And the original version of it is very much tilted towards reading and writing. So oftentimes, we hear from STEM folks like “What about problem sets?” And that’s and that’s just the Wild West in terms of how much time students spend on that, it’s much harder to get a handle on it, so it’s not there. But there are places in this estimator where you can add a new assignment that isn’t captured by reading and writing and just give your own estimates for how much time you think students will spend. And the main value of this estimator, I think, is that I found that many of my colleagues, myself included, are just not good at the head math required, we just keep adding these assignments, and we think we have a good sense, but literally sitting down and writing out like “Okay, they have to go to the library to get the source.” Well, it’s gonna take him some time to walk to the library and walk back&hellip like literally things like that, realizing how much time you’re asking your students, and then adding it up can be really valuable. And I would do it sometimes on the back of an envelope, but it was chaos. And so I thought, why can’t we just have a calculator that does that, So we have an old version of the calculator, we have a new version that my colleagues in online education at Wake Forest, Allen Brown, helped us work on to add in discussion posts and video lectures and other things so that it’s a little bit closer to what asynchronous online courses might involve. And it can be a tool for overall assessment, but also individual assignment assessment of like, how much time might it spend for them to do this type of reading or to do these types of videos. And if you disagree with what the estimator says, my favorite feature of the estimator is, you can manually adjust it. So you don’t have to get in arguments with us. Whatever your own assumptions are, you can go in there and put that in, and you’ll still be surprised with what the total amount is probably, at least I often am, that I’m giving more than I realized and I have to go back and make some hard choices. So hopefully, it’s a useful tool for everyone. But as John, you said, one of the best things about it is that allows us to better communicate with our students about what we’re expecting as well. And we’ve heard from so many students who have found it super helpful in the courses that have done this, both students who are struggling, but also students who are crazy overachievers, and who will spend 20 hours on a one-page paper. It’s a real relief to them. Even if they only spend four hours when they’re supposed to spend one, at least it’s four, and not 20. So it helps them manage their time as well.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve done, at least on longer term projects, that has worked really well for me and my students is having them keep a timesheet and asking them to divide out tasks. And I pose it to them so that we’re in the design field. So it’s to help them think about how they might price something in the future, so they know how long it takes them. So that’s how you get the buy in. But what it helps me do is see how long it takes them to do certain things. And realize it’s like, “Why did you spend this amount of time doing this thing that was really not important, as other thing was much more important?” And then you can coach the group on those sorts of things, which can be helpful. And along those same lines, one of the things that I run into, and this may fit more into the idea of problem sets or things like this is how much time students will try to problem solve a technical issue that they just aren’t problem solving in the right way at all. And so they could spend hours trying to do something that if they just asked a question… [LAUGHTER] &hellipit would have taken two minutes.

Betsy: Like ask for directions…. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, so I’ve been reminding my students, especially since the fall, when we’ve been doing much more online,that, if you’re spending more than 15 minutes trying to solve this technical problem, A. take a break, you’re just going in circles, maybe come back and try again. But if you’re spending much more time than that, then that’s a good clue that you need to ask for help.

Betsy: That’s really smart. And really, I think, super helpful. And I think getting feedback from our students about how much time they’re spending is not just good at the individual level of coaching. It also is great formative feedback for adjusting our own expectations. Again, and it corrects the estimator, maybe you put it in the estimator, and has happened to me too. And I realized&hellip because one of the things about the estimator, it’s best about reading, usually, in terms of its reading estimates, but one of the central insights from the reading literature is that the difficulty of a text is just as much about students’ vocabulary as it is about the text itself. So I would guess “this is a pretty easy text for my second year students at Wake Forest.” And then if they’re all taking a lot longer, what I realized is that actually, I misjudged their familiarity with these concepts that would be in this book. That this book is actually harder than I thought it would be. So I need to up it in terms of the estimator to say “Actually, there are more new concepts than I realized that the students are engaging with and it’s going to take more time.” So asking the students is just as important as you communicating with them. It’s a two-way street for sure to get that formative feedback. I also think telling them about time management and struggling with time management. I’ve seen some really good strategies. I know our learning assistant center, who works with students, has some good counseling that they do with students about how do they create a master syllabus or kind of a calendar for when they’re going to do things. And I also saw somebody, I think, shared it on the POD listserv, but a strategy of creating a Google calendar with basically time slots for all of your activities in your course. And then students import it into their Google Calendar and move those around. So you would set it up like two hours for reading this text. And then they could move it in their calendar. And so that works for them. But they basically see the blocks of time that they need to set aside. And if they did that for every class, it would be even better, they could see “Oh, wow, this is 40 hours in a week, I need to set aside time to do this work.” And frankly, we should be doing that even before the pandemic. But we’re learning this lesson now of how to help our students manage time and due dates, and all of that, because it is a little bit more. And again, I also want to emphasize too, not just all the cognitive load of multiple assignments, but learning new tools also takes time. This is kind of your point about troubleshooting, Rebecca, like, if a student has never used the video function on Canvas, they may find themselves spending 45 minutes trying to get the video function to work, when that’s not in any of our calculations of their assignment. We’re assuming they’re just going to record the video and upload it. So being mindful of the time it takes them to learn a new tool in this scenario is also really important.

John: You mentioned the issue of reading tied to students prior knowledge and vocabulary. But that’s going to vary a lot across students. So I know a lot of people, when they include estimates from the calculator, will say this is an estimate of what this is, your mileage may vary and keep track of how long it takes you to do these things, and use that to adjust your future estimates of the time requirements for these tasks.

Betsy: That’s a nice idea too, to say you students adjust. So that’s really smart. I like that a lot. For sure, it varies across students. And especially, I mean, even thinking about students with disabilities is an even more interesting challenge. And there is an interesting question, I’ve had some good conversations about to what extent, if we’re putting that estimate… the average&hellip in the syllabus does that create problems for students who may be slower, they think that there’s a deficit. So you need to be thinking about how you frame it, I think is really important. And to be up front that saying it is expected and that is the normal course of things that we’ll all have different rates and this is a ballpark average. You can even put a range&hellip might be an idea too&hellip of ballparks there, but recognizing and saying it’s totally understandable that there’ll be jeans taking a different amount of time, because again, prior knowledge, not just ability, it’s all sorts of other things. How often have you read in the past? How often have you worked with technology in the past? Any of these things, they’re gonna make a difference.

Rebecca: One of the things that conversations about perceptions of workload lead me to is I wonder what the perceptions of learning are?

Betsy: Yeah, I think this is a great question. Because when we think about how students got “got by” in the past by doing less work, what they meant by “get by” was successfully complete the course and get the grade that they desired. If we actually ask them about how much they learn, I don’t know. I mean, that’s a really interesting question, would they say, “Oh, well, it takes more to get my A now&hellip” so that’s duplicating the workload&hellip “But, oh, by the way, I’m also learning more.” It’d be interesting to see. I mean, it depends on f the primary issue here is that students doing less work before and now they’re doing all the work we expected of them, then I think you would expect a lot more learning. But there could also be these issues of the pandemic, I’m in crisis, I can’t work as quickly. If those are the issues, or I’m overwhelmed by the multiple assignments, and I can’t keep track, then there may not be as much learning happening. So my guess is there’s probably equal levels of learning, it’s totally a guess. But in other words, that there are challenges to this moment that students learn less. But there are also things that we’re doing better than we have in the past that make up for that. But I hope that we get some good empirical data on some of this and think through it, because I do think that these strategies, while they are more work, are also probably likely to lead to deeper and lasting learning as well, if the students are able to do it. There’s also the challenge of students who just give up, and then get overwhelmed, and they’re just completely behind. And then they have no motivation to even do a little bit. And so we want to be mindful of that too. But if they’re able to keep up, I’m hopeful at least, that these things should, at least from the research, they should lead to more learning, but who knows.

John: In terms of student reaction, though, student perceptions of what’s most effective is often passive learning and repeated reading. Fluency illusion makes it seem that you’ve mastered the material without being confronted with some type of evidence that you really don’t know this stuff quite as well. And that all the techniques that we’re actively encouraging in teaching centers are giving students more feedback more regularly about what they know, and what they don’t know. And that doesn’t feel as good. And there was a study at Harvard about a year and a half or so ago, where they surveyed students on how they perceived their learning, relative to the actual learning gains they receive across both lecture-based classes and classes that relied on active learning. And there have been a lot of such studies where in general, the students believe that active learning is not as effective yet the learning gains tend to be significantly greater. So there is a bit of a disconnect between what students perceive as being effective and what actually is effective, which also can lead to that perception of busy work that you mentioned before?

Betsy: Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I think, and this would be a whole other podcast you probably all have done all these podcasts thinking about this issue of student perceptions about learning. I think part of it is what they’re used to. There’s a lot of things that are going into helping all of us understand how we learn and what works and what doesn’t work. And so I think there is a hope for us to try to sort of bring them along with us, I guess I would say, I guess the valuable insight from the studies is that we shouldn’t take for granted that if students say they’re not learning, and if they aren’t learning, that we need to recognize that they may be. And so part of our job is to help them understand, with hopefully concrete evidence that we can show them, “Look, you’re actually learning here in significant ways” &hellipto help them understand why we are choosing these approaches. And it’s not just because we don’t want to teach or we’re lazy, or what are other stories people tell about active learning, moving forward. So I think part of the way we bring them along is to also acknowledge that sometimes there may be assignments that are not useful, and that there may be sometimes things that are overly burdensome in terms of time. And so instead of just always being “You’re wrong, students, you’re wrong here, let us tell you how it is,” to say, “Okay, let’s listen to our students” and say, “Actually, that assignment, it took more time than it was worth. And so we’re going to think creatively together about things that will work for you.” But also acknowledging that there’s a long literature on how people learn that should inform it, and not just perceptions that make a difference.

Rebecca: I think when I’ve even asked students about some of those things like “What do you wish you had more of?” &hellipthey do realize that when you have those little assignments to hold them accountable, and help them practice, I had students asking for more. In the fall, I had students saying “We had a few of those, those were helpful. We wish we had more of those.”

Betsy: Yeah, there’s no question. We saw that in our survey, too. And that’s the reality of anytime you do a study, it’s an average. On average, students think they’re learning less, but they’re always going to be students who, “Oh, I’m aware, I’ve seen this happening.” And they’ll be students who sort of totally missed the boat. But yeah, we saw that for sure. We saw students who appreciated the check-ins, but the number one thing that we saw from our students on various questions was that they wanted more opportunities to work with each other, which, normally, they don’t like that. And there’s literature, right? It’s like, “Oh, I want to be taught by a teacher and not my peer.” But in the pandemic moment when they don’t get to connect with their peers, like socially. So our students are back on campus at Wake Forest. But there’s lots of restrictions on what they’re allowed to do with each other socially. So especially for some of our first-year students who hadn’t made friends yet, this was their opportunity. Classroom collaboration was their opportunity to make friends. And so yes, it was tied to their learning. But they also really just appreciated it and said, “I want to be able to work more, they helped me understand the material more.” So they were calling out both the sort of friendship aspect, the social aspect, and saying, “Oh, it helped me feel more confident in the material, because I could ask questions.” So I certainly think it’s not a universal story, that students are upset about these kinds of active learning and small stakes things. But it’s more universal. I think that they feel like there’s a lot more work. And so that’s what’s so interesting. Rarely do you have a finding or experience where so many people are in an agreement about this. And so it’s just such an interesting thing that I have not met a person who said, “I felt like I had less work.” That’s kind of interesting. But there was one student in our survey, I think I quoted this in our blog post, that was really interesting, where she said, “The courses are easier, but they’re emotionally more difficult.” So the online courses are easier, but it’s emotionally more difficult and more difficult to try hard for. One of my hypotheses was that being in a pandemic makes our capacity to work lower. And so I think that’s part of what that person was getting at. Everything feels like more work, even if it’s the same amount of work. And I am guessing that it’s both that and also maybe a little bit more work too, that’s going on, I’m going to be curious to see what happens in the spring. We’re gonna do our survey again. And we did have some interventions where we talked about this, but there’s no mandates about what people are going to do. So we’re going to ask our faculty, again, what they’re doing. And then we’re going to ask our students and see if things got better. And hopefully, that’ll make us understand maybe which hypotheses are more or less likely to be true? Who knows?

Rebecca: If anything, at least, this is something faculty and students all have in common. We all feel like we have more work.

Betsy: Yeah, well, [LAUGHTER] and actually, we didn’t even mention this. And I didn’t mention in my blog post, because it was already too long, is some of this switch to low-stakes assignments also increases the workload for faculty. You don’t have to assess it all, but many of us are just used to that, so we look at everything and grade everything. And so certainly, we heard a lot on our faculty survey of “I cannot sustain this for another semester.” So, this semester, we may find that many of them have shifted back to fewer, larger assignments. So I’m not sure. We just heard some anecdotes, but I could see that happening too, for their own workload sake as well.

John: In addition to the trauma of the pandemic and all the issues associated with that, I believe you also mentioned the fact that many students signed up for face-to-face classes and just being in an online environment is going to make them less happy. And if you’re not as happy in that environment, it’s going to seem like more work.

