303. Higher Ed Then and Now

Teaching practices have gradually evolved as we’ve learned more about how humans learn. From one year to the next, these changes may appear small, but the cumulative effect is profound. In this episode, Todd Zakrajsek joins us to reflect back on the changes that have occurred in higher ed during our careers.

Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published four books in the past four years. His most recent book is a fifth edition of Teaching at it’s Best, a book he co-authored with Linda Nilson.

Show Notes

  • Zakrajsek, T. and Nilson, L. B. (2023). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors. 5th edition. Jossey-Bass.
  • Zakrajsek, T. D. (2022). The new science of learning: how to learn in harmony with your brain. Routledge.
  • Harrington, C., Bowen, J. A., & Zakrajsek, T. D. (2017). Dynamic lecturing: Research-based strategies to enhance lecture effectiveness. Routledge.
  • EdPuzzle
  • PlayPosit
  • ChatGPT
  • Wayback Machine

Transcript

John: Teaching practices have gradually evolved as we’ve learned more about how humans learn. From one year to the next, these changes may appear small, but the cumulative effect is profound. In this episode, we reflect back on the changes that have occurred in higher ed during our careers.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Todd Zakrajsek, and I am with Todd here in Durham, North Carolina. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published four books in the past four years. His most recent book is a fifth edition of Teaching at it’s Best, a book he co-authored with Linda Nilson. Welcome back, Todd.

Todd: Well, thank you, John. Well, this is exciting. And Rebecca may be a long ways away, but I have never been arm’s length from a person who interviewed me for a podcast before.

Rebecca: Isn’t that cool?

John: And we’ve really done that before either at a conference or at Oswego,

Todd: I feel very special.

Rebecca: Well, we can celebrate with our teas. So, today’s teas are:… [LAUGHTER]

Todd: I’m drinking a peach mango that I got from some teas that John brought, which are fantastic.

Rebecca: John, how about you?

John: I am drinking a Tea Forte black currant tea, which I brought from Oswego, in a new mug that was given to me by Claire McNally, when she visited this area last week.

Todd: Love Claire, she’s fantastic.

John: And it has kangaroos on it.

Todd: Yeah.

Rebecca: And I can’t see it. Let me see it, John. Oh, that’s a cool mug.

Todd: It’s a good mug. I got a mug from her university. But I didn’t realize I should have brought it. So I feel bad about that. But it is a podcast. So I didn’t think about what it would look like.

John: That’s true, we generally don’t do a lot of visuals on here.

Rebecca: And I have a blue sapphire tea in my Tea Rex mug.

Todd: Well, that’s a nice mug,

John: We’ve invited you back to talk a little bit about how some of the changes you’ve observed in college teaching across your career have impacted how you teach today. When did your work in higher ed begin?

Todd: Actually, it started when I was a graduate student. So back in 1987. So there’s no reason to try to figure out how old I am. Now I’ve basically specifically dated myself here. I started teaching, I got to teach an introduction to statistics course. And I had so much fun that I taught again the following year. And by the time I left my graduate program, I had taught more courses in that program than any other graduate student had ever taught in the psychology department there. I really loved teaching right from the beginning, when from the beginning, very concerned about student learning, and just getting rolling.

Rebecca: What was it about the teaching, Todd, that really got you hooked?

Todd: Just watching the studentsis. it’s the same thing as it is today, when you have an individual who’s struggling with something, and suddenly they get it and you realize that they may eventually get it on their own, but you realize how much you’ve helped them to move that along very quickly. And facilitating the learning process, I just really love that. That doesn’t mean I was fantastic at it. But I really did love it.

Rebecca: Sometimes the things we love the most are things that we’re not great at to start with.

Todd: That’s true.

John: My experience was similar, actually, I started in 1980, with a course where I had a fellowship, so I didn’t have to teach. But there was a sudden shortage in the department. And they asked me to fill in. And I was planning to go on into research. But it was just so much fun teaching that I’ve never stopped.

Rebecca: I taught as a graduate student too, and taught the whole time I was there. But I started a little bit later in 2003.

Todd: Alright, so that was a couple of years later.

Rebecca: Just a couple.

Todd: Yeah, I had kind of a funny start, I will mention that when I first started that after the first semester of teaching, my students got almost all As and Bs. And the department chair called me in and he said, “I’m not going to have you teach any more courses.” And I said, “why not?” And he says, “Well, you give grades away like candy, we have to have better standards than that.” And I said, “Well, how are you basing that?” And he says, “Well, you know, we looked at the grade point averages.” And I said, “Well, how about if I bring in my final exam, and just walk through it, and then you can tell me how it could change to be more rigorous.” And so it was great. I showed it to him at the beginning. And like the bottom of the first page, the students had to calculate a statistical value, then I had them explain how they came about that number. But if they had used a different test how might it been inappropriately found and what the interpretation might have been, based on the fact that they had done it wrong with a different test. I thought it was important for them to understand how these things can change. The Chair said, “I can’t believe you have your students in the first class actually talk about various tests like that.” And I said, “Yeah, I did. Then we turned the page he says “You did nonparametric tests?” I said, “Well, yeah, we did parametric tests, but then I thought they should know the equivalent.” And he said, “We never do that.” And then he turned the last page and he said “You had them do a two-way ANOVA? You’re only supposed to go through one-way ANOVA.” I said, “Yeah, but we’d finished everything and we still had a week left. And I figured I might as well introduce the next concept to them. And so I showed them how to do a two-way ANOVA and they ended up with all As and Bs. So if you could help me in how to push their grades down and give them lower grades, I’m perfectly happy to do that.” And he then set me up with two courses the next semester, but it’s that reliance on the teaching evaluations is always funny.

Rebecca: Todd, it’s just funny, as we’ve gotten to know you through the podcast [LAUGHTER] it sounds so perfect that that was your first experience. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Yeah, I’ve lived my entire career on the edge. [LAUGHTER]

John: And those sorts of arguments are still occurring in a lot of classes today about rigor and the need to keep grades lower.

Todd: Yeah.

John: They’re less severe than they were a few years ago.

Todd: Yes, but also looking at how well a person’s teaching based on student evaluations. I mean, we should be looking at authentic assessment. Some things have changed through the years, some things have not changed through the years.

Rebecca: Well, technology is one of those things that has changed.

Todd: Woosh, yeah.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what tech was like in the classroom when you first started and how it’s evolved a bit?

Todd: Yeah, I know you have some listeners who have been teaching for a very long time. So those of you have been teaching for like 30 to 40 years, just stop and think back about what it was like when we first started. For those of you who have been teaching like Rebecca since 2003, let’s just mention that technology back then was mostly pens and chalk and chalkboards. So back then, of course, there’s technology, there’s always technology, but we were using overhead projectors. This was long before the internet came along to really be used in the classes. LCD projectors were not out yet. Canvas, Blackboard, Sakai, all those learning management systems were not around. We didn’t have any of the ways to email individuals, you couldn’t email your students back then. And there was no ChatGPT to write your papers for you.

Rebecca: But there were calculators that could do all the work for you.

Todd: Yes, but this is the cool part. Back when I started teaching statistics, I’m glad you mentioned the calculators, huge debate back then was whether or not the students should calculate the statistical values by hand using the calculator, because computers had just come onto the scene and we could punch the data into a computer and have a computer run an ANOVA for you. Should you calculate it by hand? Should you run it to the computer? And there was a huge camp that said you should do it by hand or you will never understand a statistical value. And I said, “You know, we’ve got the technology there. Why don’t we have the students use the computer to do the mundane stuff, and we’ll have more time to talk about the theoretical and the important implications.” But even back then we were having the discussions about whether to use the technology at hand or not. Oh, and by the way, we are also hanging grades on doors. So we would figure out the grades, we’d tack it to the door, and then the students who want to know what their grades were for the class would swing by and look at the door.

John: And they were sorted alphabetically, to make it easier for people to find where they were in the grade list.

Todd: Yeah, it was great. We listed them according to their social security number, [LAUGHTER] which was a little different back then. And yeah, we actually did that back then. But as John pointed out, they were listed by number so nobody knew whose number went with whom, except, surprisingly, they were alphabetical on the door. So not only could you figure out Armstrong’s exam score, you’d get Armstrong’s social security number as well. Yeah, times have changed.

John: And it was also back in the day of dittos and mineos as well, which was the only way of disseminating information on paper.

Todd: This is so much fun. We’ll get to some real meat of this thing. But that walk down memory lane has some fun stuff too. The dittos…

Rebecca: I remember dittos, just for the record, okay.

Todd: Yes. So you probably remember, if you dittoed just before class, and you handed it out in class, the students would all pull the ditto up to their face, so they could smell the ditto fluid. And they got that smell. I was running dittos one time in the graduate student office, and I noticed when I looked down because it ran out of fluid, and I had to put some more fluid in, and I looked down and I noticed that the floor was kind of eaten away by this ditto fluid. And then… this is the best part… About a month later, I was digging for something in the closet and I found extra tiles and I thought they should put these tiles down to replace the ones that are all eaten and on the side of the box it said these tiles were long lasting and durable, reinforced with asbestos. So that ditto fluid was eating through asbestos tiles. That’s some strong stuff.

John: …to make it a little bit more friable so that it would disseminate in the air nicely.

Todd: Well, there had to be something to help the faculty members who were running all their own dittos to not mind doing it, and one way of doing this is to have them use ditto fluid, because I’ll tell you, you may not have liked it when you started, but by the end, it was all right. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It’s funny that we’re taking this walk down memory lane, because on our campus, I was in our historic lecture classroom today in Sheldon Hall.

John: What are some of the other changes that have occurred and how have they influenced how we teach?

Todd: Yeah, so it’s interesting, I did the walk down memory lane and we were chatting about this stuff. It’s all fun, but thinking about how the changes have taken place. I think that’s really important. So there have been massive changes. I think that we tend to forget, it’s so easy to communicate with students now. Heck, people are texting now so that you can text back and forth with students. But think about how that has transcended or gone through time. There was a time when I would have to call and leave a message for a student on an answering machine, and then they would call back and we would try to find a time that we could talk on the phone. If we wanted to have a conversation. I could either leave a note for the student or I could call and leave a message that says least come see me after class. So even having a conversation with a student was difficult, then it became easier with email because you could start emailing back and forth. And now we have Zoom. And the equity in the way that this has changed, just think about the difference of this, if I’m leaving a message for a student, they may not even have an answering machine, if they’re living off campus with limited means back then. So even getting in touch with a student would be challenging. Now I can have a Zoom conversation with a student who doesn’t have to hire a babysitter, who doesn’t have to find reliable transportation, who doesn’t have to drive across town and burn gas, and to do all of those things that it would take to have a 15-minute conversation that in the past would have been really hard, and even four or five years ago would have been challenging. The grades, why in the world would a person have to leave… and I was teaching in very northern Michigan, there were days that the wind chill was 75 degrees below zero… and students would leave their dorm rooms and walk across campus to see a grade on the door. It’s actually physically dangerous. And now we have learning management systems, we could post things for students. Interlibrary loan used to take weeks to get a document that you can now go on and get. People can lament all of these technological changes at times, but we’re actually creating more and more equity within the higher education system as we make certain things easier. Not saying that we’re anywhere near an equitable system yet, but we’re moving in a really good direction. And a lot of those changes are helping us to get there.

Rebecca: I’m thinking about all the times when I get to go to the door or meet after class, it really assumes that students are a certain kind of student, they’re full time, they have time. And our students now are working [LAUGHTER], and where they’re juggling a lot of different schedules and things.

Todd: Yeah, and I mean, we want to be careful too. And I agree with you 100%. But they were juggling back then too. But some of the things we were doing, for instance, I taught a night class. Now I would probably suggest if I was going to teach a class from 7 to 10pm that I would teach it through zoom, because there’s a lot of reasons that it’s good to do. But I had students that I noticed in class, would very quickly at the end of class would start talking to other students and I couldn’t figure out what it was doing because a lot of buzzing and stuff. And what I found was that there were certain students who were uncomfortable, and we were in a very safe campus, but they were uncomfortable walking to their car at 10 o’clock at night. So I started saying to the students, “Hey, I’m gonna park a car… and when we showed up, there were quite a few cars there… but I’ll be under the second light, I drive a little red Chevette, not a Corvette, a Chevette, but I’ll have my car there. If you want to park near me, we can walk out together.” And there were students that were not paying attention to almost any of the class because they were fearful of how they were going to get to their car safely. When you think about Zoom and stuff, it’s even safety factors, I would never have a review session now like I used to at 8 to 9 pm the night before the exam because I’m exposing people to potentially dangerous situations. Now we’d have zoom sessions. But I could tell you 40 years ago, there was no even concept of what zoom would be and how it would work. Even Star Trek didn’t have stuff like that.

John: And there was also, besides the inequity associated with people who were working, many campuses had a lot of commuting students who could not easily get back to campus for office hours. Or if they were just taking classes on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and your office hours was on a Tuesday, they’d have to come in that extra day, arranging childcare, or their work to be able to fit that into the schedule.

Todd: Yeah, it really did start to change that system. So we got a little bit more equity, and like you were saying too, the commuting students, the part-time students, the students taking distance courses. When I first started teaching, I was writing… oh my word, remember the correspondence courses? …and you mail away and get a packet of material, you take a test at a local library and, and they talk about distance education being not as good as on campus, but at least better than nothing. And now we’re finally getting to a system where we can stop assuming that those folks who are coming in for part-time courses and stuff are just getting something better than nothing. They’re actually getting something similar to full college courses, which some of those online courses are actually as good or better than college courses that are on campus. But all that’s changing with the technology. It’s crazy.

John: And there’s a lot of research that supports that in terms of the relative learning gains with online and face-to-face, as well as hybrid courses, which seemed to outperform others in a few meta studies that have been done. But those were options that just weren’t available back then. And the early online courses were often designed to be replicas of face-to-face classes, and they probably didn’t work quite as well. But we’ve learned since that, which brings us to the issue of research. During the time that you’ve been teaching, there’s been a lot of research on teaching and learning. While some of it was taking place, it wasn’t very widely disseminated to faculty.

Todd: Yeah, that is true, too. It’s so much easier to get technology out. It’s easier to gather data, it’s easier to write it up. It’s easier to edit it so all of those types of things that are happening now that couldn’t happen before. And as a result, we’re learning a lot more about how people learn, you know, the book I did on the New Science of Learning, looking at a lot of the ways that students learn. And part of it’s just the ease of getting to information. But also part of it’s just being able to investigate how people process information. I used to teach Introductory Psychology back then, we would talk about the stages of sleep. And nobody really knew, for instance, what REM sleep was about, we knew that you had to have it or else it caused some problems. Deep sleep we knew was important, we now have indications that deep sleep for consolidation is necessary for semantic memory. If your sleep is interrupted, you can get eight hours of sleep. But if you don’t get deep sleep, the information doesn’t get consolidated. Procedural memory, how to give shots and kick balls and do anything procedurally looks like it’s more solidified during REM sleep. So again, the different types of sleep are associated with us learning long term, different types of information. We never knew that before all this technology was running around. In fact, back then I gotta say, I remember from my intro psych class being told that you were born with a certain number of neurons, and as you live through life, neurons would die. And if you killed them by drinking or doing something like drugs or something, they were gone forever, and you would never get more. And if you broke a connection, it was broken forever. That’s just simply not true. But it’s what we thought back then. So technology has really allowed us to look better at how people learn, different ways of helping them to learn and different ways they can even study. By the way, before we move on, we now have this physiological demonstration that staying up all night and cramming the night before the test. Even though it gets you slightly higher grades on the test, we now know that because the information is not consolidated that it won’t be there a week later or two weeks later. So we’ve always told students, you shouldn’t do it, but now we can actually show them why it doesn’t work.

John: And the LMS itself has offered a lot of ways of giving more rapid feedback to students with some automated grading with some things to give them more low-stakes testing opportunities. And those were things that we just couldn’t easily do back when you started teaching.

Todd: No, John, that’s a really good one. And we know that one of the most consistent findings right now in all of learning and memory stuff is that the more often you do something, the easier it becomes, long-term potentiation. Which means the more frequently you retrieve information from your long-term memory, the easier it is to retrieve. And just like you’d mentioned, we can now do LMS systems that are set up so that you could do practice quizzes, you could do dozens or hundreds of practice quizzes and keep pulling that information out over and over and over again. That was just not possible before this. And so the LMS helps with that, it helps by giving feedback, really good feedback so that students know what they’re doing well, and what they’re not doing well. And it helps faculty members to design feedback specifically for certain types of projects, and so that I can more easily give more feedback without spending a lot more time on it. So LMSs have done a tremendous amount of work. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that you can have all of the LMS systems loaded with the content. So students can log in and get their information without leaving their house. If there’s fiscal challenges with your class, you can put in articles, the students may not have to buy a book, they could read the articles. And so we’ve got students who were able to come to classes because they can afford to be there. By the way, I remember being on a committee when I was a graduate student, and we were looking at financial aid and different financial systems. And I remembered asking the Chief Financial Officer, I said, “What increase in tuition does there need to be before you start to see students drop off because they can’t afford to be here?” And this was about 40 years ago, but he said $100 for a year, if they have to pay $100 this year more than last year, some students won’t come back. If we look at the price of textbooks now, textbooks can cost $400. So, a book like that is definitely going to make a difference between some students being able to take the class or not. So LMS systems make this possible.

John: And they also make it easier to share OER resources that don’t have any cost for students, or some less expensive adaptive learning platforms, giving all students that first-day access. I remember, not so long ago, when I was still using textbooks in some classes, students would wait several weeks before they got that book. And that put them at a severe disadvantage. And the people who were being put at a disadvantage. were generally the students who came in with the weakest backgrounds because they came from lower resourced school districts.

Todd: Yeah, if they had the resources, they would have the better background foundational material, but they’d be able to buy the books. And you mentioned OERs. So open educational resources are really another thing that are really valuable because back then, before the technology, you couldn’t produce something that would be readily available like throughout the world. And so this project that’s going on now where they’re doing introductory level books in all the different disciplines, you can get an OER introductory psychology textbook that students can log in and read. None of that was possible before the technology. So even the creation of OERs has changed so much.

Rebecca: Well, speaking of digital materials, libraries have changed significantly too over time from having completely physical collections and interlibrary loans and things that take a lot of time to having a lot of digital resources, which changes access to research and materials that you can populate into your classes, but also can aid students in the work that they’re doing. Can you talk a little bit about the change in libraries and how that’s impacted how you’ve taught?

Todd: Yeah, you know, libraries have been fascinating to watch over the last 40 years, because it used to be the biggest challenge librarians had before them was which books to put on the shelves because there was a finite amount of shelf space. And there were lots and lots of books. And so that was the big thing. We used to take out journals that weren’t used very much to make room for other journals. Through time, little by little, they started digitizing all that stuff. And I can remember chatting with librarians, one conversation I had was back around 2001. I said, gonna be interesting, because there’s gonna come a day where there’ll be no books in the library, and the Dean of Libraries said “Well, there’s always going to be books.” I said, “Not always, potentially.” But even if we reduce them, I said, “What is your foresight? How is the library going to change?” And so he had a couple of ideas. But what it basically boiled down to our conversation is, I always felt like a library was like the brain of the campus, it had the books, and it had all of the information that you could go and get. As the books left, and things were diversified in a way that you could find this stuff, you could get all the information right from your dorm room, or from your apartment, when the internet came along, you could get anything you needed, then the library was still a physical space that was in the middle of campus. And what it should become is a learning commons, a place where people go to share and to learn from one another. And I think that’s what’s really changed is individuals still just pile into libraries and use the space, but they use it in different ways. They go there to meet other individuals to work, which they did before. But they took away that aspect of going there for the book part. And it meant all of those shelves got emptied, and they started pushing them out. And you can go into libraries right now that have very few shelves. But they have webcams, they have smartboards, they have spaces where folks can plug in their computers and share with one another. They’ve got screens set up so that you can project and have students sitting around a table, they’ve got Google Glass set up, all of these types of things that bring students together to use technology to learn from one another.

John: And they have cafes to help support that to make it easier for people to gather.

Todd: Yeah, you could swing by and get a cup of tea.

Rebecca: It’s funny, even when I was in high school, my sister and I would rely on going to the library to have access to a computer so that we could even type of paper, because we didn’t have one at home. And that kind of place of having the technology started a long time ago, but it’s amped up quite a bit over the last 20 years.

Todd: Yeah, and I agree completely. And the computers that are there. I mean, even right now, with the books dissipating, there a’re still large numbers of computers. And oftentimes, they’ll even be an area in a library that’s carved out with really high-end computers. But it gives students an opportunity to go. We make this assumption that everybody has a computer and they don’t. But libraries give them that opportunity.

John: Yeah, for those students working on smartphones or Chromebooks, that gives them access to all the tools that students with $2000 or $3000 or $4,000 computers.

Todd: Yes, because smartphones can work for lots of things. But they’re a little tough to write a paper on

John: When I started teaching, and probably when you did too, the predominant mode of instruction, which actually still is often the predominant mode of instruction in many departments, was lecture. That’s changed quite a bit since then. Could you talk a little bit about the shift from lecture-based courses to courses that involve much more active learning activity?

Todd: Yeah, or they just involve a lot more of everything. The concept of flipped classrooms, which was almost impossible 30, 40 years ago, because you really couldn’t get the information to the students. Yes, it was kind of possible, but whoo, if it was hard now, it was really hard back then. But the ability to get information out to students that they can read it before they come to class. But coming back to the lectures… So I’m going to take this moment and those of you who know me know that I’m going to do this, is that we still have no evidence that lectures are bad, but there’s something that we need to really keep in mind. I think this is vital. I do think it’s important for us to be able to talk about buzz groups and jigsaws and fish bowls and lectures and Socratic lectures, discussion lectures, all those different methodologies out there so that we know what we’re talking about when we chat with one another. But I do think it’s time that we stop talking about lectures being more effective than one thing or fishbowls being more effective than something else and look at the components of what is valuable in a learning experience.

John: And a good reference for that is a book on Dynamic Lecturing, which you happen to be a co-author of.

Todd: That is true and in fact that there’s the Dynamic Lecturing. And then there’s a chunk in that about The New Science of Learning. And then there’s a whole chapter in that about Teaching at its Best, because that’s a good point, John, thank you.

Rebecca: It’s almost like you’re trying to slip it in everywhere you are.

Todd: Because the research… people keep talking about one methodology being better than another. Here it is, folks, you can be a hideous lecturer, you can be a phenomenal lecturer. And if you’re a hideous lecturer, you’re not going to learn anything. If you’re a phenomenal lecturer, students will learn from you but they won’t learn all the time, it depends on some student factors. I’ve actually been exposed to group work in flipped classrooms that were awful. And so that concept is we start thinking about and this is why it’s going to come back to the technology, we think about the elements that need to be there, that are necessary for learning to take place. I’m just going to do this, because it’s not the topic I’ll make it very brief, is let’s just go with three things. If you don’t have your attention, as a teacher, if my learners aren’t attending to what I’m saying, if they’re on their phone or thinking about bacon, then they can’t process what I’m presenting. And if you’re having a think-pair-share, if they’re not attending to the person they’re sitting next to, you have to have attention. Number two, they have to have some value. If I’m hearing somebody or I’m reading something, and this has no value to me, it’s really hard to get it into your long-term memory and to learn it. And number three, I have to have a clue of what’s happening, I got to understand some aspects. Now if we think about attention, value, and understanding, now we can flip back to the technology. This is why gaming works. Gaming draws the attention, it increases the value, because you want to win the game, and it has understanding. We have all played games. You open up the old board games, and now it’s digital, where you don’t have a clue what the game is. It’s like, if you advance a player four pieces and the opponent advances five pieces, you have to go back three spaces, unless it’s a Tuesday. When those instructions are that complicated, you don’t understand. So we can use technology to help with attention, we can use technology to help with the value of what’s going on. And we can use that technology to help with understanding. Those are things that were very difficult before. And they allow us to do things like a mini lecture and then shift over to an active learning exercise, and then say, take all this information and create a Zoom session tomorrow that will go over it again. So the technology has really helped us to be able to do all of these things to get at the core of learning, a topic I barely care about. [LAUGHTER]

John: That’s an important one, because people often see this as this binary issue where you lecture or you use active learning. And there are some really effective ways to combine them. And in fact, in that book on dynamic lecturing, it was suggested that lecture can be more important in introductory courses, when students don’t have as much of a knowledge base.

Todd: You’re absolutely right. Discovery learning is a really great way to learn if you’ve got a lot of time. I can just put you into a room with some other people and say, “Here’s some data, and here’s some things we need to know. Go.” And if you don’t have any foundational knowledge at all, it takes forever to figure it out, you go online, you know what to look for, I could do a five-minute lecture, and at the end of five minutes, set it up and say, “Now go and work with your neighbors. In fact, here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to have you each work in small groups in class, I’m going to open up a Padlet. At each table, I want you to go in and add your information or put it into the column that corresponds with your group number.” As an instructor, I can watch everything develop in front of me. While I’m in the room, I can look at my laptop and see it and walk over to a table and say, “looks like you’re struggling a little bit.” I’ve lectured, I put them into small groups, I’ve had them use technology, I’ve created a little bit of competition on who can come up with what and I’ve had a way for me to monitor it and give them feedback. That is so different than what teaching used to look like. So pulling it all together, that’s what we do.

Rebecca: The tools to be able to monitor have been really helpful in my own teaching and being able to get a better pulse on what’s going on and get a nice overview and then be more targeted in how to interact with small groups rather than just kind of wandering around more aimlessly like I think I did initially. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Yeah, and this is all going to be great until we get our cognitive load headbands that I’m waiting to be developed. So anybody who’s listening, take this idea, run with it, you can make a bazillion dollars and then take me out to dinner or something. I want a headband and the headband has a light and it measures brainwave activity. And then as I’m teaching, if you start to be a little bit like it’s a little bit too much, you’re moving out of that zone of proximal development, the light turns from green to a yellow. And then when it hits red is like when you’re trying to put together an Ikea bookcase and someone comes by and says “What do you think of this?” and you say, “Errr, I’m working on an Ikea bookcase right now.” …that shutting down with that red light. I’m telling ya, that’s going to be the technology we’ll want next.

Rebecca: It would be so helpful. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: You can actually look and see somebody else’s zones of proximal development and their cognitive load. Whoof. Which by the way, there’s a little party game that they’ll do periodically at parties. It’s like if you’re a superhero, what would you want your superpower to be? And I was in a room one time and one person said they wanted to fly and somebody else said that they wanted to be invisible, which real quickly in my head, I’m thinking, what could you possibly gain that wasn’t illegal or creepy if you’re invisible. So aside from that, transporting and everything else, and they got to me, and I said, “I want to be able to see people’s zones of proximal development. If that were my superpower, I’d be the best teacher.”

John: I bet that went over really well at those parties. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Yeah, my friends all said “You are amazingly smart and quite insightful.” They used different words, but that’s what I heard. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: They didn’t start with what is that? [LAUGHTER]

Todd: As soon as I start talking, most of my friends just shake their head and drink whatever beverage they have near them. [LAUGHTER] So yeah, it’s good times, good times. They’re all impressed. They don’t say it all the time, but I know they are.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that often happens with technology is that it allows us to get things quickly and move through things quickly. But sometimes, as you just noted, learning doesn’t happen quickly.

Todd: Yeah.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about speed and the difference between maybe not having all the technology and all the things really quick versus maybe now where we have it at our fingertips, but do we always want it at that speed?

Todd: So there’s another study that I’m waiting to see. This is an easy study, folks, somebody can run this one quickly. We all know that students are listening to any recorded lectures or recorded material that they have to watch, 1.7 is about the best speed that we tend to see people listening. 2.0 is a little bit fast for some folks. 1.0 is like normal speed, that’s no good, too slow. So what I’m curious about is the space between words and between sentences that our brains, because they move so fast, we can listen faster than somebody can talk. And we have all this other stuff going on is I can be thinking and processing while you’re talking to me. But if I bumped that up to one seven, I think we close the gaps. And I hear it a lot faster. But what I don’t think is happening is the cognitive processing while I’m listening. The active listening component to it. So I think technology can create concerns in those directions. And students who do try to process material too fast… we’ll wait and see.

John: And that’s especially important in flipped classrooms where students do watch these videos outside. One of the things I’ve been doing with those, though, is embedding questions in the video so they can watch them as quickly as they want. But then they get these knowledge checks every few minutes. And then if they find they’re not able to answer it, they may go back and get their attention back and watch that portion again.

Todd: Yeah, I think that’s a really good way to go. EdPuzzle’s kind of a fun technology to use. I don’t know if that’s the one you used.

John: I’m using Playposit, which is a bit more expensive, it works beautifully. I love it, they did just double the price this year, though, it was bought by a new company.

Todd: This is the tricky spot now as the prices are going up. You know, inflation is a terrible thing to waste. Anytime somebody can raise prices now it’s like, “ooh, inflation”. So you know, prices double, inflation is 8% with runaway, now it’s back down around three. But when inflation was 8%, they doubled the price and say, “Hey, we’ve got to,” but yes, it’s some of them are expensive. There’s lots of things that are less expensive. Oftentimes we pay for functionality that help us but the freemiums kind of thing. So stuff that’s inexpensive. I just wanna let everybody out there know just about anything you want to do in class or can think about doing it, there’s a way to do it for either free, or probably under $100 a year, which I know $100 can be expensive for some people, it’s about eight bucks a month. And so things like Padlet that I think might be up around 140 now, so maybe $12 a month, can change how much time you spend doing things, and how much time for students. But yeah, I love the embedded questions to help slow things down.

Rebecca: I think that the cognitive load can happen really quickly if we’re piling lots of information in but not always providing the time to process and use that information in some way in the kind of activities that you were talking about. Or knowing when everybody’s red light is going off in the class.

Todd: Or when people try to do multiple things. I mean, now you’ve got the technology around. So if students are trying to listen to an assignment while they’re texting their friend and have a TV on, I mean, we’re living in an age where there is a lot going on, and people believe they can process lots of things. Evolution doesn’t happen quite that fast. And so I think we have to be careful with that one.

John: One other thing that’s happened is back when you and I both started teaching, the only way students generally communicated their learning was either on typed pages or on handwritten notes. Now we have many more types of media that students can use. And also we’ve seen a bit of an expansion of open pedagogy. How does that help students or how does that affect student learning?

