218. Blended Learning

Posted in access, blended learning, diversity, equity, feedback, first-generation students, learning, online learning, pedagogy, returns to education, social justice, teaching
December 15, 2021

Although new to many as a result of the pandemic, blended learning has a long history of effective use. In this episode, Chuck Dziuban and Patsy Moskal join us to discuss how blended learning has been used at the University of Central Florida for the past two decades. Chuck is the Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida [UCF] where he has been a faculty member since 1970, teaching research design and statistics. He is also the Founding Director of the university’s Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. Patsy is the Director of Digital Learning Impact Evaluation, also at the University of Central Florida. Chuck and Patsy are both Online Learning Consortium Fellows and have been doing research on blended learning for quite a while now. They are also two of the editors of the recently released third volume of Blended Learning: Research Perspectives.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Although new to many as a result of the pandemic, blended learning has a long history of effective use. In this episode, we examine how blended learning has been used at one institution for the past two decades.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Chuck Dziuban and Patsy Moskal. Chuck is the Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida [UCF] where he has been a faculty member since 1970, teaching research design and statistics. He is also the Founding Director of the university’s Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. Patsy is the Director of Digital Learning Impact Evaluation, also at the University of Central Florida. Chuck and Patsy are both Online Learning Consortium Fellows and have been doing research on blended learning for quite a while now. They are also two of the editors of the recently released third volume of Blended Learning: Research Perspectives. Welcome, Chuck and Patsy.

Chuck: Well, thank you, Rebecca. We’re glad to be here.

Patsy: Yeah, thank you very much. So nice to be here talking to you guys.

John: It’s great to see you back, Chuck. And it’s great meeting you, Patsy.

Chuck: Yeah, this is my third time. I’m honored.

John: Our teas today are… Are either of you drinking tea?

Chuck: I am drinking lean green tea from a Christmas mug.

Rebecca: Perfectly in season.

Patsy: Yeah, I’m just drinking a green tea. My usual afternoon drink.

Rebecca: I think I’m accidentally drinking watered-down English afternoon tea. I think I put hot water in my cup without putting a teabag in it. And so it’s very light.

Chuck: You’ve always been innovative, Rebecca.

Rebecca: So it’s hot water. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a peppermint spearmint tea blend, as it is late in the day and I had a lot of caffeine earlier.

Rebecca: Miss your blends there, John. Haven’t had one in a while.

John: Well, I’ve got some new fresh tea to make them.

Rebecca: I’ll have to stop over. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss blended learning. First, it might help if we start with the definition of blended learning?

Chuck: The definition of blended learning could take this and several other podcasts. The whole notion of blended learning has sort of evolved by complexity. It is diverse, it is interdependent, it is connected, and it is adaptive. I remember the early days with the Sloan Consortium where Frank Mayadas, who was adamantly opposed to blended learning, had wanted nothing to do with it. And Tony Picciano and I finally convinced him to fund a small summit in Chicago to begin discussing blended learning. And the first task, of course, was to define blended learning, and that was 30 years ago. And here we are, still defining blended learning. Blended learning is emergent, it is changing constantly. It almost defies definition. If you look at the literature, Oliver and Trigwell writing that famous article “Can ‘Blended Learning’ Be Redeemed?” and castigating it because it is not scientific, it has no specific definition and never will. To Rhona Sharpe saying its great strength is the fact that it is undefined and it allows every campus to develop its own model of blended learning. So blended learning definition is a very, very tricky kind of thing. It’s going to be some combination of online and face-to-face education, but it has evolved way past that, as you all know, in terms of doing this. I think basically—and I’ll let Patsy chime in in a minute—it’s become what Susan Leigh Star has called a “boundary object.” Boundary objects are something like critical thinking. If you go to the UCF or Oswego campus and you say to faculty, “Are you in favor of critical thinking?” “Oh yes, we are. Critical thinking is wonderful!” But then you get the group together, you get the faculty consortium together, the Faculty Senate, and they disagree. They fight vehemently over the definition of critical thinking. However, if you go back to their individual constituencies—rhetoric, physics, mathematics—they know precisely what critical thinking is. And that’s very much the way blended learning has evolved. It’s moving, it has changed the way we think about this and it is emergent. It will be emergent for the next decade.

Patsy: Just from an institutional standpoint, we do have a definition of blended learning. We actually refer to it as “mixed mode” on our campus. And it’s a combination of online and face-to-face, but it has to have some reduced seat time. So for instance, if it’s a three-credit-hour course, there may be one hour that is in a physical classroom space, with the remaining two hours being asynchronous online instruction. So, we have a newer modality that actually started in our College of Business to have large enrollment. And we don’t have classrooms large enough to fit even a fraction of the students. So, they looked at a mode that has less than 20% face-to-face. So basically, meet five times in a semester, splitting up a large class into five smaller groups, and they focused on making those active learning. And the remainder of the instruction, again, is online. So for us, it just has to have some reduced seat time capacity.

