After a year of experimentation during the pandemic we can reflect on practices worth keeping. In this episode, Martha Bless joins us to examine what we’ve learned from this experience about building and maintaining a productive class community in multiple modalities. Martha is an Academic Director at the Association of College and University educators (ACUE). She has been working with us at SUNY Oswego to support our faculty in the ACUE program for the past two years. She’s a member of the Education Department at Albertus Magnus College and Southern Connecticut State University.
Shownotes
- Bless, Martha (2021). Revisiting pandemic teaching advice OpenStax. January 25.
- Kaizena
- Michael Wesch – ACUE page – YouTube channel
- Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.
- Darby, F., & Lang, J. M. (2019). Small teaching online: Applying learning science in online classes. John Wiley & Sons.
- Flipgrid
- Miro
Transcript
John: After a year of experimentation during the pandemic we can reflect on practices worth keeping. In this episode, we examine what we’ve learned from this experience about building and maintaining a productive class community in multiple modalities.
We should note that this episode was recorded in late April when there was still a great deal more uncertainty about the success of the vaccination program. Today, we’re a bit more optimistic about the fall semester than we were at the time of this recording.
[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: Our guest today is Martha Bless. Martha is an Academic Director at the Association of College and University educators (ACUE). She has been working with us at SUNY Oswego to support our faculty in the ACUE program for the past two years. She’s a member of the Education Department at Albertus Magnus College and Southern Connecticut State University. Welcome, Martha.
Martha: Thanks, Rebecca. I’m so glad to be here. It’s like being with my friends again. I love it.
John: It’s good to talk to you.
Martha: Yeah, yeah.
Rebecca: It’s been a while.
Martha: I know. I know.
John: Our teas today are…
Rebecca: Martha. Are you drinking tea?
Martha: Yes. Special for this occasion, I poured myself some iced green tea because we’re experiencing beautiful weather here in Connecticut where I live.
Rebecca: Wonderful. I have Scottish afternoon tea. I’m back on a streak again.
John: And I have Lady Grey tea.
Rebecca: That’s an unusual choice for you, John. It’s caffeine in the afternoon.
Martha: Is that like Earl Grey? Only Lady Grey?
John: Yeah, they use something different. I actually like it better than Earl Grey.
Martha: Earl Grey is strong. Yeah, it’s got that strong herby flavor to it.
Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to follow up on an OpenStax blog post you wrote in January titled Revisiting Pandemic Teaching Advice. Now that we’ve survived the spring semester, and maybe are planning for the fall… maybe we’re in denial about the fall. But for many faculty, that might be back to in-person classes that are socially distanced and masked after multiple semesters of online teaching. So what are some things that are on your mind as you look back over the past year and into the fall?
Martha: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I’m already getting questions from faculty about this idea of a HyFlex classroom. you’ve heard this term before, where they might be in a face-to-face classroom, but it’s going to be socially distanced, they’’ll be wearing masks, they might have students who are also Zooming in at the same time that their students are face to face. So, that’s gonna pose them real challenges. My husband teaches in a K-12 world, and they’ve been dealing with that all year. So he has kids Zooming in, he has kids who are in the classroom. So it’s a real juggle, and I will say the first couple of weeks of that kind of a classroom can be super stressful. But a way to help with that is to try to have your students who are in class bring devices, whether it’s a tablet, or a laptop, so that, if you want to do small group instruction, for example, you could have the students who are Zooming in sit with the students in the classroom at a desk on the laptop, so that it feels like they’re there. And then I would just say it’s all the same strategies and practices that I’ve been talking with faculty about for the entire year, which is focusing on building that relationship, focusing on getting the stress out of the room first, so that people can focus on the teaching. And that includes you as the teacher. It’s okay in those kinds of situations to come in and say, “Okay, my tech isn’t working today. So let’s talk it through,” or whatever’s on your mind. But I think for HyFlex, again, if you were teaching online this past year, and now you’re going back to campus. In that situation, again, there’s going to be a big learning curve there.
John: What are the best ways of building community in a classroom, because as you noted in your blog post, that’s one of the most important lessons taken away, the importance of maintaining community.