Todd: Wow, that’s really changed a lot as well. Blue Books. Remember the blue books? I think they still sell blue books in the library. They may cost more than the I think it was eight cents when I started, but the concept of writing things down, you turn them into the faculty member, the faculty member would grade them and turn them back. One of the big things that I caught years and years ago was so much wasted cognitive energy in terms of what they produced. I’d read a paper from a student and think this is amazing, and no one will ever see it. It was written for me, I graded it. And now it’s done. I think the technology has changed so many things. One of the biggest things, I would encourage all the listeners, any faculty member out there is, whenever possible, create something that will take the students’ work, the things that they’re doing, and use it to make society better. It’s not that hard. There’s assignments that you can do on Wikipedia. Anybody who wants to complain about Wikipedia, if you don’t like it, I’m gonna go back to Tim Sawyer, who is a faculty member of mine, my very first time I ever did TA work. I was complaining about some students. And he said, “You can complain three times. And after you’ve complained three times, either stop talking,” he was a little bit ruder about that, “or do something about it… just shut up or do something.” And so I complained about Wikipedia for a while, that it wasn’t all that effective. And I thought, well, if I don’t like the page on cognitive load on Wikipedia, I could give an assignment of my cognitive Psych class to go on to Wikipedia and fix it. And so you can have Wikipedia assignments, there’s so many things you could do. Here’s one for you. If you’re doing one on communication, you could have your students go and take pictures or short videos somewhere on campus of something that’s meaningful to them, and then jot down why it’s meaningful, take that compilation of stuff and send it over to the office on campus that does publicity. What better way of drawing students to campus than to have all of these students that have said, I love sitting by the pond because… and in the past, we would have had students write a paper about someplace on campus that you think is effective, put it in the blue book, we would grade it, we turn it back to the students. And that is a waste of possibilities. And so I think we do have lots of ways that we can get the students involved in helping through technology,

John: One of our colleagues in SUNY, Kathleen Gradel, had an assignment for a first-year course, where the students went out, took pictures, geocoded it and added it to a map layer that was then shared with other first-year students about useful resources on campus and their favorite spots on campus, which is another great example of that type of authentic learning.

Todd: Yes, for the authentic learning, there are just so many possibilities because of the technology. If anyone doesn’t have ideas, ask deans, ask the provost, ask the president on your campus, like what kind of information would be helpful, either for the next round of accreditation or for just helping the campus and we can design those things. Another one I did was we took students to the museum. We’d go to the museum, almost any class could kind of find some way to tie museums in, and through the museum, not only would they write stuff that the folks at the museum who did curation would help use, but also just helping the students to see how issues from the museum, how artifacts and things can be used in their own life, to better understand.

Rebecca: When I first started teaching, community-based learning was popular, in fad at the time, and I think having the experience of being a student in a class like that, but then also a faculty member teaching classes like that has really informed the kinds of projects that I do. Maybe they’re not always community-based learning, but they’re often community oriented, whether it’s the campus or even the surrounding community that the campus is situated in to help students get connected. There’s so many nonprofits that need partners and love, there’s always a project that can be done. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: There is. And I used to be a director for a service learning component of the campus. And yeah, there’s just so much out there that we can do to help others.

Rebecca: And students always had such a strong connection. And they didn’t want to fail because other people were depending on them. And so there was a real investment in the work that they did on projects like that.

Todd: I will admit that I’ve never experienced it myself. I’ve never even heard of anybody that if the students are doing some kind of authentic learning, that their authentic learning is then used to help somebody else. I have never heard students say “What a waste of time” or “I hate that class,” or “those assignments are just busy work.” They’ve never used those terms.

John: One common sort of project is to create resources that could be shared with elementary or secondary school students in the disciplines. And again, they can see the intrinsic value of that.

Todd: Yeah. Students could write short manuals on how to learn and then pass that on to the first-year students. And so upper-division students could be helping the lower-division students because not everybody can get a copy of The New Science of Learning, third edition.

John: …available from… [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Available at… used to be Stylus. Since Stylus was sold to Routledge, now it’s available at Routledge. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Given the historical background that we’ve walked through today, what if we think about the future? Where do you see technological changes or learning theory changes impacting the future of higher ed?

Todd: Yeah, we’re living at an interesting time. I like to point out to folks that when you go back to Socrates, Plato kind of time there was a thought that if you wrote something down, it would weaken the mind so we shouldn’t write things down. Luckily, some individuals wrote things down or we never would have known. We’ve gone through several iterations of those kinds of things. Samuel Johnson, I believe it was, who said “With the ready availability of books, teachers are no longer needed. If you want to learn something, you could go get a book on it.” Well, that was a couple of 100 years ago. And we still have faculty members, we have students writing things down, we’re reading, I don’t imagine how you could teach without writing things down and having books. The internet came along, as we were discussing earlier, while we were teaching, we watched the internet show up. And there were people who said, “Well, with the internet, there’s going to be no need for teachers anymore, because students can get whatever they want.” I can’t imagine teaching without the internet right now. So as we’ve gone through each of these iterations, there’s been this fear that maybe we’d be supplanted by some technology followed by “I don’t know how I’d work without that,” it’s a little trickier now, because with generative AI, we’re talking about not just something being available, but actually creating something. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. But there’s some real possibilities that the generative AI ChatGPT, could do things like help students who have writer’s block, get started. And that’s an individual that maybe could produce something really cool, but just can’t get started. I didn’t publish my first book until about seven or eight years ago, because I’m one of those individuals who has a terrible time from a blank screen. I just have a terrible time with that. And so now, I don’t use ChatGPT to actually write anything significant. But I will tell you that I will use it for the first paragraph. That’s all, just one paragraph. And then I completely rewrite that. And there’s no actually trace of it. But it’s something that gets me going.

John: So can we count on more than a book a year going forward? [LAUGHTER]

Todd: No, no, no, no, you can’t. So exhausting. But the concepts that will help students that can do that, I think that’s going to be helpful for them. So there’ll be a type of student who couldn’t have produced before, but now can. We are definitely going to run into some challenges, though, with students who are going to just use generative AI and use artificial intelligence to actually create and to hand something in instead of doing the work. So I do think we’re in a challenging time right now. And I wouldn’t make light of that. There’s actually something that I find fascinating from this. Right now, more than ever before, we can actually have artificial intelligence create something for us, especially in higher education, this hasn’t been done before. The tricky thing is that we were the ones to be able to make that possible, because we learned things. If we let a machine do that work for us, we’re not going to be put into the situation or our students coming along, will not be put into a situation where they’re intelligent enough to do the things that need to be done when they need to be done. And so I do think we’re facing a real dilemma right now. If my students, for instance, always do use some artificial intelligence to create a paper and hand it in, if I can’t catch it, they may end up with an A in that portion of the class. But there’s going to come a day when they’re going to have to write something or be able to read something and tell if it’s written well. And so I’m a little bit nervous, we’re entering a phase where by bypassing some cognitive processing that needs to be done, we may be limiting what we’re able to do in the future. Wrapping this up, though, I don’t want to be the person who says if you use a calculator, you’ll never understand this statistical test. So I don’t know where the balance is. But I do think we’re going to have to have decisions coming up that we’ve never had before.

John: Generative AI is drawing on that wealth of knowledge that has been produced. And for that to continue to grow in the future, we do need to have some new materials being created. So that is an interesting challenge, unless it goes beyond unless….

Todd: …unless it creates it. So that was one I thought about, by the way, sometimes you’re sitting around just thinking about stuff and it’s interesting. I was thinking how do I acquire new information. And the way I acquire new information is I go read articles, I read books, I read a ton of stuff. And then I say I think this is valuable, I don’t think that’s valuable. And then I put it together and say here’s what I’m thinking. And now I’m looking at this generative AI who goes out and scans the environment and pulls these things and then creates something new. It doesn’t have the cognitive processing that I have at this point, but…

John: it’s in the early stages.

Todd: We have some folks who are very concerned out there, especially in European countries that are starting to put some guardrails out, because at the point that it keeps grabbing stuff, and then generating and then it grabs the stuff it generated, then it’s going to be interesting. But as of right now, I just read another article, I think it was yesterday, that they’re going out and grabbing the most popular or most frequently written things and then putting it down as if that is right.

Rebecca: The way that you might prioritize as a human with an expertise in something, is going to be really different than a system that’s prioritizing based on popularity, [LAUGHTER] or like how current something is like when it was last published. That’s a really different value system that really changes priorities.

Todd: Yeah, and I think it changes how we teach. I think the way we teach is going to fundamentally shift because we’re going to have to work with students with all these things being available and explain to them and talk to them about the learning process and the value of the learning process. And keep in mind, this isn’t just about ChatGPT writing papers, everybody’s freaked out about that right now. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that you could get fresh, cleanly written papers that have not been plagiarized at all, we’d be able to do that for 20 years. There are paper mills, I can either write away or contact somebody and say, “Please write me a 10 page paper on Descarte, and they would write it, I could turn that in. What actually has happened recently is that everybody can do it, even those who can’t afford to have a paper written at $10 a page or whatever it’s costing. And so equity comes back again. [LAUGHTER] Now we’re an equal opportunity cheater. So we have to be careful with that. But I think the way we teach is going to change because all that information is going to be available, kind of like the internet on hyperspeed. And then what do you do with that? It’s going to be really intriguing. I think it’s an exciting time.

Rebecca: So Todd, this episode’s gonna come out right at the beginning of this semester. So you’re saying we need to be thinking about how to change our teaching. ChatGPT’s here, what are you doing for the Fall differently?

Todd: Well, I think the biggest thing is what we were just talking about, looking more at the learning process, which has been a big thing for me for the longest time, is explaining and talking through the learning process, I can hand you all this information, but if I hand it to you, you don’t learn. In fact, one of my favorite examples came from a friend of mine, and it was the gym, if you want to get in better shape, I could pay somebody to go do sit ups for me. And then I could somehow log in the book at the gym that 100 Sit ups were done, use the passive voice there, and somebody else did them for me, I’m not going to get in better shape unless I do the situps. So I have to do the work, I have to run, lift weights, do the situps in order for me to be able to gain. We need to just turn that into a cognitive process for our students to really gain cognitively they have to do the work. And so I think more than ever, it’s how do we convince students of that? And for the faculty members who say, “Well, that’d be great, but my students just want the grade.” If that’s the case, we have a bigger problem than whether or not some technology can write a paper for them.

John: So how do we convince students that it is important for them to acquire the skills that we hope they get out of college?

Todd: I think this is probably going to come down to the community building, it’s been there forever. If you really want your students to do the work, the best thing you can do in my view, and that’s why I’m gonna say, Rebecca, I don’t think a lot for the way I teach, has changed. You build a community, you build relationships, you talk to the students about importance of things, if you’re sincere about that, and they get that then yes, there’s going to be some students that are going to mess with the system, they have always been there. But you’re also going to get a lot of students who will say, “Yeah, that’s a good point.” And then they’ll do the work. I don’t teach as many undergraduates as I used to, I’m teaching more faculty than ever because of being the faculty developer. But there were years that I would have to tell my students don’t put more time than this in on your paper, you have other classes, you need to do the work in the other classes. Because, and I’m telling you, I am very proud of this, my students would spend a ton of time on this stuff for my class, because they didn’t want to let me down. And I would say you’ve already got an A, I’m proud of what you’re doing, please go work on your other classes. That kind of scenario happens when you build community. And I’m not saying it’s easy, I would never say it’s easy. And it’s not going to happen for everybody. But it is the foundation of good teaching.

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

Todd: There’s just so much going on right now. I think that what’s next for me is I am still in that headspace of coming kind of back from the pandemic, anybody who says, “Yeah, but the pandemic’s all over,” wait for November, we won’t know, we’re going to see. But I still think that’s next is kind of thinking about how we teach and learn in this environment. So moving in that space, it’s probably not surprising. I’m working on the next book here. One of the things I want to do now is the last couple of books that I’ve done had been pretty heavy books. And now I want to write something that’s a little bit lighter. So it’s going to be more of a quick guide with more narrative and having some fun, I love telling stories. I love having fun with people. So I’m going to try to create a book that’s kind of like a science of learning and teaching at its best but really accessible and more of a story-based kind of way of looking at things.

Rebecca: Who is your audience for that book?

Todd: Anybody who will read it? [LAUGHTER] Anytime I write anything, I have to have the audience firmly in mind and think about who am I talking to. And I really believe there is a pretty big overlap with students and faculty who don’t know specific things. And I’m not saying this in a mean way toward any of my faculty colleagues at all. But there’s a lot of people who aren’t taught about things like long-term potentiation and deep sleep in terms of semantic memory, and looking at depth of processing and those types of things. So the same type of thing we can say to a student, we know you shouldn’t cram, but here’s why you shouldn’t cram… faculty learn a lot from that as well. And so my audience for this book is going to be faculty and students, students, because I think it’ll be more fun to read about how to learn in a narrative form like that. And faculty because it’s more fun to learn when you read in that kind of a format for some people. we’ll see.

John: And if faculty design their courses to take advantage of what we know about learning, it can facilitate more learning.

Todd: Wouldn’t that be cool? We could just keep rolling, rolling. What a great amount of work. I mean, a huge amount of work that faculty do. They’re hard working folks that are just cranking away all the time. Number one, making their life a little bit easier by helping to understand things would be great. And just having a little bit more fun would be fun, would be nice way to go to0.

Rebecca: Hey, anytime you can save time, so that we can have more play in our lives is better.

Todd: Yeah, just to do whatever you want to do.

John: Yeah, ending on a note of fun is probably a great way to end this.

Rebecca: Well. It’s always great talking to you, Todd. Thanks for chatting with us and going on the Wayback Machine.

Todd: Oh, you know, I love the Wayback Machine.

Rebecca: I love it too.

Todd: For those of you who don’t know about that, you should check out the Wayback Machine

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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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288. Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning

Faculty generally design courses on their computers, but many students interact with courses through mobile devices. In this episode, Christina Moore joins us to discuss the benefits of being mobile mindful in course design.

Christina is the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She is the author of Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning: Harnessing the Technology that Students Use Most, which was recently released by Stylus Publishing.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Faculty generally design courses on their computers, but many students interact with courses through mobile devices. In this episode, we discuss the benefits of being mobile mindful in course design.

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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 Christina Moore. Christina is the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She is the author of Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning: Harnessing the Technology that Students Use Most, which was recently released by Stylus Publishing. Welcome, Christina.

Christina: Thank you so much. So glad to be here.

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

Christina: I am.

Rebecca: Woohoo,what kind? [LAUGHTER]

Christina: I have to, of course. I am having honey vanilla chamomile tea. Just something refreshing and light.

Rebecca: That sounds perfect for a Friday afternoon. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have one of my usuals, ginger peach green tea, today.

Rebecca: I just got a new shipment of my blue sapphire tea pack. So I’m back to drinking that. It’s a good spring tea.

John: And it’s all sparkly, isn’t it?

Rebecca: It’s not sparkly, it’s blue sapphire.

Christina: I never heard of sparkly tea, but I’m intrigued.

Rebecca: There is. We need to get our hands on some.

John: It was the same episode where you describe that tea. We’ve invited you here to discuss Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning. You note that you started writing this book on your phone? Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of this book project?

Christina: Yes. So probably the very first step is my interest in Universal Design for Learning. I find it to be a really useful framework for thinking as expansively as possible about how students can learn and how we, as instructors, can be involved. So my very first interest into mobile-mindful teaching in earnest was reading Tom Tobin and Kirsten Behling’s Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: UDL in Higher Ed, and they have a chapter on “Meet the Mobile Learners” that was really this important call to learning with our phones and how, as educators, we’re really missing out if we’re not willing to consider the role that that could play, and I thought the argument was really convincing. So I started to do just a little bit of exploration into the topic. And that was probably in January 2020. And then a couple months later, COVID hit in earnest. It really upended our lives. I’m a mother of two young kids, and they were two and four at the time. So it was sometime in late March or early April, that we had been so cooped up, and we had used the family minivan so seldomly that we decided just to play in the car, that that would be the activity; not moving in the van anywhere, just playing in there. The kids would crawl around, listen to the radio… it was just one of those really comical moments just totally different than life in general. And it was really during those days that I was using my phone for work a lot more than I ever had before, because I just sometimes needed to keep things moving while we didn’t have childcare. I would read articles, I would take notes on how they might apply to something else I needed to write or work on that day, or it would spark an idea. And it was really at that point that I realized, it’s not just 18-, 19-, 20-year olds who want to learn on their phones, it’s really something that all of us, at least the vast majority of us, take advantage of. And during certain periods of our life, we need to lean on them more heavily. So I actually started to realize this while I’m sitting in the van, and I started writing down some notes about this experience. I was connecting back to some of the things I started to read and work on earlier. And then I sent the piece to EDUCAUSE and they were really interested in publishing it. It was a really short piece, but I was really surprised with how many people resonated with that, because mobile learning is still something that tends not to excite most instructors, it just feels like this distraction device, something people don’t want to think about, we’re already frustrated about it. But a lot of people recognize themselves, I think, in the story that I told and in some of the practical places to start. So in many ways that was sort of the seed to what would become this book, because honestly, while my interest has been in educational technology for a while, I would not have guessed, I would have written this book, but really it was the need to address something that I think we’ve been ignoring, or just haven’t been able to find a really accessible entry point to as far as a really good learning opportunity and even a good teaching opportunity for us. I was really inspired in this book to say “Okay, let’s come up with a starting point for at least considering what role mobile learning can play. And let’s start developing our curiosity and see where we go from there.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who the audience of the book is?

Christina: I really tried to make this book to the person who is excited about teaching, they really care about their students’ learning experience, even if they’re not so excited about the idea of students learning on a mobile device. And I would describe the audience that way, because I think that’s the audience that a lot of the enthusiasm around mobile learning has been missing. And we haven’t had that critical mass of instructors who are finding a good entry point in. So I would say it’s like the learner first, tech second, type of instructor who uses technology, normally, because they see it has a real benefit for students. And they may not always be comfortable with it, but they’re willing to try things as long it isn’t too overwhelming. So with that audience in mind, I really tried to take a beginner approach to tech. I explain how QR codes work, how you can create one, might even explain what the share icon is, because that’s really important for fluid learning and connecting our learning experiences. But I also allow space to dive into more course activities and possibilities that you can do with students, even if you don’t feel completely mobile tech savvy, because I’m somewhat in that boat as well. Of course, I learned a lot through this book, but I hope I did some of the learning and pre work so that faculty readers and other educators can just feel free to try things out, even if they’re not totally sure how they feel about these things.

Rebecca: Can you define what you mean by mobile learning, just to make sure that we’re all on the same page early on the conversation?

Christina: Yeah. So mobile learning, first and foremost, makes us think of learning on a smartphone, which mobile learning can sometimes mean like tablets, and even non-smartphones. But we’re normally talking about smartphones, phones that have the capability to connect to the internet, especially because increasingly, most people, most adults, have mobile phones. But I do think a little bit larger about mobile learning as well, just acknowledging the fact that we learn in motion. I think a lot of us sit in front of a computer for a lot of the work that we do. But what I try to guide us to think about is the fact that we learn and work in multiple places, with our laptop, with our phones, while we’re on a walk, while we’re on a drive. We do not stop learning or stop thinking the second that we are no longer in front of a screen officially working on things. So I also try to tease out that much larger idea of we are learners in motion and that we are learning and responding to our environments.

John: And smartphone ownership by students is close to being ubiquitous, nearly all students have a smartphone. And they normally have them with them all the time. And they use them regularly for learning. Yet there is some faculty resistance to students using smartphones in the classroom. How do you address that when faculty say “I don’t allow smartphone use in my classes?”

Christina: I think I take a balanced approach to this. So first, I acknowledge that and understand. I think even our students don’t really like how distracted they constantly feel by technology. Our institution actually just facilitated a student engagement panel with students talking about creating a collaboration around student engagement and learning with faculty. And even that was expressed by the students themselves. And that was corroborated by the research that I looked into. So, I think, and I have this mantra a lot throughout the book, which is somewhat the mindful aspect of it as “Well it’s okay, let’s acknowledge and notice that we have that skeptical feeling, but sort of suspend it and just be a bit curious.” So my first piece of advice is to talk with students directly about this issue, because our classes look different. They’re small, they’re large, they’re gen ed classes or major classes. So I think it helps to first talk with the students, maybe on the first day, if you’re discussing the course syllabus, “What should tech use look like in the class?” It can either be in class or in an anonymous form where you’re saying: “Some research has found that cell phones can be distracting not only to the person using it, but to the person next to them. How do you feel about this and your learning environment?” Then that can help at least bring them into the discussion, so that with whatever you decide, they feel like they have had some say and input, or at least some understanding of why you do what you do. That being said, I would definitely not support just a total tech ban. And that’s because, and the book does get into some of this research, there’s pretty strong indication that students are using these phones for e-texts, sometimes they are caregivers who really feel anxious if they don’t feel like they’re going to know right away if there’s an issue and they’re the primary contact. So there’s lots of evidence that by banning this technology altogether, we can do real harm to the students who really need it the most, which overwhelmingly are women, or people of color, and people with disabilities. So I wouldn’t encourage a total tech ban, a conversation with students, and really, similar to what James Lang has talked about in his book Distracted, that we don’t have to take an either/or stance, it’s not really reasonable to expect totally undivided attention. I mean, think of any faculty meeting and how many phones are even out during those. So just thinking realistically, but also maybe guiding your students, like, which point in class do you think it’s really important to put away the phones because you’re just talking to one another, and then maybe prompting students to do that. Whereas other active learning situations, you might not worry so much about the technology being used, because the activity itself is so engaging that you don’t really have to worry about that. So overall, I actually encourage us to think more about the mobile learning possibilities outside of a classroom, because I actually think that that’s where its virtues come out a lot more than it’s vices.

Rebecca: I’m really struck by the idea of this fluid learning and learning on the go. [LAUGHTER] And having learning in your pocket and work in your pocket. Your story was reminding me that just the other day, I was enjoying the nice weather, but had a lot of work to do, so I got out my mobile device and I talked through the presentation I needed to give so I could get an outline done while I was on a walk without having to be at a computer. And there’s lots of ways that we can use our devices. We talked a little bit about QR codes, and that might be one obvious way to use a mobile device in a classroom, but what are some of these other ways to use a phone that are in these other spaces that we don’t always expect?

Christina: So I think your example of being on a walk is one that I talk through, because part of the book, a fairly large section of the book is called “Start with Self.” And this is really guiding us through the basics of what it means to be a mobile learner, what are some basic skills that will help you actually become more familiar with what it is to be a mobile learner firsthand, because we’re really not used to thinking of ourselves in that way. And I like the walking to sort of get a break, but you’re still actually being very productive. And maybe you’re being more productive because you’re breaking up your thinking, your body is moving, your muscles are moving, so your brain is likely going to be better and more responsive. But I think, for most of us, we have to sort of walk through the steps of “Okay, but how do I make that happen? How do I use voice to text in order to be able to speak into the phone and have the text written out? Where do I do that? What app do I use?” And along with fluid learning, which is the idea that we design learning activities so that if we do our learning in one place, we can then access it in a useful way, in a different context, a different device, in a different situation. So it gets into that decision of am I taking my notes in a app that I can easily access when I do decide to sit back down at the computer? So I think going through those simple steps of “Okay, what buttons do I have to press? How do I find out how to do that? What tools and processes are going to work best for me?” I think is something that we have to start with, because many of us aren’t used to putting all of those pieces together. But just to use this example, again, the idea of being able to walk and learn in a productive way, is a really good example of something that’s good for our bodies that in a way actually takes us away from screens a little bit because we’re not so focused, even on the screen in front of us, we’re just using it basically as a recording device. And that’s why I do like us to think a little bit broader about mobile learning because yes, it is learning that is made possible because of phones but it is not always just us with our thumbs staring at this teeny tiny screen, but it’s also how it allows us to take pictures of things that we find so that we are actually connecting whatever we’re talking about in class to something that we are seeing in a completely different context. And if we think about the application that we make possible, how much more powerful is that learning that we’re able to take it from our environment, and then find some way to share it with our classmates, such as a shared messaging platform or a shared folder where people can put their pictures, I’ve heard really amazing examples, especially in like biology and STEM fields, where instructors are using, whether it’s something like social media or just a shared photo folder, where both the instructors are sharing photos and asking their students to identify them, sometimes on a daily basis, where also students are actively collecting samples via photos. And then they are working as a class together to label the genus or species of whatever leaf, plant, or whatever that they have identified. So I think that answer was a little bit mobile in and of itself, it might have kept going, but I think it provides some examples.

John: In the title of your book, you use mobile mindful, rather than mobile learning. Why is that distinction important?

Christina: Even stepping back to when I was thinking of mobile learning directly, I was really wanting to use my phone more productively so less mindlessly, because I was noticing I was just going to my phone to pass the time. And I was doing things I wasn’t even interested in or was consciously thinking of. So I began thinking, “Okay, how can I redirect this habit into something that is more intentional?” So that’s one reason for the use of the word mobile mindful is this idea of intention, and using our phones for the things we actually want to do rather than just for this pure distraction. But I also use the word mindful with it as a hopefully less intimidating and less techie sounding approach to it. So when I think of mobile mindful, I think of something that’s mobile aware, or mobile-ish, or it’s an adding a piece to our already existing rich ecology for learning that we create in our classroom. And just adding this as like an extra tool, an extra really powerful way to connect all of these pieces together and help our students learn more often and think about the content more often. So it’s a mindful approach to mobile learning, but also like, let’s start with mobile aware before we like go diving into mobile learning. So I contrast it with mobile first learning, which some people are doing amazing work on, which is putting in the constraint and challenge of let’s try to create a whole learning environment that can take place on a phone. That is not the approach that I take in this book. I think it’s productive for most college and university instructors to first start with, “Well, how can this be one piece and one delightful added element to all of the good work that we’re already doing?”

Rebecca: I’m curious in your role as an instructor and in a teaching center and your interactions with students, what are some of the most interesting ways you’ve seen that students have just adapted to using their phones to help with learning?

Christina: Well, I’ll answer the question, but I’ll also add something to it that I think is important for us to realize, that once we go through the learning process of being a mobile learner ourselves, there may need to be a little bit of prep work that we also do with students. Well, a lot of our students have only known the world that is mobile phone capable, it doesn’t always mean that they are ready to be mobile learners. They have definitely internalized messages that phones are bad for them, phones shouldn’t be in the classroom, even though they bring them in anyway. So there’s very much this vice type of attitude towards it. And therefore they haven’t had always a lot of opportunities to use their phones as these powerful learning devices. So I would add sort of the caveat of “Yes, students are doing amazing things and can do amazing things, but they may need to be guided into it a little bit just as much as we do.” So with that being said, I would say that some of the exciting things that students are doing and going back to QR codes, I really liked the example of audio essays that were taken to specific places. And again, QR codes have become so much easier to both use and create. You can basically create them from any browser. The QR codes in my book are purposely created for free by right clicking on any website and there’s a drop down option that says create a QR code. You can create fancier logo specific ones, but I decided to just use the default one as sort of a demonstration of the fact that they are really easy to create, and that’s how I went about it. So I think even just adding an element to maybe research presentations or things for a specific audience where you say, “Okay, how could you use a QR code to direct people to a different learning element?” And so it might be directing them to a piece of audio where you’re explaining something that is in a very specific environment. So again, thinking about learning being mobile is you are creating learning experiences that take place in very specific locations, or could take them to a form that they fill out or a petition or something like that. So I think it creates a lot of convenience and thinking about your audience and makes it a little bit more creative. And then the one other really interesting use that I cover, and I talk about the ethics of mobile phone use and inviting students to use their mobile phones. That’s actually a really good opportunity to get students to think more critically about the data being collected on them. So some faculty have done really interesting work in places like statistics, or other data analysis type of classes, and students have been invited to download the data that is collected about them on social media or on Pokemon Go, especially those that are mobile dependent, like especially Pokemon Go. It not only teaches the students a really useful content skill and applies it, but it helps them be a little bit more critical about what is actually going on behind the scenes when they don’t actively take a role in limiting data sharing about what they’re doing and where they are. So I think that type of application of getting students to think and actually dig into their own data is a really good example of what I think faculty could start to find as really exciting about mobile-mindful teaching, as they start to see that there is a lot they can have students do that really isn’t as possible in other ways.

John: You mentioned QR codes. When they first came out, they were really useful tools, but you had to dig up a specific application to scan them. Once smartphone manufacturers allowed the cameras to directly read and respond to QR codes, it became such a game changer in terms of their use. I don’t think I’ve given any presentations, either in class or at a conference in the last three or four years, except during the time when all instruction was remote, and then I was more likely to drop URLs in the chat. And it just opened up so many great possibilities for sharing resources with students, with colleagues, and so forth. I’m still amazed at the number of faculty who don’t know how to use QR codes. And I was really glad to see you had a discussion of that in the book in terms of how instructors could use those within their classes. You mentioned a little bit about the use of QR codes, but how might instructors use that in their class?

Christina: Yeah, so and just as a funny note, back to the audience, my mother is reading my book, and I asked if she’s tried any of the QR codes yet. And she said, “What’s a QR code?” [LAUGHTER] And I said, “Oh, maybe you haven’t gotten that far in the book yet.” But then I was explaining it to her. And she’s like, “Oh, it’s what’s been on all of the restaurant menus.” I was like, “Yep, those are the ones.” So I also think of like, you don’t know what a QR code is and you’ve seen it, but you haven’t connected the dots. I’m hoping that this book will connect a lot of the dots. So I will give a couple of really useful examples of an instructor intentionally using QR codes. So, I think in the spirit of Universal Design for Learning, it can be really nice to add QR codes to print handouts, because I think sometimes students do like to have print handouts because it helps them resist some of the distraction that comes with phones. They like having something tactile, but by putting a QR code on them, if they would rather consult something on a phone and take digital notes, they immediately have that option. So I think that’s something that’s fairly easy that can be done if you use print handouts, but want to be conscious of people potentially using mobile phones, or directing people intentionally to other websites by using their phones. My other favorite, which I think is also useful in other contexts, is when you want to get quick feedback from your audience, such as students, displaying a really big QR code on a projector. And then even in a really large class, they can pretty easily scan it and then they can give you some really useful feedback that you have in a digital form that can be automatically analyzed or you can quickly go through it. So I think of some of the really classic active learning strategies that we may be familiar with such as exit tickets, what you want to know from students at the end of class. It might be the muddiest point, where you want to know what students are still confused on, or one-minute papers, where you want a really quick reflection about what they’ve learned in the class. So by displaying that QR code, students can take the form there, and then you quickly have all the data. Inversely, you can also do this at the beginning of a class, if you want to ask students, either three review questions, or you want to ask them three questions that are just going to prime the pump of whatever you’re about to discuss to sort of see what they know before you’ve even covered it. While I didn’t do it with the QR code, this was one of my favorite mobile learning activities that I tried the last time that I teach. Because it was an asynchronous online course, I wanted to get a sense of students feeling like I am responding to what they’re learning and thinking. So I would start the week with a really short form and say, “This will take you five minutes, I just want to know what has your experience been doing primary research? Do you know the difference between primary and secondary research?” And then I could address that feedback directly into my instructional video. So it would create that sense of presence, even though it was an asynchronous course. And by telling them it would take them five minutes, they did it right away. So like, that’s kind of the magic of micro learning, which is, I think, one of the superpowers of mobile-mindful learning is if you can break things down into smaller chunks, students will do it. And that’s kind of the interesting course design pedagogical challenges, to figure out how to get things into smaller pieces.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we often assume is that the students who are using their phones for learning or to complete work are more traditional aged college students. But from my experience, [LAUGHTER] it’s often adult learners who are using their phones the most, because they’re often double timing as your example in the van [LAUGHTER], or at soccer practice or during swim lessons and trying to complete a module or reading the captions on a video, or [LAUGHTER] any number of other things, getting a start on a paper or trying to edit or providing feedback to peers or something. So they’re taking it with them, and often maybe in an environment where there’s other things going on, but trying to make progress on something in the little snippets of time, those small chunks of time that might be available.