Chuck: Well, Patsy has given a great definition of logistics associated with blended learning. And then you have the educational implications of blended learning. There are great thinkers about this. Charles Graham has done a great deal of work on the kinds of blends, augmenting blends and supplemental blends and all of those kinds of things. Anders Norberg in Sweden who has done a marvelous paper on looking at blended learning simply from a time perspective… Do you want to be synchronous or asynchronous? So there are many forks to this kind of thing. What do you do with seat time? What do you do with educational philosophy? And as we talk about modality, and I will say now and people probably won’t like me, but course modality is one of the worst predictors of outcomes ever, in terms of doing this. When you look at any kind of predictive model, students don’t care about modality, we’re the ones that seem to be obsessed with it.

John: Could you tell us a little bit more about how the blended learning program at UCF got started?

Chuck: We started this whole thing with online learning. And Patsy and I began to collect data immediately. And the administration said, “Oh, this data is very informative, collect more of it.” So one of the studies we did is we looked at the presence of students who were taking online courses. And lo and behold, we found that the vast majority of them had a campus presence. All of these distance students that we imagined didn’t really exist. They were taking courses from labs, they were taking courses from the library, and they had a presence on campus. So it led to the conversation of… Well, if they’re here, can we somehow use the affordances of both modalities, of the face-to-face and the online learning? And what happened was, we developed, and Patsy’s already mentioned, this notion of, we call it “mixed modality.” We like to think that we invented it, but everyone else likes to think they invented it as well. And we stuck with mixed modality for a very long time, until Sloan began funding blended learning. And then we changed very quickly to blended learning. Patsy, what did I leave out about that?

Patsy: No, I think that’s essentially how we started doing blended learning. And we’ve never had enough classroom space, I’m sure every college is the same. So, part of the reason that we looked at online and blended was to increase access for our students, to help people, provide them with the means to be able to get an education. And it was very appealing for the administrators to look at the concept of blended learning. Again, if you took that three-credit hour and built one-credit hour with face-to-face, well I can fit three of those blended classes in one classroom over the course of the semester. So that’s an appealing use of maximizing the classroom space. And I think our past CIO, Joel Hartman’s, idea was to do that. Ironically, It’s a lot harder than you think because of the way scheduling is done. As you can imagine, departments don’t necessarily coordinate. We all know how it works functionally, sounds great, but when you try to put it into play at a university sometimes there’s things you don’t plan on. But we did have our Rosen School of Hospitality Management within the last, I’d say, five to seven years. And they’re down at our International Drive area because, not surprisingly, that’s where all the hospitality jobs are, so it makes sense. And they had a huge parking issue. So they had not been interested at all in blended learning until they realized they could use it for this exact reason. And then they jumped on the blended learning bandwagon and are now one of our biggest users of that modality. So it’s really interesting how, if you’re thinking outside the box, a lot of this comes to play.

Chuck: That’s an interesting story. There’s a great aphorism by the great philosopher, Yogi Berra, who says, “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, except in practice there is.” And this is what’s happened and the fact is that although the Rosen College began their blended learning initiative out of a not-so-educational perspective, again, this logistic thing. And I will quote that our former CIO, Joel Hartman said, “If you ever think you’re going to make money with this, you’re in the wrong business. It’s not going to happen.” But the other thing has happened, the Rosen College has developed into a marvelous, marvelous educational system using the blended learning model. Maybe not for the right reason, but they have evolved,. and they’re doing things extremely well, because they’re a natural for the combination of hospitality management, face-to-face, and online learning.

John: So blended learning started there mostly because of limited resources and the need to use the resources more efficiently. How did it work? What does the research tell us about how effective blended learning has been compared to other modalities?

Chuck: Well, imagine yourself as a faculty member who has been told, voluntold, that we’re going to do a blended learning course. So now what you’re going to do is you’re going to have part of your course online, part of your course face-to-face. The first time, almost always, a faculty member starts, they start with this thinking: “What in my face-to-face can I offload to the online environment?” And they think about that, and that is usually the beginning of this. And then it begins to emerge when they say, “Ah, maybe this is not the way to think about it. Maybe I need to think about it in terms of which is most effective online, in which students do the best online, in which students excel in the face-to-face environment.” So what happens, John, is there’s an evolutionary development of faculty members, to the fact where they no longer think about this as two modalities. But they think about this as a constructed course with seamless boundaries. And that really happens over several semesters. If you’ve ever done it yourself, teaching the first course in any of these modalities, which we have, it’s a disaster. It just is not the way you think it is. We’re all pretty experienced at this, and we all know when it goes well. And we all know when it doesn’t. And nothing feels better when it goes well, and nothing feels worse than it goes badly. That’s the way it happens, it evolves. Now the outcomes from that is a story that we can talk about later.