Martha: One of the things that struck me when, in March of 2020, when we were all sort of thrust into this, like, learning curve, where we didn’t have a choice anymore, we had to learn how to teach online. I know I experienced, both as a faculty development professional and as a teacher myself, as a faculty, I get this barrage of emails from multiple companies, from my IT department, from my department chair, all my colleagues, etc. And every day, there would be some new, like, “Try this, here’s this training. Come to this session.” And for a lot of us, it was overwhelming. So what I found was, I tried to sort of filter through all of that barrage of what, in many cases, was very helpful information. Sometimes it was a lifeline, like, “How do I use Blackboard? I need help with that.” But when it came down to it, I think when the dust settled, it occurred to me that there were really two big takeaways with that abrupt shift, one of which was: one of the most important things about online teaching, whether it’s synchronous or asynchronous, is building community. That’s one of the challenges because obviously, you’re not right there with them. You don’t have facial expression, you don’t have gesture, you don’t have tone of voice. So that became really important for me to focus on as a teacher. And then the other thing that bubbled up for me and a lot of us was the workload, the sheer workload that, if you’re new to online teaching, it can be a real time suck. And I always say this about online teaching and learning, The thing about online learning is it’s a great way to learn because you can do it in your PJs, you can do it whenever you want to. It’s always there. You can go to it when you have the time and when you schedule it, but that also is the thing that makes it, from a learning perspective, really easy to forget about, which is why we have often high dropout rates, high failure rates in online learning. From the teaching perspective, I think it’s that same thing. The great part about it is you can do it anytime, you can get to it when you have the time. But the flip side for teaching in an online class is the time management piece, because we often feel like we always need to be online, we always have to be there to answer the email right away. And that can be a huge pressure. Because again, it’s always there. You never know when to turn off, turn on. When am I teaching, when am I not teaching when I teach an online class? So for me, one of the biggest things was… well, a couple things really… at the beginning of the semester, in your syllabus, in your conversations with your students, to make sure that you clearly identify the parameters of communication in your online class. How soon should they expect an answer to an email? When are you available for meetings? When are you not available? About how long is it going to take you to give them their feedback, and so on. So I think, for students, if they know from the get go, here are the parameters, here’s what you can expect from me in terms of communication, then I know I can set that schedule and stick to it. Because it’s like a contract between me and my students. When I say to them,“No, I’m not going to email you back at three in the morning, I’m not going to email you at five in the morning, I’m going to email you between these hours and get back to you within 24 hours.” So I think that that’s a big thing for me in terms of time management that worked really well.
Rebecca: Circling back to the idea of building community, maybe we can take each modality one at a time, what are some strategies in asynchronous environments to get back community going?
Martha: In asynchronous environments, I think that’s one of the hardest because there’s no set time to be together. So I think a couple of things are really important. The first is to get in there and communicate with an announcement, before your students actually arrive, have it populated in your course so that when they open the course they see either an announcement or a video welcoming them to the class, something warm and inviting, not “Hi, here’s what to expect,” but “Hi, here’s who I am. Here’s what we’re going to be doing in this class. Here’s how it’s going to impact your life.” And, particularly in an online asynchronous class, I think video becomes really important. And I know that people are hesitant about being on camera, it can be a little tricky, it can be like, “Oh, that’s really me? That’s what I look like?” But I think we need to get over that and just sort of embrace the camera and make short videos that reveal your personality. And if you’re familiar with Michael Wesch, I know he’s wonderful. He has a great YouTube channel. And he has a wonderful little short video about how to make short videos, which is hilarious. And his point, and also others, James Lang, for example, who wrote Small Teaching, and Flower Darby, who wrote Small Teaching Online, they all refer to the use of video and not to be afraid of it. Because, in fact, research tells us that students actually prefer videos from their teachers that are not slick and highly produced. They prefer them that are more homey, that give them a sense of who you are as a person, maybe a little window into where you live and what your family was like or who your pets are. Those are often more well received than something that you might work on for hours and hours that’s really slick and prepared. So don’t be afraid to create these small little videos and post them frequently. Typically, what I do in an asynchronous class is I post at least two announcements a week and at least one video announcement a week. In the beginning of the semester, I typically do it at the beginning of the week. And then as the semester rolls on, they’ve submitted their first or second assignment, I usually do a short little video that says, “Hey, great assignment. Here’s what I noticed.” And I do a little recap about common themes and threads that I saw in the assignments. So video is a really important thing in an asynchronous class. In a synchronous class, when you’re meeting with students, I think encouraging them to go on camera… I know it’s been a real challenge for faculty. I’ve spoken to a lot of faculty who say, “My students just won’t go on camera, how can I get them to go on camera?” …and certainly we can’t make them. We can do as much as we can to encourage them, including having them use things like background screens, etc. If they’re a little bit shy about coming on and showing where they’re living or whatever it is, but encouraging them through incentives and through modeling it yourself and being on camera, I think, is really important in a synchronous class. And also using active learning techniques where you’re putting students in groups. I do a thing called a chatterfall often at the beginning of class where I have all of my students do a check in and I say, “Okay, type of word into the chat, how are you feeling today? Don’t submit it until I say ‘go.’” And then you say “go” and the chat explodes with all of these words from your students. So doing fun, active, things like that, I think is a way to build community in a synchronous class. Face to face…. obviously, in a HyFlex classroom, of course you’ll have your students in front of you and your students Zooming in. One of the simplest things that has the biggest impact, believe it or not, is learning and using students’ names. You would be amazed how much of an impact that has on students in a face-to-face classroom, in a synchronous classroom, and as am async when you’re replying to discussion forums, for example. “Hey, Rebecca, great job in this discussion, I love that you enjoyed the story.” Just using someone’s name communicates to them that you see them as a human being, that they’re included in this learning community and that you value them. So simple things like that, and be a good way to build community as well.