Christina: And that’s what I think is useful about thinking of this fluid learning environment is, of course, we don’t always want to be learning in that context. We want our students to think deeply, we want them to have time to really mull over ideas and work in larger chunks of time. But what I’ve come to realize is that there really is quality learning that can happen in those snippets of time, mostly by frequency. Because I think a lot of times with the way activities and courses are set up is that the students are cramming right before class, the last possible minute, to do everything they were supposed to do over the last week. And we know from experience that this does not produce quality work. And it doesn’t bring into our class, a really curious thinker who’s really been mulling over these ideas. So I think if we reframe this sort of micro learning as “How would your students think differently, if they thought about your course content four times a day, even if it was in really small snippets?” They would probably be a lot more prepared and have more interesting things to say once they do sit down with that hour to work on things. So even if we sort of dread and don’t love the idea of our students doing things while waiting in line for five minutes, or being in a waiting room for 10 minutes, I think reframing it as like this is a piece that will contribute to a longer work period. I think that’s a lot more inspiring.

Rebecca: You know, from my own experience, I get more reading done, because sometimes I have my device read to me and I can do that in the car or in other places… maybe not good for research kind of reading but good if I’m trying to get background knowledge on something or keep up with something that’s current.

Christina: Rebecca, you’re narrating and describing exactly the types of things that I want readers to notice about themselves, about how they learn, because I think we normally don’t notice these things. We just sort of do them because we’re trying to just do what we can. And what we want to get students to notice about their own learning emotion as well.

Rebecca: I mean, I’m a designer who designs for mobile devices, so I’m already sold. [LAUGHTER] But I think it’s important that we recognize how often people are using their devices already, and all the ways that we could use them that we don’t always know that we can. My students are often really surprised when I show them some of the features that are available to them on their phone that make their lives easier.

Christina: Yes. Exactly. And that’s why we have to take students along with us and pointing things out like, “Oh, do you know how to do this? Do you know that the learning management system has an app? Do you know that it will give you push notifications when I message you, so you don’t have to worry about catching up on my emails as much?” I think those little nudges like, “Oh, did you know or how do you keep notes on a phone?” I think those types of nudges and getting them in the right direction will help in your class and throughout their whole lives.

John: And you mentioned that you got started on this through a UDL approach. And smartphones enable a lot of assignments that can be done in multiple modes. Could you talk to us a little bit about how instructors might use that to give students multiple ways of demonstrating their learning?

Christina: Yeah, this reminds me of a course activity that I propose in the book. And it’s called “untethering the research presentation,” because I predominantly teach writing and rhetoric to first-year students, they’re required courses. So I think students are really used to doing slide presentations for their classes. And I think they do that because we’re comfortable with them and so it just becomes this routine thing that doesn’t have a lot of love and spirit behind them. So I think this idea of untethering the research presentation is like, let’s think of this in a little bit of a different way. If we’re not using slides, what else can you do? Is it a really engaging discussion without technology? Is it a video? Is it coming up with a social media campaign. And what I like about that idea is not only is it a more creative and authentic way to put whatever they’ve been researching into action with a real audience, but it gets them to think in a different way about how that information lives. So I think mobile learning can be a really important part of this, especially if students are thinking about who their audience is. They may determine that their audience is going to best be reached on a mobile device. So if they’re doing a video, and they determine that their audience is most likely going to look at this on a phone, how are they going to design that video accordingly? If it’s on social media, then doing something in portrait might be the best because it scrolls through better that way. So I think prompting our students to also be, depending on their field, be prepared to be mobile practitioners and how they can reach a mobile audience. Another example I use is if you are a math educator, we hear about the new math and reaching out to parents about how to guide them through that. How many of your parents are likely going to maybe be smartphone dependent, meaning that the only reliable internet they have at home is on a phone? So how are they going to use that sitting next to their child helping them with math? So I think by posing those types of ways of presenting information for a specific audience, is a good example of both inviting students to express their learning in a way that they are comfortable with and excited about and speaks to their strengths, but also getting them to think about the audience for the work that they’re doing too, and how to demonstrate that learning to an audience in a way that is relatable and accessible to them.

Rebecca: So one of the things that got me really curious about how students are using mobile devices is actually, how they might even engage in the learning management system. So we talked a little bit about having an app, but also sometimes there’s a web version that’s made responsively, and also exists on the mobile device. And what I’ve discovered often is that those are sometimes different, or the way you even get to information material is different. So that’s always something that I start talking to my students about is like, “Okay, if you’re using the app, you can do this one thing, if you use the website, you can use this other thing.” I’m mentioning this, in part, because the way that students are engaging with their materials sometimes is really different if they’re in the app of a learning management system versus the website version of it. We might have micro lessons or small activities that we’re doing on our devices, like videos and things and those experiences might be really different. I’m curious about the ways that we can help faculty become more aware of the different ways our students are using their learning management systems, even on our mobile devices.

Christina: Yeah, so that’s great. And I’m glad we’re bringing it up. I highly encourage us to regularly take mobile test drives through our materials. I think it’s a really good place to start. So pull up your syllabus on a phone, what does it look like? How easy is it to navigate how when you open up links that are there? How many clicks does it take or how many taps if we’re thinking mobile mindful? How many taps does it take for them to get to the content that they want to get to? So I think actually going through the tactile experience of going through your course materials on a phone is really insightful, because I actually hope that you’ll find things work a lot better than you expect, because I think mobile accessibility has gotten a lot better. And I think sometimes we might still be thinking in like a 2004, even 2012, realm of like, where everything just looked terrible on the phone. I think we might be surprised when we actually go through that things scale, and are more responsive than we expect. So I think that that’s a great place to start. If you use the learning management system at your institution, and you’ve never looked into whether they have an app, you can do that. Download it. You might discover things, like I mentioned sort of offhand earlier, that there are push notifications whenever you use the announcements forum, or whatever it’s called in your learning management system. So students get that right away, rather than hoping that they get into their email. So you may discover that there are certain surveys that work okay, but if you maybe used a slightly different tool, or you broke up the question in a different way, it might be even more responsive. And that might make you think, “Okay, if I actually just break this one 30-question quiz into three 10-question quizzes and open up that access so that they can take it as many times as they want, and then I tell them in class, I want you to do these, you can do them on your phone, it’ll probably only take you 10 minutes a day, I mean, then you start to think of how much they’re practicing and reviewing the material so that they don’t even have to think about it anymore, they can get right into the more complex thinking. I think even that test drive mentality of like, “Okay, let’s see how it looks,” then I can sort of guide students on what I think works well on a mobile phone and what I think doesn’t work well on a mobile phone. And then even, and this is what I was doing throughout the book, is taking screenshots that I wanted to save and show in class, okay, this is how it looks. It really helps reinforce that for students, and then going through your course texts, trying to identify what works well, on a mobile device, tell students to do that. You might also feel free to say: “This one text, it really doesn’t respond on mobile well, that’s something I would say to do on your computer, to do offline.” I think talking students through those options really gives them a lot more agency, because I think a lot of our impulse is to say, “Don’t use your phone for the course, it’s not designed that way.” But they are, for different reasons. Sometimes, they’re just going to do it that way. So if instead we can say, “Well, the discussion forums work well if you do a video post, but otherwise, if you need to cite things it might not.” So by giving them an action and plan, rather than just saying, “Don’t do it,” I think that’s gonna get us a lot farther. And I know that in doing this test drive and thinking about how we can leverage those five and ten minutes, it actually got me really excited to think about quiz design, how I get feedback from students, and even how I design my instructional videos. In the UDL mindset, I started to record my videos the same, but I would just pass them on to YouTube as well, instead of just in the learning management system, and then I would have a link that says access on YouTube. And then I would make that into a playlist. It’s not really any extra work, it’s just organizing them into one list. And then it gives students the opportunity to just keep playing through, which we probably know, as mobile consumers ourselves, is that it’s easy to get us to buy in, if it’s only a three-minute video. But then we’re like, “Okay, let’s just do one more three-minute video. And then we’ve been watching videos for a half hour very easily. So if we can use that capability for good, [LAUGHTER] I think that can be something exciting for us.

Rebecca: Christina, did you just suggest designing a learning rabbit hole? [LAUGHTER]

Christina: I sure did.[LAUGHTER]

John: We gave a workshop recently where we encouraged people if they were using videos in their class to do the embed, rather than sending students to YouTube, because that rabbit hole could often take them in directions away from the course. But if you’re directing them to a playlist with a whole series of videos, then having that rabbit hole could be very useful.

Rebecca: That’s downright sneaky.

Christina: Yeah, but let’s use the sneakiness for good. But, doing the test drive, we can also recognize where things are distracting if we tried to take them to a mobile device. And we might just be transparent about that, and for that reason, suggest that they don’t go in that direction. So it’s why it’s this mindful approach. It’s just being aware of what works well and what doesn’t, and giving our students some direction accordingly.

Rebecca: Sometimes that test drive can reveal even little details like should this open in the same window or a different window?

Christina: Mm hmm.

Rebecca: Because some tools are fine on a desktop, but as soon as you try to do it on the mobile device inside of the learning management system, it’s a nightmare.

Christina: I think that’s actually a really good example of how I think going through this thought process will reduce friction, and overall just improve the teaching design in general, because we found that with online teaching, too, is that when people began teaching online overall…I mean, as long as they did it, right, of course, and took a good approach… it actually often increased the quality of their in-person or on-ground learning as well, because it was just a different way of thinking about it. And it helped you see where there were barriers that you could take away. So I think that’s a good example of, it just helps you pay attention to the learning experience in a different way that could give you really good insight overall.

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

Christina: Well, first is, a little bit of a break. [LAUGHTER] I definitely want to talk about the book, and I will be, but I’m taking just a little bit of a pause. But during this pause, I’m actually putting together content for a blog to kind of be the “what’s next” of the book, because the book is an invitation and it’s a framework for us to get started with mobile learning. But from there, I know that there are people doing brilliant things with mobile learning, or they’re going to have lots of light bulbs that go off because of this book. So I want to continue the conversation. I didn’t want it to end with the book. So I plan on contributing content myself, but also inviting people to share their mobile learning strategies, victories, challenges, stories. So I may provide my email address so that people can feel free to contact me if they would like to contribute something. I’m gathering up goodies so that I can start to share them out into the world. And then I also want to work with faculty to research how the application of these strategies are going, because I’d like to see the evidence and put them out in more formalized ways so that we can really build and make this a practice that is more common, more accepted and really is convincing that it is what students need and provide guidance on how to do it well.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for the book and really thinking about introductory audience.

Christina: Thanks a lot. This was great.

John: I really enjoyed reading the book and I’m really happy we can share this with our listeners.

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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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278. Google Apps and the LMS

Creating course content in an LMS can be time-consuming and tedious. In this episode, Dave Ghidiu joins us to discuss ways of leveraging Google Apps to simplify content creation, facilitate student collaboration, and to allow students to maintain access to their work after the semester ends.

Dave is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Coordinator of the Gladys M. Snyder Center for Teaching and Learning at Finger Lakes Community College. Previous to his time at FLCC, he spent a few years as a Senior Instructional Designer at Open SUNY, where he was a lead designer for the OSCQR rubric software.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Creating course content in an LMS can be time-consuming and tedious. In this episode, we explore ways to leverage Google Apps to simplify content creation, facilitate student collaboration, and to allow students to maintain access to their work after the semester ends.

[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.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Dave Ghidiu. Dave is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Coordinator of the Gladys M. Snyder Center for Teaching and Learning at Finger Lakes Community College. Previous to his time at FLCC, he spent a few years as a Senior Instructional Designer at Open SUNY, where he was a lead designer for the OSCQR rubric software. Welcome, Dave.

Dave: Thank you so much. This is so exciting to talk to you, too. I’m sure you don’t know this, but we have a very rich and robust parasocial relationship.

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

Dave: I am. Halee, over at Saratoga Tea and Honey, makes tea bought from scratch and has made this Focus Pocus which is really, really good. I thought I would need my brain fog busting blend today.

Rebecca: I think I really needed that earlier in the week. [LAUGHTER] I just have English breakfast today, John.

John: And I have Tea Forte black currant tea with some honey from Saratoga Tea and Honey.

Dave: Their honey selection is out of this world.

John: It’s amazing, and they offer free samples, which is one of the reasons why I end up buying so much because there’s so many different flavors that taste so good.

Rebecca: And just for clarification, they’re not a sponsor. [LAUGHTER] It’s just a common choice lately.

John: That’s right, because that was [LAUGHTER] also in our last podcast with Jim Lang.

Dave: Oh, it was it really? Oh. that’s awesome. My wife, Katie went to high school with Halee, which is how we wound up shopping there.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s funny. So Dave, in January, you presented a workshop at SUNY Oswego, where you describe ways to use Google Apps to simplify repetitive tasks. I took many notes, started implementing some of these things. Could you provide a little bit of an overview of the basic strategy that you advocated for / continue to advocate for?

Dave: Yeah, that was a ball presenting, there was so much engagement and some really, really good questions during the presentation. Thank you for inviting me out. I think we’ll start with some level setting and I just want to let you know that everything we talk about today is using Google Docs in tandem with the LMS. At FLCC, Finger Lakes Community College, we use Brightspace. So everything that we do, and we’re talking about today will be irrespective of what software the campus uses. In fact, at FLCC, we’re a Microsoft house, and I just happened to have a better workflow with Google Docs. So I think it’s important for the audience to know that you don’t need to have Google Classroom, you don’t need to be a Google campus, you can do all this stuff today.

Rebecca: And a lot of it’s documented on won…. what’s the website?

Dave: As you know, SUNY migrated to Brightspace last year, and we in the computing science department at FLCC kicked the tires quite a bit on it. So much so that we were doing all these really niche, interesting things. So Carrie, who’s one of the professors in the department, says, “Hey, we should have a mini-Summit.” So we all got together and did a show and tell of all the things that we’ve been doing. And I chronicled all those, I wrote them down. And I just started a blog called LEARNBrightspace.com. So that will have a lot of these things that perhaps you didn’t learn in the Brightspace training, and it can potentiate your online classes. And this is also the home of where I’m putting these Google mechanisms, because I think it really blurs the line. I’m using Brightspace, just as much as I’m using Google Drive and Google workspace. So all these ideas and concepts will live at LEARNbrightspace.com.

John: And having noted that this is created for Brightspace, many of the tools that you’re referring to and the basic techniques could work with any LMS, Correct?

Dave: Correct. In fact, I started this project, working at MCC, 2010 – 2012. So I was using ANGEL at the time. And then we migrated to Blackboard. And I started ramping it up and now we’re using Brightspace. So this will work in any LMS. But it will also work just in a regular website. This is just all pure HTML.

John: And from what I recall, the basic principle is you try to reduce repetitive tasks within the LMS by leveraging Google Drive and Google Apps.

Dave: Sure, I call that the tyranny of repetition and software development, we have what’s known as the ground truth, and you want all the information to exist in one place and push it out in separate places. I have a twin brother who’s a software engineer, and he always talks about ground truth. I call it the single point of truth, but it’s the same thing. And a good example is your office hours. Since I’ve been listening to you, I’ve rebranded them as my student time, but your office hours, you want to have it in one spot, but push it out, maybe in your LMS. Maybe in your syllabus, perhaps you have three or four or five different syllabi, so you have it living in one spot and change it in that one spot. And you can push it out to all these other arenas. You don’t have to worry about updating it in 5, 6. 7 different spots.

Rebecca: And how do you do that?

Dave: Well, there’s a few different ways to do this. And I think the easiest way to explain it would be for this particular task. And this is going to be a concrete example of how I use this single point of truth. I use Google Sheets, Google Sheets is great for formatting tables. So I format my table. And then I highlight what I want to put, for instance, in my syllabus, and then I copy that, and I go into my syllabus, which lives in Google Docs, and I paste and when you paste, it says, “Hey, do you want to link this to the Google sheet so that if the Google Sheet ever changes or updates, we can see the changes here?” So I always click on yes, that’s exactly what I want. And the very first time I do that, I spent a little bit of time formatting it in Google Docs where I have to like bring the margins over, it’s not that hard of a lift, it goes pretty easy. Once that’s done, I’m done. I never have to reformat that table. So when I come the next semester, and I change my student time, or my office hours, I can just push those right to my Google Docs. The other place I do that is within the LMS. So within Brightspace, I have a page that says office hours or student time, and I actually embed a Google sheet right there. So when the students click on office hours or student time, they will see maybe a little blurb by me that says, “Hey, if you’re meeting in my office, here’s my office number, if you want a link to my virtual room, here it is, and look below, and you can see all my time.” And that’s really just the Google Sheet. Once I update that Google Sheet, I never touch that content in my course. And that’s semester to semester. Once I set up my course, I never touch that content again, because all the changes are live,

Rebecca: Does embedding a Google Doc or a Google sheet in an LMS present any accessibility concerns that we should be aware of?

Dave: As long as you’re using the iframe tag, they actually have a long description tag, which is not necessarily all tagged, but I think they’re screen-reader compliant, but iframes, use whatever accessibility is in the target site. So for instance, if I framed Tea for Teaching, if your site’s compliant than whatever my LMS, when I embed Tea for Teaching would use that compliancy, the screen reader just would actually be reading the Tea for Teaching website. So as long as your Google Doc and your Google Sheet or whatever you’re embedding is accessible, then this is also accessible.

Rebecca: So it’d be important to do things like have header rows and that kind of thing. And if you’re using Google Docs, you might want to know about Grackle, which is a great accessibility tool to check your accessibility of those files.

Dave: Oh, that’s interesting, because Microsoft does a really good job, with Word, of making things accessible, and they have their accessibility checker. I haven’t seen that in Google Docs. Are you using Grackle?

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s a third party tool that we have on our campus. And it works across Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and will help improve the accessibility of all those documents and any PDFs you might need to export.

Dave: Oh, that’s awesome. I’m glad I came today. I’ll look that up as soon as we’re done. It is worth mentioning, and I’m glad you said that. In Google Docs, and I spend most of my time in Google Docs, not Google Sheets. In Google Docs, I’m always using headings, I like the textual hierarchy. And I always do the alt tags, there’s a lot of easy things to do that make my life easier and make it more accessible for anyone viewing the content. In fact, and I believe I demoed this in January, most of the assignments that I give my students are a Google Doc, and I have them make a copy of it. And then they paste images in for a lab, we’re doing computer science stuff. And I use those headings. So when they give me their Google Doc, I don’t have to scroll through 20 pages, I can use the document outline and click on the different headings where I know their answers are going to be so I can just skim it real real easily. So this is just another example of Universal Design writ large that it is better for the student, it’s better for me, it’s better for everyone.

Rebecca: That’s totally the strategy I use too, Dave.

Dave: Oh, really? Oh, that’s interesting. I’m so glad to hear that.

John: And so if you’re sharing templates with students for assignments, you can set them up to be accessible so that when you submit them, it’ll automatically have the heading structure.

Dave: Yeah, in fact, one of the things that I do, and I demo this in the video in the recording in January, but also at LEARNbrightspace.com, one of the tabs says “Tools,” and in this particular thing, you can paste in the URL of your Google Doc. But one of the things I do is: instead of making a template or saying to the students click in this Google Doc go to file, save as a copy, you can just change the URL of the link to your doc and chop off the last four characters that say “edit” and make it “copy.” So when the students click on the link, it’ll actually force a copy in their Google Drive. So that’s just one of the nice things you can do with those links. And one of the really, really cool ways to bend these URLs is you can make a link that goes to your Google Doc. You can also make a link by changing “edit” to “copy” that will force a copy. You can make a link instead of edit, you can do “export?format=PDF,” and that will take a carbon copy of your Google Doc and download it as a PDF. And that’s a great thing to do, for instance, for my course syllabus, because my course syllabus is embedded. Any change I make to my course syllabus in Google Docs gets pushed out automatically, but students like to print that out. So, I just put a link right on my page in my LMS, where the course outline is, or your syllabus, and it says “Click here, if you want to download it as a PDF,” and that download it as a PDF, “Click here if you want download as a Word,” and it just downloads as a Word. And it’s not that I’m hosting a PDF or Word, it’s converting my google doc at that moment in time to a PDF and downloading it. So that’s really, really slick. And that’s a great way to get your course materials into students’ hands.

Rebecca: And I’m pretty sure I saw the code to that button on your website.

Dave: You did, at LEARNBrightspace.com. You go to LEARNBrightspace.com, you paste in your URL of your Google Doc, and it gives you the code for those buttons, it gives you the code to in bet it gives you a code to do a thumbnail of your image, which is live, and it gives you the code to embed a QR code should you want that. You can just do some really crazy things. And I think that’s a perfect example of how to learn what you can do, is just go to that website and check out like, “Oh, I can download it as a Word file.” This is a great example of a single point of truth. I have one course outline and I might have it in three or four different classes, I have different sections. I only update it in my Google Docs, and all the courses where that embedded file lives, they get to see all those changes. And you remember in the good old days, or the Dark Ages, rather, of LMSs. So if I had a PowerPoint, for instance, and I changed my PowerPoint, I’d have to go into all those sections and take down that PowerPoint and upload a new one. But I don’t need to do that anymore. If I have Google Slides, I just change the slides. Because once it’s linked in your LMS, or once it’s embedded, you never have to touch that piece of content in your LMS again. You make as many changes as you want to your slideshow and it’s live immediately. And by the way, you can do the same thing with links to Google Slides, where it can download as a PDF, download it as a PowerPoin.,

John: The show notes file accompanying this podcast will contain links to the LEARNBrightspace.com website and to the recording of the workshop that you provided in January at Oswego for anyone who wishes to explore these options in more depth.

Dave: Awesome. I just started making this website, so I’ll be building it out. And again, it’s going to have a lot of Brightspace stuff, but also all this Google stuff that I’ve been doing for a few years.

John: One of the other things you demonstrated was the use of Google draw to automatically update images in an LMS, such as the ones that you used to signal whether a module was open or not. Could you tell us a little bit about how that might work?

Dave: Yeah, so I actually have a very unhealthy relationship and dependency on Google drawings. And I thought it was just like a throwaway tool. But once I started using it, I was like, “Oh, this is really, really slick.” So much like a Google Doc, my syllabus or Google Slides, you can embed a Google drawing. In Brightspace, we have the visual table of contents which Rebecca, I’m sure you had like a ball with, given your role in graphic design. The visual table of contents, if you don’t have an image in the description for your module, then it will just inherit whatever your course image is, in the main course. Using Google Drawings, I’ve created thumbnails for each of the chapters. So when you look at the visual table of contents, each chapter has a unique image that somehow intimates what we’re doing in that chapter. And then I put like a big one in a circle, or big two or big three, whatever chapter it’s on. Because it’s a live image, I can change the look and feel of it. So I have a gray overlay that I put over upcoming chapters. And then I have a banner that stretches across and says “upcoming.” So the students on day one can see all the chapters, and anything that’s upcoming, they can kind of see what the chapter is about with that thumbnail because it’s behind like a somewhat transparent gray rectangle, and they can see the big banner that says upcoming. But then when that module opens, I just go into Google Drawings, that gray rectangle on the banner, I send that to back, and you can’t see it anymore. So when the students come into my course, that’s how they know what the most recent chapter is. Anything that says upcoming and is gray, that’s in the future. Anything that’s bright and exposed, that’s what we’re doing now.

Rebecca: For those that are familiar with Google Draw, because, I don’t know many of us have thought of it as being kind of a junk app… [LAUGHTER]…

John: …spoken by someone who is used to that Photoshop stuff.

Rebecca: …can you talk to us a little bit about what it’s capable of doing and what it’s not capable of doing?

Dave: Yes, it is not capable of doing Photoshop. So you’re not going to have a lot of those high-end or even mid-range tools, such as the content aware or the lasso tool, it just doesn’t have all that. This is more for what I would say as graphic design if you’re doing almost illustrations or almost vector images. And you can put photographs up there. But I use it mostly as textbox, some colors, and I don’t want to undersell it, because right now I’m convincing myself that it is kind of a puny little web app, but it’s so potent in the ability to change the content of an image. So if you want to embed that image in your course you can change it and it does do some high-end things. You can crop in different shapes. But really, if you’re looking for Photoshop, this is not an adequate replacement.

John: But the ability to do layers offers some really nice capabilities as you described, because a lot of basic drawing apps will not allow you to introduce or to have layers.

Dave: That’s a good point. And there’s also the ability, much like Photoshop, it has a canvas, but then… and I don’t know what you call the area outside of the canvas, I call it the staging area. So I can put things that I might be using later in that staging area, and it’s not visible in the image. And that’s also where I put… and Rebecca, you’ve been asking about accessibility, I keep my alt text in the very first text box in this staging area so that if a screen reader is reading it, my alt text is right there. It also makes it very easy when I need to embed it later on. Because I don’t have to keep retyping the alt text, I keep it right there.

Rebecca: That leads exactly to what I was going to ask you about. It’s almost like a read my mind is whether or not, when you’re creating these Google Drawings, if it actually maintains text or not, because that indicates an accessibility issue, if it’s an image of text, or if it’s actually text.

Dave: For the listeners that want to pull this thread, when you publish the image it is, is for all intents and purposes, a jpg png. So it’s going to be a flattened image…

Rebecca: no SVG, huh?.

Dave: Actually, you can download it as an SVG, I believe, I don’t know if you can embed it as an SVG.

Rebecca: If I can’t embed, it’s no good to me. [LAUGHTER]

Dave: One of the ways that I use Google drawings, and I saw this at a conference, and the professor who was presenting was not presenting this aspect. This was just like a throwaway thing she was doing and I was blown away. I was like, “Woah, that is really cool.” So I stole this from someone I saw presenting. She doesn’t embed it as a JPEG or PNG, she actually embeds the Google Drawings website. So if you change the “/edit” or “/preview,” and you can do that in Docs as well, it gives you a more packaged… it doesn’t have the toolbar… and if you do it that way, you do have access to all the text. But one of the things that I really like about it, and I’m glad that we’re going down this road, is I make… think of it like a horizontal rectangle, and I have three squares side by side in that rectangle. So when it comes time to exemplary work, for instance, in my class right now, students are making infographics and they might not have ever made an infographic before. So I say, “Hey, here’s some work students have done in the past.” And I take a screenshot of three really good infographics and I make thumbnails all in this Google drawing. It’s just one Google drawing that has those three thumbnails. I make those hyperlinks. So now when I embed this Google drawings, not as an image, but this Google drawings in preview mode, students can click on these different hyperlinks and it pops up PDFs that actually live in my Google Drive of the actual infographic. So to answer your question, you can embed your Google drawings in such a way that text is retained. But, my caution is, I think with accessibility your mileage may vary if you’re actually embedding the Google drawing app as opposed to an actual image.

Rebecca: Proceed with caution when putting text and images. Yes,

Dave: I did work on OSCQR, when I was working with Alex Pickett and Dan Feinberg at Open SUNY, and I think Alex been a guest on your podcast before, right?

John: She has, a couple of times.

Dave: And by the way, I think working with Alex and Dan really helped me explore all this stuff in Google as we were working on that Google software. But in the OSCQR, I think that it says “Do not ever use text on an image as your primary way of conveying information.”

Rebecca: Indeed.

John: People can refer back to a discussion of an earlier iteration of the OSCQR rubric, because it’s continuing to evolve.

Dave: It sure is, and I’m not involved with that project anymore, but I’m always really impressed when I see the new things that they’re doing.

John: You’re at a Microsoft campus where students all have access to Microsoft Office apps. So why do you choose to have students work in Google Docs?

Dave: That’s an interesting question that oftentimes when I talk to other campuses about this, that that question comes up quite a bit. I like Google Docs for a number of reasons. One, more and more students are coming to college and they’re more comfortable with Google Docs. And to be clear, most of the stuff that I do in Google Docs you can do with the Microsoft suite. And when I say Google Docs, that’s just a proxy for Google workspace or Google Drive. There’s a number of ways that people have colloquially referred to it. I like Google Docs for a number of reasons. One of the reasons why I like having students use Google Docs is version control is so simple, because unlike Microsoft Word where you might have a version on your desktop, and then you go to another computer, and you have to download it, that’s just obviated with Google Docs. But I really enjoy having my students submit in the LMS, just a link to their Google Doc, and they’re sharing it with me. I actually have them share it so that anyone with the link can comment, because all I really want to do is comment on their work. One of the problems I had with uploading a PDF or Word file is I might spend some time annotating it, and I might spend some time just like highlighting it. And those tools in the LMS have been a little wonky and unreliable at times. And by the way, the students, when the semester ends, they might not ever get that file. So all the work that we’ve put into commenting and highlighting on their work, they might not ever see that if they didn’t even know they could go back and look at their work. So I like Google Doc, because if they own it, even when the semester is over, they still have access to it, which is not how it works if students upload a file. So that was my primary impetus. But I found recently that I’m really, really happy with their commenting feature. So when I leave a comment in their work, and I like to leave comments,that’s like footprints that I’ve been looking at their work. When I leave a comment, they get an email to their Gmail account, and it says “Hey, Dave left a comment,” but also says “Would you like to reply?” and they can just, right from their phone or wherever they get this email message, they don’t have to go into Brightspace, they can just reply to that comment. And I really think that’s an equilibrium I haven’t seen in LMS’s before. It’s really been teacher centric, where the student uploads a document, the teacher says, “Let me as the teacher make some comments,” and the conversation ends there. Whereas in Google Docs, now you can have these conversations that are bilateral. In fact, I was talking to my wife about this the other day, she’s the Director of the library at MCC, but she teaches a class at FLCC and she uses Google Docs. And she said, “You know, I was in there. And I was just leaving some comments on papers for the students, and one of my students got an email notification, she popped right into the document and we actually had a conversation in the comments.” So I think that’s really, really neat. And I like that the students can leave the semester and still have it. And Google also rolled out this feature a few months ago, that allows you to, in addition to commenting, there’s an emoji button and you hit that emoji button and you can just add an emoji on whatever you’re highlighted. And it’s really, really slick, because I might historically say, “Hey, I really liked what you did here.” But now I can just leave an emoji thumbs up or smiley face or whatever I’m going to do. So that’s a little bit better for me, because I can cruise through the work and let people know my sentiment without having to be very verbose.

Rebecca: And you can save that language or when you really need it…

Dave: Yeah.

Rebecca: …which may mean it might actually get read.

Dave: Oh, that’s an interesting point, yeah.

John: Another reason for using Google apps is that they are something that most students have worked with in elementary and secondary school, because Google Classroom is a really commonly used tool and students are already used to that environment. Another thing that I’ve liked about Google Apps is the ease of collaboration where students can collaborate in real time on Google docs, Google slides, or Google sheets and that just doesn’t always work quite as smoothly in other Office applications as it does in Google apps..