Patsy: I think UCF… early on… we were lucky that we got involved with online and blended learning when we had enough resources to be able to do it right. And we had visionary administrators who recognize that it’s important to focus on the faculty development, it’s important to focus on research and try to use research to help inform the process. And so all of those units were put into place early on. And the late Dr. Barbara Truman actually led the Faculty Development Initiative. Dr. Steve Sorg, who’s retired, led the Center for Distributed Learning, and then Chuck led the research arm of our beginning part. So in faculty development, one of the main drivers and we’ve always said, “Don’t let the technology drive the instruction, but let your instruction drive the technology.” So, as part of the faculty development, faculty are encouraged not to just figure out what to put online versus face-to-face. But really think about redesigning your course from the ground up. What are your learning objectives? What are your instructional objectives? What do you hope to do? And then find the best tool… whether it’s online, face to face, active learning, adaptive learning, whatever… find the tools available that you can do well, and go from there. So I think that’s been part of it. And UCF also has a detailed process for quality review for courses. So if you’re teaching online or blended, you are required to go through the faculty development and get certified. But that gets you access to an instructional designer who helps you think through not just the technology, but the pedagogy behind it. You get access to graphic artists and we call them tech rangers who develop all kinds of great tools and games and simulations and all that kind of stuff. For adaptive learning, we actually have instructional designers that focus on personalized adaptive learning. So they know the software and the instructional components of adaptive learning and how to do it well. That’s the big carrot, they get incentivized to come through the program. But I think, once they get in, they actually like some of the stuff they found. So, in redesigning their course to be online and/or blended, they find tools that they then want to incorporate in their face-to-face courses as well. So that’s historically been what we’ve done, what we’ve seen. And it served us well, I think, to maintain quality across the institution.

Chuck: Well, what you see also is, that Patsy didn’t mention, is in our training of faculty, they experienced the blended learning course. They actually are involved in a course that is blended learning. So they understand, as students, what they are confronting in terms of this. So it is, again, evolutionary in terms of a changing process. And I will say that every faculty member who comes in from whatever department thinks that the pedagogy and unique problems associated with their discipline is in fact unique. That what you have to do in rhetoric, what you have to do in physics, is vastly different than any other discipline. And we are special and we are unique. At the end of this course, they realize that there is common ground, mostly all common ground in terms of what constitutes effective instructional things. And they’re able then to look at all of these technologies we present to them and be able to evaluate them, “Is this technology really a solution looking for a problem, or is it something that can actually help me become more effective in my instructional design?” And it is, again, an evolutionary process. And you’ll see a coming together of faculty during this experience. And they don’t all buy it. We’re instructionally design oriented. And I always remember an incident of someone from rhetoric came into my office and threw a copy of Derrida on my desk and said, “What is this instructional design stuff? When you understand deconstructionism, we will talk.” So I read the book and said, “The book deconstructed and disappeared. Now, what do you want to talk about in terms of doing this?” But the point is, you have to respect the values of the discipline. And I say that with tongue-in-cheek, but you absolutely have to respect the value structure of any discipline you’re working with. If you tell them they’re doing it wrong, you’re not going to get far.

Patsy: We also rely on something called “web veterans.” We have our web vets, which are faculty who have already been through the process. And not surprisingly, I think anytime you have a new initiative, there are those people who jump on board, the first people out of the gate who love to test drive stuff. But they become the experts, and they know how to do it well, and they know the pros and cons. And they also add credibility. So faculty listen to other faculty, particularly those within their discipline, or STEM listen to other STEM faculty and so forth. But it’s much more credible than having an instructional designer telling me how to teach when you’re not in my classroom, as Chuck said. So I think it’s really helped. We have a faculty advisory board that really helps direct what we do and think about the evolution as we’re now in a state of evolution, I think, and with COVID, are going to be in a state of evolution. I think that really has helped.

Chuck: Well, we’ve all taught, we’ve all taught for a long time. And there’s a great deal of difference between teaching a few courses, and teaching year after year after year after year over the long haul of this, and we’ve all taught and we’ve all taught semesters. And I think all of us experience this excitement, and anxiety at the beginning of a semester. You say, “I really want to do a good job, and I’m all excited and I’m nervous.” And at the middle of this semester you say, “My god, will this thing ever end?” You’re trying to get through it and trying to work through this sort of thing, and at the end of it you feel a sense of completion. And that rhythm is so important to understanding the instructional process, not only with technology, but as a faculty member in general. And we have to respect that teaching a long period of time is a difficult task. And you all know that classes are very much different. What goes well one semester does not go well the other semester. We’ve all experienced that, we’ve all experienced that.

Rebecca: I’m living that.