Betsy: That’s right. Yeah. And this is where I had a throwback to my own time tracking that I did. Maybe five or six years ago, I did time tracking of my own time and I was fascinated because I wasn’t very good at predicting what I was spending my time on. If I didn’t like being in a meeting, I felt like it dragged on and on and on. If I was reading a book that was really exciting. I thought it was like this [finger snap]. But actually, if I went back, “Oh, I was actually spending a lot of time” or even just working on a design project, I would just lose hours staying up till however many hours in the night because it’s exciting to me, it doesn’t feel like work. And so my guess is that there’s some of that going on, too. And I will say in our survey, there was a group of students who were really unhappy with online learning in general, not specific teachers, not specific strategies&hellip that they did not want online. And so those students, obviously, if they had that much anger and sadness about being online, I can’t imagine that they would be excited and enjoying&hellip like, just another 15 minutes of online would be a slog for them, you know, and so I’m sure that things are slower, because they’re not enjoying it, because they didn’t choose it. And I think that’s a really important thing for all of us in higher ed to be thinking about is that, just because there are some students who are unhappy with online right now doesn’t mean that online itself is the problem. It’s partially giving our students autonomy and choice of how they experience their courses. And there are some of our students who just really want to be in person. And those students are probably also the people who really want to be socializing with their friends. And they aren’t getting any of that right now. And so they’re doubly upset, triply upset, like many of us, and that’s not a good position to be in to enjoy your work&hellip the work is really work. I’m sure that some of that’s going on.

John: I spent a decade working on our faculty assembly one semester. [LAUGHTER]

Betsy: I like that. Yeah, there you go. That’s true, right. Sometimes there’s something that just drags on. Time is tricky like that. Some of our students also commented on just sitting in their dorm rooms all day on their computer screen all day, and leaving to get takeout food and coming back. And they’re in singles, often&hellip a lot of them are in singles, because we de-densified our dorms, like it’s just not a great mode of existence. And so anything they can do to get away from the screen, as Rebecca, as you said, that I think is a really valuable strategy for all of us to try to incorporate into our courses.

Rebecca: I’ve noticed this semester, in my classes, I have really good engagement. They’re synchronous online, I can see people contributing. But there’s a lot less camera use this semester than there was even last semester with some of the same students. And maybe it’s the winter slog, “Oh, the winter won’t end.” But it’s just also just being on screen and feeling almost like you’re in performing mode. I think it’s some of that, too. I’d like to turn my screen off sometimes.

Betsy: I was just gonna say that for those of us that are in committee meetings all the time with our colleagues, like we’re still with screens on all day. And yeah, I absolutely think that there’s just an exhaustion and awareness that there’s another semester of this, we don’t know when it’s going to end. &hellipreally tough, certainly.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Betsy: Well, if I knew what was next for the fall, I’d be a millionaire right now. Who knows what’s next for the fall? I think that’s the biggest challenge for all of us, as we’re thinking about higher ed, in the near term, at least is what’s going to happen in the fall. But I do think with respect to the topic of this podcast, we often talk about when the pandemic ends. It’s going to be like a trickle, I think. There’s not going to be a sharp ending to it. But whenever we start talking about the future of higher ed in a serious way, I do think there’s going to be a very interesting question about how much do we expect of our students outside of class? And what is an appropriate workload? What is the nature of a credit hour? All of those kinds of questions should be on the table because I know for a fact that many of my faculty, even when they go back to in-person are going to want to keep using the strategies. They’ve read the research that we presented to them this summer, and they see that it’s valuable and that their students are learning and so it’s not as if the workload is going to decrease dramatically, I’m guessing, when we go back to in person, so we may need to have larger conversations about that in higher ed.

Rebecca: Thanks so much for joining us, Betsy. It’s always a pleasure.

Betsy: It was great to be back. I love this podcast. 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.

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168. Synchronous Online Learning

The pandemic forced many faculty to experiment in different modalities in 2020. In this episode, we reflect on our own teaching experiences with synchronous online courses this year.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: As we approach the end of a really challenging year, we’d like to thank all of our guests who provided so much help and support to us and all of our listeners, and we’d like to thank you, our listeners, for hanging in there with us. We’ve all learned a lot in 2020 and we’re looking forward to a chance to apply what we’ve learned in circumstances in which there are fewer external threats.

…and now we return to our regularly scheduled podcast.

The pandemic forced many faculty to experiment in different modalities in 2020. In this episode, we reflect on our own teaching experiences with synchronous online courses this year.

[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]

Rebecca: Over the past few months, we’ve talked a lot about the pandemic and ways to adjust our teaching. And we’ve talked a lot about online learning, but we haven’t really focused on synchronous learning. John and I both taught synchronously this semester. So we decided that in this episode, we would focus a little bit more on synchronous learning and what we’ve learned about it in our own experiments in our classes.

John: Our teas today are:

Rebecca: I have Scottish breakfast once again.

John: …and I have a blend of spearmint and peppermint tea.

Rebecca: That sounds much healthier than my choice.

John: It’s not my first tea of the day.

Rebecca: This is not mine, either.

John: This is my first herbal tea of the day.

Rebecca: This is my second pot of the day. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, Rebecca, what classes were you teaching this fall?

Rebecca: I was teaching two design classes that are smaller. So I had one web design course that was stacked. So, it had beginning, intermediate and advanced students in it, 25 students, and we met synchronously, but also had asynchronous classes, it’s considered a studio course. So for a three credit course, we have six hours of class time, and three hours of outside work, which is a different balance than maybe other folks. And then the other class I was teaching was a special topics design course, which was smaller, it was about 10 students. And that class was also synchronous, but it was a project-based class, and we worked on two community design projects: one for a project called Vote Oswego, which was a get-out-the-vote initiative on campus, and the second is a project called “Recollection,” which is a storytelling project with adult care facilities.

John: And we do have an earlier podcast on an earlier iteration of Vote Oswego. So we’ll include a link to that in the show notes.

Rebecca: So John, what kind of classes are you teaching? We obviously don’t teach the same thing.

John: I was teaching two classes this fall. One was a large synchronous session with 288 students. And the other was a fully asynchronous section with 60 students this semester,

Rebecca: At what level were the students in both of your classes?

John: These were both introductory economics classes. So most students in the class were freshmen, and it was their first economics course.

Rebecca: So, your classes are much larger than mine, you’re teaching much more younger students or newer students, and my classes are smaller, project-based, and usually junior or senior students.

John: Yes. And there’s certainly some differences in the disciplines as well.

Rebecca: No, that they’re the same. [LAUGHTER]

John: Why did you choose a synchronous mode of delivery rather than an asynchronous mode, or a face-to-face option this fall?

Rebecca: So I chose not to do face-to-face delivery for my own health reasons, I chose to not be on campus for my own safety, because I have a chronic illness. So I chose specifically to have strong synchronous components, because a lot of our students are used to working in a studio together and having a community around each other and kind of feed off of each other’s work and work collaboratively. And I wanted, because of the classes I was teaching, to continue to have collaboration as a key part of my class. And I was really concerned that if I didn’t have a strong synchronous component, my students wouldn’t be able to effectively collaborate with each other, because there would be too much scheduling issues and what have you. So it’s a little bit of a carryover from the way that I would run my classes in person in that I give a lot of class time to project-based learning and team-based work and do a lot of lectures and things like that asynchronously in like a flipped classroom style. How about you, John?

John: Basically, I tried to preserve something as close as possible to what was originally scheduled or what was originally planned. And my large class is typically about 400 to 420 students, and I just couldn’t imagine taking that class and doing it in a completely asynchronous manner, because when I teach a class asynchronously, I give students lots of individual feedback, and it would be really challenging providing individual feedback to several hundred students. I just didn’t really have the time to do it in that sort of mode. So I thought it was better to work in a mode where I could give students feedback in a group setting using some interactive tools, where they’re all getting feedback at once. It was the only way I could see handling a group that large. If I was trying to do it as an online class, it would be effectively more in the form of a MOOC with very little interaction, either among the students or between me and the students.

Rebecca: One of the things that we both talked about before we started recording was how we both used a flipped classroom model to help with our synchronous session. So can you talk a little bit about how you did that and what students were doing outside of class.

John: This is actually, in many ways, similar to what I had done in a face-to-face class. Before each class, students would have some readings to work through. And I use the Lumen Learning Waymaker package, which is basically taking materials from a textbook, combining it with interactive multimedia, where they got to shift demand and supply curves and other curves around and see how they responded when they change parameters. And they read a bit in that online text and then they would work through some problems on it where they were allowed multiple attempts at those problems. I also created some videos with embedded questions that were at a somewhat higher level than the textbook readings, which was a little bit more challenging. And they were given unlimited attempts to work through those videos with the questions. And they also, outside of class, participated in discussion boards, where I asked them to relate what they were learning to things in the world around them, in their own lives and their own experiences.

Rebecca: …nice little inclusive teaching practice right there, right? …connecting students with their experience and making it relevant to them.

John: Right, because we know that students learn things most effectively when it has some salience, when they see the relevance to their life.

Rebecca: And the waymaker package, if I remember correctly, had some quizzing and stuff associated with that, and unlimited attempts, a version of retrieval practice there.

John: It’s a mix of things with unlimited attempts and limited attempts. So, the microeconomics Waymaker package is designed, and all of their Waymaker packages, for that matter, are designed, is that they start with a list of broad learning objectives. And they break it down at each module level to sub objectives. And they break those down into sub modules. So, in what would have been the equivalent of a chapter of a textbook, there’s usually two to four sub modules on particular aspects of that. And students work through that. And embedded in it, they have some review questions, some practice questions. And those they can take an unlimited number of times at any point in the course. Once they complete the module, they have a module quiz where they are limited to only two attempts at it. But they’re getting feedback on what they did well. And what they didn’t do well. It’s automatically color coded to indicate whether they mastered the material in one of the blocks of content in there. And then, if they take the module quiz, it will give them feedback on what areas they did well, and what areas they need to work at more. And they’re being directed back to the areas that they need to review. And there, they do have unlimited practice opportunities. And the other thing I did is I created my own videos that focused primarily on the topics that students generally find the most challenging. And in economics, that’s generally with either applications involving math or involving graphs. It was one module a week, and I would take the topics that I know, from past experience, they were likely to have the most problems with, I’d create my own videos with that. And I was using PlayPosit, which allows you to embed questions in there. Most of those videos I created were between five and 12 minutes in length. They would watch the videos and answer questions as they were going. And if they got one of the questions wrong, they could go back and replay that portion of the video and then try it again. And they were given unlimited opportunities for that.

Rebecca: I think you mentioned students really loved those opportunities.

John: At the end of the class, I gave them a Jamboard, which I know is something you’ve used more regularly, asking them what worked well. And there was very much universal agreement on the PlayPosit, as well as on the Waymaker aspects of the course. They really liked the fact that there were practice activities embedded right in their textbook, and that they could go back and try things over and over again until they mastered it. And it was giving them feedback on whether they had, in fact, attained mastery at every step. And it was a nice visual indication of what they’ve learned and what they still needed to work on more.

Rebecca: Excellent.

John: What did you do in your asynchronous components of your class?

Rebecca: Well, the balance of my classes, as I mentioned before, is a little wonky in that we’re supposed to spend more time in class and less time out. So asynchronously, I did a lot of independent stuff that students were not necessarily doing collaboratively. So this is where I had lecture videos that are recorded that were about the topics that they were going to be working on or introduce the component of the project that they were going to be doing. And then they also were completing things like LinkedIn Learning tutorials. And we also have access to D-Q University, which is a set of tutorials for accessibility, and teaches accessibility. So I took advantage of that package as well. And largely they were completing those kinds of tutorials, both of those have exercise files and that kind of thing that they can follow along with. They get little certificates. When they’re done completing there’s little quiz questions and stuff. So they were doing a lot of that kind of work asynchronously. They were also using Slack to communicate with their teams for independent things that they were working on that they needed to communicate out to teams when they were working on projects together. And I also use Slack as a place to have discussion. So like you, I had discussion questions that tried to make what we were talking about relevant. We were exploring design, specifically like web design and how they interacted as a consumer versus how they would interact as a maker and did a lot of observational studies. We also did some discussion boards that were really about design activities and things that got students off the computer. So they were just documenting what they did off-screen, offline. So things like listening to a podcast so that they didn’t have to be staring at a screen and what their takeaways were. They attended virtual conferences, which I guess was still on-screen, and did some sketching, like paper prototyping and some other methods that we like to encourage our students to do, just to kind of help balance the screen time a little bit for students. So that’s largely what they were doing asynchronously.

John: Were you having them submit some copies of that work in some way, or were they just reflecting on the work that they had done?

Rebecca: The little non screen activities were documented in a discussion, essentially, that we were holding on Slack, and then tutorials and things, they were just submitting their completed certificates. And so I broke down those LinkedIn Learning courses and things over multiple weeks. So they didn’t really submit those certificates until they were completed. But they were doing a little bit by little bit, but if they didn’t do the tutorials, they wouldn’t be able to do the projects or the actual work that we were doing of the class. So it was pretty important that they were doing those components outside of class.

John: Once your students were in class, what did you have them do in a typical class session?