Dave: Yeah, I feel like Microsoft is always like six to 12 months behind Google when it comes to innovation in the collaboration. So it’s nice to have that ecosystem. I think it’s also worth noting for the collaboration, and I’m glad you said that, the LMS doesn’t have collaboration built in, at least at the faculty level. So if there are two or three other people in the department teaching the same class I am, but different sections, it’s a little cumbersome for us to ask to be in each other’s section. And you can easily screw things up. So if we have a lot of our content in Google Docs, again, we don’t need to be bothering Jeff Dugan, who’s the Assistant Director of Online Learning at FLCC and say, “Hey, Jeff, can you add me to the sections over here?” we can just manage that ourselves in Google Drive.

Rebecca: I really appreciate the collaborative nature of Google Docs and just the Google apps generally. I use that as well for peer feedback and evaluation. I like the flattening of the hierarchy between the faculty member and the student. And you can collaborate on things. It works really well when I’m working with upper-level students or graduate students where the process really is more of a mentorship or more collaborative in nature in the first place. And it’s happening more in real time. But I always am concerned about the ability to document and maintain copies of things. Because when the students own the thing, then you have to develop a system to back stuff up, when if they’re uploading a document or something to an LMS, that backup is kind of happening. Do you have any strategies for that?

Dave: I’m working on this software right now, and I had this working with Blackboard and then we switched Brightspace so I have to change the paradigm. But I actually create my content, all the Google Docs, all the Google Sheets, whatever I’m going to do in one folder, and then I get a roster for my students. And I effectively make a folder for each student, and I give them read/write access to that folder, but I’m still the document owner, and then I can push out, I can copy all the documents into each of their folders. That is, I think, the golden standard. And then at the end of the semester, I can turn that work over to the student and I can make copies if I so choose. So I had all that infrastructure written and it was working great in Blackboard, so I’m back to square one with Brightspace. But that’s not stopping me because I still think it’s valuable even if I don’t necessarily have access to their work after the semester ends. There is a revisions feature in Google Docs too, which a lot of people don’t know about. And this is why I keep using the same syllabus that I’ve been using since 2019. I make changes whenever I need to, if there’s a typo, or if I change it from fall to spring. And if a student comes back to me, and they say, “Hey, I’m transferring, I need the syllabus from two semesters ago. Can you give that to me?” I just go to that same document, I go to file revisions, and I can pick a date and it rolls back to that date. I print it, give it to the student, and then I go back. So it’s not a perfect system, but it’s a good enough system that I think covers all my bases for right now.

Rebecca: In the past, I just had a folder that I had students submit their work in. [LAUGHTER] It was like “Put your copy here, please.”

Dave: And I think one of the things we didn’t really talk about and I think you were talking about it, but I hadn’t really considered this, is the group work. It’s just so much easier. You don’t have to make the different groups in your LMS and then articulate who has access to what, it’s all built in. To be clear, I love the LMS because it can have those features, I would never just use Google Docs alone. I need the LMS to distribute the content to say who can see what and when to manage the grades and have the assessments. But the Google docs are kind of the meat of what I use. So the skeleton is the LMS and the Google docs are the meat.

John: For quite a few years, I’ve had students do some open pedagogy projects, where they’re working in groups for their own components, but they also are working on some shared materials. And I just download a spreadsheet from our registration system with all their email addresses in it, and use that to share that class folder with them, and then just create subfolders for each group and let them work in there. And then when they’re ready to share it with the rest of the class for peer review, we just copy it from those sub folders, and they have access to it as long as they don’t remove the access after the semester is done. And it’s worked really nicely, because the basic issue Rebecca was talking about is sometimes when students would share a URL to a file, they forgot to change the access so that other people could view it. But if they start in a document that you already have access to, all those problems just go away and that makes it a lot easier.

Dave: It sure does. And in fact, Rebecca, that problem I have all the time. So my very first assignment in all my classes is: make a copy of this Google Doc, share it appropriately, and send me the link. And because there’s these interactive checkboxes that you can do in Google Docs, I have a checklist. So I kind of get rid of that problem immediately. But I’m glad you talked about also open pedagogy. It was either one of your podcasts, or maybe it was Teaching in Higher Ed, but I was listening to some stuff about open pedagogy. And also, I’m married to the director of the library at MCC. And so that might have had something to do with it. And we created at FLCC our Java textbook. It is all open pedagogy. The faculty kind of did the bones, but the students, and this textbook’s been around for like three or four years now, the students, even today I’m getting email messages like such and such made this change… that even today, someone’s like, “Hey, it would be really cool if you thought about talking about this.” So we get hundreds of comments every semester, because our one open textbook is commented on by all the students… we share it so that they can comment. And likewise, in my principles of information security class, we have the students every semester look at a recent cybersecurity issue, debrief what happened, and give an analysis of like this could have been avoided if you’ve done a, b and c. So they create them in Google Docs, I aggregate them all into a PDF, and then that PDF lives in Google Drive, and I actually embed it in the course. So students next semester can see all the work that the students have done this semester. And there is a conversation that students have about Creative Commons, so they know what they’re getting into.

John: One of the things you shared in that workshop presentation was a tool that would allow you to use markup to create documents outside of the LMS that could then be embedded in the LMS. And that’s specifically in Brightspace, so this may not be as generally applicable. But could you talk a little bit about that tool and why you might want to do that.

Dave: I would love to talk about this tool. And I would love to take credit for it, but I can’t. Aaron Sullivan, who’s a professor in the department, came up with it and he was suffering a different tyranny, not the tyranny of repetition. He was the tyranny of formatting your texts in Blackboard only when you hit the submit button, it wouldn’t render how you thought it would. He’s like “There’s got to be a better way.” So he started this project in Blackboard, and then when we switched to Brightspace, he tweaked it for Brightspace. It takes someone like me, who is very good at math, computer science, but I have no eye for design, and my students think that I’m a graphic design luminary. What his software does is just… I can’t even describe it, you’ll have to go back and watch the video, but it thrives on markdown, which is a very simple language. In Microsoft Word you might highlight text and then hit the bold button to make it bold. Or if you’re savvy you might hit Ctrl-B or Command-B if you’re on a Mac to make it bold. Markdown is even lower level than that. So you would say for bold, I think, you put an asterisk before the words, before the text and after the text, and italics will be an underline. But Aaron’s gone bonkers with this. And he’s come up with all sorts of ways with very, very easy to apprehend markdown codes, make your course in Brightspace just eye-poppingly delicious. It is unbelievable. I can’t say enough good things about it. And you kind of have to know a little bit about markdown, but it’s the kind of thing where you can easily digest and be like today I’m going to work on bullet points, and bullet points, by the way, it’s just an asterisk. I’m going to work on bullet points, and then it converts it to all the HTML and just paste the HTML into your course. And then maybe the next day like “Oh, I really want to do the accordions because Brightspace has the accordions built in, and also the tabbed interfaces. But it’s really hard with the way Brightspace is setup, at least at Fingerlakes, to have both of those on the same page. So Aaron has distilled everything to be a very easy language where you can just do like ^acc, and that creates an accordion. It’s awesome. It just saves so much work. And then we actually save all our text files. We use GitHub and I make it public but you could use it in OneDrive or in Google Drive. You just host these text files. So when it comes time next semester and you want to tweak things, you just tweak this text file, run it through Aaron’s software, which is at LEARNBrightspace.com You run it through the software and it translates everything to the HTML with the JavaScript and the CSS and you just paste it in Brightspace and it works and it looks gorgeous and it’s responsive. It has heightened my aesthetic game by about 1,000,000,000%.

John: And the way the accordions, for example, in Brightspace work is there’s an accordion template that you can use as a style sheet. The default page has 6 blank accordion templates on it corresponding to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 item accordions, and then you delete the ones you’re not using. And then you just paste or type your content into that accordion template’s contents. But this tool, you don’t have to do any of that. And you’re not limited to a six-item accordion, if I recall correctly.

Dave: You can do more than six if you’re really brave with your HTML. But like, who knows what happens. And the other issue is you can’t do accordions and anything else, because the templates don’t have accordions and tabs, I don’t think. So if you want to have both those in one piece of content, then you kind of have to maybe open up another tab that’s like your sacrificial tab, and it’s just really, really wonky. So Aaron’s software, we’ve been calling it “Markdown to Brightspace.,” that’s the working name, anyhow. You can see that at LearnBrightspace.com. We will be building that out with videos and things to help people understand how to use the tool because it is more power than one person should wield.

Rebecca: That, at least, reduces high levels of irritation.

Dave: Yeah, Brightspace and Blackboard both have much better text editors than they did two years ago. The one and Brightspace, it’s just so unreliable, which is I think, what drove Aaron mad enough to make the software. And to your question earlier, John, I think that it did work for Blackboard and it can work for HTML, but we need to add some tweaks to it just to make sure that it’s universal. So right now, the predominant version is for Brightspace.

John: It would be nice if there was a universal translator type application that would generate the code in Blackboard, or Brightspace, or Canvas or any other commonly used LMS.

Dave: And Aaron’s is very, very close, it would really be just some small, small tweaks. But I will tell you, just last night, in my role at the Center for Teaching and Learning, I send out a newsletter every week. And I’ve been doing it in Outlook and you can do some things. And last night, I was like, I wonder if I can use Aaron’s software to do this. So I use the markdown I created an email, like a template, and then instead of copying the HTML code, I literally highlighted all the HTML, not the code, but the actual like images and graphics and stuff. And I just pasted it into Outlook, and it is gorgeous. It is absolutely beautiful. So perhaps that might be a way to have that work in other LMS’s, I would encourage people to look at that video. Because I think that having the how to of how to do all the things we’ve been talking about might help. And that was the video from your professional development in January. And just keep coming back to LEARNBrightspace.com. By the way, it’s not monetized and I don’t track you or anything… purely putting out there for the benefit of the world. But we’ll be publishing more stuff on Brightspace, some really cool, wacky things you can do there, we’re going to be putting out some really cool, wacky things you can do with Google Docs. And we’re going to be doing some really cool wacky things that you can do with Aaron’s markdown software.

Rebecca: Sounds exciting, and it’s interesting that you’ve said all these things that are coming. But our last question is always: “What’s next?” And now you have to come up with something else.

Dave: Well, I knew that was going to be your question, I thought I could preempt that. But I would say some of the things that I’m working on right now is first of all accessibility. So if anyone out there is listening to this and is an accessibility expert and wants to team up with me to refine my processes, and I can see you waving to me so maybe we can chat offline and really just check this and make it more accessible. The other thing is, I’m working on a few other projects that I think would be of benefit to educators and not of benefit to anyone else. And that all uses Google Docs. So for instance, I have a spreadsheet where I keep comments that I might use for different assignments. But then one of the reasons I really like Google Docs, being a computer nerd, is every Google Doc and Google sheet has a JavaScript component to it. So you can build software off spreadsheets. So some of the software I built is this comment generator. So you manage the comments in your Google Sheet, and then you hit a button and it pops up this nice window with all the comments and it’s tabbed for the different classes you teach. And you can just click on the comment, it copies it into your clipboard, and then you can just paste it. So when you’re grading, and assessing other students’ work, it just makes it go a little bit faster. And I’m also working on rebuilding that tool that I was talking about earlier, where it can spin off Google Docs for all the students in your class, and then you own them until the end of the semester where you can turn custody over to them. So I’m constantly building tools to help me be faster and better at what I do. And hopefully sharing those with other people along the way.

Rebecca: Yeah, if you need a user tester for backing up documents. [LAUGHTER]

Dave: Yeah, I would happily swap that experience with some accessibility knowledge.

Rebecca: That sounds fair. Well, thanks so much for joining us. It’s always a pleasure, and we always take away something new.

John: Thank you. It’s great talking to you, as always,

Dave: Yeah, it’s great seeing you too. And thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I just listened to, I think I told you this, but I listened to the most recent episode about Chet GPT and it blew me away. So keep doing what you’re doing because every episode is better than the previous, with the possible exception of this one. This one might be one of the low points, but the rest of them I really enjoy listening to.

John: Well, thank you

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

276. Teaching at its Best

New faculty often start their faculty roles without training in teaching. In this episode Linda Nilson and Todd Zakrajsek join us to talk about the evolving roles and expectations of faculty and explore the new edition of a classic teaching guide.

Now Director Emeritus, Linda was the Founding Director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of the Faculty Development Fellowship in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Linda and Todd are each individually the authors of many superb books on teaching and learning and now have jointly authored a new edition of a classic guide for faculty.

Shownotes

  • Zakrajsek, T. and Nilson, L. B. (2023). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors. 5th edition. Jossey-Bass.
  • Nilson, L. B., & Goodson, L. A. (2021). Online teaching at its best: Merging instructional design with teaching and learning research. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Nilson, Linda (2021). Infusing Critical Thinking Into Your Course: A Concrete, Practical Guide. Stylus.
  • McKeachie, W. J. (1978). Teaching tips: A guidebook for the beginning college teacher. DC Heath.
  • POD
  • Betts, K., Miller, M., Tokuhama-Espinosa, T., Shewokis, P., Anderson, A., Borja, C., Galoyan, T., Delaney, B., Eigenauer, J., & Dekker, S. (2019). International report: Neuromyths and evidence-based practices in higher education. Online Learning Consortium: Newburyport, MA.’
  • Padlet
  • Jamboard
  • Eric Mazur
  • Dan Levy
  • Teaching with Zoom – Dan Levy – Tea for Teaching podcast – May 26, 2021

Transcript

John: New faculty often start their faculty roles without training in teaching. In this episode we talk about the evolving roles and expectations of faculty and explore the new edition of a classic teaching guide.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Linda Nilson and Todd Zakrajsek. Now Director Emeritus, Linda was the Founding Director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of the Faculty Development Fellowship in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Linda and Todd are each individually the authors of many superb books on teaching and learning and now jointly have authored another superb book. Welcome back, Linda and Todd.

Linda: Thank you very much.

Todd: Really appreciate the opportunity to be here.

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

Linda: I’m drinking a tea called water. It’s rather dull, but I enjoy it.

Rebecca: It’s very pure.

Linda: Yes, very pure. Very pure.

Rebecca: How about you Todd?

Todd: Oh, I’ve got myself a Lemon Detox because I’ve spent most of my day getting all toxed and now I’m getting detoxed. [LAUGHTER] Wait a minute, that sounds bad. [LAUGHTER] But that will be all right. [LAUGHTER]

John: Especially at Family Medicine.

Todd: Well, we can fix it. [LAUGHTER] In general, life is good.

John: I am drinking pineapple green tea.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s a new one for you, John.

John: I’ve had it before, just not recently.

Rebecca: Okay. I’m back to the very old favorite, English afternoon. Because I stopped by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching and grabbed a cup before I came.

John: And we are recording together in the same room, which has been a fairly rare occurrence for the last several years. We’ve invited you here to discuss your joint endeavor on the fifth edition of Teaching at its Best: a Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, that Linda originally developed and now you’ve collaborated on this new edition. How did the collaboration on this edition come about?

Linda: Well, let me talk about that. Because it was pretty much my idea. Jossie-Bass contacted me and said “let’s put out a fifth edition” and I said “let’s not.” [LAUGHTER] I was not in the mood to do it. I’ve been retired six and a half years now and I’m loving it. I mean, I’m really loving it. And while retired, I was still writing the second edition of Online Teaching at its Best. And then I was writing a book, Infusing Critical Thinking Into Your Course, and I guess I had had it. I mean, I wanted to really make a change and I wanted to get specifically into working at an animal shelter. So I was all occupied with that. So I thought I remember Wilbert J. McKeachie, when he was doing Teaching Tips that he came to a certain point after I don’t know how many editions that he brought other people on to really do the revision work. And so I decided I’m going to do that. So Jossey-Bass said “Okay, fine.” They wanted three names. Okay, I gave him three names, but my first choice was Todd Zakrajsek, because 1. I knew he’d finish it. [LAUGHTER] I knew he’d finish it fast. I knew he do a great job. He knows the literature like the back of his hand, I wouldn’t have a worry in the world. And guess what? Todd accepted. Hip hip hurray. I was so happy. I couldn’t tell you.

Todd: Well, this is great because I said no when they asked me. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Like any smart person would, right? [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Well, I did end up doing it, of course. But the reason I said no was I knew that book very well and I know Linda very well. And I said, “There is no way. I don’t know anybody who can step in and pick this thing up. She knows so much about so much that it’s just not possible.” And they said, “But she really wants you to do this.” So I went back and forth a couple times and I finally decided to do it. And I will tell you, Linda, because I haven’t mentioned this to you. The first three chapters, I had to go back and redo those when I got done with it, because I was so scared of the first three chapters [LAUGHTER] that it was really rough. And then finally it’s like, okay, I hit my rhythm and I walked into it with impostor syndrome a little bit, and I finally caught my footing, but it’s a good book to start with.

Linda: Thank you. Thank you very much. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I know, the plot thickens, right? It becomes more interesting as you go from chapter to chapter, right. And before you know it, there’s a happy ending after all.

Rebecca: So Linda, Teaching at its Best has been around for a long time with a first edition published in 1998. Can you talk a little bit about how that first edition came about?

Linda: Yes, that was…I can’t believe… 1998. That’s 25 years ago. It’s almost scary how time flies. But anyway, the actual seed of the book came about in about 1994… 95. But I need to give you some background because I had been writing TA training books since like, the late 1970s when I was first given the task of putting together a TA training program. So back then, I was putting out weekly mimeos,[LAUGHTER] remember mimeograph machines. Some of you don’t know, what is she talking about? But anyway, that was technology then. But anyway, smetl great, though… it really did. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That’s the second time today someone has made a reference about the smell of those.

Linda: Yeah, oh yeah.

John: The dittos are what I remember having the stronger smell

Todd: The ditto did, yeah. yeah, and I’ll tell you before we move on, when I was a graduate student, we had a ditto machine. I just have to say this, Linda, because you liked the smell and all there.

Linda: Yeah, Yeah.

Todd: But they had a ditto machine. And below the ditto machine, I noticed that the floor tiles were kind of eaten away by the ditto fluid. [LAUGHTER] And then here’s the best part is that one day I was rooting around in the closet looking for something and I found the extra tiles in a box and the side of the box said “reinforced with long-lasting asbestos.” [LAUGHTER] So the ditto fluid was eating through asbestos lined tile, but that’s how strong that stuff is. So yeah, we all enjoyed the smell of that stuff back in the day..

Linda: Yeah, yeah. I guess it’s a good thing for all of us they invented something else, like copying machines. So anyway, so I started doing that at UCLA. And then that turned into like a booklet of sorts. And then I was at UC Riverside, and I was writing books there. And I sort of revised it every couple of years. And I was also writing these with my master teaching fellows. So we were doing that. And then I came to Vanderbilt, and I decided, well, I’m going to do this, pretty much on my own, I’ll get some help from my master teaching fellows. But anyway, it turned into an actual book. I mean, it turned into a happy monster. And I was very pleased with it. Well, along about 94-95, my husband recommended that I turn it into a regular book, and talk to a publisher about it. So anyway, I said, “Oh, great idea. Great idea and just sort of didn’t think about it much. Then in 1996, he died. And I thought, “Well, how am I going to pull myself through?” I bet it would be a great idea and a great tribute to him if I took Teaching at its Best, the Vanderbilt edition, and turned that into a general book. And I decided to do that and kept my mind off of bad things. And it turned into Teaching at its Best, the first edition. That’s why I dedicated the book to him, by the way, because it really was his inspiration that got me to do it. And so anyway, tribute to him. So that’s where the first edition came from. I mean, it really grew out of tragedy. But it’s been a comedy ever since, right? [LAUGHTER] So anyway, it’s been a wonderful thing.

John: And it’s been a great resource.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that it pulled you through, but then has pulled many teachers through. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: And I’ve gotten such feedback from faculty members who said, “I saved their lunch,” you know, if they were really in big trouble, and some of them said, “I was in big trouble with my teaching and you got me tenure.” Yeah, like, right. But anyway, the book helped a lot of people. And I guess maybe something in me when I first published this book said, “Gee it would really be great to be the next Wilbert McKeachie, right, which is a very pretentious thing to think. But then they wanted the second edition, I was thinking, “Hey, maybe I’m on the road to something.” And then there was a third, and then there was the fourth. And it didn’t get any easier to write the subsequent editions really, it was just a matter of keeping up with the literature. And so right now, I’m off into another corner of the world. So I just didn’t want to immerse myself in that again.

John: So that brings us to the question of what is new in the fifth edition?

Todd: Well, that’s my question. I’ve known Linda for the longest time. By the way, I do want to mention before we go on, I can’t remember, Linda, if it’s been that long ago, but it might have been the second edition. When at POD, I said, “You need to do a second edition of this book” …or second or third. But I was using the book. I mean, I learned so much from it. So for the new edition. Number one, of course, the research has been updated only because the research is always changing. And it had been a few years. So that’s number one. In terms of changing the book, though, we only have a leeway of about 10,000 words. Now, for those out there listening 10,000 words sounds like a lot of words until you’ve got a 200,000 word book, it was about 190. And they said, you can’t go over 200 Because the book just gets too big then. So it is 10,000 words longer than it was in fact, I think it’s 10,003 words longer. So it’s right in there. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So you snuck an extra 3 words in.

Todd: It could have been a squeeze to put three words in there. And it’s always hilarious because when they say there’s just a few too many words I just start hyphenating things so yeah, it kind of all works. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, just any words at all. So you can do “can you” as just a hyphenated word. It works. [LAUGHTER]K So is that terminology, the terminology does change and I find this fascinating. One of the things I love to write about books is learning. I mean, Linda, the same thing what as we write, we read a ton of stuff. And as we read stuff, we learn stuff. So this one in particular, for example, is that I grew up with PBL as problem based learning. And I had done workshops on it, I had worked on everything else, but I hadn’t looked at it for quite a while. And in this particular book, as I started looking at PBL, I couldn’t find anything on problem based learning. And it was fascinating because I was doing some digging, and then I called Claire Major, who was an early person who had a grant on problem based learning and everything I ran into was about 2002, it just started to drop off a little bit, and there was some, but it started to tail off. And when I talked to Claire, she says, “Oh, yeah, I used to do quite a bit about that, it was back around 2002-2003.” And now, and the reason I’m saying this is, every time I saw the letters PBL, it was project based learning. And project based learning sounds a lot like problem based learning, but they’re different concepts. And so anyway, going through and finding some of the terminology, so it was consistent with what’s being done right now has changed. There is now a chapter on inclusive teaching, because over the last three or four years, we finally realized that there’s a whole lot of individuals who haven’t been successful in higher education, partly because of the way we teach. And so I’ve been making an argument for a few years now that teaching and learning, the classroom situation has always really been based for fast-talking, risk-taking extroverts. And we’ve suddenly realized that if you’re not a fast-talking, risk-taking extrovert, you may not get a chance to participate, classroom and other things. So I looked at some different things with inclusive teaching. There’s a whole another chapter on that. And then just the language throughout, we talk a little differently now, just even over the last three or four years than we did five, six years ago, I was pretty surprised by that. But there’s some pretty significant changes in language. So the book has a slightly different tone in language, and those are the biggest changes. Oh, I should say, before we move on, one of the biggest other changes, and I did this one, Linda put a section in there that said learning styles had changed significantly from the previous edition. And so she had pointed out that there was no longer a section on learning styles. And I put the learning styles right back in there, I told Linda and she gasped just a little bit. And then I explained that I put it back in there, and then said exactly how terrible it was to basically teach according to learning styles, because it’s the myth that will not die. So that’s back in there.

Linda: People love it. I know. [LAUGHTER]

John: We have that issue all the time, students come in believing in them and say, “Well, I can’t learn from reading because I’m a visual learner.” And I say “Well, fortunately, you use your eyes to read,” and then I’ll get them some citations.

Todd: Well, I’ll tell you, and before we move on, these are the types of things we learned. I couldn’t figure out why the thing is so hard to die. What is it that’s really doing this because other myths we’ve been able to debunk. And part of the reason is licensing exams, when you are in pre-service and you want to become a teacher, the exams you take to become a teacher, a large portion of those exams, have learning styles questions on there. So you have to answer about visual learners and auditory learners and kinesthetic. And so until we get those out of teacher education programs, we’re teaching teachers to believe this. So anyway, there you go. Public service announcement. Be careful about meshing. And if you don’t know what meshing is, look it up and then stop it. [LAUGHTER]

John: We have had guests on the podcast who mentioned learning styles, and then we edit them out and explain to them later why we edit out any reference to that. And I think most of them were in education, either as instructors, or they’ve been working as secondary teachers. It is a pretty pervasive myth. In fact, Michelle Miller and Kristen Betts, together with some other people, did a survey. And that was the most commonly believed myth about teaching and learning. It was done through OLC a few years back, about three or four years ago. Yep,

Todd: Yeah, I saw that survey. Yes, it’s pretty amazing. Michelle’s an amazing person.

Rebecca: The experience of the pandemic has had a fairly large impact on how our classes are taught. Can you talk a little bit, Todd, about how this is reflected in this new edition?

Todd: Things have changed pretty significantly because of the pandemic. There’s a couple things going on. Again, the inclusive teaching and learning, which I’ve already commented on, is really different now. And it’s interesting, because it goes back to the 1960s. We’ve known that, for instance, African Americans tend to flunk at twice the rate of Caucasians, in large machine-scored multiple choice exams. So we know it’s not the teaching, and we know it’s not the grades, it has to be something else. And it turns out that it was you put students into groups and those differences start to disappear. So I mean, even more so the last couple of years, it’s a lot of engaged learning, active learning. I’m still going to pitch my stuff that I’ve been ranting and raving about for years. And there’s no data out there that says that lecturing is bad. What the data says is that if you add active and engaged learning to lecture, then you have much better outcomes than lecture alone. But we’re learning about those types of things in terms of active and engaged learning, how to pair it with and mix it with other strategies that work, looking at distance education in terms of systems and how we can use technology. So a quick example is I used to have a review session before exams. And oftentimes, it’s hard to find a place on campus to have that. And so you might be in a room off in one hall or the library or something. And if the exam was on Monday, I’d have the review session at like six o’clock, seven o’clock on a Sunday night. And there are students who couldn’t make it. I would simply say, you can get notes from someone else. And we’ve known for the longest time, if a student misses class, getting notes from somebody else doesn’t work. Well, now I do review sessions on Zoom, we don’t have to worry about finding a place to park, we don’t have to worry about some students finding babysitters, if they’re working, it’s recorded, so they get the exact same thing. So things like Zoom have really changed teaching in a sense that you can capture the essence in the experience of teaching and use it for others, and it has helped with some equity issues. You can’t do it all the time. And teaching over Zoom is different than face to face. But there are now ways of using different technologies and using different modalities to help to teach in ways that were not really used before the pandemic.

John: Speaking of that, during the pandemic, there was a period of rapid expansion in both the variety of edtech tools available and in terms of teaching modalities themselves. In the description of your book, it indicates that you address useful educational technology and what is a waste of time? Could you give us an example of both some useful technologies that could be used and some that are not so useful? And also perhaps a reaction to the spread of bichronous and HyFlex instruction?

Linda: Yeah, I’ll take this one. And I’m drawing a lot of stuff from another book that I co-authored, with Ludwika Goodman. We were writing about Online Teaching at its Best, okay. And she was an instructional designer. And I came from teaching and learning and we put our literature’s together. And we were talking about modalities a great deal, especially in the second edition with the pandemic. Well, one thing I found out, not only from reading, but also from watching this happen was that this Hyflex or bichronous, whatever you want to call it, is a bust, if there ever was a modality, that’s a bad idea it’s that one, even though administrators love it because students can choose whether to come to class and do the things they would do in class, or to attend class remotely? Well, yeah, it sounds like “oh, yeah, that could be good.” But the technological problems, and then the social problems, especially the in-class social problems are enormous. And in-class social problems, like small group work, how do you hear what’s going on in the classroom over this low roar of small groups? Okay, so how can you help? How can the students that are learning remotely, what can they do? Now, the way this was invented, by the way, was for a small graduate class, and then okay, like, makes sense, because you’re only dealing with six students in this room and six students who are remote. But other than that, it’s so bad, the logistics, the sound logistics, the coordination that the instructor has to maintain, the attempt at being fair to both groups, at bringing in both groups, when the groups can’t even hear each other well. Now, if we had Hollywood level equipment in our classrooms, we might be able to make this work a little better, but we don’t, and we’re never going to have that. So there are just a lot of technological and social reasons why HyFlex, that’s what I called it in Online Teaching at its Best, what it was called at the time is a complete bust. Now, not to be confused with hybrid or blended learning, which we found has worked exceedingly well. So bringing in some technology, but into a face-to-face environment and that being the base of the class. Now, remote’s nice, but you might not want to do remote all the time for all things. It’s not quite the next best thing to being there. But it’s something and as long as you don’t just stand there and stare at the camera and lecture for an hour. You’ll get complaints about that quickly. And particularly with students today when they really need to be actively involved, actively engaged. So yeah, sure, fine, talk for three minutes, maybe even push it for five, but then give them something to do and you really, really must in remote because otherwise, you’re just some talking head on television.

Todd: I agree completely. In fact, it was funny because I happen to have a digital copy of the book here. And so I typed in a ctrl F and I typed in HyFlex and there’s one comment to the preface that said there’s many different formats out there and then I will tell the listeners, if you’re expecting to learn about HyFlex, the word never shows up again in the book. [LAUGHTER] So, it’s not in there. I mean, you look at the literature that’s out there. And I think it’s fair to say that maybe there are people who can do it. I haven’t really seen it done well and I think Linda’s saying she hasn’t either. And it’s so difficult, especially for a book like this. That’s not what we’re all about. I mean, again, if it even works well, which I’d love to hear that it would be a very advanced book and that’s not what this is. So we do have a lot in there about technology in terms of edtech tools, though. There are those in there, I would just say real quickly, for instance, Padlet’s one of my favorites, I’ll throw that out there. I like Padlet a lot. But there are tools out there, if you want to do a gallery walk, which for instance, if you happen to be in a face-to-face course, you’d set up maybe four stations with big sheets of paper, you put your students into groups, and then they walk from sheet of paper to sheet of paper, and they move around the room. And they can do what’s called a gallery walk. You can do the same thing online with a jamboard, you can set up jamboards so that there’s different pages, and then each group is on a page. And then you just say it’s time to shift pages, they could shift pages. So I’ve done gallery walks, and it’s worked well. I’ve used Padlet for brainstorming. And one of the things I love about Padlet, I’ll have to say is if you are doing some digital teaching in a situation, you can watch what each group is developing on the page for all groups at the same time. I can’t hear all groups at the same time when I walk around the room. So there are certainly some technologies coming out that can really do things well. There’s also things that don’t work very well, though. And I think one of the things you want to keep in mind is just learning theory. Does the technology you’re using advance students, potentially, through learning theory? Does it help with repetition? Does it help with attention? Linda was just mentioning attention, if you lecture too long, you lose their attention. If you do something ridiculously simple or not… I was gonna say stupid, but that sounds rude. But if we do something as a small group that makes no sense, you don’t get their attention either. So using clickers, I have to say, I watched a faculty member one time because they were touted as a person who was very engaging. And this is at a medical school, so I really wanted to see this. And the person used clickers, but used it in a way that asked the students a question, they responded, and the instructor looked up at the board and said, “Here’s how you responded, let’s move on.” And then moved on to the next thing. And about five minutes later gave another question said, “How do you respond?” and they clicked the clicker, and then they moved on again. That had no value at all, and in fact, there was no actual interaction there. So afterwards, I say, can’t you just ask a rhetorical question and just move on? We got to be careful not to use technology just because it’s being used, it should advance the learning process.