Chuck: Absolutely, and it’s draining, Rebecca. It is draining because you contribute a great deal of emotional intellectual energy to this task. We all do. We were talking about boundary objects. Equality is a beaut, it is a beaut.

Rebecca: You’re talking a lot about some really important resources that are in place at your institution: a pretty expansive support system of technology support, instructional design support, actual technology [LAUGHTER], peer support, time, professional development. That leads me to think that perhaps one of the biggest mistakes people make, or institutions make around blended learning, is not putting enough resources into the system?

Chuck: Yeah. But again, I think you have to be careful with, “If I had more money, I’d do a better job.” The whole notion is not only that, but commitment at the administrative support level, and all particular levels, and basically saying, “We value the teaching enterprise, and we’re going to do everything we can to celebrate that.” That is critically important, because money alone doesn’t do it. You know that as well. I had a friend once who said, “If you had all the money and everything you wanted to do your job, two weeks later you’d come back and say, ‘I don’t feel fulfilled.’” Because it takes much more than that.

Patsy: Well, and it’s easy to hear us talk about all that we have in place now. But understand, we started in 1996, so we didn’t start with all of this. We started with instructional designers with TV trays and laptops, meeting people at the campus coffee shop or in their offices. And it started small and grew as the initiative and the institution grew. So over time, it’s easy to add resources. But I think one of the common mistakes is just underestimating the amount of work it takes to produce a quality online or quality blended course. And not meaning to be a Debbie Downer, but segueing into what we’ve experienced during COVID, we’re very careful to make sure to differentiate what we had to do from an emergency remote instruction, and say, you know, “That is not the quality online learning that we have worked so hard to put into place for the last few decades.” So I think that’s very different, in terms of just trying to survive and keep the doors open, so to speak, for students, with everyone… those who have never been through any training, those who’ve never had any online-teaching experience in the middle of a pandemic with kids at home and scant technology resources… students who don’t have any technology resources, who have major job issues, family issues, in the least-conducive-to-studying room and try to expect everyone to excel. I think that’s really the fact that it does take a lot of work. And so I think that maintaining realistic expectations, as Chuck said, it’s not a one-and-done kind of thing. It’s not a one-and-done when you teach face-to-face either, right? The first time you teach any class, it’s not the best time you teach. You evolve, you learn, you adjust, and continue to try to, hopefully, improve every time you teach. I think that’s true of any of the online or blended modalities as well.

Chuck: Steven Johnson has written a wonderful book called Where Good Ideas Come From. It is just a really, really good book and he has three adages in terms of this. One is… What is the adjacent possible when you start this? What is the reasonable next thing you can do? You can’t do it all, so do the thing that you can do and do it well. That’s the adjacent possible, it comes from a biologist named Stuart. The second thing is a slow hunch. You have to be in it for the long haul. If you look at Darwin, he was in it for the very long haul. And he didn’t even know what he had for several years until he came up with it. You have to commit to the long haul to do it, not a quick fix. None of this is a quick fix. And the next thing is a liquid network. You need to be supported by a network around you to prop you up as you go along. And Rebecca, when you said this in terms of resources, one of the resources is you are in this for the long haul if you’re going to do this. So it takes an institutional commitment, and that always is not there.

Rebecca: What are some of the most promising areas of development in blended and online learning?

Patsy: We’ve had good success using adaptive learning, we have an adaptive learning initiative. We started in 2014, I guess. And again, we learned it takes a lot of work, we use a content-agnostic platform, so Realizeit is our enterprise solution. We do have, our math department uses ALEKS as well. But it takes a lot of work. Faculty want control, and you get control, you have to redesign the course. But you have to actually design all of the content for a lot of it, or at least the majority. And trying to import from another sounds great, but it always still requires work to get it to work well. Though, that’s one of the things that we’ve had good luck with. I think we’re going to see a lot more blended learning post-COVID. We’ve never really promoted synchronous online learning and haven’t seen a big drive to do synchronous until everyone had to do Zoom. And now I think there’s some faculty that are going to run for the hills as soon as they can get out of Zoom mode and never want to look back. But there are some who were already asking, “You’re not going to get rid of Zoom, are you? Because I found it’s really great for me to do these discussions…” So there are people who’ve already, again, figured out instructionally how they can use this effectively, and do it from a distance. And when you’ve got students who might be geographically dispersed or have to worry about traffic, we have parking issues, all of that stuff comes into play. So I think we’re going to see a lot more blended learning in general in the future. And not just in instruction, but also in the workplace. We’ve seen pilot testing in a hybrid work environment now with so many days in the office, so many days remotely. So, I think that’s one thing.

John: If you’d like to learn more about Realizeit and adaptive learning at UCF, we did a podcast with Chuck a while back, episode 30, on adaptive learning, and we’ll include a link to that in the show notes.