Rebecca: The two classes I was teaching I handled a bit differently because of just the sheer volume of students in the bigger class, which was 25 students that were working on projects. They were working on collaborative projects, in teams of three, for the most part. And so what we would often do is show-and-tell’s or critiques in small groups. So let’s say there was two or three teams together that we would do a little critique with in a breakout room, while other teams were meeting and collaborating. We would also do things like come together to answer questions about things that they were working on, troubleshoot or whatever, and then go work on projects in breakouts for a bit. And then we’ll come back at a scheduled time. I also did one-on-one meetings with students during class time. So I’d set up things like a quiet work breakout room or the chatty breakout room. And students would pick the place that they wanted to go while they were working on projects. And then I would meet with them individually for critique, and often a lot of code troubleshooting is a lot of what I spend synchronous time doing. And students sometimes met with my TA to do the same thing, and with our small groups. I also did a lot of design challenges. And students really liked those and would like to do more to hold them accountable for the kind of material that they were learning outside of class or being introduced to outside of class in a low-stakes environment to test it out with some peers and troubleshoot. So I would pose a little design problem. And then they’d work in a small group to work on that problem in a very tight amount of time. They might spend 30 minutes… my classes are three hours long… or an hour, and then we’d come back and show them off or talk about different things. And I tried to make those design challenges fun and entertaining. So one of the first things we did, which worked really well to start gelling their teams that they were with the whole semester was designing an emoji for Slack that they used for their team. And they loved that assignment. It was partly about working at a small size, and so it was tied to some of the curriculum that we were doing, but it was fun. So they did that in a small team and then had to implement it. Later on in the semester, we did things like a 404 error page for their projects, which were just kind of entertaining. We tried to make them amusing, so that if you landed on a page, it was a good user experience. So things that maybe wouldn’t typically work on in one of my classes that were a little bit more fun, but really were emphasizing the technical and conceptual things that we were working on. The other thing that we use synchronous time for is I took advantage of our virtual platform, and I brought in alumni multiple times, and local designers multiple times and did little Q and A’s with them. Not every week, but every few weeks, or every couple weeks, I would bring in a designer for a 30-minute session. They’d introduce their work. And then students did a Q&A with them, which students really loved. And it broke up our time a bit and really gave them something special that maybe we didn’t always do in a face-to-face class that made the synchronous environment kind of special.

John: Excellent. That is a nice opportunity provided by Zoom that actually could work in the classroom too. But I think many of us just hadn’t really considered it so much. It doesn’t really matter where you are when you’re teaching in this sort of synchronous environment. So it’s very easy to bring in guest speakers and it’s something we’ve probably should have been doing more of in the past, but I think many of us will be doing more in the future.

Rebecca: So John, how did you use your synchronous time?

John: I had told students before each class session, what specific topics we’d be working on. And then most of the class time was spent asking him a series of problems of progressively higher levels of challenge. I basically adopted Eric Mazur’s clicker strategy of trying to find challenging questions where roughly half the class will get it wrong the first time and then letting them meet (in this case, I had the meet in breakout rooms), discussing it and coming back and voting again on it. And generally, you’d see a fairly significant increase in the performance after they’ve had that chance to engage in peer discussion. And that’s where a lot of the learning seems to happen when clickers are being used. I used iClicker. The only difference is students could not use a physical radio frequency clicker because they have a range of a couple 100 meters and students were spread out all over the world, I had one student in Egypt, I had students in South America and students spread throughout the country this time. So they needed to use either their laptop or a mobile device in order to do that. We discussed it as a whole class after they come back from the breakout rooms. And then I’d asked them to explain their choices. I generally have them use chat, and then I’d go through and correct any misperceptions they’d have. And I try to guide them to the correct answer by asking them questions, and letting them see for themselves why some of the answers were right, and some of them were wrong. And generally, that’s how we spent many of our classes. Initially, I was also using Kahoot! from time to time. They enjoyed Kahoot!, but I noticed a bit of a drop off when we were doing the Kahoot! sessions, because those were not graded. And with the clicker questions, they were being graded, and that tended to receive a somewhat higher level of interest. It was very low stakes, they got a certain number of points for an incorrect answer on either attempt, and they got a bit more points when they answered the question correctly. And initially, I was giving him three points for an incorrect answer, and five for a correct one. And they asked it perhaps that could be bumped up, because some of the questions were so challenging. And I did raise it. So they ended up getting four points for any answer, and five points for a correct answer. So it is extremely low stakes. So I tried to do a lot of retrieval practice in the class, where it started from essentially no stakes with the embedded questions in the reading, then it ramped up to in class applications of this, where they still get 80%, even if they got it wrong, but they had another chance to get it correct. And then they took that module quiz, and even there, they had two attempts at it. So if they made mistakes, they had lots of resources they could go back to and work on it. So I tried to set it up and provide them with many pathways to attain mastery of the content, and to encourage a growth mindset and to encourage them to recognize that people make mistakes when they’re learning and that there’s a lot of benefit from having those mistakes as part of your learning process. There’s a lot of research that shows that we learn things much more deepl if we get them wrong, when we first try it, we’re much more likely to remember it later on, then if we happen to get it correct, initially. In that case, we’re much more likely to forget it a bit later. And that was a bit of a challenge for students. But I think they eventually appreciated the fact that everything was fairly low stakes.

Rebecca: I think I’m seeing some themes in the things that, although we’re teaching very different classes in very different contexts, there’s some real big themes about how we’re using our synchronous time, and even how we’re using our asynchronous time. And so there’s an emphasis on peer interaction and establishing those peer networks, really enforcing or reinforcing things and dealing with muddy points. And then also just providing the encouragement and support like that low-stakes environment or trying to foster a growth mindset. So in my classes, I did the same thing. I was doing peer group work and trying to really get them to collaborate and troubleshoot together and they love that that… that was really valuable. I spent time doing live demos and troubleshooting, when there was a really troublesome technical component or something that they were trying to do that a lot of them were having trouble with, that they could ask me live questions. So that same muddy point kind of thing that you were getting to in what you were discussing. And then, finally, the growth mindset that you started bringing up, I’d also tried to do and, although I didn’t have a lot of low-stakes testing, or something like that, I set my projects up so they were done in sprints. So a long full-semester project was broken into multiple two-week sprints, where they would work on something, get feedback, and then could revisit whatever they did, and then add a new component to it. And so I did that throughout the whole semester. So there was a bit of retrieval practice, a bit of spaced practice in there, and certainly some fostering a growth mindset and the idea that you make mistakes and that’s how you learn. And I spent a lot of time… I don’t know if you experienced this too, John… but I experienced a lot of time in synchronous and saying like, “You can do this. It’ll be okay. And this is how the learning experience works.”

John: And I did have to do a lot of that, especially in the first few weeks of the semester, because they were not used to a flipped class environment. And they were not used to this notion of making mistakes and learning from mistakes as part of your learning process. Because most of them have come up through their elementary and secondary school system thinking that they need to memorize some things and reproduce it on exams. And they do well if they get high scores, and they don’t make mistakes. And that’s just not how we learn in general. And it was important, I think, to help remind them of that. Another aspect of the flipped class environment that we’re both using is that we let students learn some of the basic skills, the easy things that they can learn pretty easily on their own, from other resources. And we’re trying to focus our class time using essentially a just-in-time teaching approach where you focus on the things that students always have trouble. In a traditional classroom environment, what normally happens is students will learn the easy stuff in class where faculty will lecture them on basic definitions and basic concepts. And then it all makes a lot of sense until students try to apply it. And they try to apply it typically in assignments outside of class, or in high-stakes exams. And it’s much more productive if the students use the time outside of class to master those basic concepts. And then we hold them accountable for having done that somehow in class. And then we give them assistance on the things that they find challenging when they need it. Not after they’ve had that experience of a more high-stakes assessment in some way.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think what I found or that students really shared with me that was something that they really appreciated was that there was a lot of structured time to work on those difficult problems in class. This is true of my face-to-face classes too, but even maybe more so in this online environment where students were having a really hard time managing their time. I would allow time to work on a project during class… it was scheduled, but then there was a check in point later on in the day. You wouldn’t want to spend three hours staring at a screen on Zoom, like this makes no sense. So I certainly did not do that. And I don’t want anyone to think that I did that. But, I would do things like “Okay, we’re going to check in at 9:30. And then we’re going to do a little activity together. And then you’re going to have some work time to work on X. And then we’re going to come back at 11. And you’re going to show me what you did. And then we’re going to have a little discussion or do another little activity, and then we’re gonna come back again at 12.” And we would have a schedule where there was time to kind of come back. What I found is, over time, students often wouldn’t actually get off of Zoom. They would just turn their cameras off and their microphones off. And I would do the same if it was like a work time. And then when we all came back on, a lot of students would turn the media back on. That said, I, of course did not require that depending on where students were, I certainly had students that were in environments where they couldn’t turn their cameras on, or had really poor internet connections, we adjusted as necessary there, and we had a way to communicate in a much more low-tech fashion using Slack during class time. So if something happened with someone’s internet connection, or whatever, they could still stay connected with us and what we’re doing.

John: How did you assess student learning in your class?

Rebecca: My classes are all project based. So the majority of grades are built on projects, not entirely, we had discussion boards, and I had some collaboration things that they were doing, and they were evaluated on those things as well. But projects were the significant piece of the puzzle. And the way that I graded them was really just providing feedback about the kinds of things I was going to ultimately grade very regularly throughout the semester. So every couple of weeks, they were getting feedback on their code for my web class, for example, feedback on their design, feedback on their writing, not a specific grade, necessarily, but feedback on all of those elements that were going to go into the final project. And then the ability to revise all of those again and again and again and continue to get feedback on those.

John: Did you have your students engaged in any reflective tasks?

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s a really great question, John. I had reflection built in two ways. So at the end of each sprint, or kind of module in my class, they were working on two projects at the same time throughout the semester, so they’d work kind of two weeks on one project, two weeks on the next project and cycle back… that was so that I had time to give them feedback regularly. So that was part of my structure. But at the end of one of those modules, I had a reflection activity that I implemented using a Google form. So a few different prompts to think about what they got out of that sprint, goals for their next sprint, that kind of thing. And then I also had some big group reflections at different moments during the semester, I had one at the beginning, and a couple in the middle and one at the end. And I use Jamboard for that, which is a Google suite tool that has sticky notes, and is the same kind of way that you might brainstorm. So I use it as a way to collect reflections in sticky note form, essentially, virtually. And I would have a reflection question for folks to respond to or a couple of different boards with different kinds of questions. In the beginning, we did something called “hopes and fears,” which is something I’ve talked about before… setting up the class like, what are they hopeful that they’re going to get out of a collaborative project? What are they scared about? We find out that like, all the teams have the same hopes and fears. During the middle of the semester, what are some of the big takeaways that you’ve had? What are some things that you want to work on? What are some things that you’d like to see changed about the class and various themes bubble up on that. And then at the end of the semester, I asked questions like, “What was your biggest takeaway? What was the thing you were surprised that you learned? What is one recommendation of something you would change in this semester?” and “What is something that you want to continue learning?” and I got really useful feedback on what to change about the class but also, some really great themes bubbled up across the class, which really results in like kind of three or four things for each of those questions, which was a nice way to wrap up the end of the class and summarize for students after they completed that task. And one thing that I like about the Jamboard is that it actually ends up being anonymous. You can see people while they’re working on it, but it doesn’t keep a name with a sticky, ultimately.

John: So you can see who’s active in the board, but you don’t see who is writing which note.

Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. So that worked really well for me. How about you, John, were you able to build in reflection? I know you have such a big class. So it can be tricky.

John: I wasn’t able to do as much of that with my large section. But I did have them do that, to some extent in their discussions. For one discussion forum in both classes, I had them use a tool called Packback, which uses artificial intelligence to give students some feedback as they’re writing their prompts. And each week, students had to post a question related to that week’s material and they had to respond to at least a couple other people. But one of the nice things about Packback is it will check the cognitive level of the posts, it will give them some feedback in terms of grammar, it will also do a little bit of checking to see if the material has previously been posted. And it gives students some feedback, encouraging them to say more than “I agree.” And it also encourages them to document sources and to provide resources or references for the arguments they provide. And they get a score on that. So it takes a lot of the evaluation of that away. And so I monitored all of that. But it was something that seemed to function pretty well, just by the interaction between the users and that system. I haven’t really mentioned much about what I did in my online class. My online class uses many of the tools, but obviously, I couldn’t do synchronous, because that class is fully asynchronous. I couldn’t do the same type of instruction. But I had students do two other things in that class that provided opportunities for reflection, one of which was I had them work in a metacognitive cafe, low-stakes discussion forum, where they reflected on what they were learning and the learning process. And that gave them another way of making connections to their learning and reflecting on how well they were learning materials and what barriers they were facing, and also sharing effective learning strategies with each other. They were given some readings each week, generally on research-based learning practices as a primer for many of those discussions… others, they were just reflecting on what they’ve learned and how it might be useful in their life to tie it back to themselves. But the other thing I had students do is work on two podcast projects in that class. And in those they were taking what they were learning and making reflections about how that connected to the world around them. Many of them ended up being related to COVID and pandemics, but they were making some really good connections, and they were getting a chance to see how the material they were learning had some relevance in their own lives. And a lot of that came out in some of the things they were discussing in their podcasts. And they also did use Jamboard once at the very end of the term. But I also use Google forms a few times to have them reflect on the process of what was working, what wasn’t working in the class and what was working and what was not working in their own learning processes and what I can do and what they could do to help them learn more effectively.

Rebecca: I don’t know about you, but I was really surprised at how well synchronous learning actually went for me. I had some technical difficulties early on with my internet connection. It took me a while, but I got around to fixing that problem by hardwiring my internet and resolving some of those things. But I felt just as connected to my students as I would normally. I had a lot of interactions. And in some ways, I was able to facilitate those interactions a little more equitably online, because it wasn’t just the person who came to nudge me and stand in line and be the next person. Instead, I could really coordinate using waiting rooms and breakout rooms and really give everybody a chance to have one-on-one interactions with me, which I really appreciated. And I really did get to know all of my students quite well, which I was a little bit surprised about. And then, in an area where it’s really technicalaAnd we’re doing a lot of coding and things on screen, being able to share screens and take control of another person’s computer to fix things or show them how to do something was incredibly valuable. We use some of those kinds of tools in person. But it actually was, I think, in some cases more effective using this particular tool. So I was kind of surprised at how well some things worked. And I think that even when things go back to face to face, there’s definitely some components here that I would keep.