John: However, clickers can be effective if it’s combined with peer discussion and some feedback and some just-in-time teaching. If it’s just used to get responses that are ignored, it really doesn’t align with any evidence-based practice or anything we know about teaching and learning. But those per discussions can be useful and there’s a lot of research that show that does result in longer-term knowledge retention when it’s used correctly, but often it’s not.

Todd: Right. And I think that’s a really good point. I’m glad you said that, because Eric Mazur, and his concept tests, for a large extent, that’s where active and engaged learning really took off. And that is a clicker questions. And they can be used as great tools. But again, if you’re using it for the right reason, which is what you just said, My comment is, there’s technology out there, that is a waste of time, and not a good thing to have, because it’s just not being used in a way that’s conducive to learning. So good point, that’s fair.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who the audience of the book is?

Linda: Sure. It’s actually for anybody who teaches students older than children, I suppose, because it isn’t really designed for teaching children. But other than that, it’s really for people who teach but don’t have the time to read a book. The nice thing about Teaching at its Best is you can go to the table of contents, you go to the index, you could find exactly what you need for your next class. And it’s very oriented towards how to, so it could be for beginners or for experienced people who simply haven’t tried something specific before, or want a twist on it, or just want some inspiration. Because there there are a lot of different teaching techniques in there. And they’re all oriented towards student engagement, every single one of them. But I wanted to comment too, on just how the job of instructor or professor has changed over the past, I don’t know, 40 years, I suppose. I know when I started teaching it was a completely different job. And I started teaching in 1975, when I was 12, of course, but no and I was young to start teaching because I was 25 and there I was 180 students in front of me. So oops, my goodness, what have I done? But that’s exactly what I wanted to do. But you’d go in there, you’d lecture and you’d walk out. You were in complete control of everything. Like, you might throw out a question and you might get a discussion going. But it wasn’t considered to be essential. In fact, there were two teaching techniques back then: there was lecture, and there was discussion. And nobody knew how to do discussion. Now, I had to find out a few things about it when I was doing TA training, because TAs were supposed to be running discussions. But there wasn’t a lot out there. Thank God for Wilbert McKeachie’s book Teaching Tips, because that was about the only source out there you could go to. So anyway, but now the job, I mean, oh, it’s mind boggling what faculty are now expected to do. And they are supposed to, like, learning outcomes. Okay, I love learning outcomes. They’re wonderful. But I didn’t have to do that when I started, I just had to talk about my subject, which I dearly loved. And so, that was nothing. But you’ve got learning outcomes. So you’ve got to be like, a course designer, you have to deal with a student’s mental health problems, right? It’s part of the job, and you’re expected to respond to them. You’re supposed to give them career counseling in careers that you might not know much about, and possibly for good reason, because you’re in your own career. It’s so time consuming, not to mention fair use, oh, yes, fair use has changed, fair use has changed radically. And when you’re dealing with anything online, the rules are totally different. And you’re highly restricted as to what you can use, what you could do. When you’re in a face-to-face classroom, it’s a little bit easier. So yeah, so you got to be a copyright lawyer to stay out of trouble. And then you get involved in accreditation, you get involved in that kind of assessment. So you have to all of a sudden be totally involved in what your program is doing, what your major is doing, where it’s headed. There’s just too much to do. And there are more and more committees and oh, there’s a lot of time wasted in committees. Of course, you’re supposed to publish at the same time and make presentations at conferences. It was like that back then, too. But now, the expectations are higher, and it’s on top of more time in teaching, and more courses. I was teaching four courses a year, and you can’t find that kind of job anymore.

Rebecca: So Linda, you’re saying the animal shelter is going really well now?

Linda: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Todd: That’s hilarious. Well, I want to point out too, and I think Linda’s said it very, very well is that we are expected to do things we never had to use before. Never worried about before. And I love the fair use is great, because when I first started teaching, and I’ve been teaching for 36 years, when I first started teaching, you’d videotape something off TV and show it in class and then put it on the shelf. And I knew people who showed the same video for 10 years. Right now you better be careful about showing the same video for 10 years. But these are things we need to know. I would say also, by the way, this is a really good book for administrators, anybody who would like to give guidance to faculty members, or better understand teaching and learning so that when promotion and tenure comes along, you get a sense of this. And so if you’re saying to the faculty, they should use a variety of teaching strategies. It’s not a bad idea to know a variety of teaching strategies. And so I think it’s good for administrators as well, and graduate students. But I want to take a second and tell you, one of the reviews of the book, I guess, came in just yesterday or the day before from Dan Levy. He’s a senior lecturer at Harvard University. And what he put was Teaching at it’s Best is an absolute gem. Whether you are new to teaching in higher education, or have been doing it for a while, you will find this book’s evidence-based advice on a wide range of teaching issues to be very helpful. The style is engaging and the breadth is impressive. If you want to teach at your best you should read Teaching at its Best. And I love what he put in there because it doesn’t matter if you’re a new teacher or you’ve been doing it for a while, this book’s got a lot of stuff in it.

John: And Dan has been a guest on our podcast, and he’s also an economist, which is another thing in his favor. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: That is good.

John: I do want to comment on lenders observation about how teaching has changed because I came in at a very similar type of experience. I was told by the chair of the department not to waste a lot of time on teaching and to focus primarily on research because that’s what’s most important, and that’s the only thing that’s really ultimately valued here or elsewhere in the job market. But then what happened is a few people started reading the literature on how we learn And then they started writing these books about it. [LAUGHTER] And these books encouraged us to do things like retrieval practice and low-stakes tests, and to provide lots of feedback to students. So those people…[LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I don’t know any of them.

John: …but as a result of that many people started changing the way they teach in response to this. So some of it is you brought this on to all of us by sharing… [LAUGHTER]

Linda: I apologize.

Todd: Sorry about that.

Linda: I apologize.

Todd: We apologize and you know, I will say too is, so yeah, sorry. Sorry about doing that. But I’m glad you said that.

Linda: We made the job harder didn’t we?

Todd: We did, but you know to just be fair for Linda and I as well as I still remember a faculty member calling me, It must have been about 20 years ago, and I just started doing a little bit of Faculty Development, she was crying, she had given her first assignment in terms of a paper. And she said, I’m sitting here with a stack of papers, and I don’t know how to grade them. And it got me thinking a little bit, how many of the aspects of the job that we’re required to do, were we trained to do? And that’s the stuff that Linda was mentioning as well, is nobody taught me. I’m an industrial psychologist. And so nobody taught me the strategies for delivering information to a group of 200 people. Nobody taught me how to grade essay tests. Nobody taught me how to grade presentations, I didn’t know about fair use and how I could use things. I mean, you go through and list all of the things that you’re required to do. And then look at all the things you were trained to do. And this is tough. And that changed. So I have one quick one I’ll mention is I was hired as an adjunct faculty member before I got my first tenure-track job. And I was teaching 4-4. So I had four classes in the fall, four classes in the spring. And about halfway through the spring, I ran into the department chair, and I was interested to see if I was going to be able to come back and I said, “Hey, Mike, how am I doing?” And this was at Central Michigan University, a pretty good sized school. He said, “You were fantastic.” And I said, “Excellent. What have you heard?” He said, “absolutely nothing.” So when it comes to teaching, what I learned was: research, you had to do well, and teaching, you had to not do terribly. And that is what you were mentioning has changed is now you’re kind of expected to do teaching as well.

Rebecca: And there’s a lot more research in the area now too. So sometimes it’s hard to keep up on it. So books like this can be really helpful in providing a lot of that research in one place.

John: And both of you have written many good books that have guided many, many faculty in their careers, and eliminated that gap between what we’re trained to do and what we actually have to do.

Rebecca: So of course, we want to know when we can have this book in our hands.

Todd: Good news for this book, which is exciting because we really cranked away on this thing and it’s listed in Amazon as being due on April 25. But it actually went to press on January 23. So it’s already out and about three months ahead of schedule.

John: Excellent. We’re looking forward to it. I’ve had my copy on preorder since I saw a tweet about this. I think it was your tweet, Todd, a while back. And I’m very much looking forward to receiving a copy of it.

Todd: Excellent. We’re looking forward to people being able to benefit from copies of it.

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

Todd: It’s hard to tell what’s next because I’m exhausted from what’s been [LAUGHTER] ever moving forward, as I’m working on and just finishing a book right now that’s to help faculty in the first year of their teaching. So it’s basically off to a good start. It’s what specifically faculty should do in the first year of getting a teaching position. And aside from that, probably working on my next jigsaw puzzle, I like to do the great big jigsaw puzzles. And so I just finished one that had 33,600 pieces. It is five feet….

Rebecca: Did you say 33,000 pieces?

Todd: No, I said 33,600 pieces.It was the 600 that…

Rebecca: Oh, ok.

Todd: …was difficult. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah.

Todd: When the puzzle is done, it has standard sized pieces, and it is five feet by 20 feet. So I just enjoy massively putting something together. It’s very challenging. So quite frankly, for those about and listening to this is if you imagine 33,600 puzzle pieces, that’s about as many studies as Linda and I have read to put this book together. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: Nothing to it. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: So that’s it for me. [LAUGHTER] Linda, what are you up to these days?

Linda: Oh, well, I live in la la land. So I’m still doing workshops and webinars and things like that mostly on my books of various kinds, various teaching topics. But I think what I want to do is retake up pastels and charcoals. My father was a commercial artist. And so he got me into pastels and charcoals when I was in high school. Well and then I dropped it to go off to college. Well, I want to get back into it in addition to working at the animal shelter. I know. It’s la la land and I wish la la land on everybody that I like.[LAUGHTER] I hope you all go to la la land and enjoy being a four year old all over again, because that’s the way I feel. I adapted to retirement in about 24 hours. That’s pushing it… you know, it’s more like four. But anyway, I slept on it. [LAUGHTER] That was the end of it. But I know I eased into it. I eased into it. I was still writing. I was still doing, especially before the pandemic, a lot of speaking. So then the pandemic hit and it just turned into online everything. And now I’m back on the road again, to a certain extent. I love it. So anyway, it’s a nice balance. So yeah, I wish you all la la land too.

Todd: That’s great.

Rebecca: That’s something to aspire to.

Todd: Yeah, it is. But you know, since you mentioned the speaking things, I just have to do the quick plug here. Linda, I think you and I, years and years ago, were joking around at POD about who would be the first one to get to the 50 states and have done a presentation in every state. And so I gotta tell you, I’m not even sure where you’re at in the mix, but I am at 49 states. And if any of your listeners are in North Dakota, [LAUGHTER] I could certainly use a phone call from North Dakota.

Linda: Well, I want to go to Vermont. I have not been to Vermont…

Todd: Oh, you haven’t.

Linda: …to give a presentation. So I would enjoy that. But I’ll go to Hawaii. I’ll do anything in Hawaii for you. Absolutely anything. [LAUGHTER] I’ll do gardening, [LAUGHTER] I’ll do dishes, your laundry. I don’t care.

Todd: That is good. Yeah, Linda and I had this gig. It was a long, long time ago. And I don’t know, it must have been 20 years ago we talked about it even. And there was some rules too. You had to be invited. And there had to be some kind of an honorarium or just I mean, it didn’t have to be much, but the concept was you just couldn’t show up at a state and start talking. [LAUGHTER] Otherwise, we’d have both been done a long time ago. But yeah,

Linda: Yeah.

Todd: … it was fun. This is the way nerds have fun. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, that’s a competition that’s benefited again, a lot of people over the years.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. It’s great to see both of you again, and we look forward to seeing your new book.

Linda: Thank you for this opportunity. It was a pleasure.

Todd: It was so much fun. Thank you

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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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274. ChatGPT

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has been the focus of a great deal of discussion and concern in higher ed. In this episode, Robert Cummings and Marc Watkins join us to discuss how to prepare students for a future in which AI tools will become increasingly prevalent in their lives.

Robert is the Executive Director of Academic Innovation, an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Digital Media Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia and is the co-editor of Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Marc Watkins is a Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. He co-chairs an AI working group within his department and is a WOW Fellow, where he leads a faculty learning community about AI’s impact on education. He’s been awarded a Pushcart Prize for his writing and a Blackboard Catalyst Award for teaching and learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has been the focus of a great deal of discussion and concern in higher ed. In this episode we discuss how to prepare students for a future in which AI tools will become increasingly prevalent in their lives.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Robert Cummings and Marc Watkins. Robert is the Executive Director of Academic Innovation, an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Digital Media Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia and is the co-editor of Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Marc Watkins is a Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. He co-chairs an AI working group within his department and is a WOW Fellow, where he leads a faculty learning community about AI’s impact on education. He’s been awarded a Pushcart Prize for his writing and a Blackboard Catalyst Award for teaching and learning. Welcome, Robert and Mark.

Robert: Thank you.

Marc: Thank you.

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

Marc: My hands are shaking from caffeine so much caffeine inside of me too. I started off today with some I think it’s Twinings Christmas spice, which is really popular around this house since I got that in my stocking. My wife is upset because I’m in a two bag per cup person. And she’s like saying you got to stop that, so she cuts me off around noon [LAUGHTER] and just to let me just sort of like dry out, for lack of a better word from caffeine withdrawal.

Rebecca: Well, it’s a great flavored tea. I like that one too.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I could see why you would double bag it.

Marc: I do love it.

Rebecca: How about you, Robert?

Robert: I’m drinking an English black tea. A replacement. Normally my tea is Barry’s tea, which is an Irish tea….

Rebecca: Yeah.

Marc: …but I’m out, so I had to go with the Tetley’s English black tea.

Rebecca: Oh, it’s never fun when you get to go to your second string. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: Oh, an old favorite, John.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I’m back to one of my new favorites, the Hunan Jig, which I can’t say with a straight face. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the ChatGPT. We’ve seen lots of tweets, blog posts, and podcasts in which you are both discuss this artificial intelligence writing application. Could you tell us a little bit about this tool, where it came from and what it does?

Marc: I guess I’ll go ahead and start, I am not a computer science person. I’m just a writing faculty member. But we did kind of get a little bit of a heads up about this in May when GPT3, which is the precursor to ChatGPT was made publicly available. It was at a private beta for about a year and a half when it was being developed, and then went to public in May. And I kind of logged in through some friends of mine social media to start checking out and seeing what was going on with it. Bob was really deep into AI with the SouthEast conference. You were at several AI conferences too during the summer as well, Bob. It is a text synthesizer, it’s based off of so much text just scraped from the internet and trained on 175 billion parameters. It’s just sort of shocking to think about the fact that this can now be accessed through your cell phone, if you want to do it on your actual smartphone, or a computer browser. But it is something that’s here. It’s something that functions fairly well, that you make things up sometimes. Sometimes it can be really very thoughtful, though, in it’s actual output. It’s very important to keep in mind, though, that AI is more like a marketing term in this case. There’s no thinking, there’s no reasoning behind it too. It can’t explain any of its choices. We use the term writing when we talk about it, but really what it is, is just text generating. When you think about writing, that’s the whole process of the thinking process and going through, being able to explain your choices and that sort of thing. So it’s a very, very big math engine, with a lot of processing power behind it.

Robert: I completely agree with everything Marc’s saying. I think about it is, and I believe it’s true, Marc, as far as we know, it’s an open AI, but it’s still using GPT3, so it’s really the same tool as Playground. I think it’s really interesting that when openAI shifted from their earlier iteration of this technology, which was Playground and there were some other spin offs from that as well, but that was basically a search format where you got an entry, and you would enter a piece of text and then you would get a response, that when they shifted it to chat, it seemed to really take it to the next level in terms of the attention that it was gathering. And I think it’s rhetorically significant to think about that, because the personalization, perhaps, the idea that you had an individual conversation partner, I think is exceptionally cute. The way that they have the text scroll in ChatGPT so as to make it look like the AI is “thinking” to maybe push this out when it’s immediately available. I think all of that reminds me a little bit of Eliza, which is one of the first sort of AI games that you could play where you play the game to try to guess whether or not there was another person on the other side of the chat box. It reminds me a bit of that. But I can certainly see why placing this technology inside of a chat window makes it so much more accessible and perhaps even more engaging than what we previously had. But the underlying technology, as far as I can see, is still GPT3, and it hasn’t changed necessarily significantly, except for this mode of access.

Rebecca: How long has this tool been learning how to write or gathering content?

Marc: Well, that’s a great question. So it is really just a precursor from GPT3. And again, we don’t really know this because open AI isn’t exactly open, unlike their name. The training data cuts off for this model for ChatGPT about two years ago. And of course, ChatGPT was launched last year at the end of November. So, it’s very recent, pretty up to date with some of that information, too. You can always kind of check the language model and see how much it actually, as we say, knows about the world by what recent events it can accurately describe. It’s really interesting how quickly people have freaked out about this. And Bob’s, I think, building off of that, I think he’s very right that this slight rhetorical change in the user interface to a chat, that suddenly people are able to actually interact with, set off this moral panic in education. You guys know this through the state of New York, New York City schools have now tried to ban it in the actual classroom, which I think is not going to work out very well. But it is certainly the theme we’re seeing not just in K through 12, but also higher ed too… seeing people talk about going back to blue books, going to AI proctoring services, which are just kind of some of the most regressive things you could possibly imagine. And I don’t want to knock people for doing this, because I know that they’re both frightened, and they probably have good reason to be frightened too, because it’s disrupting their practice. It’s also hopefully at the tail end of COVID, which has left us all completely without our capacity to deal with this. But I do want to keep everyone in mind too, and Bob’s really a great resource on this too, from his work with Wikipedia, is that your first impression of a tool, especially if you’re a young person using this and you have someone in authority telling you what a tool is, if you tell them that that tool is there to cheat or it is there to destroy their writing process or a learning process, that is going to be submitted in them for a very long time. And it’s gonna be very hard to dissuade people of that too. So really, what I’ve just tried to do is caution people about the fact that we need to be not so panicked about that. That’s much easier said than done,

Robert: Marc and I started giving a talk on our campus through our Center for Teaching and Learning and our academic innovations group in August. And we’ve just sort of updated it as we’re invited to continue to give the talk. But in it, we offer a couple of different ways for the faculty to think about how this is going to impact their teaching. And one of the things that I offered back in August, at least I think it still holds true, is to think about writing to learn and or writing to report learning. And so writing to learn is going to mean now writing alongside AI tools. And writing to report learning is going to be a lot trickier, depending on what types of questions you ask. So I think it’s going to be a situation where, and I’ve already seen some of this work in the POD community, it’s going to be a situation where writing to report learning has to maybe change gears a bit and think about different types of questions to ask. And the types of questions will be those that are not easily replicated, or answered in a general knowledge sort of way, but they’re going to lean on specific things that you, as instructor, think are going to be valuable in demonstrating learning, but also not necessarily part of a general knowledge base. So, for instance, if you’re a student in my class, and we’ve had lots of discussions about… I don’t know… quantum computing, and in the certain discussion sessions, Marc threw out an idea about quantum computing that was specific. So what I might do on my test is I might cite that as a specific example and remind students that we discussed that in class and then ask them to write a question in response to parts of that class discussion. So that way, I could be touching base with something that’s not generally replicable and easily accessible to AI. But I can also ask a question that’s going to ask my students to demonstrate knowledge about general concepts. And so, if both elements are there, then I probably know that my short answer question is authentically answered by my students. If some are not, then I might have questions. So I think it’s gonna be about tweaking what we’re doing and not abandoning what we’re doing. But it’s really a tough moment right now. Because, as soon as we say one thing about these technologies, well then they iterate and they evolve. It’s just a really competitive landscape for these tool developers. And they’re all trying to figure out a way to develop competitive advantage. And so they have to distinguish themselves from their competitors. And we can’t predict what ways that they will do that. So it’s going to be a while before, I think, this calms down for writing faculty specifically and for higher education faculty generally, because, of course, writing is central to every discipline and what we do, or at least that’s my bias.

Rebecca: So I’m not a writing faculty member. I’m a designer and a new media artist. And to me, it seems like something that could be fun to play with, which is maybe a counter to how some folks might respond to something like this. Are there ways that you can see a tool like this being useful in helping or advancing learning?

Robert: So, we’ve talked about this a bit, I really think that the general shape to the response, in writing classes specifically, is about identifying specific tools for specific writing purposes in specific stages. So if we’re in the invention stage, and we’re engaging a topic and you’re trying to decide what to write about, maybe dialoguing with open AI with some general questions, it’s going to trigger some things that you’re going to think about and follow up on. It could be great. You know, Marc was one of the first people to point out, I think it was Marc said this, folks who have writer’s block, this is a real godsend, or could be. It really helps get the wheels turning. So we could use in invention, we can use it in revision, we can use it to find sources, once we already have our ideas, so identify specific AI iterations for specific purposes inside of a larger project. I think that’s a method that’s going to work and is going to be something that gets toward that goal that we like to say in our AI Task Force on campus here, which is helping students learn to work alongside AI.

Marc: Yeah, that’s definitely how I feel about it too, and to kind of echo what Bob’s saying, there’s a lot more than you could do with a tool than just generate text. And I think that kind of gets lost in this pipe that you see with ChatGPT and everything else. I kind of mentioned before Whisper was another neural network that they launched just quietly back in the end of September start of October of last year, that works with actually uploading speech. It’s multilingual. So you can actually kind of use that almost like a universal translator in some ways. But the thing that’s, like outstanding with it is when you actually use it with the old GPT3 Playground… I say the old GPT playground like it’s not something that’s still useful right now… it uploads the entire transcript of a recording into the actual Playground. So you actually input it into AI. If you think about this from a teaching perspective, especially from students who have to deal with lecture, and want a way to actually organize their notes in some way, shape, or form, they’re able to do that then by just simply issuing a simple command to summarize your notes, to organize it. You can synthesize it with your past notes, even come up with test questions for an essay you need to write or an exam you’re going to have. Now from a teaching perspective, as someone who’s like try to be as student-centric as possible, that’s great, that’s wonderful. I also realized those people who are still wedded to lecture probably going to look at this, like another moral panic. I don’t want my students to have access to this, because it’s not going to help them with their note taking skills. I don’t want them to be falling asleep in my class as if they were staying awake to begin with. So I’m going to ban this technology. So we’re going to see lots of little areas of this pop up throughout education, it’s not just going to be within writing, it’s going to be in all different forms, the different ways… that I’m right there with you using this tool to really help you begin to think about in designing your own thought process, as you’re going through either a writing project, some people using it for art, some people use it for coding, it’s really up to your imagination of how you’d like to do it. The actual area that we’re looking at has a name, I don’t even know it has a name until the developers we’re working with, guys at Fermat. So there’s this article from a German university about beyond generation is what they call the actual form of that. So using your own text as sort of the input to an AI and then getting brainstorming ideas, automatic summaries, using it to get counter arguments to your own version notes. They use it also for images and all different other types of new generations too. So it’s really out there and like I think ChatGPT is just kind of sucking all the air up out of the room because likely so it’s it’s the new thing. It’s what everyone is talking about but so much has gone on, it really has, in this past few months. The entire fall semester I was emailing Bob like two or three times a week and poor Bob was just like “Just stop emailing me. Okay, we understand. I can’t look at this either. We don’t have time.” But it really was just crazy. It really is.

John: What are some other ways that this could be used in helping students become more productive in their writing or in their learning?

Marc: It really is going to be up to whatever the individual instructor and also what the student comes up with this too. If your process is already set in stone, like my process is set in stone as a writer, I think most of us are too as we’ve matured, it’s very difficult to integrate AI into that process. But if you’re young, and you’re just starting out, you’re maturing, that is a very different story. So we’re going to start seeing ways our students are going to be using this within their own writing process, their own creative process, too, that we haven’t really imagined. And I know that’s one of the reasons why this is so anxiety producing, because we say that there is a process, we don’t want to talk about the fact that this new technology can also disrupt that a little bit. I’ll go and segue to Bob, too, because I think he’s talked a little bit about this as well.

Robert: Yeah, one of the things that we’ve come together in our group that Marc’s co-leading is, we’ve come together to say that we want to encourage our students to use the tools, full stop. Now, we want to help them interpret the usage of those tools. So really being above board and transparent about engaging the tools, using our systems of citation, struggling to cope as they are, but just saying at the beginning, use AI generators in my class. I need to know what writing is yours and what writing is not. But, then designing assignments so you encourage limited engagements, which are quickly followed with reflection. So, oh Gosh, who was is Marc, a colleague, that was, I think, was at NC State in the business class where last spring he had students quote, unquote, cheat with AI.

Marc: Paul Fyfe, Yes.

Robert: Yes, thank you. And so he, in so many words, he basically designed the assignment so that students would have AI write their paper and almost uniformly they said, “Please, let me just write my paper, because it’d be a lot simpler. And I would like the writing a lot more.” So that type of engagement is really helpful, I think, because they were able to fully utilize the AI that they could access, and then try a bunch of different purposes with it, a bunch of different applications with it, and then form an opinion about what its strengths and weaknesses were. And then they pretty quickly saw its limitations. So, I mean, to specifically answer your question, John, I do think it can be helpful with a wide range of tasks. Again, invention stage, if I just have an idea, I can pop an idea in there and ask for more information and I’ll get more information. Hopefully, it will be reliable. But sometimes I’ll get a good deal of information and it’ll encourage me to keep writing. There are AI tools that are good about finding sources, there are AI tools that will continue to help you shift voice. So we’ve seen a lot of people do some fun things with shifting voice. Well, I can think of a lot of different types of writing assignments where I might try to insert voice, and people would be invited to think about the impact of voice on the message and on the purpose. And let’s not forget, so one of the things that irks Marc and myself is that a lot of our friends in the computer science world think of writing as a problem to solve. And we don’t think of writing that way. But, as I said to Marc the other day when we were talking about this, if I’m trying to write an email to my boss in a second language, writing is a problem for me to solve. And so Grammarly has proven to us that there are a large number of people in our world who need different levels of literacy in different applications with different purposes and they’re willing to compensate them for some additional expertise. So I had tried to design a course to teach in the fall, we were to engage AI tools, specifically in a composition class, and I had to pull the plug on my own proposal because the tools were evolving too quickly, Marc and Marc’s team solved the riddle because they decided that they could identify the tools on an assignment basis. So it would be a unit within the course. And so when they shrank that timeline, they had a better chance the tools they identified at the beginning of the unit would still be relatively the same by the time they got to the end of the unit. So getting a menu or a suite of different AI tools that you want to explore, explore them with your students, give them spaces to reflect, always make sure that you’re validating whatever is being said if you’re going to use it, and then always cite it. Those are the ground rules that we’re thinking about when we’re engaging the different tools and then, I don’t know, it can be fun.

Marc: You mean writing can be fun? I’ve never heard such things.

Rebecca: It would be incredible. One of the things that I hear you underscoring related to citations, it was making me think about the ways that I have students already using third party materials in a design class, where we use third party materials when we’re writing a research paper, because we are using citations. So we have methods for documenting these things and making it clearer to an audience, what’s ours and what’s not. So it’s not like it’s some brand new kind of thing that we’re trying to do in terms of documenting that or communicating that to someone else. It’s just adapting it a bit, because it’s a slightly different thing that we’re using, or a different third party tool that we’re using or third party material that we’re using, but I have my students write a copyright documentation for things that they’re doing, like, what’s the license for the images that they’re using that don’t require attribution? I go through the whole list, the fonts that they’re using and the license that they’re using for that? So for me, this seems like an obvious next step or a way that that same process of providing that attribution or that documentation would work well in this atmosphere.

Robert: I think the challenge, and Marc and I’ve talked about this before, the challenge is when you shift from a writing support tool to a writing generation tool. So most of us aren’t thinking about documenting spell checker in Microsoft Word, because we don’t see that as content that is original in some way, right? But it definitely affects our writing, nor do we cite smart compose, Google’s sentence completion tool. But how do you know when you’ve gone from smart compose, providing just a correct way to finish your own thought, to smart compose giving you a new thought. And that’s an interesting dilemma. If we can just take a wee nip of schadenfreude, it was interesting to see that the machine learning conference recently had to amend its own paper submission, Marc was pointing this out to me, their own papers submission guidelines to say: “if you use AI tools, you can’t submit.” And then they had to try to distinguish between writing generators and writing assistance. And so that’s just not an easy thing to do. But it’s just going to involve trust between writers and audiences.

Marc: Yeah, I don’t envy the task of any of our disciplinary conventions trying to do this. We could invest some time in doing this with ChatGPT or thinking about this. But then it’s not even clear if ChatGPT is going to be the end of the road here. We’re talking about this as just another version of AI and how he would do that. I’ve seen some people arguing on social media about the fact that a student or anyone who is using an AI should then track down that idea that the AI is spitting out. And I think that’s incredibly futile because it’s trained on the internet, you don’t know how this idea came about. And that’s one of the really big challenges with this type of technology is that it breaks the chain of citations that was used to actually, for lack of a better word, to generate text. I was gonna say to show knowledge, but it can’t really show knowledge, it’s just basically generated an idea, or mimicked an idea. So that really is going to be a huge challenge that we’re going to have to face too and think about. It’s going to be something that will require a lot of dialogue between ourselves, our students. And also thinking about where we want them to use this technology. I think for right now, it’s something that you want to use a language model with your students, or invite them to use it too, tell them to reflect on that process, as Bob mentioned earlier too. There are some tools out there, LEX is one of them, where you could actually track what was being built in your document with the AI, which sort of like glow and be highlighted. So there are going to be some tools on the market that will do this. It is going to be a challenge, though, especially when people start going wild with it, because when you’re working with AI, when it just takes a few seconds to generate a thing and keeping track of that is going to be something that will require a great deal of not only trust with our students, but you really are going to have to sit down and tell them, “Look, you’re gonna have to slow down a little bit, and not let the actual text generations sort of take over your thinking process and your actual writing process.”