Chuck: Oh my God, way back to episode 30. We are dinosaurs, aren’t we?

John: Since a few of our listeners might not have been listening back in the primeval times of episode 30, could you briefly explain why adaptive learning might be useful in supporting students with diverse educational backgrounds?

Chuck: I think you really have to ask yourself, “What is the problem we’re trying to solve in the United States of America?” I’ll get it from a different point of view. I think a problem in the United States is that if you live in a lower economic quartile, your chance of going to and graduating from college is 10%. The odds against you are nine to one. I think blended learning and adaptive learning and some of the things that we’ve learned during this pandemic, are going to help us a long way to begin to solve that kind of a problem. That is, we know that many of our underserved students live in an environment of scarcity. They don’t have enough resources, they don’t have enough time, they don’t have enough transportation, they don’t have enough support from their families. They have simply no opportunity to engage in the university the way we’ve constructed it in the years past. They can’t do it. So we also learned, and very much from several papers and the notion that, if you fix the amount of time that a student has to learn, what they are going to learn is going to become the variable. If what they learn is constant, then the amount of time they spend learning, surprise, is going to be the variable. We’ve confronted this, it’s a difficult challenge for universities. But I think one of the real affordances of what we’ve got is to begin to look at… How can we, as universities, eliminate this horrible educational inequity, which exists in the United States of America? That’s a real affordance that we’re going to learn. John Carroll’s great paper, “A Model of School Learning,” said 60 years ago that we have to find another way, that the students do not start from an even playing ground. And you take an underserved student who comes in and one domino falls, their car breaks, or they can’t get childcare, the entire system collapses on them. They miss one class and they’re behind, they miss two and they’re lost. The optimal choice is to drop out. That is not the choice that we want. And I think the things that we’ve talked about today are going to really help us address these very serious problems in our country. You know it, we are wasting millions of minds in the United States, and we can’t do it anymore. I don’t know if blended learning and adaptive learning will solve it all, but it’s going to go a long way to help, I think.

John: And that issue of income inequality and the growth of that is really troubling. We bring so many students into our campuses, and then we just let them fail out without providing support so that they can be successful. And it’s a waste of resources, and those students are ending up burdened with a lot of debt once they leave, without getting the benefits of that education. And I agree, this is one of the most critical things we need to work at.

Chuck: Let me address the debt problem, too. That’s a huge problem, John. Right now, the accumulated college debt in the United States is $1.7 trillion. That is mind blowing. If that were a GDP, it would be the 13th largest economy in the world. We have got to do something about this in this country, we have got to find a way. And like you just said, tragically, if you drop out, you’re in debt, and you’re in debt for nothing. And Pell Grants are wonderful, but Pell Grants are two semesters. One semester, you get on probation, you have one more to get off probation. If you don’t get off probation, you’re no longer Pell eligible. Do you know how hard it is to bring up a whole semester of Ds in one semester? It can’t be done, can’t be done.

John: One of the things you mentioned is that blended learning is likely to be adopted more as a modality moving forward as colleges have experimented with a wide variety of modalities. But for many campuses, this may be the first time they’re doing it. What are some of the most common mistakes that faculty make when they build that first class? You mentioned before, Chuck, that these classes, the first time you teach them are often unsuccessful. What are some of the things faculty should avoid doing when they build that first blended learning class?

Chuck: I mentioned earlier that when they begin, they view this as two separate modalities and what of my face-to-face… what of the gold standard can I offload? And the thinking of, “I’ll offload the unimportant stuff to the online environment.” It’s wrongheaded thinking. In terms of I think what they have to think about really is, “Are there students in my class who can learn better online? Are there students who function better in the face-to-face environment? And can I somehow encompass that?” And it’s all the things that we wrestle with all of the time in all of the courses. In all of my courses that I’ve taught, I wish I did everything well. Sadly, I do not. I wish I were excellent at everything. And some things, I just cover material. And I think faculty have to come to terms with, “When am I covering materials?” It’s a very introspective kind of thing. And I think you’re not necessarily ready for it the first time because, as Patsy said, I think the first time you’re in survival mode. I think Patsy will agree that the first time you do you say, “What have I got myself into, and why am I doing this?” It is evolutionary. That is a mistake to think about that. And I think a mistake is to think it’s going to go well the first time, it hardly ever goes well the first time. It’s like the first time we ever taught a course. I didn’t know anything the first time I left Wisconsin and came to then-FTU, I didn’t know anything about teaching. So I lectured for three hours. My God, I don’t understand why they didn’t lynch me. And I didn’t know any better!