Rebecca: I know one of the things that faculty might be particularly stressed about, and obviously we have some faculty who have a little experience of this over the past couple semesters, is teaching in person when everybody’s masked. So you might be used to seeing facial expressions, even if you were teaching synchronously online, you might still have gotten to have that, right?
Martha: That’s true, yeah.
Rebecca: So what are some ways or things to be thinking about or planning for in person when people might be masked, but still generate community?
Martha: That’s a really great question. I wonder if doing things like “Hey, bring in a picture of you doing something and share it with the class, when you weren’t masked? What are some things you’d like to do” and share that. And I’ll share that on the screen: “Here’s me at the beach without my mask, here’s me with my family without my mask,” so that at least people can get a sense of the whole person. That’s really one of the only things I can think of.
John: One thing that I’ve done, it was primarily in asynchronous classes, but I’ve thought about doing this in synchronous classes too, is to have students create short flipgrid videos or voice thread and have them do short introductory videos, and then just share them. Now that may not scale very well in a large classroom, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that in a class of 400 students this fall. But that is a way of at least asking students to share something of themselves where at least they can see each other. One concern I have with incentives for turning on the camera is that many of our students are in crowded living quarters with multiple people in the room, there’s often a lot of noise and distraction, and sometimes they’re on limited bandwidth. And so the students who would find it easier to turn on the cameras are those who are living in nice living quarters with their own private space where they can work, where there’s no other people around. And so it’s essentially rewarding the students that are in a better environment, and it would disadvantage your students who are not able to do any of those things.
Martha: I agree. And when I say incentives, I mean things like not points or grades necessarily, but a nudge, or like, “let’s do some gamification, because everybody’s on camera today,” that kind of thing, more interactive conversation. Yeah, I wouldn’t use it as a carrot for a grade or extra credit points or anything like that. But certainly doing more fun activities, and saying, “Hey, if everybody’s on camera today, guess what? We’re gonna stop five minutes early, and I’m going to show you this really cute, award winning short graphic novel,” something that’s more the social oriented incentive, rather than a grade incentive, because, certainly, that wouldn’t be fair at all. I have students who come in on their iPhones. In one of my asynchronous classes, I have students literally all over the world. I have a student in China and one in St. Vincent. This was the best excuse email I ever got, by the way, as a teacher, I don’t know if you know, but St. Vincent in the Caribbean is just experiencing a volcanic eruption. He emailed me and said, “Dr. Bless, I’m so sorry. I’m not going to be able to hand in my paper. I’m being evacuated because of the volcano.” And I was like, “please just stay safe. It’s okay.” [LAUGHTER] But yeah, that was the best late excuse I think I’ve ever gotten as a teacher.
Rebecca: I’ve had two synchronous online classes this semester, and camera use is way down. But I’ve discovered that during certain activities, students will use their microphones quite a bit, and the chat a ton. And we’ve been using interactive whiteboards, like Miro, and students are super active in those environments. So although I can’t see a single face, I actually feel like I’ve gotten to know many of these students. Sometimes they’ll turn the camera on if we’re having a one-on-one conversation or something for a small amount of time. I even had a student turn on her camera the other day, she’s like, “I don’t want anyone else to see this, but I’ll let you see my crazy hair.” [LAUGHTER]
Martha: I love that.