Robert: Speaking a little bit of process right now, I’m working on a project with a colleague in computer science. And we’re looking at that ancient technology, Google smart compose. And much to my surprise, I couldn’t find a literature where anyone had really spent time looking at the impact of the suggestions on open-ended writing. I did find some research that had been done on smaller writing. So, for instance, there was a project that asked writers to compose captions for images, but I didn’t see anything longer than that. So that’s what we did in the fall, we got 119 participants, and we asked them to write an open-ended response, an essay essentially, a short essay in response to a common prompt. Half of the writers had Google smart, compose enabled, and half didn’t. And we’re going through the data now to see how the suggestions actually affect writers’ process and product. So we’re looking at the product right now. One of our hypotheses is that the Google smart compose participants will have writing that is more similar, because essentially they will be given similar suggestions about how to complete their sentences. And we expect that in the non-smart compose enabled population we’ll find that there was more lexical and syntactical diversity in those writing products. On the writing process side, we’re creating, as far as I know, new measures to determine whether they accept suggestions, edit suggestions, or reject suggestions. And we all do some of all three of those usually, but the time spent. And so we’re trying to see if there’s correlations between the amount of time spent, and then again, the length of text, the complexity of text, because if you’re editing something else, you’re probably not thinking about your own ideas, and how to bring those forward. But overall, what we’re hoping to suggest, and, again, because we’re not able to really see what’s happening in smart compose, we’re having to operate with it as a black box. What we’re hoping to suggest is that our colleagues in software development start inviting writers into the process of articulating our writing profile. So let’s say, for instance, you might see an iteration in the future of Google smart compose that says, “Hey, I noticed that you’re rejecting absolutely everything we’re sending to you. Do you want to turn this off?” [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

Robert: Or “I noticed that you’re accepting things very quickly. Would you like for us to increase the amplitude and give you more more quickly?” Understanding those types of interactions and preferences can help them build profiles and the profiles can then hopefully make the tools more useful. So, I know that they, of course, do customize suggestions over time. So I know that the tool does grow. I think as John you might have said, you know, how long is it learning to write, well, they learn to write with us. In fact, those are features that Grammarly competes with its competitors on. It’s like our tool will train up or quickly. At any rate, what does it mean to help students learn to work alongside AI? Well, what I believe, when it comes to writing, part of what it’s going to mean, is help them to understand more quickly what the tool is giving them, what they want, and how they can harness the tool to their purposes. And until the tools are somewhat stable and until the writers are invited into the process of understanding the affordances of the tool and the feature sets. That’s just not possible.

John: Where do you see this moral panic as going? Is this something that’s likely to fade in the near future? And we’ve seen similar things in the past. I’ve been around for a while. I remember reactions to calculators and whether they should be used to allow people to take square roots instead of going through that elaborate tedious process. I remember using card catalogs and using printed indexes for journals to try to find things. And the tools that we have available have allowed us to be a lot more productive. Is it likely that we’ll move to a position where people will accept these tools as being useful productivity tools soon? Or is this something different than those past cases?

Marc: Well, I think the panic is definitely set in right now. And I think we’re going to be in for some waves of hype and panic. We’ve already seen it from last year. I think everyone kind of got huge dose of it with ChatGPT. But we were kind of getting the panic and hype mode when we first came across this in May, wondering what this technology was, how would it actually impact our teaching, how would it impact our students too. There’s a lot of talk right now about trying to do AI detection. Most of the software out there is trying to use some form of AI to detect AI. They’re trying to use an older version of GPT called GPT2 that was open source and open release before openAI decided to sort of lock everything down. Sometimes it will pick up AI generated text, sometimes it’ll mislabel it. I obviously don’t want to see a faculty member take a student up on academic dishonesty charges based on a tool that may be correct or may not be correct, based off of that sort of a framework. TurnItIn is working on a process where they’re going to try to capture more data from students that they already have. If they can capture big enough writing samples, they can then use that to compare your version of your work to an AI or someone who’s bought a paper from a paper mill or contract cheating because of course, a student’s writing never changes over the course of their academic career. And our writing never changes either. It’s completely silly. We’ve been sort of conditioned, though, when we see new technologies come along to have it’s sort of equivalent to mitigate its impact on our lives. We have this new thing, it’s disruptive. Alright, well give me the other thing that gets rid of it so I don’t have to deal with it. I don’t think we’re going to have that with this. I’m empathetic to people. I know that that’s a really hard thing for them to hear. Again, I made the joke too about the New York City school districts banning this but, from their perspective, those people are terrified. I don’t blame them. When we deal with higher education, for the most part, students have those skills set that they’re going to be using for the rest of their lives. We’re just explaining them and preparing them to go into professional fields. If this is a situation where you’re talking K through 12, where a student doesn’t have all the reading or grammatical knowledge they need to be successful and they start using AI, that could be a problem. So I think talking to our students is the best way to establish healthy boundaries, and getting them to understand how they want to use this tool for themselves. Students, as Bob mentioned too, and what Paul Fyfe was doing with his actual research, students are setting their own boundaries with this, they’re figuring out that this is not working the way the marketing hype is telling them it is, too. So, we just have to be conscious of that and keep these conversations going.

Robert: Writing with Wikipedia was my panic moment or my cultural panic moment. And my response then was much as the same as it is now. Cool. Let’s check it out. And Yochai Benkler has a quote, and I don’t have it exactly right in front of me, but he says something like all other things being equal, things that are easier to do, are going to be more likely to get done. And the second part, he says is all of the things are never equal. So that was just like the point of Wikipedia, right? Like people really worried about commons based peer production and collaborative knowledge building and inaccuracies and biases, which are there still, creeping their way in and displacing Encyclopedia Britannica and peer-reviewed resources. And they were right, if they were worried because Benkler is right. It’s a lot easier to get your information from Wikipedia and if it’s easier, that’s the way it’s going to come. You can’t do a Google search without pulling up a tile that’s been accessed through Wikipedia. But the good news is is now the phrase about Wikipedia that she’s is that Wikipedia is known as the good grown up of the internet, because the funny thing is that the community seems so fractious and sharp elbowed at first about who was right in producing a Wikipedia page about Battlestar Galactica. Well, so that grew over time, and more and more folks in higher education and more and more experts got involved and the system’s improved, and it’s uneven, but it is still the world’s largest free resource of knowledge. And it’s because it’s free, because it’s open and very accessible, then it enters into our universe of what we know. I think the same thing holds here, right? If it’s as easy to use as it is now, the developers are working on ways to make it easier still. So we’re not going to stop this, we just got to think about ways that we can better understand it and indicate, where we need to, that we’re using it and how we’re using it, for what ends and what purposes. And so your question, John, I think was around or at least you used productivity. So I don’t agree with his essay, and I certainly don’t agree with a lot that he’s done, but Sam Altman, one of the OpenAI co-founders, does have this essay, his basic argument is that in the long run, what AI is doing is reducing the cost of labor. So that will affect every aspect of life, that it’s just a matter of time before AI is applied to every aspect of life. And so then we’re dropping costs for everyone. And his argument is we are therefore improving the lives and living standards of everyone. I’m not there. But I think it’s a really interesting argument to make if you take it that long. Now, as you mentioned earlier about earlier technologies… the calculator moment, for folks in mathematics. My personal preference would be to have someone else’s ox get gored before mine is, but we’re up, so we have to deal with it. And our friends in art, they’re dealing with it as well. It’s just a matter of time before our friends in the music, obviously our friends in motion capture are dealing with it, I think you’re handling it in design as well. So it’s just a matter of time before we all figure it out. So that we have to sort of learn from each other in terms of what our responses were. And I think there’ll be sort of these general trends, we might as well explore these tools, because this is the world where our students will be graduating. And so helping them understand the implications, the ethical usage, the citation system purposes, it’d be great if we had partners on the other side that would telegraph to us a little bit more about what the scope and the purpose and the origins of these tools are. But we don’t have that just yet.

Marc: I agree completely with what Bob said, too.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s been interesting in the arts is the conversation around copyright and what’s being input into the data sets initially, and that that’s often copyright protected material. And then therefore, what’s getting spit out is derivative of that. And so there becomes some interesting conversations around whether or not that’s a fair use whether or not that’s copyright violation, whether or not that’s plagiarism. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on whether or not these similar concerns are being raised. over ChatGPT or other systems that you’ve been interacting with.

Marc: Writing’s a little bit different, I think there are some pretty intense anti-AI people out there who basically say that this is just a plagiarism generator. I see what they’re saying, but any sort of terminology with plagiarism, it doesn’t really make sense. Because it doesn’t really focus on the fact that it’s stealing from one idea. It’s just using fast and massive chunks of really just data from the internet. And some of that data doesn’t even have a clear source. So it’s not even really clear how that goes back to it. But that is definitely part of the debate. Thank God I’m not a graphic artist, ‘cause I don’t know, I’ve talked to a few friends of mine who are in graphic arts and they’re not dealing with this as well as we are, I can say that, to say the least too. And you can kind of follow along with some of the discourse on social media too. It’s been getting intense. But I do think that we will see some movement within all these fields about how they’re going to treat generative text or generative image, generative code, and all that way. In fact, openAI is being sued now in the coding business too, because they’re copilot product was supposedly capable of reproducing an entire string of code, not just generating, but reproducing it from what it was trained on too. So I think it is an evolving field, and we’re gonna see where our feet land, but for right now, the technology is definitely moving underneath us as we’re talking about all this in terms of both plagiarism and copyright in all the things.. And I’m with Bob, I want to be able to cite these tools and be able to understand it. I also am kind of aware of the fact that if we start bringing in really hardcore citation into this, we don’t want to treat the technology as a person, right? You don’t want to treat the ideas coming from the machine necessarily, we want to treat this as “I use this tool to help me with this process.” And that becomes complicated, too, because then you have to understand the nuance of how that was used and what sort of context it was used in too. So yeah, it’s it’s going to be the wild west for a while.

Robert: I wanted to turn it back on our hosts for a second if I can and ask Rebecca and John a question. So I’ve could remember the title of Sam Altman’s essay, It’s Moore’s Law for everything. That really, I think, encapsulates his point. What do y’all think as people in higher education? Do you think this is unleashing a technology that’s going to make our graduates more productive in meaningful ways? Or is it unleashing a technology that questions what productivity means?

Rebecca: I think it depends on who is using it.

John: …and how it’s being used.

Rebecca: Yeah, the intent behind it… I think it can be used in both ways, it can be used to be a really great tool to support work and things that we’re exploring and doing and also presents challenges. And people are definitely trained to use it to shortcut things in ways that maybe it doesn’t make sense to shortcut or undermines their learning or undermines contributions to our knowledge.

John: And I’d agree pretty much with all of that, that it has a potential for making people more productive in their writing by helping get past writer’s block and other issues. And it gives people a variety of ways of perhaps phrasing something that they can then mix together in a way that better reflects what they’re trying to say. And I think it’s a logical extension of many of those other tools we have, but it is also going to be very disruptive for those people who have very formulaic types of assignments that are very open ended, those are not going to be very meaningful in a world in which we have such tools. But on the other hand, we’re living in a world in which we have such tools, and those tools are not going to go away, and they’re not going to become less powerful over time. And I think we’ll have to see. Whenever there’s a new technology, we have some people who really praise it, because it’s opening up these wonderful possibilities, such as television was going to make education universal in all sorts of wonderful ways and the internet was going to do the same thing. Both have provided some really big benefits. But there’s often costs that are unanticipated, and often benefits that are unanticipated, and we have to try to use them most effectively.

Robert: So one of the things I‘ve appreciated about this conversation it’s that you guys have made me think even more, so I want to follow up on what you’re saying, and maybe articulate my anxiety a little better. So Emad Mostaque, I think is his name, is the developer or the CEO of Stability AI, and he was on Hard Fork. And I listened to the interview and he basically said, “Creativity is too hard and we’re going to make it easy. We’re going to make people poop rainbows.” He did use the phrase poop rainbows [LAUGHTER] but I don’t remember if that was exactly the setup. And so I’m not an art teacher, but I’m screaming at the podcast. No, it’s not just about who can draw the most accurate version of a banana in a bowl, it’s the process of learning to engage the world around you through visual representation, and I’m not an art teacher. So that’s my fear for writing. I guess my question for everybody here is, do you think these tools will serve as a barrier, because they’ll provide a fake substitute for the real thing that we then have to help people get past? Or will that engagement with the fake thing get their wheels turning and help them find that as a stepping stone and a reduction to the deeper engagement with literacy or visual representation.

Rebecca: I think we already have examples that exist, that the scope of what someone might do so that it appears, looks, feels really similar to something someone already created. So templates do that, any sort of common code set that people might use to build a website, for example, they all then have similar layouts and designs, these things already exist.That may work in a particular area. But then there’s also examples in that same space, where people are doing really innovative things. So there is still creativity. In fact, maybe it motivates people to be more creative, because they’re sick of thinking the same thing over and over again. [LAUGHTER]

John: And going back to issues of copyright, that’s a recent historical phenomenon. There was a time when people recognized that all the work that was being done built on earlier work, that artists explicitly copied other artists to become better and to develop their own creativity. And I think this is just a more rapid way of doing much of the same thing, that it’s building on past work. And while we cite people in our studies, those people cited other people who cited other people who learned from lots of people who were never cited, and this is already taking place, it’s just going to be a little bit harder to track the origin of some of the materials.

Marc: Yeah, I completely agree. I also think that one thing that we get caught up in our own sort of disciplinary own sort of world of higher education is that this tool may not be really that disruptive to us, or may not be as beneficial to us as it would be somewhere else in some other sorts of context. You think about the global South, that is lacking resources, a tool like this, that is multilingual, that can actually help under-resourced districts or under-resourced entire countries, in some cases. That could have an immense impact on equity, in ways that we haven’t seen. That said, there’s also going to be these bad actors that are going to be using the technology to really do lots of weird, crazy things. And you can kind of follow along with this live on Twitter, which is what I’ve been doing. And every day, there’s another thing that they’re doing. In fact, one guy today offered anyone who’s going to argue a case before the Supreme Court a million dollars if they put in their Apple Air Pods and let the AI argue the case for them. And my response is, if you ever want the federal government to ban a technology in lightning speed, that is the methodology to go through and do so. But there’s going to be stunts, there’s already stunts. And Annette Vee was writing about GPT4chan, which is a developer that used an old version of GPT2 on 4chan, the horrible toxic message board, and deployed that bot for about three days where it posted 30,000 times. In 2016, we had the election issues with the Russians coming through, now you’re going to have people with chat bots do this. So it can help with education, definitely, I think that we’re kind of small potatoes compared to the way the rest of the world is going to probably be looking at this technology. I hope it’s not in that way, necessarily, I hope that they can kind of get some safety guardrails put in place. But it’s definitely gonna be a wild ride, for sure.

John: Being an economist, one of the things I have to mention in response to that is there a lot of studies that found that a major determinant of the level of economic growth and development in many countries is the degree of ethno-linguistic fractionalization, that the more languages there are and the more separate cultures you have within the society, the harder it is to expand. So tools like this can help break those things down and can unleash a lot of potential growth and improvement in countries where there are some significant barriers to that.

Marc: Absolutely. I just really want to re-emphasize the point that I brought up at the beginning too, especially now in the wake of what Bob said too. I was not introduced to Wikipedia in a way that would be interesting or anything else. I was introduced to this as a college student with a professor saying to me, “This is a bad thing. This is not going to be helpful to you. Do not use this.” Keep that in mind, the power that you have as an educator when you’re talking about this with your students too, that you are informing their decisions about the world too, about what this tool actually is, when you’re introducing talking about this with them, when you’re actually putting the policy in place of yourself of saying “This is banned.” And I just kind of want to make sure that everyone is really kind of thinking about that now with this because we do actually have a lot of power in this. I know we feel completely powerless in some ways. It’s a little odd that the discussions have been about this. But we actually have a lot of power in how we shape the discussion of this, especially with our students.

Robert: Yeah, that’s a great point and I’m glad you raised it. My question is, I wonder, John, as an economist, and also what you think Rebecca as well, do you guys by the Moore’s Law for Everything argument? So 20, 30 years from now, does generative AI increase the standard of living for people globally?

John: Well, I think it goes back to your point that if we make things easier to do, it frees up time to allow us to do other things and to be more creative. So I think there is something to that.

Rebecca: Yeah. And sometimes creativity is the long game. It’s something that you want to do over a period of time and you have to have the time to put into it. I think it’s an interesting argument.

John: I have been waiting for those flying cars for a long time, but at least now we’re getting closer to self-driving cars.

Robert: I was about to say they gave you a driverless car instead. [LAUGHTER]

John: But, you know, a driverless car frees up time where you could do other things during that time, which could be having conversations or could be reading, it could be many things that might be more enjoyable than driving, especially if there’s a lot of traffic congestion.

Rebecca: …or you could take a train, in which case, you’re also not driving, John

John: …and you’re probably not in the US, [LAUGHTER] or at least not in most parts of the US, unfortunately.

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

Marc: What’s next? Oh, goodness. Well, again, like I said, there are going to be waves of hype and panic, we’re in the “my students are going to cheat phase.” The next wave is when educators actually realize they can use this to actually grade essays, grade writing, and grade tests, that’s going to be the next “Oh, wait” moment that we’re going to have to see too. That will be both on hype and panic too. And to me, it’s going to be the next conversation we need to have. Because we’re gonna have to establish these boundaries, kind of in real time, about what we want to actually do with this. They are talking about GPT4, this is the next version of this. It’s going to be supposedly bigger than ChatGPT and more capable. We know all the hype that you can kind of repeat about this sort of thing too. But 2023 is probably going to be a pretty wild year. I don’t know what’s gonna go beyond that. But I just know that we’re going to be talking about this for the next, at least,12 months for sure.

Robert: I agree with Marc, I think an discipline at least, the next panic or I don’t know, jubilee, will be around automated writing evaluators, which exists and are commercially available. But the big problem is the research area known as explainable AI, which is to me tremendously fascinating, that you can build neural nets that will find answers to how to play Go, that after I don’t know how many hundreds of years or even 1000s of years that humans have played Go, find winning strategies that no one has ever found before, but then not be able to tell you how they were found. That’s the central paradox. I would like to say I hope explainable AI is next. But I think, before we get explainable AI, we’re gonna have a lot more disruptions, a lot more ripples when unexplainable AI is deployed without a lot of context.

John: One of the things I’ve seen popping up in Twitter is with those AI detectors that apparently ChatGPT, if you ask it to rewrite a document so it cannot be detected by the detectors, will rewrite it in a way where it comes back with a really low score. So it could very well be an issue where we’re gonna see some escalation. But that may not be the most productive channel for this type of research or progress.

Rebecca: Sounds like many more conversations of ethics to come. Thank you so much for your time and joining us.

Marc: Well, thank you both.

John: Well, thank you. Everyone has been talking about this and I’m really glad we were able to meet with you and talk about this a bit.

Robert: Yes. Thank you for the invitation. It’s been fun to talk. If there’s any way that we can add to the conversation as you go forward, we’d be happy to be in touch again. So thank you.

John: I’m sure we’ll be in touch.

Marc: The next panic, we’re always available. [LAUGHTER]

John: The day’s not over yet. [LAUGHTER]

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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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235. Pandemic Teaching: Week 109

We take a break from our usual interview format in this episode to reflect on how our teaching has continued to evolve as we moved through a second year of pandemic teaching. We also speculate a bit about the longer term impact of the pandemic on teaching in higher education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Roughly two years ago, our campus shut down for a two-week pause until the COVID-19 pandemic was brought under control. And now we’re celebrating a two year anniversary of that.

Rebecca: We’re celebrating that, John?

John: Well… [LAUGHTER] Let me rephrase that. [LAUGHTER] So this is now the second anniversary of that temporary shutdown, which has had some fairly substantial consequences for teaching and learning in higher ed. We thought this would be a good time to reflect back on how the pandemic has altered the way in which higher ed is taking place in the U.S., and also to speculate a little bit on what the long-term implications of these changes might be on instruction in higher ed.

[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: Today’s teas are…

John: Since I’ve had lots of tea earlier in the day, I am having a Twinings Pure Peppermint tea.

Rebecca: And that seems good, that seems good. Given that we’re needing to find comfort, because this has been going on for so long, I have reverted back to my dear old friend, English Afternoon tea, for today’s episode.

John: Very good. We thought we’d start by reflecting back on where we were before the pandemic. What was our life like?

Rebecca: Oh, my life was glorious, John. I was on sabbatical, I had a studio space set up, it was all perfect for working. Had my really big monitor that I invested in because I was going to spend so much time in this studio. I was doing research, I was immersed in accessibility related research, inclusive pedagogy, and taking online courses.

John: I had some classes that were going really well, I was going to a lot of conferences, I had several conference presentations scheduled. And in general, things were really positive. And then we had this shutdown, and things have changed quite a bit.

Rebecca: I know, I had so many travel things planned too, John. I had conferences, travel, there were so many glorious things happening. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I think we’ve talked about this before, individually, but I don’t know if we’ve talked about it on the podcast, but the nice thing about going to conferences in person is that you can focus on them. You can actually focus on the topics that are presented, you can go to sessions and focus entirely on those sessions. And then there’s all those wonderful hallway conversations with the presenters and with other people doing similar work, without the distractions we have in our regular day-to-day work weeks. Conferences since then, at least for me, have been entirely remote conferences. And that’s been a somewhat different experience.

Rebecca: Well I’m going to so many conferences now, except… [LAUGHTER] I intend to go to so many sessions, and then often have to make concessions about what I can go to and what I hope to at some point in the future revisit in a recording later on. So I really appreciate the ability to engage with a lot more material. The potential is there with these remote conferences that in many cases didn’t even exist before in that format. So I appreciate that component of it, especially having a small child and not having to uproot for long periods of time. But if I’m in the office, or people know that I’m around, that I’m still teaching my classes, or going to meetings and all these other things are still on my calendar, even though I’m supposed to be at a conference the whole time.

John: And that’s been exactly my experience, that I sign up for these conferences expecting to attend three or four or five sessions with the hope of catching up on the others later. And I’ve been lucky to attend more than two or three at any of the conferences I’ve virtually attended this year. Again, it’s nice to have those videos, but it’s very rare that I’ve had time to actually go back and watch them. And I’m very much looking forward to the return of in-person conferences.

Rebecca: Yeah, I mean, I’ve definitely had some great information that I’ve been able to access through virtual conferences, but I really do miss some of the opportunities to engage with colleagues that I don’t know, are new to me, who might have some similar interest that we might be able to collaborate or share resources. And I deeply miss that.

John: And also, I found I have a lot less time for professional development reading and other professional development activities, not just the ones at conferences, but also ones within the discipline: catching up on reading, reading new books, new journal articles. It seems as if we have much less time in the day now than we did prior to the pandemic.

Rebecca: I used to have a really regular routine prior to the pandemic of reading, both within my discipline but also pedagogy and other relevant professional development readings every morning. That’s how I started my day. I don’t do that anymore, I don’t have time.

John: And also I found, especially recently, I spend much more time browsing the news to see what the current potentially world-ending crisis is at any given day. Right now we’re in the middle of the war in Ukraine. And that certainly provides some substantial distractions from the areas that perhaps we might prefer to be focusing on. And I think that’s also true for our students.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that our attention is more divided in that way. I might be paying more attention or more careful attention to the news, or health-related news in a way that, although I certainly consume news on a regular basis, my consumption of such things is up significantly, and basically has replaced some of the other things that I might have read otherwise. And I think our students are feeling that too.

John: And one thing I’ve also noted is that the workshops that we do in the teaching center tend to have a bit less attendance this year than in the past. In the first year of the pandemic, we had an explosion of interest when people were transitioning to new teaching modalities. But this past year, faculty have generally been reporting that they feel a bit exhausted, that they just can’t fit in one more thing. And one of the things that’s made this a little bit more challenging on our campus and throughout the SUNY system, is that we’re going to be moving to a new digital learning environment this summer. And for those of us who are teaching in the summer, we’re going to have very few weeks to learn the new environment and to prepare our courses. And that’s been somewhat challenging. And a lot of faculty are very concerned about this one more disruption in the way they’re teaching. And I think that’s been making it much more challenging for many people.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think faculty are just tired. So many lifts that needed to be done to survive during the pandemic. We all went kind of in survival mode, put in way more hours to make experiences that were good for students. Because, as teachers, we really care about these student-centered approaches, and there was a real commitment on our campus by all of our faculty to do this. As John mentioned, lots of people participating in professional development, really putting the commitment and time in. And that’s really valuable work. But we’ve been doing it for two years. [LAUGHTER] And I think that faculty are just starting to get to a point where they’re trying to reclaim some time back for research, or reclaim back some time, dare I say, for leisure.

John: I remember reading about that at some point in the past. [LAUGHTER] But following up on your comment there, one of the things we’ve learned about inclusive teaching, partly from Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, is the importance of providing students with structure. And from my observations, students need that structure more than ever in a world filled with so many other distractions and disruptions. And that all requires some work on the part of faculty to provide more complete directions, more instructions, and, more generally, just to provide more support for students than we had been doing in the past… that we probably were doing too little of it in the past, but I think now it’s needed more than ever.

Rebecca: You’re making a good point here. I know that one of the things that I shifted to doing that students have really responded positively to is providing weekly updates, or at this point, four semesters in, I’m doing recaps of each class period with, like, what to do for the next class period. And students await that to help structure their time outside of class. But one of the things that I’ve definitely had students report is just how much distraction there is, challenges that they’re facing. They’re also reporting things like mental health challenges, the state of the world weighing on their minds, and being distracted by health related things, war, race-related issues in the United States. The other thing that students are reporting is that they’re really self-conscious about interacting with other students, about giving feedback or receiving feedback. In my case, I’m teaching online, and they’ve all said that they would appreciate people having their cameras on, for example, in the Zoom class, but all report that they don’t, because other people don’t, and they’re conscious about their appearance. But also they’re reporting in reflection assignments that they’re really afraid of just what other people think of them, generally.

John: I think one of the costs of the year plus of remote teaching in general is that students lost a lot of connections with other students. And not only were there some issues in terms of a learning loss, it was also a loss of social interaction. For the classes that did take place in person in the first year of the pandemic, people were wearing masks and were separated often by six or more feet, and were actually discouraged from interacting in small group discussions and so forth, or small group interactions in general. And I think that’s led to some issues where people have to re-learn how to interact with each other again.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think unfortunately, some of the aftermath or during-math of the pandemic has been sometimes an over-reliance on sage-on-the-stage methods in the classroom, in part out of necessity, because facilitating those interactions was too difficult, especially in person.

John: In the fall semester, it was my first time back in the classroom after a year of teaching remotely, I was teaching our large class where most of the students were first-year students. And I had about 189 students in the classroom, but they were spread out in a room that seats about 420 students, which had often been filled with 420 students in past semesters. And when I tried to get them to interact, it was a real challenge because sometimes they were 10, 15 feet away from other students. Some of the students did interact, but whenever they were talking to other students they were pulling down their masks to do so, which was also less than optimal. So it was a bit of a challenge trying to encourage students to keep masks on but also to talk to each other. And it was a far lower level of interaction than I’d ever seen before. Now, I’ve noticed in the spring semester that interactions are much closer to what they had been prior to the pandemic, partly because I’m teaching juniors and seniors I suspect, but also partly because I’m dealing with smaller classes, and we actually did end the mask mandate just two weeks ago. And I think that has been a signal of a return to normalcy that I very much have enjoyed seeing, and I hope it lasts at least for another month or two before the next wave of the pandemic hits. But it’s been nice hearing students more clearly without the mask, and it’s been nice to actually see the faces of the students who choose not to wear masks. Some students have been consistently choosing to wear masks, and that’s probably not a bad strategy, especially if they face any health issues.

Rebecca: One of the things that has been really enlightening for me over the last couple years, having not really taught online before but teaching online synchronously, is how much using some text-based communication is so helpful in getting to know the students and allowing them to ask questions and get help. It’s not that I wasn’t using text-based communication before, because I have typically used chat tools like Slack as part of my class structures. But there’s definitely more of a reliance on that, and I’ve ramped up things like reflection assignments that are more written. And this is interesting, because I typically teach design classes, so there’s a lot of visual work that’s happening, and so the written work isn’t always a common element. But it’s interesting how honest students have been in those reflections in revealing things like being self-conscious, or being concerned about what their peers think, or being honest about mental health issues, and revealing that knowing that I was going to read that, and that that information I would then have. So it’s interesting, because I have not seen the faces of many of my students. [LAUGHTER] I’ve interacted with them synchronously, but not seen their faces, and still actually feel like we have a pretty strong connection. And I think that they’ve revealed or indicated that they have strong connections with each other as well. Despite what maybe from the outside would look like a lot of barriers.

John: I do have to say that it’s been such a relief to me to go back into the classroom, because when I was teaching that large class on Zoom and seeing that sea of black boxes, it was really hard to maintain my enthusiasm and to try to maintain engagement, because there were always a number of students who were just tuned out… who when you called on them just were not responsive, when you sent them to breakout rooms just kind of ended up hanging out there, and in general it was also reflected in their performance on all the graded activities in the class. And that was kind of depressing. And I’m very much enjoying the classroom interaction again. Now I’ve been teaching online for many years, asynchronously, and that worked very well all through the pandemic. But I think part of that is that the students were older and had very strong motivation for being successful in the classes because they saw the importance of the classes in their educational or career goals, which is not something that freshmen and sophomores always have intrinsically, at least.

Rebecca: I might add to what you’re saying, John, in that I certainly had that experience teaching mostly through Zoom. My class size has been relatively consistent throughout the pandemic as what it was before, which is smaller, about 25 students in total. And I definitely experienced feeling like, “What are you guys doing in these breakout rooms? Just like sitting staring at a wall? I’m not sure what’s going on here.” I’d pop in, and no one’s talking to each other. And I still have that experience [LAUGHTER] to be clear. I still pop in, and it seems like nobody’s engaging with one another. But what’s been interesting is that in the kinds of reflection questions I’ve been asking students, they’ve revealed more of what those interactions are like when I’m not present. And what’s interesting is that many of the students are indicating that they’re relying on each other to troubleshoot, to help each other out, to brainstorm, to get feedback from one another. They’re just not doing it constantly the whole time they’re in there, but they are getting a lot of value out of that. And my timing just is terrible? I don’t think they have any reason to lie about that, because there’s evidence of it, they’ve given specific examples of the kind of feedback that they’ve received or the kind of help that they got, and what happened. So certainly I’d like to see more engagement, but I also think that they’ve become more accustomed to working in that space, and knowing what the expectations of that space are. And I’ve also set up more structure for those spaces, and I’ve provided instructions and ways to intervene in those spaces. Using Zoom you can’t chat to breakout rooms using the chat feature, so we set up Google Chat to do that, and all of those things have helped manage those interactions in a way that I wasn’t doing in those first semesters.

John: And I should note that my experience was in the first full semester of remote teaching. And there the students themselves were complaining that some of the other students were not actively engaged in the breakout rooms, that they’d call on them and they just wouldn’t respond. They’d actually show up because they had to intentionally choose to go into the room, but then they just wouldn’t talk to each other. And I got that response from about 35 to 40 percent of the students, so it was a pretty significant issue. Maybe with more experience they’ve gotten better, but I’ve been out of that teaching modality for the last year, and I’m very happy to be out of it, because even though I’ve never required students to turn on their cameras, it makes teaching a lot more challenging when you can’t see the people that you’re interacting with. Sometimes you hear the voices, but not always even then, and most of the interaction was through chat. But the class that I taught in the fall of 2020 had over 300 students in it, and the chat with 300 students was often a constant stream of text. The signal to noise ratio in that was not quite as high as I would have liked. So I did rely on breakout rooms a lot, but they just were not as effective as I had hoped or have been in other contexts.

Rebecca: I think the kinds of classes we teach also has a big impact there. I’m teaching studio classes, we’re in class together six hours a week. I have a smaller class size, I know the students very well, and I have the opportunity to interact with them all individually on a pretty regular basis, which I think perhaps does guilt students into participating more. [LAUGHTER]

John: That makes a lot of sense. And my large classes are intro classes, and it’s their first experience in college and generally their first experience in a large class. And it can be perhaps a little bit intimidating, especially when they’ve just come out of a period where they were taught remotely in their high schools…after the end of their senior year was spent in remote instruction of somewhat varied quality depending on the resources of the school district and of the individual households.