Patsy: I think Chuck’s right, it’s a lot of work. And so from the faculty perspective, I think trying to have realistic expectations and not look at it as, “Here’s the endpoint of where I want to go, but you have two weeks to do it.” That’s not going to work. Make sure you have enough time. If you have access to resources, I think that’s really important.From an institutional standpoint, we know it takes a lot of work to create an online class. Faculty would say it takes more work to create a good blended class. So you can either have the best of both worlds, but it could also be the worst of both worlds. And you don’t want that to be the outcome. So trying to have realistic expectations and then, from an institutional standpoint, make sure you have the support that you need, not just for faculty, but for students. Make sure that you have the robust infrastructure. And for us, what we found, especially like this last year with COVID, is that we did have a lot of students who were doing those courses, we have a very small number of fully online students that take only online. What our students do is really pepper their courses with a mixture of modalities. So they take an online and a blended and a face-to-face. And we’d like to think that the online and blended help reduce the opportunity cost for getting an education. So they can help them balance their life with education. But we have a lot of labs on campus. They were relying on the computers in the labs, they were relying on the Wi-Fi in their dorms, the laptops that they might have access to, and things like that. So I think just making sure that you have the infrastructure that’s necessary, that you have support to be able to handle any issues, questions, both for students and for faculty. From an institutional standpoint, I think it’s really critical. And if you’re going it alone and you’re a faculty member, and there are people who do that, understandably, if you’re in a situation, start small. Keep your expectations realistic, and grow your course as you learn, as you go along. So keep improving it.

Chuck: One of the strategies… UCF is a very selfish place. In all of these kinds of initiatives, what we do is we cherry-pick the best faculty we can find to maximize the effectiveness of what they’re doing. When we did our adaptive learning things, we had faculty members who looked and said, “Oh yeah, I want to do this.” And we knew they were the best faculty we had and we knew they would make it look good. One colleague in nursing, who has left us by now, she said, “I don’t want any of your tutorials. I just want to mess around with this, RealizeIt, and figure it out for myself.” And she did, and she was marvelous. And that kind of a model really motivates faculty. I would point out so far we have not talked one iota about blended learning. We have talked about blended teaching. That’s what we talk about. We call it blended learning, but we segue, to use Patsy’s word, right away to blended teaching. And that’s an evolutionary thing, Rebecca, that we’re going to have to deal with in the years to come in terms of what is blended learning, aside from the arrangements for teaching. And the other thing that has happened is, you can blend many things. We’ve talked about blending courses. You can blend a university, you can blend all kinds of aspects of this institution in terms of faculty, and students taking online and blended and face-to-face courses. Blending their locations, blending many, many things that people have written about. Our dear departed colleague, Karen Swan wrote about the blended university and several others have talked about that notion of expanding it behind the notion of just a course, that it is much more than that. That is blending a university culture.

Rebecca: Chuck, I’m glad that you brought up students because one of my next questions was going to be: How do we prepare students for this kind of learning? Sometimes they come into an environment. And I know we had a lot of students say this in the emergency teaching that we were doing, like, “I don’t know how to learn online, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to balance my time, I don’t know how to manage different modalities and things.” So what are some things that we can do to support actual student learning in an environment that might be unfamiliar to them.

Patsy: As soon as you said that I gravitated towards the faculty I work with who teach predominantly undergraduates and a lot of freshmen. Now, I don’t want to say they parent them into success as much as they can. But in some sense, that’s what they do. I think it’s probably idealistic for us to assume that freshmen come in and are going to go from being handheld with what we do in K12, to instantaneously going to be able to jump into a course and know what they’re doing and take responsibility and all of that kind of stuff. So faculty are very strategic at using the technology to nudge them, remind them, try to provide some motivation for them to get involved. And I think that’s some of what is important, I think that that helps students ease into this. We find a lot of… maybe it’s because of Florida… but I think Florida requires our high school students to have some online learning experience. But even then, the high school online learning is not the same as what we do. Because again, there’s parent consultations, and there’s a lot more very structured, dedicated time with parents and students that you don’t get, I mean, we just can’t do in higher education. But I do think there’s some strategies. We are seeing a lot of colleges are trying to work to find out who is at risk earlier and hopefully intervene. So what interventions do we have? That really early identification, trying to identify students who are in trouble and making sure they get access to the help that they need early on is important. Some of the analytics work we’re finding, you’ll see, I think, a trend that’s going to continue, as we have more and more access to student engagement, student performance with both platforms and our LMS and all of that. Everybody’s shooting out analytics, right? I mean, we know we track people all the time now in terms of how they’re doing, where they are, and what’s going on. Some of that is helpful, it’s going to be important to sift through the noise to find what’s really helpful for those students who need help.