John: I’d agree. And I think students were amazed at how well some of those tools work. When in breakout rooms, they would be using the whiteboard features, they would be sharing screens, they’d be making the case, they’d be drawing on the screens, and that was something that would be much harder to do in a face-to-face environment. Initially, at the beginning of the class, I had some issues with chat being kind of flooded with irrelevant material, and I had to clamp down on that a little bit. But within a couple of weeks, they started actually using it very productively, and it provided a voice for all students, even those quiet students who would have otherwise sat in the back of this large lecture hall. They were able to type something in chat, after thinking about what they wanted to say before doing it, without being concerned about interrupting the discussion that was going on. And I think that was really helpful. And when I taught large classes with three to 400 students, there’s almost always 3 to 10 Students who have trouble not having side conversations when there’s other activities going on. And that mute option is kind of a nice feature and the ability to set their microphones so they’re all muted unless they choose to unmute… to have the default being muted until people click the unmute option… made it really easy. And I was amazed at how quickly they adjusted to muting and unmuting. By the end of the term there was maybe only once or twice a class where a family member or someone else would walk into the room and start talking. And then they’d remember, they had to mute their mics, and it was very rare. In a class that large, I was impressed by it… and working with students one on one, during office hours, it was so much easier to have students just share the screen and show you exactly what their problems were then to correspond with them with email, or even have them boot up their computer or you try to find what they were talking about when they came to your office. It was just much more efficient.

Rebecca: Yeah, I could actually see it. You can Zoom in, you can see what they’re talking about. I also found, and I was really floored, in this last week of classes, students were doing their final presentations,at how well they did develop facility with these tools. They’ve developed a lot of fluency in the kinds of tools that are actually very relevant to my particular discipline. It’s relevant to many disciplines. But designers use these tools all the time when they’re working with clients. And so it was amazing to me that we got through 15 presentations so efficiently. We didn’t wait for anybody to share their screen. They just knew what they needed to prepare, had it ready, they started developing slide decks really effectively, and could just do the things that they needed to do really efficiently. One of the last things I said to my class was like “I’m so proud of you just being able to do that. We didn’t have to wait for anybody today. That was amazing.” And so maybe a little bit of a blessing in disguise, you hate saying like, “Oh, the plague is such a great thing.” But they really did develop some useful skills and tools and they became more effective communicators. That was something that a lot of students reflected on and things that they didn’t expect to learn is how much better they became collaborators and just communicators generally… not just in person, like through Zoom or in text… like through chat in Slack.

John: Video conferencing is likely to be a part of their lives in the foreseeable future, especially now that everyone has adapted tp this mode, it’s very useful for them to learn how to use that efficiently. The one thing I do miss though, is seeing their faces in person and recognizing them. One concern that I have is, I’m hoping to be back on campus in the fall, there may be students that I work with who interact with me regularly, whose voice I would recognize or whose name I would recognize on the screen, but whose face I just wouldn’t recognize because a very large proportion of students just didn’t feel comfortable having their cameras on regularly, and I understand that. We’ve got a lot of students living in crowded living quarters or working with very poor network connections. But I do miss actually physically seeing them. And I had my last class session earlier today. And I encouraged them to stop by in the fall and just say hello.

Rebecca: Yeah, I mean, I agree that the physicality is certainly something that’s missing. But it was amazing to me how connected I still felt to all of the students at the end of the semester. And I think that they felt connected to each other too and they verbalized that, and also wrote that in their Jamboard reflection. So although there’s much to be improved, given this was the first time out and an experiment in many ways. I’m really thankful that I read Flower Darby’s book about Small Teaching Online because that actually informed a lot of my practices, even though it was synchronous, and a lot of her material was about asynchronous learning. It really did help me remind myself of things that I already knew that I needed to do, but to kind of make a checklist of things that I definitely needed to do as I was rethinking my classes for the fall. So thanks for chatting with me, John.

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

Rebecca: I am sitting down to reflect on what worked and what didn’t work, to try to troubleshoot some things for the spring. And I’m teaching a class that’s brand new to our curriculum for the first time in the spring. And so we’re developing it for online synchronous, although ultimately, it’ll probably be a face-to-face class. We’ve had to re-conceptualize some of the things that we were going to do because of the technology limitations that students may have. If they’re online, we’re expecting that we might have a lot of students who are relying on their phones versus software and having access to high-end software packages or computers that can run them. So we’ve had to rethink things. But I’m pretty excited about being able to experiment with my students with all kinds of technology in the spring, but it’s definitely a puzzle that I’m currently starting to work on. How about you, John?

John: Well, I still have a lot of grading to do. But once that is done, one of the things I’m going to be doing is converting a textbook I had written in econometrics to a Pressbooks site, which will be a lot of conversion because it’s originally in LaTex, a typesetting language used for mathematical typing and I’m planning to create a lot of videos, I’m hoping to get many of them done over the break so that I’m not spending 15 or 20 hours a week creating videos as I was all fall. And I’m hoping to get a little bit further ahead of the semester this time, so I’m not doing as much preparation at the last moment. And we’re both going to be working on putting together a series of workshops in January for our faculty to help people prepare for whatever comes at them this spring

Rebecca: We’re just going to be really busy.[LAUGHTER]

John: I’ve never spent as many hours working on my classes as I have this semester.

Rebecca: I agree. There was a lot of startup costs converting to this modality, but I’m hoping a lot of that stuff I’ll be able to keep and reuse moving forward. Thanks, John. Always nice talking to you, John. We chat all the time. But it’s nice to sometimes hear about some of the thought process and things behind some of the decisions that you’ve made in your classes. So it was really nice to actually hear about how you did some of that stuff this semester. So thanks.

John: And I also appreciate hearing more about what you’ve been doing in your classes. We spend most of our time on podcasts talking to our guests and only mentioning little snippets of what we’ve been doing ourselves.

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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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167. Supporting Persistence

Some students thrive in online courses and some students struggle. In this episode, Dr. Becky Cottrell joins us discuss the impact of student characteristics and circumstances on their success in online courses. We also discuss strategies that we can employ in our online classes to help all of our students be more successful. Becky is the online and hybrid course development analyst in the social work department at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Show Notes

  • Tinto, V. (1993). Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Tinto, V. (1997). Classrooms as communities: Exploring the educational character of student persistence. The Journal of Higher Education, 68(6), 599–623.

Transcript

John: Some students thrive in online courses and some students struggle. In this episode, we discuss the impact of student characteristics and circumstances on their success in online courses. We also examine strategies that we can employ in our online classes to help all of our students be more successful.

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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 guest today is Dr. Becky Cottrell. Becky is the online and hybrid course development analyst in the social work department at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Welcome, Becky.

Becky: Thanks for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Becky: I’m drinking water today.

John: And I am drinking ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: And I’ve gotten seasonal with my Christmas tea today.

John: I’ve got to bring that back. I’ve got a lot of it up in the office, along with some cinnamon sticks.

Rebecca: I beat you, John, I beat you this time. [LAUGHTER]

John: I saw your presentation at the OLC Accelerate conference, where you were talking about the research you’ve done on student outcomes in online and face-to-face classes at an Hispanic serving institution. Could you give us an overview of what prompted your interest in the topic, first?

Becky: Absolutely. I have been teaching online for more than six years. And I started working with a number of colleagues who really didn’t think that you could teach Spanish online. And I took that as a challenge and really wanted to teach a really great online Spanish class. And from there, it got me wondering who is taking online classes? I noticed a really big difference between my face-to-face students and my online students. And I wanted to know more about who they were and how they were doing in those classes. And combining that with the fact that we have seen an increase in student enrollments in online classes at our institution and around the country over the last many years, even before COVID, it really seemed important to me to know how students are doing in their online classes and what their grades are and what their outcomes were.

John: And that research becomes even more important when we put it in the context of COVID with the rapid shift online. Many people who were avoiding online instruction like the plague, have suddenly been forced to change their teaching modality.

Rebecca: …due to the plague. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, we can no longer say “avoiding it like the plague” anymore.

Becky: And students are complaining now and you hear students who don’t want to pay Harvard tuition rates for a substandard educational experience in an online class. But, are those experiences really substandard? I really want to know that.

Rebecca: That’s definitely a great question and a really relevant one right now.

John: So, this was your dissertation research?

Becky: It was. So, I just finished my PhD in Curriculum and Instruction. So I did a lot of research about what are student outcomes and what do they look like with different types of curriculum?

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about where your study was done?

Becky: Absolutely. So we use a pseudonym for the site. So, Russell University. It’s an urban university in the Mountain West and a very non-traditional population. So, lots of older students, lots of first generation students, veterans, working students, more students who are married… helping raise families. So, not your typical just-out-of-high-school students. It’s an Hispanic serving institution, and has been for the last few years.

John: How large was the sample that you worked with?

Becky: I started looking at every class that had online and face-to-face enrollments over two academic years, and at a large institution that ended up with 156,000 total course enrollments. But the statistical method that I was using doesn’t let one student be in the treatment group and the control group. So we had to aggregate students. And so I aggregated them down. There ended up being 28,000 students in the study. And from there, I just wanted to look at the ones who were taking mostly online classes, or mostly face-to-face classes. So those who were in that top 25% or bottom 25%, in terms of online enrollment, ended up being 7765 students over the course of two years.

John: That’s a nice sized sample. In many institutions, you have some students who are only online students, some students are only face-to-face. It sounds like there was a bit of a continuum there.

Becky: Certainly there were some who were all online or all face-to-face. It wasn’t something that I specifically looked at in my study, so I can’t pull out specific numbers of that. But yes, we definitely had students in the study who were entirely online and entirely face-to-face.

John: In terms of the online classes, were they developed with the assistance of instructional designers?

Becky: That’s a really interesting question. And the answer basically, is I have no idea. It wasn’t one of the things that I looked at in the study, I was looking more at student characteristics than course characteristics. That said, Russell University has a really robust online offering. Over the last 20 years, they have increased their online course offerings a great deal, and particularly in the last five years have really ramped up their efforts to develop courses and have really excellent quality matters certified courses at the university. That doesn’t mean that all of our courses meet that standard. But it has been an institutional goal and one of the things that they’ve worked on. but I was just looking at student demographics when I was looking at the study. Partly that’s hard because we have students who are taking maybe 20 different classes, and so they could have had one or two that were developed through an instructional designer, but the others may not have been. So, no real way of knowing.

John: The outcome you were looking at specifically was student success in the course?

Becky: Yes, so I measured student success in two different ways. The first way was looking at student grades, which we measured by course GPAs that was aggregated based on their course enrollments. And the other one was withdrawal rate. So, what was their percentage of withdrawals during the courses that they were taking during the two-year sample?

John: One of the things I found really interesting about your study is that you use a methodology that took into account sample selection in a way that so many education studies don’t. And you suggested the reason for that, I think, when you said that your online students were quite a bit different than your face-to-face students. Could we talk a little bit about that issue of sample selection in studies of this nature?

Becky: Absolutely. This is a really common problem in educational research, that you have something called selection bias. And I think that those of us who teach are aware that our students who enroll in 8 am classes are really different than the students who enroll in 2 pm classes. And we see some of those similar things with online classes versus face-to-face classes. It’s just a really different group and personality of those students. And what happens is students get to sign up for their own classes. There’s nobody randomly controlling them into different classes. They pick the ones that they want with the teachers that they want at the times that they want and in the course modality that they want. And we don’t know why. So that’s part of what I wanted to look at in this research is: what students are enrolling in online classes and what students are enrolling in face-to-face and why? Is there a balance between the groups? Are they really similar? Or are they really different? And so what I found was that there are different students who are enrolling in online classes versus face-to-face classes, which is not unexpected. As an example here, we found that students who are working full time were more likely to take online classes, which makes sense, they need to take the online classes because it fits better with their schedule and has greater flexibility to match their work schedule. But at the same time, what impact does that have on course outcomes? Does it mean that they are really motivated because they have a full-time job, so they’re going to get better course grades? Or does it mean that they are working full time and they’re managing a family and if something comes up, they’re going to put their schoolwork to the side because other things are more important. So selection bias, and the way that students self selected to classes, really changes how they might perform in those classes. Which brings us to that question of are those student course outcomes based on the online course modality? Or are they based on the characteristics that made students choose the online course modality?

John: When you didn’t control for student characteristics, what did you find in terms of comparing the outcomes in online classes with face-to-face classes?

Becky: One of the things that was really interesting here is that those students who were taking 75%, or more online classes actually had significantly better grades in their online classes than they did in face-to-face classes. So the online course GPA for those students taking 75% or more online classes was 2.55. And for those taking face-to-face classes was only 2.34. So definitely a significant difference and higher grades in online classes, which is not what I was expecting. Then, with regard to withdrawal rates, we had totally different results, which is that there was no significant difference in withdrawal rates among the two groups before balancing for those 15 different student characteristics.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what those 15 characteristics were and how you chose those?

Becky: Absolutely. I used Tinto’s student integration model to look at what characteristics he felt contributed to student success and persistence in the institution. So, I ended up with 15, different personal characteristics related to students. So, a lot of demographic characteristics: age, race, gender, those sorts of issues. We tried to get academic performance through GPA, transfer status, transfer GPA, ACT scores, SAT scores, those sorts of things. We also tried to determine institutional commitment through if they had a declared major. And the one area that we would have liked to have more, but wasn’t available in an institutional data set, was something related to like computer literacy and other skills that were related to performance in an online class, but it just wasn’t something that was available. So 15 different characteristics, including those demographics, academics, and just connection to the institution.

John: So you were using a nearest neighbor matching with, I believe, a two-to-one ratio?

Becky: Yeah.

John: Could you describe that, perhaps, for our listeners?

Becky: Absolutely.