Rebecca: But it’s been nice. I’ve had students presenting work, just speaking a little bit about what they’re doing. And then students are asking all kinds of great questions in the chat, providing good feedback, and it feels really engaged, maybe even more so than in person sometimes.
Martha: Yeah, it’s so funny that you say that, because, thinking about my synchronous class, and a lot of them don’t go on camera. But it’s amazing how much is conveyed just through your voice. Like, I know who they are when they speak, like, “Oh, yeah, so and so? Yep, absolutely. Thanks for you know…” And you’re right about the chat, they are more likely to use the chat than they are sometimes to speak. And I’m okay with that. That’s participation in my mind, as long as they’re sharing their thoughts via chat or voice. And it’s one of the things that I wrote about in the blog piece is to save time in terms of the grading load of any course, and that’s always a challenge for teachers. It’s always like, “I really want to give feedback. But oh, it takes so long to give so much feedback on papers.” So I found a tool when I was working on my dissertation. My doctoral work was about feedback in classrooms, and how to make that process more streamlined and better from both perspectives, for both the student and the teacher. And I came upon this tool, it’s called Kaizena, and it’s actually an add-on for Google Docs. Like a lot of these tools, there’s a free version and a paid version. But it’s not very expensive if you’re a teacher, and the students, of course, don’t have to pay. And what I’ve found is I use that tool, that allows me to drop an audio file or a mini lesson right into the student assignment. Then when they open it up, they hear me giving them comments. And I’ve been using this now for about a year and a half. And in every semester, about mid semester, I survey my students and I solicit feedback from them about various things, my teaching and Kaizena, specifically, and I ask them, “What are your thoughts on the audio feedback,” and far and away, most of them say, “Oh, I really like it, it’s more personal, I can hear the explanation that you give, that makes more sense.” And from my perspective, I can give them a lot more about what they can tweak in their assignment and how to do it than I ever could writing it on Word or in a margin on a real piece of paper. And the other thing that’s kind of funny about it. And sometimes when I give a video summary of “Let’s talk about this assignment and trends that I saw,” one of the last ones I created, I said to them, and it’s you know, towards the end of the semester, so I’ve given them a lot of notes already. And I said “In this paper on Kaizena, some of you may have heard my voice change a little bit and get a little irritated.” [LAUGHTER] And they laugh, and they’re like, “Oh, I know, I know, you’ve given me that note before, Dr. Glass. And I promise next time in the next paper, I won’t do it again,” or whatever, or “I’ll make it better.” But they always tell me in that mid-semester feedback that they really appreciate the voice component of it. And for me, it’s also a time saver. This is one of the other things that I found about the workload in online classes and how to derive that and it makes it more enjoyable. It takes some getting used to like I’m just talking to my computer, but my students really enjoy it. So for me, that’s become a really valuable tool.
John: And the tone of voice in terms of showing when you’re getting frustrated can also show when you’re not being quite as serious, when you’re being a little bit more flippant, which won’t show up in the same way when students are reading the comments, because we know that people in general are more likely to interpret things in a negative way.
Martha: It’s really true. And what I found is that, of course, on the flip side, I also give positive comments like, “Wow, that’s an amazing story. What a great sentence you’ve written here, terrific thesis.” And I can also give little personal anecdotes. One of their assignments is a little short memoir. And I can say, “Oh, yeah, I did that too,” or like relate to them in that way. So it’s a multi-purpose tool for me in both building community and in time saving, because they can hear that connection to me, to what they’ve written, which I think they really value.
Rebecca: I think that also happens too, when you’re trying to give encouraging feedback about improvement, but they just hear “Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” When it might be like, “Oh, you did this thing here. You could do it better by doing X,” which is really different.
Martha: Yeah. And the little mini lessons that I’m talking about… So, in Kaizena, what you do is, you set up your account, and I can create mini-lessons by pulling in content from the web. So like, “Here’s a little video on how to not use passive voice.” “Here’s a little video on APA format,” whatever it is, and I drop it right into the paper so that they can click on it and hear a little one-, two-minute tutorial. They’re very honest in their feedback, and some of them say, “Okay, I didn’t watch all the videos, but thank you for giving them to me.” But the ones who say “Yeah, those were really helpful.” I think it’s a valuable thing for them to hear not just “bad, bad, bad,” but “Okay, this is an edit, and here’s how to edit it. No big deal.”
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about accessibility related to audio feedback.