Chuck: Well, Rebecca, I would say one is you certainly cannot throw these students into the breach. That is the first thing you cannot do, absolutely. In terms of, “You are on your own, and you’re going to do this.” So what you have to do then is really be very introspective in terms of, “What is it I do well in my face-to-face? And how can I translate that into an online environment?” And you know very well, I would rather give a lecture to 5000 hostile politicians than to do a webcast, simply because I am not nearly as effective in that environment. So that’s something that you have to do. And the other thing I think you have to realize is that the student voice has become increasingly important in higher education. We came from a time— at least I did—when you went and you lectured and you left, and it didn’t really matter what students thought. That is no longer the case. They have a voice and they express it continually about the quality of education and they share it. And you must realize that culture is going on all the time. All of those things are coming into play that change the educational environment and blended learning. Clay Shirky’s got a great thing that he did several years ago about… we used to lecture and that was it. But then they wanted to email us and they became really annoying. They wanted access to us more than just our office hours. That was a big change for many of us. And then they began talking to each other about us. And then they began talking to each other more about us. And then they began talking to the world about us. And I’ve used this example all the time, just go on YouTube and pick any topic related to teaching, and a professor, a good professor, bad professor, drunk professor, stoned professor, and you will find videos. Students now share their voice, and they’re part of the voice. And I think one of the big problems that we have to face now is: How are we going to integrate the new, more powerful student voice into the higher education culture? And I don’t think we’ve even begun to address that. And I’ll tell you right now, it is not with student ratings. This is another opportunity, as my administrators say to me, “I have an opportunity for you.”

John: So as we’ve talked about before, last year there was that whole experiment with remote synchronous instruction, where both faculty and students were thrust into new modalities that they were not used to. And there’s a lot of evidence of some significant learning losses, and a change in learning practices that has led to some challenges facing faculty and students as we move back to whatever this new normal happens to be in the middle of a pandemic. How can we address the larger variance in prior learning that students bring into our classes no matter what modality they’re in?

Chuck: Well, what we just experienced is something we knew existed all of the time. What this new experience has done with this very nasty virus is it simply exacerbated those differences. And we are going to have to spend some time, I think, devoting our institutions to how we can recover students. Because clearly, in my mind’s eye, the most vulnerable among our students are the worst impacted by what has happened in the last year and a half. Yet again, John, it is not evenly distributed. Unfortunately, it is unfairly distributed. There’s a great book that I just read, called The Class Ceiling. There’s a distinct wealth advantage in this country, people who are exposed to resources and stuff did much better in this environment than people who are not. And we’re going to have to spend some time trying to recover from that. And frankly, I don’t know how at the moment, I really don’t know how. I hope it hasn’t been too disastrous for us, but it has not been a good scene. As Patsy has said, people have tended to conflate what we did in the last two years with online learning, and they shouldn’t be doing that, but they do it. You know it, you know it, and I know it.

Patsy: We’re also seeing enrollment starting to drop. And I think one of the things that’s going to be really important for institutions to do is keep track of: Who are we losing if our enrollment goes down? Because I suspect it’s going to be some of those people who are our underserved population to really are now, through impact of COVID, forced to do something other than go to higher education. Either they can’t afford to do this, or they have to work full-time more than before, care for family, something… but it’ll be really interesting to see. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. We’re starting to see trends. And I think I’ve heard that across multiple institutions in terms of enrollments. We knew enrollment was going down prior to COVID. But now we’re starting to see some of it is maybe more than we expected. So I agree with you, John, I think it’s going to be important for us to really track that and figure out what’s happening and how we can adjust our instruction and whatever we have to do to bolster and help students succeed, whether it’s due to our instruction, or just no fault of their own due to last year. I think we need to try to figure out how to do that.

Rebecca: There’s a lot of shifting expectations that have happened as a result of the pandemic, in addition to, you know, “What is online learning, right?” And what people have experienced as emergency teaching, but also just other expectations around time commitments, flexibility, taking care of mental health, like all kinds of expectations have just shifted wildly from [LAUGHTER] maybe the way that they were before from both the student perspective and the faculty perspective and the institutional perspective. So I think there’s a lot of shifting that’s going to continue to go on as we all try to adapt to what’s going on around us.

Patsy: Absolutely, I agree with that. I think a lot of human resources departments are going to have to figure out how they need to adjust [LAUGHTER] some of their long-set-in-stone policies because we are evolving. I’m not sure we know where we’re evolving to yet, not there. So we’ll find out.

Chuck: Rebecca, I think you’ve hit on the problem of the century, in terms of… How are we going to re-examine our institution in terms of what our value structure is, what we have been, and what we need to be in the future? I’ve read a wonderful book now called Subtract, where the point is made that every time we try to improve, we add something. We never think about jettisoning anything that we have done, and it may be time for us to begin to consider what are some things that we have been doing that are no longer effective and they need to go. It may be painful, but I I think it’s a lesson we’re going to have to address. It’s just a marvelous notion, you just never think about dumping something. We’re going to add in more… give us more resources, give us more faculty, give us more this, give us more that and we’ll do a better job. Will you? I don’t know, I don’t know.