Rebecca: …for people like me that have no idea what that even means? [LAUGHTER]

Becky: So the methodology that I used was kind of an interesting statistical method called the propensity score analysis. And basically what a propensity score analysis does is matches people who are in the treatment group with people who are in the control group. So it creates kind of an artificial match to say this is now one person and what would have happened if they’d been in treatment or if they’d been in control. So it takes all of those characteristics and assigns them a score, and from there can divvy them up and say they are likely to be in treatment or control and it recreates those groups. And that matching allows them to determine the probability of them being in treatment or control groups, which essentially controls for the characteristics that you’ve loaded into the model.

John: To simplify it a bit, you’re comparing people who are similar in characteristics and examining the outcomes when adjusting for those characteristics.?

Becky: That is a great explanation… very concise. And the idea of the nearest neighbor two-to-one matching is basically that for each person who’s in the online class, we found two matching people in the control group. So we tried to keep as many students as possible in the final outcome.

John: And there have been at least some studies that are found one-to-one or two-to-one gives you the best estimates with the least amount of bias from that procedure..

Becky: Absolutely, yes. When there’s a one-to-one match, you get a lot better balance, because you can obviously find a matching student in the online or the face-to-face class that is the best fit. But when you start matching more students, it’s not quite as good of a fit, so you don’t deal with balance quite as well. And speaking of balance, I’m going to jump in and tell you about this right now, just because I think that’s interesting, and one of the great parts about propensity scores is this idea that the first thing that a propensity score model does is say, “Are these groups the same? Are your online groups the same as the face-to-face group?” And what we found out is that they aren’t. And I thought this was a really interesting piece of my research. So they were totally different, different enrollment patterns. and there were about eight characteristics that were significantly different. And this is where I think it’s so fascinating. So we had more part-time students in the online classes… not surprising… but they had higher ACT scores, more transfer students, more credits taken, they were more experienced students, they had higher GPAs, they were more likely to have a declared major and they were all older. So the better students were taking online classes, which is so fascinating to me, and explains ultimately, why we had higher course grades in our baseline data. Students who are better students were taking online classes, where those beginning students who were younger, who had less experience, were taking the face-to-face classes. So I just thought that was fascinating, that it was imbalanced. But it really gave a good picture as to why we were getting the outcomes we were at the institution.

Rebecca: It’ll be interesting to have some follow up studies related to COVID-19 around those ideas, because just anecdotally, students who are newer to being online, or just newer college students, have struggled quite a bit with online learning or complained about it, or just don’t know how to manage their time and those kinds of things. And it seems related to the kinds of findings that you’ve had.

Becky: Absolutely. And I think across the country, we’re seeing that those upperclassmen stay enrolled and are succeeding through these COVID transition. But it’s the underclassmen who are taking a gap year or who are failing out of classes. So I think that these results speak to that, that those students maybe aren’t prepared for an online class,

John: What happened to your results in terms of student success, when you corrected for the sample selection?

Becky: This is so fascinating. After controlling for that balance, we had originally had, in our baseline data, better scores, better course grades in online classes, and after controlling for those characteristics, there was no significant difference in course grades between online and face-to-face courses, which is awesome, it’s really exciting to know that maybe we’re doing something right. And so that was really exciting. But, at the same time, our baseline data had said that there was a non-significant difference in withdrawal rates. But after controlling, we found that there was a significant increase in withdrawal rates, and online classes had higher withdrawal rates, by about 2%, than face-to-face classes.

John: I think that’s a fairly common result, that online students often have much higher withdrawal rates than face-to-face classes.

Becky: Right. The grades are really promising. And I’m glad to know that those course outcomes are doing well. But when we start looking at withdrawal rates, it brings up some really interesting questions about how are we engaging students and why do we have bigger withdrawal rates in those online classes.

Rebecca: I was just going to ask if your research led you to believe anything about those results? If it was this particular characteristic or a teaching method? Or are those just new questions that we need to continue asking? [LAUGHTER]

Becky: I think they are mostly new questions that we need to continue asking. But there are some implications in the literature that I think lead us to some possibilities here. One of the big ones is that sense of community and connection in online classes, students really want to feel that, and if they don’t, they’re more likely to drop out from those classes. And so it’s definitely a consideration as we’re looking at more online classes is how are we building community? And how are we engaging with our students in that online space to make sure that they’re able to connect with their instructor and connect with other students in the class? I think that another factor that we see is who are taking these online classes: so students who are more engaged with families, they’re older, they’re working full time, therefore taking fewer classes. I think that those factors can contribute to their persistence or not in these online spaces. So, definitely some of those issues are there and we know what some of those reasons are. And I would love to do some future follow up research on what really is happening at this particular institution.

Rebecca: I know you had also mentioned high-impact practices and trying to incorporate more of those, like inviting students to do research and things. I’m wondering if we have any data on how prevalent that might actually be in online learning compared to face-to-face learning. How often are those opportunities actually there?

Becky: I totally agree. It would be so interesting to look at what are those impacts? And what is the prevalence of those high-impact practices? I think there’s a lot of research about what we can do to do better. And I think that even from this research that for my dissertation was almost obsolete by the time I defended my dissertation, because COVID happened, but one of the things that we can be doing better, and I think we have started is providing greater access to student services in those online spaces that students maybe before didn’t have access to advising, registration… they didn’t have a good way to connect with people who are on campus. And I think so many of our institutions have had to move towards a much better practice with that. When we went online for months, they had to figure out how to do that. And I think that we’ll keep that around and providing better services to students. And that will definitely help keep them enrolled in classes and keep them from stopping out and persisting at the institution.

Rebecca: Nothing like a pandemic to really force some innovation, right? [LAUGHTER]

Becky: It’s true, but it’s been so much fun. I love seeing that innovation and how we’re benefiting our students. I also love seeing a little more attention towards online teaching, We were the ugly stepchild before and now everyone is excited to learn about this new thing and how they can do it better.

John: It’s gone from being an ugly stepchild to a savior in some way.

Becky: Yeah, absolutely. Think about the last pandemic with the Spanish flu. What happened to their education at that point? We didn’t have online learning. Did they have distance education? What even happened with that?

John: If this has happened 20 years ago, it would have been a completely different experience with a lot of colleges just completely shutting down or moving to some type of correspondence class instruction.

Rebecca: Which I don’t think would have gone well. [LAUGHTER]

John: Which would not have gone very well.

Becky: No, definitely 20 years ago, I think that right now we can say we have similar course outcomes in online and face-to-face classes. But 20 years ago, I would have been one of those students who was protesting at Harvard about paying tuition for a substandard educational experience, [LAUGHTER]

John: What are some of the things that you would recommend doing to help build class community?

Becky: I’m so glad that you asked about this, because this is one of the other personal interests that I have. I’ve been working with a faculty learning community for the last two and a half years around developing instructor presence in an online class. And so I love talking about this, I think that there are a lot of ways that we can really develop connections among instructors and students, and also among students. So one of the best practices that I’ve seen is making sure that teachers have an opportunity to connect one-on-one with their students, whether that’s sending out an email a time or two during the semester, or requiring students to meet with them, at the beginning of the semester or at midterms, throughout the semester, to be able to develop that one-on-one Zoom connection to just be able to have a little bit of face time with students. But I think that works really well. So making sure that there is an opportunity to connect on a human level. When we teach online, we tend to be really text heavy and dry. And taking that human element that we love in a face-to-face class and pulling it out in an online space is so valuable for students, and really helps them to connect with each other and with their instructor. It’s one of those inclusive teaching practices that we do really well face-to-face, but is a little bit harder to do online, and if we’re intentional about it, it can happen. In terms of developing community among students, I think that as much as there’s resistance towards group work, I think that you can intentionally use it to develop community in your classes. And this isn’t just a “Hey, you should write a paper together and divide up the work,” it’s intentionally using that as a community building opportunity. And letting students know that that’s your intention is you want that to be community building. So one of the things I’ve always done in my Spanish classes is have students meet in small conversation groups once a week to have conversation practice with each other. And there’s always a little bit of resistance, and students aren’t so sure that they want to do it. But I have them fill out a survey to let me know what time they’re available. And it’s just a group of three students. They meet every week, and they have a great time talking with each other and get that oral communication practice they need. It also ends up being one of their favorite parts of the class. They develop connections with other students. And I hear all the time about students who actually meet in person and go out for coffee. I had one student who was taking a class from Florida and another student who was in Denver, and the Denver student had to go to Florida for something and stopped and went to go visit the Florida student in person, they went and hung out together. So I think there are just really interesting human personal connections that can be made. And leaving space for that to happen is so important. I think we get too focused on academics and lose those moments at the beginning or the end of a class where we spend a few minutes talking about nothing or the weather or the football game last weekend. And leaving that space in an online class and making sure that you have some space for that, really helps to develop those connections.

Rebecca: I definitely have experienced that this semester with my students who have had persistent groups all semester. They have said multiple times how helpful that has been for them, and they just did a reflection activity and almost every single student said “Oh, being in those groups was the best part…” which we never hear about group work, right? [LAUGHTER]. But they got to know each other and they had support through the class and used that as a way to help each other out with the course material.

Becky: Absolutely. I love that. It’s so amazing when students can get that connection and really work together.

John: I had a similar experience in my online class where I had students work on podcasts. And the first time they met, generally, is when they met in small groups to have these conversations and recorded them using Zoom. And they were supposed to be 5- to 10-minute podcasts, but many of them ended up being dramatically longer because, essentially, they were getting to know each other. It was kind of nice to see that sort of engagement and that interaction where they were getting to form this community. It would have been nice if they had recorded just a shorter segment of it. But I did get to listen in on some of those initial meetings. And it was an interesting experience.

Becky: And I agree, I signed my students to only speak for 30 minutes, and they only had to record 15 minutes of that. But the timer would tell me how long they’d been in and many of them would be in there for 45 minutes to an hour, sometimes an hour and a half… that they would just spend that time together, practicing and talking. And it was great. It was just fun to see that connection, that they went above and beyond what we’d asked them to do.

Rebecca: So drop out rates for something that you mentioned that your research pointed to this was one of the biggest issues that we needed to be thinking about in terms of online education. So in addition to instructor presence and helping students formulate community, do you have any other recommendations for faculty or instructors to help mitigate that or get students to stay? …to retain students?

Becky: Absolutely. So we’ve talked about access to student support services, building a community, some of those high-impact practices that we don’t always think about in online spaces is making sure that students have the ability to collaborate with faculty, like on a research project, especially at a Hispanic serving institution. It’s a culture where those connections are really important. And making sure to provide those to students so that there’s an opportunity to connect with faculty on working on something meaningful is really important. So as faculty, we can make sure that we’re selecting students, when we’re thinking about TAs, research assistants, make sure that we’re thinking about some of our online students as well and see if that might be a good fit for them. And one of the things that I also think about in terms of improving retention is this connection and relationship between the faculty and the student is so important. But in order to do that, we know our faculty are overworked and underpaid, and to make sure that there’s institutional support for faculty, is really important. And so making sure that there’s access to instructional design and pedagogical training through some of the resources available at the institution is a big deal, making sure that there is a collaborative opportunity for faculty to work together and share best practices and generally just supporting faculty. As we hold on to faculty, it gives them more bandwidth to hold on to their students. So institutional support is a really big deal to benefit our students as well.

Rebecca: And one that we can’t underscore enough when faculty are feeling really strained. [LAUGHTER]

Becky: No, absolutely not, not in 2020. And here we are. I don’t know about other institutions, but we’re being furloughed. And so we’re asked to do more and have fewer resources.

John: …while being at further risk in terms of employment risk, as well as all the health risks out there.

Becky: Oh, there’s so much going on.

John: You mentioned forming connections between faculty and students, and one way of certainly selecting students to be TAs, and so forth. But, what are some of the things instructors can do in their courses to help form those connections within online classes,

Becky: One of the things that we’ve really found that is helpful is moving away from a really static discussion board. We see a lot of classes where instructors say, ‘Tell me three things that you learned from this reading,” or “What are three of the five methods that are used to do whatever it is”. And those are really boring discussion boards and do not foster community, but asking questions that really encourage students to engage in a debate, in a conversation, and teaching them how to engage with each other appropriately and respectfully in an online space is really important. So asking them to solve problems together, asking them to work together, not shying away from difficult conversations. This election year has had a lot of challenges, and engaging with those in a student class in a way that allows them to bring in their own unique perspectives helps them to connect. Some of that might be through a discussion board. Some of it might be through a tool like Flipgrid that allows you to have students have a video discussion where they get to record a short video and then reply to each other. That really fosters that sense of connection and community in an online space. So allowing for that to happen is really important. We can move away from a boring discussion board to either a better discussion board or some of these other tools that foster community.

John: Flipgrid or VoiceThread or other similar tools offer a lot more possibilities for connection and hearing each other’s voices and hearing their instructor’s voice I think should help to create that sense of community more so than just reading text on a screen.

Becky: …and videos also. That, if we are recording videos, we can see the instructor, we can see the other students… having a face to put to a name. And having just a little bit of personal information… knowing that I smile and laugh, and I am an engaging person, I think, helps to connect with the course.

John: Humanizing the instructor is a phrase that’s often used, letting them hear you, hear your voice and your sense of humor, letting people know you as a person rather than just as the author of these words that show up on the screen all over the place is helpful.

Rebecca: …and humanizing the other students in the class. If it’s just a name, it’s really easy to not really think of that name as a person, the more you see and hear, not only as an instructor, but also fellow students, I think, can be really beneficial. So I think that students eat up the media when it’s available to them.

Becky: Absolutely.

John: And helping them make connections to their own life in their discussion. If they’re going to have discussion boards, one way of doing it effectively might be to have them make connections, where they draw on what they’re learning and make connections from their own life and experiences and share them, which also is a nice way of forming that sense of human presence in the classroom.