Martha: Yeah, great question. I always put in my syllabus and also talk about or put a video on the first day that I use this tool. However, if that’s not going to work for you, for whatever reason, email me. And Kaizena also lets me put in text comments. So I have that as an option as well. And because it’s a Google Doc add-on, I have all the Google Doc tools as well for editing and reviewing. So this, give them that right from the beginning and say, “I’m using this tool, if that’s going to be an issue for you just email me privately, you don’t even need to tell me what the issue is just say ‘No, I’d prefer text.’ So I give them that option.”
Rebecca: It seems like it might be helpful to do one more check in after the first time of leaving feedback as well. Like now that you’ve had some of that voice feedback, does it still work for you?
Martha: Exactly. Yeah. And I do, if it’s a synchronous class, I’ll, after the first paper comes in, I’ll walk them through it and ask “Does anyone have any questions or comments?” And if it’s an async, I usually post an announcement and then hold the virtual office hour for anybody who wants to drop in and chat with me about what they heard or any concerns they have.
Rebecca: Time saving tips are really popular amongst faculty, do you have any others?
Martha: Yeah, Kaizena has saved me a lot of time in grading. Sticking to that schedule, I think, is really important. It’s something as simple as putting things in your calendar. So if it’s an asynchronous class, and you don’t have a scheduled time, I find it really important to give myself that schedule, and try to stick to it. Because if I put it in my calendar, and I give myself a reminder, I know I’m going to be disciplined and sit down and get my work done in that hour and a half that I’ve put in my calendar, and then on to something else. So, really simple time management strategies, I think, work the best. I think thinking about creating videos ahead of time, so much of online teaching is done ahead of time, so anything that you can do before the semester starts during break week. So if you know what your schedule is going to be, you know, you can record your little intro videos for all the sections or courses that you’re teaching so that you can just quickly upload those. Making your videos not so specific to a course so that you can recycle them as well is another time saver. So rather than saying welcome to English 130, or whatever the course is, just say, “Hey, welcome to the course, this is who I am.” And then you can use that video in whatever course you’re teaching. Sometimes you can do that with videos, sometimes not, because I obviously like to make it personal for the students and the feedback that they need. But sometimes you can recycle them and that saves a bit of time as well.
Rebecca: I think i n your article, you also mentioned using rubrics.
Martha: Yes, one of the things that’s really interesting to me is that before the pandemic, most of us who are teaching face-to-face all received a course shell in our LMS, whether it’s Blackboard or Canvas or whatever it is, but the data, the statistics on use of those shells was just terrible. Like I think it was maybe hovering around 30% of face-to-face instructors actually used their course shell. Now, I think one of the positives to come out of all of this is that we didn’t have a choice anymore, we kind of had to use our course shell. And one of the things that I learned very quickly was the rubric tool in the learning management system. And again, it’s one of those things that, it’s time upfront, but you get that investment of time back multiple fold. By using the rubric tool to either convert existing rubrics that you have for your assignments or create rubrics. I created a discussion rubric for my synchronous and asynchronous classes. I had existing rubrics for some of my assignments. So I took some of that and just created it in the LMS tool itself. So that now I can go in there and just click, click, click, quickly grade it. And I’ve given them the feedback in Kaizena. So all I need to do in my LMS gradebook is grade the rubric and it’s done. And the other thing about rubrics, particularly for discussions, is I tried to get not too complicated. Don’t overthink it. I think Flower Darby talks about this too, in her book, particularly with discussions. And I’ve gone to a kind of three-pronged rubric, which is “Yeah, you got it, almost… mmh, almost there, not quite… and that’s a do over… like 1-2-3. And if they get a that’s to do over, I actually allow them to do it over because often it happens early on in the semester where they don’t quite have the hang of it. I give them an opportunity to redo because my goal as an instructor is to actually get the students to do the assignment and do it well. Rather than just feel bad about getting a bad grade.
John: Another nice thing with rubrics is that if you share them with students in advance, you’re making transparent what the expectations are. And that makes it easier for students to meet those expectations, because students often, in the beginning of a course, are trying to judge what you expect from them. And we’re not always as clear with that as we should be. And the use of rubrics can make that very explicit and create more transparency in the assessment process, which makes it easier for students to meet those expectations.