Rebecca: Not to mention really some of the very sad results of having to go remote. For many of them, they missed in person graduation. Something that’s supposed to be a really culminating experience ended up being, for many, a letdown. And it’s no wonder why we have a lot of students experiencing some mental health challenges.

John: What are some of the challenges that you’ve seen during the past academic year? Now that we’ve had a year of adjustment to teaching during a pandemic.

Rebecca: I think the biggest observation that I made, or a difference that I’ve seen this academic year in comparison to even the first full year of the pandemic, is a lot more variance in the quality of student work, not engagement in class, but the quality of student work submitted. So having a lot of really strong pieces of work, and then really weak pieces of work, and not a lot in the middle. And what’s interesting is that it’s the same assignments and things that existed the first year of the pandemic and that was not the case.

John: I’ve seen something very similar, not just with the quality work but also the quantity of work. Most of those grades below a C are because of students just simply not doing the work. And for me that’s been fairly persistent last year and this year, although it does seem to be better this semester. And I think some of it may be just that students have adjusted, some of it is because I’m teaching upper-level students who are majors either in economics or applied mathematical economics, and so they’re just more intrinsically motivated in the subject. So that’s been a pretty significant factor.

Rebecca: I feel like sometimes I’m noticing, or I’m hearing folks say that they’re finding their students to be less motivated. And I have really been thinking hard on that. I’m not sure that they’re less motivated, I’m not sure that’s the right word. I’m certainly finding in class, and in student work submitted, that students are engaged. They’re doing interesting things, having interesting things to say. They’re contributing to class, but aren’t necessarily doing work outside of class, unless that time is really structured. And even then when I hear students report what they’ve done outside of class, it often sounds like they’ve chased themselves in a circle and haven’t really accomplished anything. And so that time outside of class wasn’t necessarily super useful. And I think that has a lot to do with the cognitive load of everything else that’s going on, and not really being able to manage the world-things going on on top of four other classes, and all the things going on in all of those spaces as well.

John: With all the challenges we’ve been having, I think we all have a bit more trouble maintaining our focus and concentration, and I think that’s part of the issue for students. I’ve certainly heard that from students, that they really have trouble concentrating on the work because they have other distractions. And I’m hearing much more of that than I ever have in the past.

Rebecca: And I don’t feel like lack of concentration on something is the same thing as lack of motivation.

John: Yeah, and I certainly suspect that’s probably a major part of the issue. This is really a challenging time to be alive for so many reasons right now.

Rebecca: And to really be a young person in our world.

John: And to be going through a college experience which is very different than the expectations you had just a couple of years ago.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that’s an important thing to always keep in balance when we’re thinking about how students are responding to things. They’ve really been incredibly adaptive, especially considering how drastic their actual experience has been compared to what they imagined a college experience might be like.

John: Since the start of the pandemic, there’s been a lot of discussion about how remote instruction, or online instruction, hasn’t worked. One qualification is, what we experienced during the pandemic was a lot of emergency remote instruction done by people who were not trained in the modalities that they were using, and in particular using modalities that virtually no one had used before. So I think we should be a little bit careful in interpreting some of those claims.

Rebecca: Yeah, and even having the time and space and mental capacity to fully redesign something for a different delivery wasn’t something that we had the luxury of having. We were trying to pull these things out. I know that for me, because I was on sabbatical when the pandemic started, I actually had some time, not a lot, but I had some time, to do more of a development for the online synchronous modality that I’ve been teaching in over the last couple of years. And I think that gave me a little bit of an advantage because I was able to really consider the space and the way that I was going to be teaching and be reflective upon it, when I didn’t have to worry about the emergency things going on in the spring, or having to learn a lot of new technology because I already had some of those skill sets in place.

John: There have been some studies where there’s at least some attempt at natural experiments or random assignment of students. There was one that was done at West Point, and we can share a link to that in the show notes, which essentially randomly divided a class where half the class were face-to-face, half were attending class remotely on Zoom. But one thing I think to keep in mind with studies of that sort is that, essentially, they were comparing face-to-face instruction with students participating remotely in face-to-face instruction. One of the things that I think always happens when people try moving to a new instructional method or a new technique is people try to replicate what they were doing before. And there’s still really a lot that we haven’t learned about what will work best. So I think we should be a little bit careful about ruling out the possibility of synchronous remote or making global claims that it’s not going to work because, as you said, you spent a lot of time reflecting about it and thinking about how you needed to modify your approach to deal with this new modality. I think we should at least keep an open mind going forward about this, and do some research on what works better when we’re not in the midst of a global pandemic where the students who are there don’t want to be in that modality, and where many of the faculty using that modality are only there because they had no other choice.

Rebecca: Yeah, the ability to collaborate and work together synchronously using digital tools is really powerful, and is something we shouldn’t lose sight of using in the future. I found it really promising even though there were challenges, and continue to be challenges during this time. It’s really easy to bring in a guest using Zoom. Certainly you can use a classroom space and Zoom or Skype somebody in, but if the classroom isn’t set up for that kind of interaction it doesn’t work well. Typically, I find in my experience, it’s been really great when everybody’s in the same modality. So just watching recordings of something that’s happening live, or joining in on a live session but you’re remote… you’re not fully integrated into the situation often. But if you’re in the same platform and everybody’s in Zoom, then the chat becomes something that works a lot better, or breakout rooms become something that works quite well if you want to have some kinds of interaction. And if you’re taking advantage of the platform, and what the platform offers, and then extending with some additional tools. For example, I was using Zoom and extended with Google Chat so that I could chat with people in breakouts. And I extended with a tool called Miro, which is a digital-whiteboarding tool that’s far more developed than what’s available in Zoom. We could do all kinds of really great interactions that I couldn’t necessarily do in the same way in person, it was completely adapted to that particular situation and the context we were working in. So I can imagine this being a really important modality for working professionals, for example, who might be going back to school, who really wants to have some interaction with real humans in real time [LAUGHTER] but can’t necessarily get somewhere by a particular time.

John: I think something very similar happened when we first started to teach online in an asynchronous manner. People were trying to duplicate the same classroom environment in an online environment. And a lot of the early results suggested it didn’t work that well until people started studying it and working through what worked best. And now we have whole new ways of teaching, many of which have made it back into the classroom because they have been successful online. So recent studies find that asynchronous and face-to-face instruction are essentially equivalent. Sometimes one does a little bit better than the other, but that varies by instructor, and the instructor’s knowledge of techniques and personality and so forth. But in general, there really doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in learning outcomes between those two modalities. And with some work and development, the same may very well be true for remote synchronous. But picking up on that issue of bringing in guests and so forth with video, I think many campuses, including our own, have to do a lot to upgrade their facilities. And one of the things that faculty have learned is how easy it is to bring people in remotely, either students who are sick who are out with COVID or something else, are able to attend remotely and actively participate using Zoom or other tools, as long as we have adequate video and audio capabilities in the classroom. And I think on our campus, and probably on most campuses, we haven’t quite reached a level of video and audio that really works that well for students participating remotely.

Rebecca: Even before COVID faculty might have done lecture capture or something like that. But the expectations around that is that it’s something you’ve already experienced, and you’re going back to review it. So the expectation of really high quality wasn’t necessarily there like it is now. Now everyone’s experienced the ability to lecture capture in something like Zoom and get some really high quality recording when we’re all in that same space. Have high quality transcripts, be able to see what’s on the screen. And so, as we move forward, these are new expectations. These are not just expectations of the students who had been in school the last couple of years during the pandemic and have experienced some of the synchronous remote things. But K-12 has done the same thing, we’ve got a good 13, 14 more years of students who have already had these expectations. This is where it’s going to be at. And professionals have this now too because they also have been working remotely, and have a lot more collaboration happening in this way as well.

John: And many faculty used to bring in guest speakers, but it used to require someone to physically be there and sometimes people would travel to do that. But now you can reach anyone pretty much anywhere in the world and bring them into your classroom, if you have adequate capabilities to do that. So I think all campuses need to work on upgrading both their microphone systems so that you can hear everyone in the room, not just the sage on the stage, especially since we don’t have stages in most of our rooms. And also better video so that people presenting remotely can see their class and see the people they’re engaging with.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. I think one thing we should think about, John, is, I don’t know about you, but during this time I’ve used some pieces of technology differently or some new technologies that I haven’t used in the past—new to me, not necessarily new to the universe—that I don’t want to let go. [LAUGHTER] Like I want to keep going there. Or I want to find some sort of equivalent for the physical classroom, but I don’t know what that is yet. I’ve adopted some new practices, and I haven’t been back in the classroom, I know it’s different for you because you’ve been back in the classroom, but I see my teaching changing. How do you see your teaching changing?

John: Some of it was technology. When I moved home, all of a sudden I had faster computers, I had a nice big second monitor. And now coming back it’s really hard to adjust to the computers we have in classrooms, a single monitor which is really hard to do when you’re working with some students coming in on Zoom. Having a second monitor, and there were times when I really wish I had a third one, where you could keep the chat open on one, you could see the list of participants on it, and you could have other materials staged to bring onto the screen that you’re sharing with people participating remotely. It’s been a big adjustment. I had also had a video camera and microphone in my classroom for at least a decade, and I assumed all of our classrooms did, but this time I was assigned to a classroom that had neither of them and that required a little bit of adjustment. So I think we do need to upgrade these things so that all of our classrooms are able to adapt to the technology that’s become kind of the norm.

Rebecca: Yeah, prior to the pandemic I routinely used Slack for some kind of back-channel conversation, or to have some text conversation. But what I’ve realized now is I’ve adopted many practices teaching synchronously online that allow people to participate, who maybe don’t want to speak up for whatever reason. And I desperately don’t want to lose some of those ways of participating. And for me that includes the ability to answer questions using some sort of chat feature, the ability to use things like Miro, and so this whiteboard application has become so central to some of the things that I do, I’m now having a really hard time envisioning what that would be like if I was teaching in any kind of classroom that wasn’t a lab space where everybody had a computer. [LAUGHTER] Because these are places where we can brainstorm together, share ideas together, and have them all collate into a single location and not be lost in the time/space in a conversation. And these are ways that students have reflected in various reflection assignments that are really important to them. They found these opportunities to share their ideas, without having to speak up, to be really valuable. And it’s not just the camera thing. I think some people will jump to the conclusion that, “Oh, you’re teaching synchronously online, people are using these chat things because they don’t want to turn their camera on.” It’s true that students don’t want to turn their camera on for a wide variety of reasons which I fully support and respect. I don’t require that, we participate in other ways. But there’s also this deep insecurity that students have communicated about being afraid of being wrong, or just not wanting to voice their opinion, or needing time to think before presenting something. And these other platforms, or this other way of doing things, really supports this group of students in a way that I don’t want to stop supporting.

John: One of the things I did in my large class last fall is I had Zoom open, and I encouraged students who were present in person to use it if they wanted to participate using chat. That worked really nicely in a classroom where I had two monitors, so I could keep the chat open on one screen. And sometimes the students who are way in the back, when you have a few 100 students in the classroom they’re often really reluctant to raise their hand or to say something, but they’re much more comfortable participating in a chat discussion. And so that has helped. Another thing I’ve done is I’ve cut back on the number of exams. In my econometrics class this semester, normally, I had three exams where I used a two-stage exam which worked beautifully. And I was originally planning to do that again, until the first week of class when a third of my students were out with COVID. And we’re not quite past this yet. And I just noticed in the last week, our infection rate in this county has doubled. So I think we might still not be past it by the end of the semester, even though we’re…

Rebecca: It’s more than doubled. [LAUGHTER]

John: So I decided to drop all those exams, and I’m just doing a lot more lower stakes assessment. And much more of the work that students are doing that is assessed is done as group work where they’re working with each other every day in class on some assignments. And I more fully flipped the class where instead of giving them written assignments that they worked on individually, and then submitted, and I graded. A lot of that is done in small groups in class, but some of the basics and some of the retrieval practice and other things are done with videos I created during the pandemic with embedded questions. And that’s where they get some of the basic concepts, and they get to review it at their own pace. And they can take the embedded questions over and over again, after watching the appropriate parts of the video, as many times as they need to master the concepts. And it seems to be working much more effectively than it did when I was using a more interactive lecture approach in class.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting, and I would think those things are things that you certainly don’t want to lose, those are things to keep and continue finding ways to engage students with each other. I heard you just say something that sounded like persistent teams, John. And so I know that that’s something I have definitely adopted over the course of the pandemic. It’s something that I definitely used in a slightly smaller context prior to the pandemic, I had persistent teams for a particular project. But I’ve moved to having persistent teams for the entire semester as a way to connect students with each other, to work through problems, or to troubleshoot with one another, and just have a group of students within the classroom that they get to know each other better, it facilitates some of that relationship building. How about you, John?

John: Well, in one of my classes, in a seminar class, I have persistent teams that are working through the whole semester where they’re writing a book again. But they’re working in small groups, and they work every week on some projects. Each week they present some journal articles or working papers, and they also work on their semester-long project and that, again, has helped develop connections among students really effectively, and it’s created a really positive environment. In my econometrics class I haven’t been able to create the same sort of persistent groups simply because I’ve had students who were ill at various times in the semester. And I’ve also had a student who had a car breakdown, I had a student who was stuck in another country where their travel arrangements broke down after spring break, and I’ve had people who were hospitalized. And nearly all of them have been attending every class, but today, for example, I had all the students in class except for two. And those students were a group in the breakout room while they were working through the same sort of problems, and the others were meeting in person. So there’s some degree of consistency in the teams based on where they sit with each other, but it also shifts a little bit depending on who is there in person, who is there remotely.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s a lot easier to collaborate when you’re in the same modality. And so I think that’s an interesting challenge for HyFlex, which is showing good promise, but also definitely has its challenges. When we’re using some of these active learning techniques, or we want this community building, there can be some challenges when people aren’t there, all in the same modality.

John: And one of our earlier podcasts was on the topic of HyFlex. And in that one of the things that Judie Littlejohn suggested was exactly that: that one of the challenges with teaching in a HyFlex environment where some students will be in person, some remote, and some working entirely asynchronously, is you never know who’s going to be in class on any given day, which makes it really hard to have those persistent teams, and also to plan for in-person and synchronous remote, as well as what’s going to happen asynchronously. Because potentially, you have a constantly shifting pattern of in-person attendees, remote attendees, and students who are not engaged in any way synchronously on any given class day. And that could be a real challenge. The other challenge with HyFlex is it requires a lot more work on the part of faculty to develop the courses, and this also was discussed in that earlier podcast, and a lot more work on the part of faculty to manage it in terms of preparing things for all possible eventualities of different attendance patterns. And the development work essentially means that someone has to develop a fully asynchronous plan for each of the course modules or for each class meeting. They have to develop other activities that will work synchronously in person as well as remotely. At the very least, it’s like building two entirely separate courses. And that’s a lot more work than we typically have to do on either an asynchronous or a synchronous class, whatever the version of the synchronous class is.

Rebecca: I think what these conversations always reveal, or remind us, is that we really have to take in mind what the course objectives are, the kinds of activities that might help students best meet those course objectives, and then what modalities might best match that. [LAUGHTER] Some things are going to work really well synchronously online, and some things just aren’t. And I think some things will work really well in HyFlex, and other things will just be incredibly challenging to do there and maybe don’t make sense in that kind of a format. So I think that as we move forward and we’ve got more choice, we should really reflect upon what we’re trying to achieve, and then making good choices to help us achieve those things

John: And become more proficient using whatever we’ve learned about each modality to make our courses better. Which is why we have all these professional development activities, which have certainly become much more popular in the last few years than they ever had been before.

Rebecca: You know we’re going to be looking at professional development through these lenses too. Do we need more asynchronous professional development? Do we need more synchronous online, more in person, more HyFlex? What that mix is going to be. And it really is those same kinds of factors that we need to think about for our students. Like, who’s our audience? What are their limitations and barriers? And what modalities and things are going to help us overcome some of those barriers to participation the easiest? So, John and I have talked before about timing always being an issue for professional development, and that’s how this podcast got started. Thinking about… How do we address some of the professional development needs of our community when finding a common time was impossible to meet in person, or even to meet remotely synchronously online, especially when we have a lot of commuters and things.

John: It’s even tough for us to find time to meet to record these podcasts often. So we always end with the question, What’s next?

Rebecca: Good question, John. I’m not sure. I’m looking to the fall and thinking about teaching in person again, the first time in two years, and really just not knowing where to start. There’s a lot of things that I’ve gotten really accustomed to, and comfortable with teaching synchronously online, and things that I don’t want to let go of. Some emotional attachment to things, and I really need to rethink what things look like coming back in the fall because I cannot go back to the way I was teaching before. I’m a changed teacher, I can’t go back. How about you, John?

John: I think that’s true for all of us. For me, in my long-term horizon I’m going to hold office hours online in about five minutes, [LAUGHTER] and in the longer-term horizon I’ll be back with you to record a podcast in about an hour or so. And I suppose in terms of longer term planning, I’m looking forward to learning more about Desire to Learn’s Brightspace platform, which we’re moving to in SUNY very shortly.

Rebecca: Yeah, exciting new things happening, for sure. And I’m so glad that I’m part of your future, John.

John: The long-term horizon!

Rebecca: Yeah, I know, this is exciting stuff.

John: We’ll be back with another podcast next week.

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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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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232. The EmTech MOOC

The technology tools that we use in our daily lives are constantly changing and evolving. In this episode, Cherie van Putten and Nicole Simon join us to discuss the development of a MOOC and a wiki project designed to assist us in learning how to effectively use emerging technologies. Cherie is an Instructional Designer for the Center for Learning and Teaching at Binghamton University. Nicole Simon is a Professor in the Department of Engineering, Physics and Technologies at Nassau Community College. Cherie and Nicole work together to support a SUNY Coursera MOOC that focuses on exploring emerging technologies. Cherie is the Associate Director and Nicole is the Administrative Fellow and future Director of the Exploring Emerging Technologies for Lifelong Learning and Success, or EmTech, MOOC.

Transcript

John: The technology tools that we use in our daily lives are constantly changing and evolving. In this episode, we discuss the development of a MOOC and a wiki project designed to assist us in learning how to effectively use emerging technologies.

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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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Rebecca: Our guests today are Cherie van Putten and Nicole Simon. Cherie is an Instructional Designer for the Center for Learning and Teaching at Binghamton University. Nicole Simon is a Professor in the Department of Engineering, Physics and Technologies at Nassau Community College. Cherie and Nicole work together to support a SUNY Coursera MOOC that focuses on exploring emerging technologies. Cherie is the Associate Director and Nicole is the Administrative Fellow and future Director of the Exploring Emerging Technologies for Lifelong Learning and Success, or EmTech, MOOC. Welcome Cherie and Nicole.

Cherie: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

John: It’s great to talk to you again. Our teas today are… Cherie, are you having tea?

Cherie: Yes, I am. I’m having an orange blossom oolong tea, and this one is similar to a jasmine tea in taste, with a hint of orange blossom.

Rebecca: Which sounds very, very nice. I’ll have to try some of that.

Cherie: It is. Yes, it is very nice.

John: Nicole?

Nicole: I’m actually drinking water right now. I’ve switched over from tea. This morning I was drinking tea, though. I had my usual chai tea.

Rebecca: Glad to hear that is part of your diet. It’s very important here. [LAUGHTER] And I’m drinking a golden monkey.

John: Which is one of your favorite teas.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: She didn’t put a monkey in a blender.

Rebecca: It’s a Golden Monkey. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a blueberry green tea. So we’ve invited you here to discuss the MOOC that you’ve been working on, the EmTech MOOC. And this evolved out of the Tools of Engagement Project, which started back in 2015 to 2016, in that academic year. Could you tell us a little bit about the original project and how it evolved?

Cherie: The original idea came from 23 Things which is an education and learning project out of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in North Carolina. Then Robin Sullivan, who is at University at Buffalo, used it to create a actual college course for libraries. I believe it was Library Studies. From there, a group of SUNY institutions created the Tools of Engagement Project, which you’ll hear me refer to it as the TOEP project. And that was mainly for faculty to develop technology skills, and the MOOC was created based on that Tools of Engagement Project.

Rebecca: For those that aren’t familiar, can you describe what a MOOC is?

Cherie: A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. So it has a scale built into it, where it can have 50 people, it can have a couple thousand people taking the MOOC all at the same time. And this one happens to be on a MOOC platform called Coursera.

John: Going back to the original project, we should probably mention it was funded by a SUNY Innovative Instructional Technology Grant for both the original phase as well as for its conversion into a MOOC. But could you tell us just a little bit about how that original project worked in terms of the collaboration among campuses?

Cherie: The original project, the Tools of Engagement Project, was set up more like a website. So there would be a brief audio track that you would listen to about a particular topic. And then there would be resources and other tools that you could find about those. And there was also a community that was on Google Community. And that was a very robust community with a lot of good information going on with the people who were participating in the project.

John: And the participants would try some new software, and then write up a description about it and make recommendations about its use… Is that how it was structured?

Cherie: Yeah, so as they were using tools and reflecting on their experience, they would add comments to the community.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how that project evolved into the MOOC and what that construction process looked like?

Cherie: That TOEP project involved, I would say, at different points, probably half the SUNY campuses. And then what we would have was a pay structure. So you would pay money to participate in it and then anyone from your organization was allowed to participate in the project. So it limited who was able to participate. Then what we did was we moved it over to the idea of the MOOC. And by moving it over to the MOOC, we were able to open it up to everyone. Because that was part of the agreement with Coursera, was that anyone who had a SUNY email address and used a SUNY email address to create their MOOC log in, they were able to get a free certificate when they completed it.

Rebecca: But the MOOC itself is open to a much wider audience.

Cherie: Yes. The MOOC itself is operating in several countries. We do have our base in New York, but we also have a following in India and a few other places.

John: And the MOOC is free to everyone. It’s only if you want the Coursera certificate that you have to pay unless you’re in New York or a few other groups that have free certificates.

Cherie: Right.

John: So the MOOC consists of five different components. Could you give us an overview of those five modules in the MOOC?

Cherie: Sure. The first module talks about concepts that encourage people to take responsibility for their own learning, building lifelong learning toolkits. So this would be… Who do you need to surround yourself with as far as people who already know technology well or can help support you in your quest for more technology, and websites? …the mindset of being a lifelong learner and technology tools that will help you. Topics include the Seven and a Half Habits of Lifelong Learners, fixed versus growth mindset, the idea of Creative Commons, which is new to a lot of people, and that’s just a different way to copyright things so that they can be used in different ways. And then also accessibility so that your information is accessible to people from all backgrounds. The tools quickly change, and tools that you’re used to having for free might suddenly become tools that you need to pay for, or the tool that you absolutely love might go away. So, participants need to learn to adjust to these changes. And they need to learn how to do this on their own, because you’re not always able to take a course to quickly find out how to do something that you used to have a tool for.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who the audience for the MOOC is?

Cherie: The audience for the MOOC is everybody. But we did start with a slant towards SUNY faculty. And some of those faculty members have actually used it in courses as well. So it has been used with some students and people have assigned it as actual parts of courses.

John: One thing I do have to ask is, I should know what seven and a half habits of lifelong learners are, but I’m particularly interested in the half habit. What is the half habit?

Cherie: The half habit is play. So it’s to have fun with your learning.

Rebecca: I don’t think that should be a half a habit.

Cherie: No, it should be a whole habit, I think.

John: It should be, yeah.

Rebecca: Let’s make that eight habits.

Nicole: Another module within the MOOC happens to be Creativity, where we’re giving learners of all levels—whether it’s K-12, whether it’s faculty, whether it’s students—we’re giving them the ability to really learn how to create. And you’re creating things that are within your discipline, or within your studies, or within your hobbies. You’re learning different technologies and how to really show a play side of how to use that technology. Or it could be just creativity, in as far as your delivery or your format, whether you’re creating it for your classes as a student, or if you’re creating it for your students as an educator. We want to really encourage the technology play component. And then another module happens to be Critical Thinking, being able to be a little bit more analytical, a little bit more intentional in what technology you choose. You don’t want to just choose a technology that is over and above the purpose of what you’re trying to convey. So we want to make sure that you take ownership of what you learn and how you use it appropriately. But more importantly, educating the user on what options they have and how they may want to apply it. And then there’s Communication and Collaboration, where you’re learning how to work together in a community, but also bring students into the active learning process, how to share out different resources. It’s not just about learning the technology tool and applying it, it’s also learning how to educate others and bring other people into that growth mindset of: What can I learn? How can I share? How can I encourage? And how can I support?

John: And as part of that people also develop an ePortfolio, which is actually the fifth activity in the MOOC, where there’s a peer review of that.

Nicole: Correct, it is optional right now. But we do highly encourage users to really embrace the idea of that ePortfolio. It can be for fun, which I’ve done several in the past that are great to be able to highlight some aspects of what you’re using and what you’re learning and share those deliverables out. Or it could be something a little bit more serious minded, whether it’s a student for a course or capstone of what they’re learning, or it could be for an educator of how they can use it for their courses. So it’s a nice flexibility. We have a variety of different ePortfolios you can use, and it’s to showcase what it is that you learned and a little bit of a summary of how you can apply it.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the format of the course and the interactions that occur between participants or how the content is delivered?

Nicole: Sure, once you enter the MOOC, you are introduced to the entire platform of Coursera, and more importantly, how and why you go about using the MOOC. It allows you to transition and move through each of the different modules where you’re learning a little bit about that module. You’re learning how to share and collaborate with others within that module. And you’re introduced to little tutorials and videos on how to learn a little bit more about the idea of the module itself. Whether it’s lifelong learning or collaboration, communication, or going through how you’re using it in your course, or how you’re using it with your students. So, you learn a little bit about the information, you’ve watched a few videos, and then you’re invited to go and play and discover the different technology tools. Whether you want to look at a more open-ended approach for the technology tools using the wiki, which I’ll get into in a minute, or if you want to drill down a little bit more intentional and specific on which technology tools you use. You take a quiz to show that you understood the proficiency behind it, you develop some type of summary on the technology tool you used. And if you’re actually doing the fifth module, where you’re bringing it into an ePortfolio, you’re actually creating that actual exemplar to use with the newer ePortfolio. And when you use the technology tools, you use the second part of the project, the EmTech wiki.

John: You mentioned the wiki. Can people take advantage of the EmTech wiki without participating in the MOOC?

Cherie: Yes, they can. And I know a lot of people who use the wiki for that reason, they keep it there to find tools and resources quickly.

John: And there are hundreds of resources that are reviewed there… at least hundreds, maybe in the thousands?

Cherie: I don’t think we’re up to thousands yet, but we are hundreds. A little bit more about the wiki is anyone can add to it, you just go and you get a login and you’re able to add a tool or a resource that you really love. Or maybe there’s a tool or resource that doesn’t have a description that really fits it anymore. Maybe something has changed, maybe it used to be free and now it’s a freemium product. So you can go in and make changes as well. And don’t worry about messing anything up because it’s all moderated. We get a notice that a change was made and then we’ll go ahead and look it over and change it, maybe reformat it a little to fit the style we use. And I probably should add that we also have tags for it. So once you’re in there, if you’re looking for certain things, like you want something that’s video or you want something that is to help you persuade people in an argument, you can use that to look for different tools that would fit those various needs.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the impact the MOOC has had on participants or how faculty have reacted to their participation in the MOOC?

Nicole: It’s been very positive. I think pre-pandemic we had a little bit of a different mindset of how it was used versus over the past two years. But faculty have loved the idea, especially the cohort model, where they’re coming in, they’re learning about the MOOC, they’re learning the different aspects of the modules, they’re able to choose and customize, almost, what it is that they’re learning and how they’re using it in their courses or for their own personal learning. Throughout the pandemic, we found that a lot of educators really relied on using the MOOC because now they can learn a lot about the technology they need for their courses. And to get them through the last two years. A lot of them will also turn to the wiki because… “Okay, now I need to learn about collaboration skills. So I’ve learned about those skills, but I have a variety of different technology tools I can rely on. And which ones best suit the needs of my students?” We also found that over the past two years, we’ve had much higher numbers as far as users worldwide, both the wiki and, more importantly, through the MOOC. So it’s kind of shifted people’s mindsets on how and why they use the project.

John: You mentioned a cohort model, is this a self-paced MOOC? Or is this done with fixed starting and ending date?

Nicole: No, it is self paced. But we found that a lot of campuses and a lot of different educational groups, whether you’re using it in a course, or you’re just using it on your own, a lot of people have gone into a cohort model. I know my campus at Nassau, we use the cohort model where we offered it with a group of faculty so that they were able to actively participate and work with one another. It’s certainly self paced but we found also with students that have used the MOOC as part of their course, they like to have that cohort model so that they have that collaboration from day one.

John: And having that cohort can also create a bit of a commitment device where people are going to meet and discuss what they’ve done, it makes it more likely they’ll actually do it. Because one of the issues with MOOCs is they often have a low completion rate. But when you have a cohort of people going through, it seems to have a pretty significant effect in encouraging completion.

Cherie: Yes, it does.

John: And another advantage of it for a teaching center, say if they want to bring a group of people through, is that you can schedule around your holiday schedules and so forth. So you can come up with a schedule that works with your campus’ schedule so that you don’t have it running into holidays or spring breaks or other periods. So the self-paced nature can be really helpful.

Rebecca: I can imagine, too, that one nice thing about the cohort is that you actually know the participants are accountable to people that you know, but also you might feel more comfortable having conversations or asking questions because they’re not just like anonymous little bees in the course.

Cherie: And the other thing to keep in mind with MOOCs in general is a lot of people don’t complete them. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start them. Because you’ll get a lot of good information, take what you need from it, and maybe, eventually, you’ll have time to go through the whole thing. But I just think, don’t have the mindset where, “Oh, I started several MOOCs, and I never finished them.” You still started them, and you still got some knowledge from starting them, so give it a try.

Rebecca: Well, that’s good encouragement for sure.

Cherie: Yes, you can always refer back to them.

Rebecca: Now, I know that you use badges in this MOOC, can you talk a little bit about how that works?

Nicole: There’s always an incentive-ation component, where you really want to get leaders, you want people to learn and use the modules. So if you’re using the modules, and you complete not only going through the modules, but the quiz, and then providing a summary that you participated and completed that module, then you are eligible to receive a digital badge for that module. If you go ahead and complete all four of the modules and complete an ePortfolio, again you can earn a digital badge for that module. And what’s nice about it is it does encourage completion. But more importantly, it encourages you to really take a deeper dive. Why is it that you want to learn about a particular technology tool? Why is it you want to learn about a different module? And then really apply it. How do you plan on applying it to your learning? Again, whether it’s in a course, or just for your personal gain.

Cherie: And also, Robin wanted us to mention that it’s now an auto process through Coursera that the badging gets done. And we are like one of the first Coursera MOOCs to actually use this process. Before it used to be a manual process, which meant that it was a lot of time for us to try to figure out… “This person earned this badge, let’s do the little computer thing we need to do to get the badge out to the people.” So it’s gotten a lot easier now with that auto ability.