Becky: Absolutely. With a PhD in curriculum, I feel like I hold in my two hands two different things. So on the one hand, I have the curriculum and the course objectives and the aligned assessments and all of those things, and I think they’re so important. In my other hand, I’m holding on to the importance of people like bell hooks and Paulo Freire, and that reminder that we need to be transgressing some of these lines of our existing education and decolonizing our educational experience and humanizing it to make sure that we’re making real personal connections with the content, with the instructor. And so those are the two things that I carry with me as I’m working in my own classes in this and I’m helping faculty develop their courses is, “How do you balance those two things?” That is so hard, and I think in online classes, we do really well with the alignment and the course objectives and the assessments. And sometimes that humanizing part feels like it falls by the wayside.

John: But they’re not necessarily substitutes, they could be complementary. If you design assignments well, where they’re engaging in these authentic interactions, while achieving the learning objectives, it’s more work trying to design that, but there are some things you can do that can work fairly well.

Becky: I think there are wonderful faculty out there who are doing really great things, those are just the two things I try to always carry with me to make sure that I don’t leave one of them behind.

Rebecca: I think it’s really important to think about those two. So, it’s a nice reminder. And I think actually a nice way to wrap up the conversation, because it’s the two things to keep in mind as you move forward. Having those little takeaways at the end is always helpful. So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Becky: For me, I am really excited to dig into some of this qualitative side of things that we’ve talked about today. As I said, I love that hard quantitative research, but I’m also really interested in the humanizing element of it and that instructor presence. So I’ve been working with this faculty learning community for the last two and a half years, and we have developed an online instructor presence self-evaluation tool that we are presenting at OLC in the spring. So we’re really excited to be able to share that with some other people about how you connect with people and how we engage in our classes. So we’re excited to move forward with some of that. And just see what is happening with COVID? How has that changed things? And how might we rethink how we’re teaching online?

John: It’s just something that people would be using on a longitudinal basis to track how their classes evolved? Or is it just used in general as an instrument to share with faculty?

Becky: What we’ve intended it as is a way for people to self assess. So we didn’t want it to be a rubric. We don’t want it to be point based. We wanted it to be conversational, and a way to go in and reflect on your own teaching and consider ways that you could improve. And so absolutely, the way that we’ve designed the tool is it has a “What are my strengths? and ”What could be improved?” area on each of it. And so it would be really interesting to come back and say, you know, I did this last semester, what does that look like this semester? What am I changing? How am I improving? S o I think it absolutely could be used longitudinally.

Rebecca: That tool that you’re talking about sounds really great. So I hope we can have you back so we can talk about that in the future.

Becky: I would love to… only if I can invite a part of our faculty learning community

Rebecca: Of course.

Becky: It was a group effort. It’s one of those things that we couldn’t have done it without each other. We’ve just been in each other’s support system. And when we first found out that our institution was going online, we had a meeting scheduled for that Friday, and we talked about canceling and everyone’s like, “No, these are the people that I need.” And so we all met that Friday that we were moving online, and we haven’t seen each other since in person, but we were just that group. We’re like, “No, I need my support group.” So, I would come back and talk about it, but only if I can bring my FLC with me.

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] It sounds important to do so. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a great conversation and we look forward to hearing more research from you, Becky.

Becky: Well, awesome. Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure to visit with both of you.

John: Thanks for joining us. We’re looking forward to talking to you again.

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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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164. New Faculty in a Pandemic

Being a new faculty member at a new institution can be challenging in normal times, but also has additional hurdles during COVID-19. Most institutions begin the academic year by providing orientation activities to help new faculty learn about the institution and to meet and network with their new colleagues.  In this episode, Emily Estrada and Martin Coen join us to to compare their experiences as new faculty during a pandemic with their earlier experiences at prior institutions. Emily is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Martin is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at SUNY Oswego.

Transcript

Rebecca: Being a new faculty member at a new institution can be challenging in normal times, but also has additional hurdles during COVID-19. Most institutions begin the academic year by providing orientation activities to help new faculty learn about the institution and to meet and network with their new colleagues. In this episode, we examine how the shift to an online orientation altered the experiences for new faculty members.

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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 Emily Estrada and Martin Coen. Emily is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Martin is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at SUNY Oswego. Emily and Martin both joined the Oswego faculty this fall. Welcome, Emily and Martin.

Martin: Thanks for having us.

Emily: Thank you.

John: Our teas today are:

Martin: I’m drinking coffee.

Emily: Ooohhhh, it’s late in the day….no judgment, sorry…. [LAUGHTER] I guess that is a lot of judgment. Whoo.

Martin: I’m also drinking sparkling water, so I’ll switch between the two… and regular water, yeah.

Emily: I’m just straight up tap water.

Rebecca: I have Big Red Sun again.

John: And I have Earl Grey today.

Martin: Oh, nice. Like a good Earl Grey.

Rebecca: I’m noticing you’ve been drinking black tea later in the day these days.

John: That’s because I’ve been getting so much less sleep since March.

Rebecca: Well, you haven’t upgraded to Martin’s coffee in the late afternoon, so, I guess that’s a good sign. [LAUGHTER]

Martin: It’s a very dark roast, so there’s not a lot of caffeine in it.

Rebecca: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the experience of joining a department during the pandemic. You’ve each worked at other institutions before. So, can you talk a little bit about how joining Oswego during a pandemic is different than your experiences of joining previous faculty have been.

Emily: I think there’s some of the more obvious ways that it’s been different for me this go round. It’s challenging not having those face-to-face interactions with my new colleagues, with my new administration, and with the students, most certainly. Even though I think that SUNY Oswego has done a pretty good job helping me feel integrated and connected to at least the university and my department, the students, I feel like, I still am experiencing a pretty significant amount of disconnect. I think one of the biggest things that’s been different for me and my previous institution, because when you first start, there’s so much excitement, and there’s so much kind of fanfare surrounding that transition into the new institution, you start to feel kind of bonded to the university itself. You start to feel kind of loyal to the university brand and to the image, and you start to feel pride for being a part of this new institution. And I think that that’s been different this time for me, because there is so much disconnect and campus really is so quiet. Even though I’m working from campus a lot, it’s just not the same type of allegiance, I guess, has not been the same for me this go round.

Martin: It’s interesting, because I would say the same thing in terms of the allegiance thing. I felt the same way when I started before and now I’m feeling the same way as you here. I would say, overall, coming to SUNY Oswego was easier than my first transition, predominantly because I had learned a lot of things the first time around. First time around, I learned, you got to hound people to get things, right? So, the first time around, I was told your email address will be given to you on this day, your office will be given to this and this and this. And then when I reached out to people there to find out just various information, people would not respond to me until their contract started. That was not the case here at SUNY Oswego. I had the phone number of my department chair immediately after I had signed my contract, and essentially the person who would become my faculty mentor, I had their phone number. And so a lot of things were sorted out quite quickly. I had some difficulty with paperwork here at SUNY Oswego, getting all that sorted… people losing things, people putting in wrong information and sending my first paycheck to my address in Indiana, stuff like that. But, other than that, from like a social perspective, I’d say that things were a lot smoother. But, I think a lot of it also had to do with the fact that I’ve learned previously that you got to just hound people to get information. And so I felt very prepared. I hardly stressed me out transitioning.

Emily: Yeah. And I will say that had I been starting in this position straight out of my Ph.D. program, I think it would be a lot more challenging because, like Martin just said, and he and I have talked about this previously, it is nice, having that previous experience of starting a tenure-track position at a university in normal times, so to speak, because we kind of know what’s going to happen when we get back to that normalcy. And so, if we’re feeling less of an allegiance… and that may not be the right word, but if we’re feeling less…

John: connected?

Emily: …connected, yeah, but more in like a school spirit type sense. If we’re not necessarily feeling that school spirit right now, I know that it will come. I know it’s going to happen and that may not be the case for people who are coming straight out of their PhD programs who don’t know that that will happen.

Martin: When I started at my previous institution, I was hit with: “you need to publish, and you need to prep, like four courses.” And one of the courses was statistics, which I had never taught in my life. So, I knew, when I came to SUNY Oswego, that I needed to have all my ducks in a row, publication wise. And so over the summer, I put in a lot of work working on publications, so that in case things hit me really hard from a teaching standpoint, at SUNY Oswego, that I would be able to take that hit. And luckily, to my surprise, transitioning over because of my experience, prepping, knowing where to go for information, what strategies to follow, prepping some new courses just weren’t as challenging as I experienced it four years ago.

John: What are some of the types of things that you had to ask for that were not automatically given to you that a new faculty, perhaps, might not know to ask about?

Emily: Well, I think things related to technology, like the headset that I’m wearing right now, I didn’t want to buy it myself. I know that funds are always pretty tight in a state school system and especially given the situation that we’re in right now. And so I reached out to CTS on campus, and they were able to provide me with a headset and a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse. Also things related to different programs that I need in order to do my research.

Martin: I would agree with you though, Emily, one of the things that I really wanted to make sure I have was my email address, so that I could sign up for instructor resources at the various textbook publishers, and then also getting my hands on desk and review copies of books so that I don’t have to go and blow $300 on Amazon, just to prep my classes. When I moved to my previous institution, they didn’t give me my email address until day one. And so I had one week to prep three classes, because I had one double class and I had to find textbooks and stuff. So all this stuff I bought on Amazon Prime so that I could have it. So, in this case, I started going after: “What’s my email address? Can you hook me up with my Oswego and Blackboard?” And so I was making sure, technology wise, I had all that. And then also regarding my campus computer, I just badgered people until I got what I needed. But, I will say a lot of things came automatically a lot of things came from my department chair, Roger Guy. He would text me and say, “Hey, did you ask for this? Did you ask for that? Hey, make sure to look at this opportunity. By the way, we have these funds in our department, you should try to ask for this from this person.” So, I got a lot of help from my department chair, which is something that I did not get where I previously went straight out of grad school.

Rebecca: It’s really interesting hearing both of you talk about the transition here during a pandemic, because it wasn’t that long ago that I transitioned here, and from a different institution, and I had a very similar experience. I had to badger. But I knew to ask for certain things that I didn’t know to ask for the first time around. I knew how the system worked. So I knew who to ask for certain kinds of things. So, I had all the good technology and everything I needed up front, too. But that’s because we knew who to ask. And so it’s interesting that that really hasn’t changed. That’s just experience speaking. [LAUGHTER]

Martin: Yeah.

John: And I am still badgering people, and I’ve been here [LAUGHTER] for decades. That doesn’t always end. But, that’s really good advice for people starting to make sure that they do ask for the things that they’re going to need to be successful.

Martin: Yeah, I read this book over the summer. And essentially, one of the points that you learn from it is that don’t be embarrassed to ask questions and get the things that you feel you need to succeed. And sometimes I think people feel, especially when you’re brand new at an institution, you don’t want to be sort of a hassle or an annoyance. You don’t want to come off that way. And so I feel like some people are hesitant and just go out and ask for something. And that was one thing I learned to overcome, coming to SUNY Oswego.

Emily: I think that’s absolutely right, that it’s important to be proactive as a new faculty member. And that’s probably the case whether or not you’re starting in this insane environment or in more normal times. I also feel, though, that it’s important to recognize how problematic that can be, especially for members of certain social groups. So academia, in general, is elitist, and it is very white. And so certain people, people who may identify with those groups or with that identity, they’re going to be more comfortable with being proactive and getting their own and hounding the people and going and going until they get what they need. And I think that that is more challenging for people who are members of groups who have been historically underrepresented in the academy and so while, yes on one hand and because this is a podcast, I should make it clear, I identify as a white person and probably more importantly, I am identified by others as a white person. And so, I think in some ways, it’s easier for me as somebody who possesses that cultural capital, white cultural capital and white privilege to, feel comfortable hounding people, whereas people from other underrepresented groups along a variety of dimensions may find that more challenging.

Martin: I would agree 100% with you, I think even the fact that I’m a man, you come off more as a go getter when you’re a man badgering people about things, and it might not be the same for people of other groups.

Emily: I’m snapping, [LAUGHTER] ‘cause I really like that point. Good reflection, the’re.

Martin: Good.

John: For things where it’s not clear if you’re asking for something that it’s not clear that is generally provided, might it make sense, perhaps, to start within your department to talk to some of your colleagues that you feel comfortable with just to ask whether this is something that’s normally done? Because people are concerned about pushing for things that could cause them to be perceived as being a problem in some sense. Might that be a useful starting point before you start pursuing something too aggressively? If it’s something that’s not going to happen, might it make sense to get a feel for that before you start the badgering process?

Rebecca: I like that it’s a badgering process. [LAUGHTER]

Emily: It’s work.

Martin: Yeah, that’s how it goes. So I emailed Roger, and I was like, “Hey, I’m gonna ask you these millions of questions. Do you know who I need to go after?” And sometimes he directed me to the person who became my faculty mentor, Maggie, and other times, he directed me to Michelle, our administrative person in our department. And then otherwise, he’d be like “Reach out to this person in this department.” And so I preface it with, “Hey, I want to succeed when I get here. These are some questions I have.” And I think any relatively rational department chair wouldn’t have a problem with helping you out there if you say, “Hey, I want to succeed. And this will help me succeed…” and you just have to be honest about it, in my opinion.

Emily: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that mentorship within the department is really important. I also think that mentorship outside the department can also be really helpful. Because sometimes there are a lot of dynamics within departments. I feel very comfortable with my department, we’re smaller, and I feel comfortable voicing any concerns that I may have or asking advice. But at the same time, I think it’s important to be able to go to people that aren’t so close to home, so to speak, so that if there are awkward, uncomfortable questions, you can go to them without as much riding on it, if that makes sense.