Martha: Exactly. I think there’s a level of respect with that, that “Here, I’m telling you, I don’t want you to guess what the teacher wants. I want to spell it out clearly for you.” And I also want to spell it out, not in teacher lingo. I want to make sure that my rubrics are clear to students about even making assumptions, like “analyzes source material…” Well, do I really know that my students understand what analysis entails? And so I think it’s important, when we share the rubrics with the students to parse that language a little bit and say, “Okay, who knows what that really means? What does it mean to analyze a source?” and if they don’t know what it means, then provide that definition for them. But I try not to make it too, too jargony in my rubrics as well,
Rebecca: One of the things I quickly learned… well, maybe not so quickly, I should have learned it more quickly… is that students don’t necessarily know where the rubrics are in the LMS. And you got to kind of explicitly point that out. I think it was halfway through last semester. And I’m like, you need to look at the rubric. If you looked at the rubric, you could get full credit on this assignment. And the students are like “There’s a rubric.”” Like, “Yes, there’s been a rubric on every assignment all semester, and some of them are in the syllabus as well.” But I had to show them and they’re like, Oooooh,” but as someone who hadn’t taught online before, it wasn’t obvious to me that I needed to show them where that was.
Martha: Yeah, it’s another great idea for a short video, the first week of the semester, let’s do a walkthrough of our course, here’s where you find the rubrics and do it as a screencast. And I made that same mistake in the fall about three weeks in, I emailed this person, and they hadn’t turned something in and they were like, “Oh, where do you hand in the assignment again?” …that kind of thing. And I was like, “Oh, gosh, I assumed that people knew Blackboard.” But I really shouldn’t make that assumption. So making a short little, “here’s how to navigate our course” video, I think, is a good thing to do as well.
Rebecca: Yeah, with all those little details, I did the submission piece, like I didn’t forget that part…
Martha: Right.
Rebecca: …but, where the rubrics are, no, didn’t manage that
Martha: …not so much…
Rebecca: Like, here’s a checklist of all the [LAUGHTER] pieces of the class to go over.
Martha: Yeah, an important thing, when you make that video, if you make a short little, “here’s how to do Blackboard” video for your students make sure you’re in student view, because I’ve made that mistake, I’ve started out my video on like,” Oh, wait, I’m not in student view.” So I need to do it again.” [LAUGHTER] …a little thing to remember. And actually one of the new versions of Blackboard, I don’t use it, but my understanding is that they also have a voice comment capability in Blackboard, and so that’s also a great tool to use if you have it. I don’t have it in my version, but I know it’s out there.
Rebecca: One other quick thing to remind students about too, in one of those video walkthroughs, is that the app version is different than the website version, and not all the content that is available in the app version, including some of the accessibility features. So sometimes they’re like, “I can’t find this.” And then you find out it’s because they’re accessing it from their phone and so they default to an app. And they may need to be doing stuff on their phone, because that might be a primary portal to the internet for them. But the web version does work on their phones as well. And pointing out that they might need to switch to that view to get some of the content is maybe helpful.
Martha: Yeah, definitely. As I said, I have a couple of students who access the course on their phone.
John: We always end with the question. What’s next? …which is something we’re all concerned about right now.
Martha: Yeah, that’s a great question. So my “what’s next” is, and I’ve mentioned that I think there are some positives to come out of this, and that is that it really catapulted us even kicking and screaming some of us into the world of online teaching and learning. And now that we’ve sort of gotten comfortable with some of those practices, and with using an LMS, my “what’s next” is what’s gonna stick? Like, are the statistics for using our course shells in a face-to-face course going to go up? Are we going to utilize those grade books more often? Are we going to bring in some of our video and those kinds of communication skills moreso into our face-to-face classes? That’s what I wonder about, like, “how much of our new learning is gonna stick?”
Rebecca: And it seems particularly important if we might be masked and stuff in the fall that we do have that strong digital presence moving forward, at least as we transition back to what will become our new norma.
Martha: Absolutely. Yeah,
John: And I know on our campus, they’re talking about cutting back student print quotas to encourage more continued use of digital materials.
Martha: Wow, that’s really interesting. Yeah.
John: So the goal there is to encourage both faculty and students to take advantage of those features because it’s in everyone’s interest to do so.
Martha: That’s really interesting because, of course, when computers and printers and digital documents first arrived, everyone was like, “Oh, nobody’s gonna use paper anymore.” 20 years later, and we’re still using lots of paper. So that’ll be interesting to see if it has an impact on that. I hope it does.
Rebecca: Well, it’s always wonderful to talk to you, Martha, thanks for joining us.
Martha: This has been so fun. Thank you so much, Rebecca and John. It’s good seeing you.
John: Thank you. And we will include a link to Kaizena in the show notes.
Martha:Awesome. That’s great.
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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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