John: One of the things that I’ve been really impressed with is all the research you’ve been doing on blended learning. And one outcome of some of that research, as well as the work of other people, has been that series of books on Blended Learning: Research Perspectives. Could you tell us a little bit about how this collection of research came about?

Chuck: Well, since I’m the old guy here I can tell you exactly how it came about. Frank Mayadas allowed us to fund three summits at the University of Illinois, Chicago, run by Mary Niemiec, dear colleague of mine. 30 of us got together and discussed this notion of blended learning. And what we did is we discussed, in three groups of ten, three topics: quality—God forbid, I’m glad I wasn’t in that one—and the second one, logistics, and the third one, research. And Tony Picciano and I were in the one: research. And we were in a two-day meeting and finally Tony leaned to me and said, “This is not going anywhere. Where are we going to go with this, in terms of research?” Then the next morning, he got up and said, “We need to do a book.” So the first thing we did is we entered the meeting, he said, “We’re going to do a book,” and we got those people who are interested in doing a book. And then, at that time Sloan was running a conference on blended learning, and so Tony and I went and made a pitch about this initial book that Sloan published in terms of blended learning. And there was tremendous interest in it, and all kinds of people submitted chapters. So we had a book that Sloan published. There was a book and it went out. And then it was successful. In this niche market, a book of 1000 is successful, it’s not like Shades of Grey. And then we got to thinking with Charles Graham, ‘How about doing another one?’ And we went back to Routledge and they said, “Yeah, we see that that book was successful. So we’ll do another one.” And we did the second in the series for them. And then thirdly, they came to ask, they said, “The book did so well…” whatever that meant “…we’d like you to do a third version.” And that’s the motivation for the third book. We got a trilogy on this because Frank Mayadas didn’t like blended learning. But he’s a convert now, he’s come around in doing this. And the last book, we really jacked up the quality because we added Patsy to doing this. And now we’re moving on to a book on analytics and adaptive learning. I’ve got to stop writing books. That’s how it happened. It happened by accident.

Rebecca: Many great things do.

Chuck: Oh, they do.

John: Are there any other things you’d like to add?

Chuck: I’d like to address the fact that I think how valuable your podcasts have been for education and the nation. And I think we’re talking about a classic example of what we’re talking about. Look what’s happened over the last years: the value and importance of doing podcasts. Obviously, yours is one of the premier, and I’m not stroking you, you know I don’t need to stroke you. But the notion of this is another modality for learning that we never really considered, right? And this is what we have to do. What are these things? Cherry pick the things that are really working.

Rebecca: So we always ask and wrap up by asking, “What’s next?”

Chuck: Patsy, what’s next for you? Cause I know what’s next for me.

Patsy: Well, yeah, what’s next… wow… is surviving COVID. That’s number one. I think that’s our top priority right now, making it out of the pandemic and figuring out where we’re going to evolve to, as we’ve already talked about. Chuck and I have this book that we’re just now working on, which is data analytics and adaptive learning. So that’s coming down the pipe. And I don’t know, for me, it’s like trying to figure out how to continue to help facilitate research and enjoy what I’m doing, trying to make a difference with as many students and as many faculty as we can. So yeah. That and counting down the days to retirement because I know that’s what Chuck’s going to say. But I have a lot longer, I think, on the track than you Chuck, right?

Chuck: This is my 52nd year at UCF, formerly FTU. I think what’s going to be in the future, for me, will be retirement, but it will also be trying to reflect on what we have learned in this educational enterprise and what we need to learn as we go forward with this. Personally, it is going to be, John, and you know about this, I will be moving over to working with our underserved communities to try to solve the problems of inequity that is so crippling our educational system, and we need to work on that. But those are the kinds of things. I guess I would say thank you for having us again, and we look forward to hearing what we had to say. Right, patty?

Patsy: Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun.

Rebecca: Thank you both.

Chuck: You guys are great.

John: One thing I do want to mention is that we also had a podcast with Chuck, where he did talk about some of the ways of working with this in Episode 115, where Chuck and Harris Rosen talked about the Tangelo Park project.

Chuck: Just as an aside, the Travel and Leisure Co. has adopted another community based on what we’ve done, John, in the Eatonville community. And we’re very close to a foundation in the Midwest doing the same thing. So we are making progress. Hard as we try to get people to replicate it. I think we’re at four now.

Rebecca: That’s great!

Chuck: Yeah, it is great. It is great. And it really does work.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you always. And we’re looking forward to sharing this with our listeners.

Chuck: We really appreciate your thinking of us. We really do. Go Lakers!

John: Go Knights!

Chuck: Take care, everybody.

John: Thank you.

Chuck: Thank you so much. Bye bye.

Patsy: Thanks, guys.

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

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

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