Rebecca: I think that’s a really good point, making connections to other departments early or people just across campus, whether or not they’re in an academic department or not. That’s really important. And you can bounce things off of other folks and find out if that’s how other departments do things. [LAUGHTER]

John: Yeah, but I would imagine that’s a little more challenging under these circumstances. Because typically, at the start of the semester, when there’s all those bonding experiences, when there’s the big dinners welcoming new faculty, the lunches, when the presidents and the provosts and the deans welcome everyone and create this nice positive welcoming environment. There’s also lots of informal gatherings and receptions where new faculty get to meet other new faculty in person as well as people from other departments who might share some similar interest. Has there been very many opportunities to form those wider networks beyond your departments this year.

Martin: For me, there has been, and again, this has been the consequence of me going after certain opportunities. So, at the beginning when I started, I told Roger that I needed service. And I understood that there’s a pandemic going and that getting service would be difficult. And to some extent, I feel like, given that I was new, he wanted to shield me a little bit from it, which is pretty typical of department chairs for the first semester. But I went out of my way to tell them, “Look, this is technically my fifth year in academia. So, I want to try my best to keep that going.” And so at that point, he was like, “Okay, well, this committee needs someone, this committee…, aAnd in the end, I joined about three university-wide committees. And so that’s allowed me to interact with people completely outside, even of my college. And so that’s really allowed me to expose myself to other people, hear different viewpoints, understand certain organizational frames. So again, it was because I badgered Roger about service work.

Emily: And we have had monthly new faculty networking Zoom chats that I’ve enjoyed. I don’t know what typically happens at SUNY Oswego in normal times, but like you were saying, John, at the beginning of the semester, there is all this kind of flurry of activity and dinners and lunches. And I think that that’s all great and part of me really does miss having missed that. But I think what’s been really great about the new faculty networking Zoom things that we do is that they’ve happened across the semester. That’s not how it was at my previous institution, there was a lot of stuff happening at the beginning of this semester, like, “let’s get all excited, newbies,” but then it kind of fizzled off as the semester went on. And I think that having the Zoom meetings every month, has helped keep that connection going. And there are breakout sessions and so you get to know people a little bit more personally. So, I think that that’s been good.

Martin: I would agree with Emily on that one. Those have been very helpful sessions, it’s been also good to see where I fall in terms of how prepared I feel compared to other faculty. And one thing that stands out is the fact that I have this experience, it makes it seem like I’m a little more confident in what to do and how to handle different things, just because of that experience. So, that’s been great. But yes, learning from other new faculty and also people outside of my immediate social circle. However, I will also point out the importance of having a faculty mentor who is not in your department. When I was at my previous institution, I had someone in the communications department, his name is Wes, and I could confide everything in him. When I was on the job market. I had several offers. And he was one of the ones who told me to take this one when I was mulling it over with him. And so the thing that was really nice was I could go to him and say, “Hey, I don’t understand why my department’s doing this. Do you know why they would be doing that?” or “I don’t like this.” I still text him, I still talk to him about stuff. So, that’s something I think that where there’s an opportunity at SUNY Oswego is to connect new faculty with people outside of their department as well.

John: That was something actually that was put together this year for the first time. And it was the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Kristin Croyle, who, to a large extent, organized that. We’ve been working with her to help coordinate it, but she put the whole program together. And I’ve been really pleased with how it’s been working.

Martin: Yes.

John: And I think we may continue this beyond the pandemic, because it does seem to provide that ongoing sort of connection. Because, as you said, Emily, typically there’s this big flurry for three or four weeks at the beginning of the semester with various receptions at different levels, and then there’s nothing until the very end of the semester, where there’s a short flurry, and then again, another short flurry at the beginning of the spring semester, and then it pretty much disappears until you come back with new faculty in future years to the same events.

Emily: Yeah, and we have the Slack that we’ve been using… the new faculty… and I think that Slack has been really effective as well. And there was someone in our cohort who posted a message that was like this open call of “Hey, is anybody else on campus? Do you want to go for a walk?” …and she and I went back and forth a little bit. And a few weeks ago, we went on a walk around campus, and it was really great getting to know her. I am a transplant to the area, I have spent all of my life in the south. And so she is from New York State. And she’s been really helpful and kind of helping me think about the weather and what to expect. And I actually met up with her earlier today. She had a bag full of clothes for my daughter that her sister picked up from a friend to give to me, [LAUGHTER] which was just so kind and generous. And really kind of the vibe that I’ve gotten from New York State since moving here in July. But it’s happening, it’s just kind of on a smaller scale and a little bit more low key than it was at my previous institution, which makes me really excited for what’s to come whenever we’re normal, right? It’s just going to blow up. It’s going to be all the more better than it is right now.

Martin: You know, one thing that just sort of occurred to me, I wonder to what extent the fact that with this whole pandemic, right, we’ve been telling each other to be patient with each other, to show grace. And I wonder to what extent the fact that maybe other people in our organizational environments doing that, is being beneficial to our success here. I wonder how much that plays a role outside of just our own attempts to connect with people.

Emily: Yeah.

Martin: I don’t know.

Emily: I will say I’ve had several conversations with people in our cohort, people who have come straight from PhD programs, and some of them have communicated how they feel like starting in the pandemic has kind of decreased the pressure they would otherwise feel, that it’s giving them a little bit of an opportunity to kind of ease in to this new position and the new institution in ways that probably wouldn’t have happened had we not had the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic is awful, [LAUGHTER] like, I feel compelled to like give that… like, of course, I think everybody… they would welcome the pressure. Like, I’m not trying to suggest anything otherwise, but it’s more about like silver linings…

Martin: Yes.

Emily: Like, the patience and the grace… [LAUGHTER] …everybody is doing the best they can right now.

Rebecca: I found that it’s really great that senior faculty are really busy with other things because they’re not volunteering everybody to do everything else. [LAUGHTER]

John: And having said that, if you’d like to make some more connections across campus, we do have a teaching center advisory board, if either of you would like to join. We won’t pressure you for that now, but if at some point you would like to, just let us know, and we’ll add you to the list.

Rebecca: That’s actually the first committee I joined when I was a faculty member transferring from a different institution to connect with other folks. That was the way I did it. And look at me now. [LAUGHTER] You know, we’ve talked a lot about the differences and really seeing yourself having that experience coming in and how that’s benefited. If we were to give like a top five things for new faculty to think about asking for, or to get help on when they start at a new institution when they’ve not had experienced before, what are those things?

Martin: I would reach out to other people teaching in the department, ask them to share syllabi with you, because one thing I wanted to do is I want to make sure that when I come and I teach, that my classes aren’t completely different from what the students are used to. And to some extent, I experienced that. One of my classes, I made it way too hard for them. And that was a class again, that was completely my own doing. It was a special topics elective. But the other classes, I was able to reach out to some of the faculty and they were kind enough to share some of their materials with me. So, I was able to see, okay, this is what standard looks like. Now I can prep my own course in that way. And so that is definitely, I would reach out to other people in your department, have constant communication with your chair (I’d say that’s definitely a good thing), and get your technology sorted out way before.

Emily: Yeah, I think the technology thing is really big. I would also say to be proactive in asking for help in terms of how to navigate the various portals that we have to access. Like they’re all new to us, especially things that are a little bit more complicated like Degree Works. I know in my department, I’m expected to do advising, I think that’s a common expectation among faculty on campus. And so you’re not being a pain to ask for help. And if you don’t understand, you have to ask and ask and ask again until it makes sense. And I think that when you come into a new place, you may feel like you’re being a pain, right? Or that you’re being a nuisance, or that you’re encroaching on somebody else’s precious time. And maybe you are being all of those things. But, it’s kind of the expectation of a new faculty member, like you’re supposed to be those things, you’re supposed to ask those things, because otherwise, you’re never going to learn. And in a few years, you will be the person who a new faculty member is asking questions to. And so, yeah, that’s what I would say.

John: And we should probably note that Degree Works is software designed to help students transition their way to a degree, it lists all of the requirements, which courses satisfy them, and so forth. And it can be a little challenging when you’re seeing it for the first time and just learning about the gen ed requirements.

John: But not all departments have first-year faculty doing advisement. That’s probably more of an exception, I think. I’m not positive on that. I know we don’t assign in my department, new faculty for advisees until at least their second year, just to give them time to adjust to the institution and the requirements, and so forth.

Emily: I think some of that could be because I am coming in with prior years of service.

Martin: Same here.

Emily: And I just have two advisees. And so it’s not like I have 20. It’s almost like my training wheels, I feel like… my advising training wheels. I mentioned Degree Works, but really, it is about figuring out the gen ed curriculum, all of the requirements for graduation. Like, they’re significantly different than my previous institution. And so, asking those questions, because I feel like advising in particular, like, I take it really seriously, I know that students are ultimately responsible for their progress and for keeping an eye on their progress to degree and all of that, but I feel like they’re in my hands to a certain extent. And so I want to know the ins and outs, and I want to be a very like hands on advisor. And so that’s really what I was talking about, like figuring out how to advise effectively.

Martin: Regarding the advisees, I have like 20 advisees this semester. And luckily at my previous institution, we were dealing with Degree Works. So all that I needed to figure out was sort of what were some of the parameters regarding sequence and prereqs and stuff. So I was able to deal with that pretty well. But it is difficult. I feel like some students are less independent than others. And they demand more attention and when I’m reaching that season where it’s conference season, even though they’re virtual, and you prepare for that and I have an R&R and all these other things and then students ask questions that they can pretty much look up themselves and they want a Zoom meeting for it and you can’t just say no, and so that’s been frustrating. And luckily from Degree Works, I’d actually say the version of Degree Works that we’re using as SUNY Oswego is better than the version we were using where I previously worked. And so it’s been a lot more streamlined, a lot faster, you don’t have to, like manually search students’ names, they’re in a drop-down menu, which makes it so much easier. So, in that regard, I’m okay with it. But, yeah, advising in November is never great.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that you guys are highlighting without directly saying is that one of the things that a new faculty member has to do that isn’t totally obvious, but it takes a long time to actually figure out how the courses you’re teaching map to the curriculum within your department and how that curriculum in the department maps to the entire campus and how the gen ed fits in. And just really getting a good mental model of how the institution works as a whole for students, especially because different institutions are so different from one another, and how that is put together that I think we underestimate, often, how long it actually takes to learn how that works, and what that looks like, both for our students, we underestimate how long it takes them to learn it, and also how long it takes us to learn it. I’ve been here for eight years, I would ask questions about our degree to my department chair, I was like, “You know what, I’ve actually been confused about this, I don’t know, for eight years. [LAUGHTER] And I would really like an answer about x.”

Martin: Again, the nice thing that I have, at least with Roger, is that I will just, in the middle of a Zoom meeting, if I don’t have the answer to a question, I’ll pick up my cell phone, and I’ll give him a ring. And he gladly answers the phone and answers the question. So again, having that support makes life a lot easier.

John: maybe we could talk a little bit about your adjustment to pandemic teaching. In the spring, I think you had some experience with a rapid transition. Over the summer, you had some chance to prepare for the fall, and again, a somewhat unusual teaching environment. Could you tell us a little bit about the ways in which you’re teaching and how that’s been going.

Emily: So I am teaching exclusively online this semester, asynchronous courses, I decided to do asynchronous this fall, because in the spring, when we did have that rapid transition, it seemed like a lot of the stuff I was seeing kind of emphasized making things as simple and as straightforward as possible for students and for instructors. And based on what I was reading that meant doing asynchronous. And so that’s what I did in the spring when we transitioned at my previous institution. And that’s what I decided to do this semester as well. I think it’s working well for the most part. I will say, what I’ve come to realize at the tail end of the semester now, I feel like it’s working for the students. I did an informal mid-semester survey, and students responded, they had some constructive criticism, some constructive feedback, which I welcomed and was glad to be able to address in the semester going forward. But there was also some really positive things that I would expect to have received in a regular face-to-face semester. And so I feel like I’m at the point where I have this realization that it’s working for the students, for the most part, even though I know they’re overwhelmed and stressed, and bless their hearts, and all that stuff. It’s working for them. I feel like it’s working less for me. I didn’t realize until I haven’t been in the classroom for months and months now, I didn’t realize how much that face-to-face interaction sustained me as a teacher, I never realized that the energy that I have was so dependent on the energy students were giving me… which is really not that great of me as a sociologist, I should have had this kind of awareness all along, but I didn’t. And now that I don’t have them, now that I don’t have that face to face, as the semester’s gone on, I feel like my energy and my motivation has kind of waned, even if the students still feel really into the class and into my video lectures and all of that.

Martin: Yeah, I would agree with you on that. I’m starting to notice it now too. And I feel like, oftentimes, my own success in the classroom has depended on being able to get a sense of what the student culture is by interacting with them, understanding the body language, I like to shoot the breeze with students, I like to show up 10 minutes before class, and then usually have those three or four super devoted students that are already sitting there. And I like to shoot the breeze with them, because you get to figure out what TV shows they’re watching, what music they’re listening to, and that allows you an opportunity to investigate those things and find ways to connect what you’re teaching to that… especially with my students, they all watch all kinds of crime shows and stuff, so when I’m teaching criminal justice, it’s very easy to do that. So that had always been one of the pillars of my success. And so going completely online, it’s been more difficult and so, similar to Emily, I’ve been relying on Blackboard surveys and when you deal with that feedback, when it’s anonymous, it can be harsh, and those people who are willing to face it, to confront it, and accept it, are the people who succeed afterwards. But then there’s one student on a Blackboard survey this semester when I ask them what’s your least favorite thing about the class? They said, “Martin.” [LAUGHTER]

Emily: But that’s not very constructive.

Martin: It’s not constructive.

Rebecca: No.

Emily: …and they’re wrong. [LAUGHTER]

Martin: Yeah, exactly. [LAUGHTER] And in my response to the class, I usually will send anonymous results in a PDF file in the email. Well, usually in class, when I do those surveys, I’ll deal with it on the board. But I sent it and I said, “I’d like for all the students to like me, but I implore them the next time they take the survey, they should name specific things they don’t like about me, because then I can do something about it, maybe.” [LAUGHTER] But the thing is, you have to have a thick skin with this stuff, and if you can handle that, then you’ll succeed. But I will say, when I taught at my previous institution, I was ready for the coronavirus. I’m a very anxious person to begin with. And so when things were happening in Europe, and in China, I was already freaking out. And so I started adopting the HyFlex model in January. And so when everything hit the fan, it was really not a big deal for me. It was more just me supporting the students, making sure they’re okay, they’re feeling okay, they can handle everything. And I backed off a little bit, I allowed them all to adjust. But for me, that was okay. And next semester, even though I’m teaching synchronous via Zoom, or whatever, I’m still going to offer the HyFlex model informally by offering asynchronous content that’s consistent with what we’re learning in class, because I feel like that is going to be to some people, unfortunately, to me, fortunately, the future of teaching,

Emily: To just say one thing about what you were saying just now, Martin, I think that in terms of not being in the classroom, face to face, missing those more informal interactions have been really hard. I think a big part of my success in teaching in a face-to-face environment has to do with… I purposely am very authentic in the classroom. And so I show students my personality, and that works for me, I know that it doesn’t work for everyone, and I think that that’s fine. But, it works for me, that they get to know who I am as a person, they still have to respect my authority and my knowledge, but at the same time, being a little bit more informal with them is very effective for me. And I don’t have that opportunity as much teaching online. So, what I have found going back to your question, John, of how I’ve adapted, I have found that I’ve become a little bit more informal in my written communication with students. So whereas before, when I’m face to face, I can be informal. And so when I’m sending them an email, I can be very formal and professorial and all of that, but now they don’t get any of that informality. And so I’m using emojis…

Martin: …the same.

Emily: …and putting the gifs in my email. There’s a really great Snoop Dogg TikTok about reading the syllabus that’s gone out to all of my classes several times.

Martin: Nice.

Emily: …and so, I don’t know, I’ll be interested to see what the evals say about that… if they say anything at all, and the people who are evaluating my courses, their feedback on those things, but I think that that’s one strategy I found of introducing that informality in an online setting.

Rebecca: I had a couple of students indicate how much they really like emojis and things. My TA had done something that I thought was really stellar, and I sent her a metal

Martin: Nice.

Emily: Oh, that’s funny.

Rebecca: …like and emoji metal. She’s like, “I really like it when you do stuff like that.” [LAUGHTER[

Emily: Do more of that please.

Martin: Yeah.

Rebecca: Yeah, so I was like, “Oh, okay. I thought people would think I was really dorky.” So I just started doing it more…

Emily: Yeah.

Rebecca: …for the other students too. And it seems uplifting.

Emily: Well, and it’s like their language, right?

Martin: Yeah.

John: Yeah, and it’s authentic dorkiness, which I think is the key.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

Emily: And that’s exactly what I thought when you said that Rebecca, like, don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty sure my students think I’m like a dork sending out this Snoop Dogg, whatever. [LAUGHTER] And I am, there’s no getting around that, but it’s endearing. [LAUGHTER] It’s a part of my charm.

Rebecca: Yeah, I wasn’t sure if it was gonna be charming or not. That was the key. Like, is this gonna be a turn off? Or is it gonna be something good? [LAUGHTER]

Emily: Yeah, it can go one of two ways. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ll include a link to the Snoop Dogg video in the show notes.

Emily: Ok.

John: I already have it because I’ve sent it out to my students as well.

Emily: There you go. [LAUGHTER]

Martin: Cool.

John: Are there any things that you’ve tried this semester that you hadn’t done in the past that you’re going to continue even in a post-pandemic world, in terms of your teaching,

Emily: I am really excited about Flipgrid forums. It’s like a discussion board, except that students record a video of themselves responding to the prompt and then I require that students reply to each other with a video message. And, it’s not without its issues. I recognize what those are. And at the same time, I feel like it’s been really great for me to get to know my students more personally than I would typically would and kind of a more standard discussion board format. And I think that students are getting to know one another better as well, because I see, when I grade them from week to week, I see that the same people are responding to each other or they’re saying like, “Oh, you talked about this a few weeks ago,” and I never really have seen that in a traditional forum. There’s something about the video that works really well. I only do it for the smaller class that I’m teaching. I couldn’t do it for a 100 person intro class, I don’t think, but it’s proving effective for my upper-division course, I don’t know if I will continue it moving forward, but I’ve really enjoyed it.

John: I’ve used VoiceThread, which is very similar. One advantage of Flipgrid is that, now that Microsoft owns Flipgrid, it’s a free service provided to educators. But one of the things I did is I allowed students to either use just voice or video, and they almost exclusively used just a voice. So they weren’t very comfortable sharing videos. But even when they were just sharing voice, it was in an asynchronous online class, one of the things that really struck me and many of the students commented on this in some of the other discussion forums is whenever they read something in the course from that person, they’d hear it in the voice of the student, because they’ve learned the voices of students and it created a little more sense of community or connection to the other students that was generally not there when they were text only discussion forums.

Martin: Yeah, I agree. I’ve never used Flipgrid. But I do think that I’ll explore that a little bit. But I will continue to use the blackboard discussion forums, or at least some form of online discussion. Also, I’m going to use Zoom for office hours and meetings with students. I find Zoom to be so great for advising and any sort of meeting with a student like, especially when it comes to… I had a student the other day needing me to find something about an assignment. So I was able to just share my screen, show them in the syllabus what I meant by whatever. I was able to show them how to make use of Google Scholar and how you can leverage that when you’re looking things up in the library website. And with that being said too, incorporating HyFlex, in pretty much everything I do. I was talking to Roger yesterday, and some students, even though their seniors and juniors are still having difficulty finding peer-reviewed articles. And so I told him, you know, what, I’m just going to go ahead and make a video that shows you how to use Google Scholar, how to use the library database, how to get what you need, and then I have that video, and I can just copy and paste it on subsequent Blackboard forums. But I also think that the asynchronous content that I’ve created over the last two years, especially a lot of that’s been created this semester, I’m going to continue to share it in subsequent classes and upkeep it. I think as we start to cater to newer students, people coming from non traditional backgrounds, having the asynchronous option in any classes, I think, would help break down barriers and help students succeed. And so that’s something I feel like this HyFlex approach to pretty much all teaching… at least, it’s easier in criminal justice. It’s not that easy in other courses. But for me, that’s something I’m going to apply to my classes until someone tells me I can’t.

John: And I think a lot of people this summer have created new videos and other explanatory materials that can work in any modality. And that’s something we strongly encouraged faculty to do in the workshops that we did last spring and over the summer as well. And it’s nice to see that. Students generally react really positively to having those video resources.

Martin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John: Typically, new faculty orientation consists of this series of meetings where there’s a tremendous amount of information thrown at you all at once. This time, all those presentations were converted into videos that people could access at their own time and pace. How did that work? And or what could institutions do to make the transition easier? Because the type of transition you experienced is also the type of transition situation that many adjuncts will experience who are not physically located in the communities where they’re teaching. So even when the pandemic ends, I think there may be some lessons learned from this new faculty orientation that can continue beyond. What worked well from the orientation and what could we have done better to reach out to people who were not physically present.

Martin: So, one thing that I think worked really well is that, again, there were recorded videos that we could access, I think we didn’t necessarily need two days of sort of where you were on Zoom, I don’t think we necessarily needed that. I think one day would have been good. And then you should have been left with the videos like this asynchronous content. I think that helped me a lot, when I needed to look at how to do something, I was able to just quickly go on that Blackboard page and find the resources I needed. And if I couldn’t find it, I’ll just email my chair, and it would be fixed. So I think that was very good. I would much rather do what I did here, then go and sit with people in a building and do all that, like I get the social aspect of that. And that can be arranged, but what I’m going to orientation, I want to learn what I need to do to succeed in my job, because that’s how I work. So I like the fact that I was able to just sit there and focus on the content that was most necessary for me at that time, because there was a lot of stuff that I already knew, because I’ve already learned it at my previous institution that wasn’t necessarily pertinent to me. And so by allowing that asynchronous content to stay up for so long, I think that helped me succeed a lot. Do we need two days? No. One thing that I also think is very important is for departments on the department level to form a committee and create onboarding packets. That’s something I’ve pushed for really hard where I used to work and then it just kept on getting pushed away and away and away. But what people within the department think is important, that your department chair can just email you right when your contracts been signed and accepted, and then you know, oh, reach out to this person, if you need your email, reach out here, this is where you’ll get this. This is what you need. Reach out to this person for X, Y, and Z. I think those things, if you focus on working on them right now, and it’s just a document you can update over time, especially here at SUNY Oswego, where we use Google Drive for everything. It’s so easy just to invite someone to the document. So, I think a lot of pre-emptive stuff can be done. But, I will say I very much enjoy not having to go to campus and sit through orientations that I didn’t think was necessary to me, because it’s not my first rodeo.

Emily: I really like that idea, Martin, of having onboarding packets at the departmental level. I think that would alleviate some of the emphasis on faculty being proactive in getting what they need… that we were talking about before, especially considering how problematic that is for a variety of reasons. I think the orientation, I agree, I liked the videos, found them very informational. I like the breakout session that we have had, I think it was actually on the second day where we got to pick which group we wanted to go ask more questions to. I think more of that could have been beneficial, because we only had an opportunity to really speak with one group around campus. I wish that as part of the orientation, there would have been information on shared governance, the structure of shared governance in the SUNY system and on SUNY Oswego because it is a multi-level system bureaucracy, and it’s still not clear to me exactly what that order of things looks like, Who’s in charge of what. To some, like really clear mapping of the shared governance hierarchy. And just some really basic flowcharts on processes would have also been really, really helpful for me during orientation. Stepping aside from orientation, specifically, and thinking more about transitioning your life from one place to another. I think SUNY Oswego did a pretty good job helping us transition into the university system itself. But I really could have used some assistance with housing, some more formal assistance. And I did reach out, I think my acting chair is phenomenal. She put me in contact with people who put me in contact with people who put me in contact with people, I was talking to all these people, some of which I still have yet to see face to face. And that was all great. And I have a place to live here. But it was just a lot of work. on my end, trying to put that together. And the place that we’re in right now is not the best. It’s probably one of the biggest stressors in my life right now. And so had there been some more institutional support.. Like, I don’t know what that would look like. I think that that would have been really, really helpful. And I think that that’s probably the case, whenever somebody is transitioning into this position in general, but especially in the pandemic, when I couldn’t travel easily to the area and take a look at things for myself.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s a problem for sure. Housing here has been an issue for a very long time.

Martin: Yeah, we had the same issue. Luckily, through Maggie, she connected me with the right person. And then bam, I found a place to stay. And then the person didn’t like that we had a dog. And so I offered him an extra hundred dollars a month so we could just keep the dog in there. And luckily, he went for it. And so now we have a place. But, yeah, it was a major stressor. And when you have to live in the Syracuse area, the cost of living is different there than in Oswego. And so it almost makes your salary less when you’re living outside of the area. So. when you’re an assistant professor making an assistant professor salary, you want to maximize that, and so by living in Oswego is much better. And so, yeah, I totally agree with you Emily, that’s one of the major issues.

Emily: To your point, Martin, it may be easier to find an adequate place to live in the Syracuse area, but I have never in my life experienced a housing market like the one that I tried to get into here in Oswego. I mean, it was just bizarre. And so it just does seem to be much more informal than in most places that I’ve ever lived. And that was a struggle, not being from this area. It really was the strength of weak ties for me is what made it so that my family and I could have a roof over our head when we moved here in July.

Martin: And I will say that living in Oswego is awesome.

Emily: Yeah, I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Martin: I really like living here.

Emily: Yeah, I find it quite charming…

Martin: Yeah.

Emily: …and weird in a really great way. But I’m also holding my breath for that winter. {LAUGHTER] ‘Cause, again, I was born and raised in Texas, North Carolina for 12 years, we shall see.

John: We should note, just for people, not from Oswego. that Oswego is a city which saw a very big peak in population by the mid 1800s with the canal system, and since then the population has gradually declined with the loss of the industry. So housing prices are relatively low in the region. And there’s a lot of houses that are very old, with varying quality, some of which is very low quality and some of which is very high. But it’s difficult to find good housing. And it’s a bit of a search. It’s a challenge, especially when you’re trying to make those arrangements from another part of the country.

Rebecca: We always end by asking, what’s next?

Martin: I’m going to make sure I get tenure. That’s what’s next. I’m going to keep on crushing it and get tenure. [LAUGHTER]

Emily: What’s next for me, I will say regroup, recharge and reboot. And that was not a prepared line… [LAUGHTER] …noted for the record. That’s just all spontaneous. I don’t know if it makes a whole lot of sense. But yeah, just getting by, just taking the winter break that is around the corner, taking that time to breathe a little bit and to make some adjustments and then getting through the spring semester, and then getting back to some type of normalcy. I have to believe that’s on the horizon. So yeah.

Martin: Yeah, fingers crossed.

John: I think we’re all hoping for that. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Indeed. Indeed. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been really helpful and I hope it’ll help multiple institutions really think through just transitions for faculty in general.

Martin: Thank you.

Emily: Thank you for having me.

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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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