John: So what is the plan for keeping the MOOC current? Because with emerging technologies, they’re constantly changing. And you mentioned a little bit about that with the wiki and how that can be continually updated. But what about the MOOC itself?

Cherie: One of the things we’re going to do with the MOOC is we want to translate it in other languages. So it’s not just available in English.

Nicole: Yes, one of our big projects is being able to translate it, first starting off with Spanish and then to other languages, so that we can get and encourage more users worldwide. And it can also be used for COIL faculty, which is a SUNY initiative for Collaborative Online International Learning. So that not only can we point users to the MOOC, but more importantly, it can be used as part of a course or a COIL project. Another component is to constantly go in and update some of the videos or some of the processes that we’re learning within the different modules. We’re looking to add on, essentially it would be a sixth module, taking a look at AR and VR technology, and allowing users to go through a small component of how you can learn about adding that into your course or adding that into your own personal knowledge, and then sharing out more resources as we start building out that component of the wiki.

Cherie: And one of the things we did when we built the MOOC was we tried to not get in the minutiae, we tried to have a big picture overview so that it would last for a few years. Because technology changes all the time. So we need to make a conscious effort not to mention tech tools in our videos. So that’s when you go to the EmTech wiki for. So, when you’re in the MOOC, you’re not going to find mention of, and I’m not going to even mention any, so that this thing can live into the future. But if you mentioned certain tech tools, it’s going to date your video. So we’re keeping all that in the wiki and that can be updated.

John: Because issues of lifelong learning, your online presence and communication and collaboration, creative expression, and critical thinking are not going to go away. So I think focusing on that makes it a whole lot easier to keep the MOOC current. Very good. If anyone’s interested in learning more about the MOOC, there’s a nice website that has a wide variety of videos on it. So if you want to see more about what’s being covered in there, you could watch some of the videos and then join in the MOOC.

Rebecca: And we’ll have all those links in our show notes.

John: We will.

Cherie: One other thing that I would like to mention is the modules also go along with the NACE competencies, which is the National Association of Colleges and Employers. So a lot of these skills are what colleges and employers think you need to have to be ready for a career. So that’s another really great point of how we set this up.

Rebecca: Probably a nice way to underscore how it could be used with students.

Cherie: Yes, and it has been used, like Nicole had mentioned, it’s been used with students, and it’s been used at SUNY Fredonia with a group of students as well who were pre-professional teachers.

John: Did the pandemic have any effect on the demand for this MOOC?

Cherie: During the pandemic there was a time when the MOOC was free for everyone, because Coursera marked some MOOCs as being something that would help people with career readiness and get ready to find a job once the pandemic was over. And we did get some traction in a couple areas of the world. There was a big cohort in India, and also in South America… And, Nicole, do you remember which country in South America we were getting?

Nicole: We’re getting a big chunk, both from Brazil and Venezuela. And we actually encouraged faculty from Venezuela to use it for the COIL projects. So that was our latest big jump.

John: We always end with the question, What’s next? And that could be about you, it could be about the project, it could be anything you want to say, it could be, “I’m going to have lunch,” or, “I’m going to go shovel snow or whatever.”

Cherie: I’m going to go shovel horse manure, [LAUGHTER] because we have horses, and they were in last night. But, I think Nicole will be the best one to talk about the future because she’s going to be our new fearless leader.

John: Nicole?

Nicole: Bringing more VR and AR to both the module and to the wiki would be our next component.

Cherie: And I guess we should mention that we’re always looking for partnerships and grants for this project. So that’s another big part of what we do. And we also are looking for partners in K through 12. We’re actually working on something now for K through 12, to bring some workshops to people in the state of New York, I believe. Right, Nicole?

Nicole: Correct.

John: Well, thank you. The MOOC is a wonderful resource. And it’s nice to see that it’s still developing and growing. And I strongly encourage people to explore the MOOC and the wiki.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for joining us.

Cherie: Thank you so much for having me. This has always been one of my bucket lists to be on Tea for Teaching so I can cross that one off. I’ve been excited for it since the day it started.

John: Does that have anything to do with the horse manure? [LAUGHTER]

Cherie: No, It does not, I really sincerely mean that. I am not shoveling manure right now. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you.

Nicole: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

[MUSIC]

223. Remembering and Forgetting

Cognitive psychology research continues to provide insight into how memory works. In this episode, Michelle Miller joins us to discuss how this research can help us design more effective learning experiences for our students.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research. Her research interests include memory, attention, and student success. Michelle is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. Her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning and the Science of Memory in a Wired World will be released in early 2022 as part of the superb West Virginia University series on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

Shownotes

  • Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds online: Teaching effectively with technology. Harvard University Press.
  • Miller, M. D. (2022). Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. West Virginia University Press.
  • Carr, Nicholas (2008). “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” The Atlantic. July/August.
  • Quizlet
  • Carl Wieman Science Center Initiative (2014). Two-stage Exams
  • Tea for Teaching Episode 36. Peer Instruction A discussion of John’s use of two-stage exams in his classes.
  • Studies on laptop use for note taking:
    • Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological science, 25(6), 1159-1168. (The study most cited by people opposed to laptop use.)
    • Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2019). How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? A replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014). Educational Psychology Review, 31(3), 753-780.
    • Aguilar-Roca, N. M., Williams, A. E., & O’Dowd, D. K. (2012). The impact of laptop-free zones on student performance and attitudes in large lectures. Computers & Education, 59(4), 1300-1308.
    • Artz, Benjamin and Johnson, Marianne and Robson, Denise and Taengnoi, Sarinda, Note-Taking in the Digital Age: Evidence from Classroom Random Control Trials (September 13, 2017).
    • Bui, D. C., Myerson, J., & Hale, S. (2013). Note-taking with computers: Exploring alternative strategies for improved recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(2), 299.
    • Carter, S. P., Greenberg, K., & Walker, M. S. (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review, 56, 118-132.
    • Hembrooke, H., & Gay, G. (2003). The laptop and the lecture: The effects of multitasking in learning environments. Journal of computing in higher education, 15(1), 46-64.
    • Patterson, R. W., & Patterson, R. M. (2017). Computers and productivity: Evidence from laptop use in the college classroom. Economics of Education Review, 57, 66-79.
    • Ravizza, S. M., Uitvlugt, M. G., & Fenn, K. M. (2017). Logged in and zoned out: How laptop internet use relates to classroom learning. Psychological science, 28(2), 171-180.
    • Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24-31
  • Lang, James M. “The Distracted Classroom.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 13, 2017.
  • Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Hachette UK.

Transcript

John: Cognitive psychology research continues to provide insight into how memory works. In this episode, we examine how this research can help us design more effective learning experiences for our students.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research. Her research interests include memory, attention, and student success. Michelle is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. Her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning and the Science of Memory in a Wired World will be released in early 2022 as part of the superb West Virginia University series on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

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

Michelle: Well, nope. I’m on coffee.

John: It’s one of the most common forms of tea on the podcast.

Rebecca: So is water. John, how about you?

John: I am drinking Irish Breakfast tea.

Rebecca: Okay. All right, switching it up… switching it up.

John: The context for that is we recorded an earlier podcast today and I was drinking Prince of Wales tea. So, I did switch. Variety can be good.

Rebecca: I also made a new pot. And I have Chai now.

John: You don’t drink Chai very often.

Rebecca:No, I don’t. I drink it more around the holidays.

John: We do have some Christmas tea in the office if you ever drop by. [LAUGHTER] No one’s dropping by… everyone’s connecting remotely. But, we have lots of tea. So, we’ve invited you here to discuss Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology. Could you tell us a little bit about how this book project came about?

Michelle: It really came together in 2019, which of course now seems so incredibly long ago. But, in the context for how it came about, I’ve gotten to connect with so many faculty, instructional designers, and others in higher education over the issues we talk about in Minds Online, and all of the student success conversations. Of course, I’ve been kicking around lots of different ideas for a longer book project for quite some time. And this is one of those, it just came to me, almost in just one fell swoop one morning. I was just kind of playing around with some different ideas and thinking about research that was coming together in some areas of cognitive psychology, and also the ongoing conversations on issues such as using devices to take notes, say laptops in class, other things that were really on the minds of a lot of teachers. And so this idea of really looking at memory and how that is changing, perhaps in terms of its nature, but also in terms of its value in such a heavily technological age. And a lot of folks have researched and written about that. But really looking at it through this unique lens of teaching and learning and what we all should know about remembering and about our own memories in this technological age. So I put those ideas down and set them aside for a little while, but then was able to connect with James Lang, the sole series editor of the West Virginia University Press’ series in teaching and learning in higher education. And we got to talking about that particular idea. I think this is a great fit. And we were off and running. We began outlining the ideas, and they all did come together just really in a relatively short amount of time for a book project like this.

John: Just as a follow up to that I remember seeing a tweet from Jim Lang, where he mentioned that he liked your manuscript so much that you were invited to be a co-editor of the series going forward,

Michelle: What an honor, and if this book manuscript and all of its early forms [LAUGHTER], helped him come to that conclusion, I’m just even more pleased about it in so many ways, just from a personal standpoint. I think, like many academics,books are so close to my heart. Although today I work as an academic cognitive psychologist, it’s not a book discipline. We disseminate our research primarily in article form. So that was also just a real connection for me as well. So the ability to jump in and also become a serious co-editor as part of this process. I agree, it was really fortuitous from my point of view. It’s such an honor.

John: We’re glad to have you there, because that’s a tremendous series. We’ve interviewed many of the authors, and we’re looking forward to all the new books, including yours.

Michelle: Oh, that’s incredible to hear. And I agree. It’s a dream team. We really assembled so many people with unique perspectives and research and practical ideas, and who are really great writers. So again, what an honor to be able to participate in that.

Rebecca: One of the things that students, but maybe also some of our colleagues, sometimes bring up is the idea that in the age of digital technology, we don’t need to remember things because we can just look things up or set reminders. And that sometimes also comes up when we start talking about retrieval practice and the need to remember things. How do you respond to that argument?

Michelle: Well, there’s so many really compelling barriers or themes that come up time and again. As faculty, as we talk to students, those themes do tend to have lots of different parts to them. So, as far as students are concerned, increasingly, especially in the last few years, I’ve had myself fewer students, either implicitly or explicitly saying, “Why do we have to know this? Why do we have to memorize this? I don’t think that sitting for a test where I have to put down memorized knowledge is valuable.” I hear a little bit less of that myself. But I could definitely see how a student could look at it and say, “Well, why is it that I need to remember the cut off for statistical significance at that conventional level of alpha, as we say, in a statistics class? Why should I know how to define different variables? Why should I be able to define these key terms, say in a psychology of language class?” …which is something that I just finished up this semester. So, why do we need to know? I think that students themselves can be very moved by the simple practical components. And I think it’s a good thing that many of our students really are picturing themselves in their future professional lives, taking what they are learning, taking their skills that they’re acquiring in college, and putting that into practice in whatever their future passion, their future career, really is. And I think that they can see that if you’re constantly stopping and looking things up, if you’re kind of reassembling information that you might need for a given task or situation, reassembling kind of every time and then running from there, that’s going to slow you down. And I do think that students really want a sense of accomplishment. And I see more and more students getting excited about the prospect of acquiring really hard skills that are difficult to acquire, maybe memory and knowledge per se isn’t necessarily part of that, but I think it’s in the vicinity. And I think with students as well, what helps is again, either explicitly or implicitly getting across to them, that I’m also being selective, I’m not just kind of picking facts out of the book, and throwing them on an exam, just for the sake of being able to do so. Pretty much for anything that I want them to know cold, if they’ve got to have it down in a given course, there’s probably a justification for why that particular fact is going to be helpful or useful. And they’ve also been, I think, inspired by saying, “Well, yeah, professionals, they know this, and here’s how they can use this in a situation.” Now, what students don’t know, and what I’m unlikely to actually put out there, because it’s just a little bit too much, is this also emerging research in cognitive psychology that is actually linking having a solid knowledge base and the development of certain specific kinds of thinking skills. So without right off the bat getting too far into the nuts and bolts of that research, there is some promising new findings that are starting to link those two things, which I think conventionally, as teachers, we’ve been maybe socialized to believe that thinking skills and memory are these naturally opposed things in the mind, it’s one or the other, they’re kind of in a tug of war with each other, when in fact, both of those do work quite naturally together. So I also kind of in the back of my mind, am really increasingly starting to suspect and to believe that, for example, if they know more about, say, dependent and independent variables, if we’re doing a research methods class, in theory, at least, they should be able to do more of their own original thinking to extend that knowledge into say, designing their own studies or Interpreting studies they’re reading about in a more sophisticated way. So those are the things that I would put out there to students in response to that, yeah,quite reasonable question.

Rebecca: Michelle, I’m finding what you’re saying really interesting because I had students doing a lot of reflections at the end of projects this semester. And a lot of students explicitly said, “I need to memorize what some of these things are, because it’s slowing me down, and I can’t spend the time on the things I really want to be doing.” And in the case of the classes, I’m teaching are creative thinking, but that’s really exactly you’re talking about, they were feeling that same thing.

Michelle: Right. See that’s, that’s really validating to hear. And here again is that kind of our culture as higher education teachers in a very well meaning way, it’s like, “Okay, there’s creativity over here and then there’s memory and knowledge over there, and oh, no, we have to make this choice. They’re an active opposition.” But your students themselves seem to be coming upon the fact that yeah, when we do have more basic skills, basic knowledge at our disposal, sometimes that even frees us up to have more leftover for the creativity. That’s one way of thinking about it that I particularly like, and so, right, both of these things can definitely work together. And I think it brings up too what I’ve increasingly starting to describe as fluent practice, fluent application of what you know. I’m kind of getting this picture of yeah, I’m out there. I’m working with students if I’m a teacher. I’m out there in healthcare field. Or I’m writing something, if I’m a journalist, and I’m putting together my work right there on the fly, as your students are pointing out having to kind of stop and start and go: “Wait a minute, let me reassemble this knowledge.”

John: One thing I was thinking in terms of fluency concept is that if you’re going to be a scholar studying writings in another language, it would probably be a whole lot more effective if you didn’t have to look up each and every word as you read those things. Being fluent in the basic grammar of that language makes it a whole lot easier to interpret meaning from larger writings. And I think that holds in pretty much all disciplines.

Michelle: I agree. It’s a really compelling metaphor, isn’t it?

John: Most of the opposition to this concept, this bifurcation between memory and higher level learning, I’ve seen not so much from students, but from many faculty who reject the notion of retrieval practice on the grounds that they’re teaching higher level skills. And I’ve had more difficulty in trying to explain to some of our colleagues the importance of that fluency in the basic concepts to be able to reach those higher levels. And you described it really well, in many of your writings and on past podcasts too.

Michelle: I have had that similar experience. Going further back to the idea for this book, I’d say this is a real hot button issue. There’s really something there when an issue is this polarizing. And it really can be when you do start to talk about memory, and an even more polarizing word: “memorization.” It is very natural for faculty, I would say probably about half to three quarters, you’ll get an immediate negative reaction of pushback. And here’s the thing, it comes from a great place, I think, in all the experiences I’ve had. People will say, “Well, aren’t we harkening back to an outdated banking model of education that has been talked about for quite some time, like, ‘I’m the teacher, and I’ve got all this great knowledge, you’ve got nothing. And so the whole teaching enterprise is a matter of me kind of cracking open my brain, and you sit there passively while I pour it all into your brain.’” And, of course, that is the last thing that any really committed, engaged teacher in higher education is going to want to be doing. So I think that that is one of, again, the really good reasons why we react with skepticism when anybody brings us up. What do you students actually know? What do they actually remember? How are you reinforcing that? But, in so many different ways, I think that we can get around it, it doesn’t have to put us back into this outdated model of transfer of kind of the student got this big blank space in their head, and I’m just starting to fill it up. We don’t have to fall into that. So I think that a class or a course that emphasizes knowledge that emphasizes memory can be really engaging, and it can honor what students already know. But there are some things that we do have to change about our mindset and maybe some knowledge of our own that we have to add, in order for that to happen.

John: In the second chapter of the book, you describe some of the classic theories of memory that show up in a lot of textbooks that many educators once were exposed to and often still are exposed to. How well do those simple models hold up to evidence? And what are some examples of those simple models?

Michelle: So these models of memory… this is something that’s inspired me going way, way back when I started writing about these issues a little over 10 years ago. So, what are the disconnects between either common sense conceptions of memory that we might have, or as you said, things we’ve actually read in textbooks that seem very, very credible. And for the most part, it’s a matter of these things have been supplanted by continuing developments in the arena of memory. Now, one of the things that I love about writing about memory is that we have been researching this in cognitive psychology for a very long time. And we’ve had detailed systematic models that go back at least 50 years at this point. So it’s wonderful we have so much to tap into, but that does mean that, at this point, we have to sometimes say “Well, how have we changed these, expanded them, or made them more sophisticated?” So that’s kind of where the field has gone and where those disconnects can arise. So I think if I were to run down some of the biggest outdated ideas, or just wrong ideas, probably the biggest one is that three stops along an assembly line model. Sometimes this goes by the name, the modal model when we were talking about it in the literature, but it’s the one that if you took Psychology 101 at pretty much any point you saw in the textbook illustrated. So,the idea is that we first gather these brief sensory impressions, and that’s sort of the first step of memory, they stay in short-term memory. Sometimes you’ll see a little circle with an arrow where we’re rehearsing like we’re trying to remember the phone number before we dial the phone. And so we’re saying it to ourselves over and over. And then there’s the next step along the assembly line. It sort of travels along to long-term memory and gets dumped there, and then you can pick it back up. So this model was based on a lot of really good solid laboratory data, and it explained a lot of important patterns that scientists of the time were seeing in things like, “Well, why is it that people remember lists in a particular way? Or why is it that we can only remember so many digits that people are asking us to say back?” …and so on. But here’s the problem with that. First of all, we now know that there is a lot that goes on to determine what ends up permanently stored, and of course, the vast majority, we don’t store. So, things like meaning, things like interpretation, that short-term or immediate memory store, these days, many scientists, including myself, believe that we have quite a few specialized ones, and they work together in a sort of a coordinated fashion. So it isn’t just this one stop, and some of this is just inside baseball for memory researchers, right? But I think for teachers, the problem does come when we do oversimplify issues like “Well, okay, if short-term memory has a certain capacity”… like you’ll sometimes see the number seven plus or minus one or seven plus or minus two, “Well, if I put seven things on a slide then students will get it all, and as long as you just keep the number of things low, then you’re golden.” And it does not work that way. So things for example, that are very meaningful to students, that students can interpret, that students care about, you can have quite a few pieces of information. And as long as they kind of hang together in that way, and have some compelling thing that will cause them to stick, well, you’re much more likely to see permanent storage. And I think, too, it also leads us down this wrong path that in a way actually harks back to that banking or transfer idea of education, which encourages us to think of memory as a place. And you’ll see metaphors like, “Oh, it’s a filing cabinet.” “It’s a bucket.” And that implies, first, that if you want to remember something, you just sort of will yourself to remember it and you just put it there. And as long as that place isn’t too full, it’s great. And I think we all know [LAUGHTER] that it’s not as simple as just wanting to remember something that you’re going to be able to get it back. So I always encourage faculty don’t think of memory as a place to put things, think of it as something that your mind and your brain can do that serves other goals, that helps you do other things. So that’s one of the things that I would say about that. Now, here’s another misconception. And actually, there was a very large scale survey of adults in the United States, I talk about it quite a bit in the book, that simply asked them about some ideas about how memory works. And this one was accepted by a majority of adults who were surveyed, but memory researchers will uniformly reject it. And that is the idea that your mind is really more like a video camera. So it’s almost like we’ve taken a technological metaphor and put that in place of the filing cabinet metaphor of yor. So, the idea is that, well, we pick up things that are sort of around us or in front of us, if we see it, if we hear it, or if we see it multiple times or hear it multiple times, we just sort of store that away in a very literal form. And sometimes people will actually take this to an extreme and say, “Well, somewhere in your mind is this hidden reserve of all these things that you’ve experienced, and if you can just tap into it, you can sort of rewind the tape and find anything.” And nothing could be farther from the truth when it comes to what we currently know about memory. And so here again, for teachers, I think that that can lead us down the road of saying, “Well, if I just sort of make an announcement every day or write something on the board, and students eyes are pointed towards it, they’ll pick it up…” …and they may or may not. And for students themselves, it can lead them to think that well, even if I’m using a very passive or inefficient study strategy for acquiring knowledge, that will work. And I think we all know as well, for all kinds of different reasons, that that’s not the case simply sitting for a certain amount of time, reviewing notes, highlighting or rereading is unlikely to give much of a payoff in terms of memory. That’s because our minds, unlike video cameras, are constantly interpreting, sorting, sifting, even as we create those memories in the first place.

Rebecca: One of the things that you’ve hinted about is the idea that perhaps we don’t remember as much as we forget. [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Yes. I don’t know what the ratio is. But it’s got to be [LAUGHTER] pretty substantial.

Rebecca: So can you talk a little bit about why our minds have evolved in this way for survival purposes?

Michelle: Right, and it’s good that you’re coupling this idea of forgetting with that idea of like, what’s adaptive for us? What’s actually beneficial in terms of our memories? So again, if we’re thinking of memory, not as just a sort of bucket that is in our heads, but it’s there to help us, a few things become more clear. And I think especially for those of us who are maybe more of the typical median age and life age for faculty, we’re constantly going, “Why did I forget this? Why can’t my brain just sort of retain everything?” And this is the thing, is that while we have to be careful about making these really specific sort of evolutionary arguments, there’s been a lot of criticism of that. I think that’s reasonable. But, I also think that it is quite sensible to say, “Our minds, our brains, are evolved for efficiency.” Our memories are not going to be able to do what we need them to do if they simply pick up everything indiscriminately. That would be a really bad system design. Among other things, it would make the retrieval side of memory a lot more error prone than it is. So back in Minds Online, I use this analogy of a gigantic closet. Well, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got the biggest closet in the world if it’s sort of disorganized, and you can’t find what you need when you need it. So, our minds are very selective about what they take in. And, in educational situations, that makes us sit up and take notice, right? Because, okay, I’ve got this big, thick textbook of research methods or chemistry, you name it, and I’m going to need it in three years, maybe, when I’m graduated, my brain is going to be a little skeptical [LAUGHTER] in a sense about whether and how much of that I should acquire. So, we forget things, or fail to encode or acquire them in the first place, if they don’t clearly tap into survival, into goals, and so on. And again, without getting too literal minded about what did we evolve to remember in our ancestral environments, I think it’s also fairly clear that this is, for example, why our minds and brains pick up on things that are highly emotional. And for those of us who tack a little bit more towards anxiety, we’re acutely aware of this, because we often remember negative things. I have an example in the book, a little personalexample of how I got stung by a whole bunch of wasps when I was five years old, and didn’t even know what wasps were. And I remember a lot about that episode, not because I want to, but because my brain is trying to help me, trying to say, “Yeah, this was something that you do not want to repeat.” Now, fortunately, there’s also some positive sides to this. And you can say it also makes sense for our minds and our brains to retain things that gave us joy, gave us delight, that surprised us. Those are the things where we kind of go, “Yeah, that might be helpful for the future.” So even though I’ve got a really high bar for what I want to save, that might make it through. And I guess the other place where this could really come into play is in the area of cues. So as I’ve written about, in a lot of my work, we also have to remember that our minds are trying to be efficient in bringing back what we need to know in the right context. And we see this in a lot of areas of cognition of things we know or things we can do, we can kind of blank out on them if we’re not in the right setting. And here again, it can be very frustrating if, for example, we’re sitting in an exam and going, “Oh, my gosh, I’m trying to bring this fact back. And I know I know it, but I’ll remember it later with the right cues are there. That’s really frustrating. But another case of where our brain is trying to do its job the best way it can. And so we are highly reliant on those cues to be able to retrieve. So I think having a grasp of some of those, really can start to make the pieces click into place, and make some, sometimes frustrating, sometimes strange, quirks of the mind start to make a little bit more sense.

Rebecca: So Michelle, is that why I can remember someone in my class’s name when they’re in my class, but not when I see him on the street?

Michelle: Right, and you could also see other classical memory phenomena at play, just in thast case of students’ names and students’ faces. So when I have a new class, a new crop of students comes in, that is going to kind of overwrite, in a way, my previous [LAUGHTER] students as well. So you get these sort of interference effects. And that’s another thing that can cause forgetting or cause failure to remember is, is lack of distinctiveness, sometimes, too. When I’ve got the 10 semesters’ worth of students to remember, it gets a little bit harder to pick out the particular one. And that’s another phenomenon that I talk about a little bit in the book.

John:One of the things you talk about in the book is the argument that so often appears in discussions about whether the use of technology enhances or erodes memory. Maybe we could start with some of the arguments against the use of technology. In what way may the use of things like smartphones and automatic reminders and other things, perhaps, do some harm in terms of our memory?

Michelle: Right. So if you’ve followed at all on the kind of popular press, the books, the articles that come out about the cognitive impacts of technology, I think it’s safe to say that it leads with the negative, even up to the point there’s a famous article that just led with “Is Google making us stupid?” [LAUGHTER] There’s a lot to that claim. But, clearly, that is implying that when Google is all around us, and perhaps when we’re relying on things, that that is going to be destructive to our inborn memory abilities. And that’s a pretty concerning narrative. And you know, in the book, I talk about another large scale study that was done in the United States, asking adults: What are some of your concerns about technology? And there are all kinds of different social and emotional and all kinds of issues people cited, but top among them was they were worried about the cognitive impact. So this is one where we have to look and say, “Alright, is there anything supporting this?” Now, in part, there are. So, there was an interesting line of research that came out, and folks still continuing to look into this, some have even termed it the “Google effect” on memory… not to call out just one particular form [LAUGHTER] of technology. But that’s one they were focusing on. And this has to do with what happens when we believe like really, really believe, that we will be able to get to some fact in the future. And there were these really neat, very clever experimental procedures done to kind of convince people as they were doing, for example, a trivia task, learning some really unusual facts that they wouldn’t have known before. They led people to believe, in some cases, that these were all going to be stored in an online folder, and they’d be able to find them and other people were led to believe that that was not going to be the case, that they were not going to be able to get back to them. And perhaps, unsurprisingly to some of us, when people think they’ll be able to get it back, they’re less likely, if you give them a surprise test [LAUGHTER]to see if they remember it on their own, they’re less likely to do that. So even without realizing it, there’s that brain being efficient theme again. If it’s stored out there, I’m not going to store it on my own. And I think there are some other interesting effects in terms of what’s starting to be known as cognitive offloading. So, if I’m going to put it over here, I’m not going to carry it, so to speak, in my brain. Use of turn by turn GPS… [LAUGHTER] so what many of us, including myself, rely on to get from place to place? Well, it does turn out that if you are more reliant on GPS for a given region, you’re going to be less likely to develop a sophisticated mental model of that. So those are definitely some of the negatives. Now there’s that line. And then another kind of line that comes down on the: “Wow, this has a negative impact on memory,” in general is, of course, distraction. Now, oftentimes, as I’ve written about and talked about a lot, you can’t separate out memory and attention. Those two things are incredibly intertwined in cognition. And what do mobile devices do better than anything in the world, they distract us. For example, there’s another line of research that looks at what happens when people are taking pictures during some kind of experience they’re having. And there’s some evidence here as well, that something about getting engaged in just the attention demanding aspects of picture taking, detract from your forming memories right there on the fly. And it probably does come down to attention in that case. So, if you’re responding to notifications, if you’re fiddling with the settings on your camera, if you’re doing that, no surprise, you won’t form the memories in the first place, and since memory is not a video camera, if you’re not forming the memories in the first place, they’re gone, you really only get that one chance. So that’s some of the negative stuff. But that’s not the only side of the story.

Rebecca:You are going to tell us about the good stuff, too, right?

Michelle:Well, I think that that’s really important. And so I think that this balance, especially when we’re talking about what we’re going to base our teaching on, and what information we’re going to share with students, it is really important to capture that. So, what does not seem to be supported, if you really look at the more anti-technology, the more alarmist strain of public debate and discussion about this, it’s that these effects are not global. It’s not that having a smartphone, having access to online searches is just across the board, decreasing my ability to store information on my own in my brain, it really is very localized. So it’s not like if I walked out of that study on storing information on Google, and now I permanently have this decrement. I think it’s quite questionable. We definitely need more research, and I don’t think a strong case can be made right now that technology is decreasing attentional abilities across the board either. So again, in the moment, if I let my technology interfere with class, or with a field trip I’m on or something like that, oh, yes, that’s going to be a problem in terms of memory. But if I put it away, then I should be able to rebound. So there is that. And I think, too, you’d mentioned the issue of reminders, right? So am I picking up on correctly, that you had mentioned that using things like calendar alerts, and so on might have some negative effects.

John: Actually, the negative effect for me is that now I no longer have an excuse for missing meetings. I can’t say I forgot it, because people know it’s in my calendar because they put it there. [LAUGHTER] So, that is a negative effect for me. [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Okay, well, you know what I think the next book might have to be on the social aspects of memory in organizations, but okay, so you’re using your calendar alerts to organize and to say, “What do I need to do next?” You might even be carrying lists… alerts. If you really want to get fancy with it, you can even set alerts that go off at a given context. So here’s the thing… I think here too, well, what we’re talking about really is this other form of memory called prospective memory. And I’m always saying hey, don’t forget in the long term,short term, all these other forms of memory, that prospective memory is also there. And prospective memory, to me is fascinating. It is the form of memory that is not for something that we learned in the past or did in the past, it’s following through on an intention for the future. So, “I have to answer this email by the end of the day today” or “Oh, yeah, the meeting time has been changed, and I need to be sure to get to that.” Or even other things like taking medication at a certain time or stopping off to do an errand on the way home, all classic prospective memory tasks. Well, here’s the thing, basically, human prospective memory, our inborn capability to do this, the technical term is garbage. We are really, really bad at this. And it probably does come down to that our brains are there to react right in the moment. We don’t have anything really like a timer that goes off in our brains, we’re responding to the cues that are in front of us. And especially when we’re distracted, or when we’re deviating from a set routine, something that we always do, those intentions are incredibly fragile, and we just forget them. And so I think in this case, I think we all just ought to fold to just say, “We need to use the technology to do this.” So, digital memory is brilliant at this, right? It knows what time it is, and it doesn’t care what’s going on around you at any given moment. If you set the alert, the alert will go off. And especially when we can develop habits to refer to these, I think that’s a very positive thing. And it’s something that serves us very, very well. So while it might not fit into what most of us think of really classically as learning, per se, it’s an important thing that we deal with every single day. And so to be aware that our memories are incredibly fallible in this way, but there’s a technological fix. I think that’s using technology and digital memory for what it’s really good for, to buttress us in that way. And I think this is an emerging story. I don’t believe right now we have any research that would show that there’s going to be any kind of a decrement, or a problem that occurs, since most of us are so poor at this to begin with, I feel like, hey, even if we got a little bit worse, I’m not even sure if we would notice, like you I’ve got to rely on the calendar. If it’s in the calendar, I’ll be there. If it’s not, nope, I won’t.

Rebecca: And those calendar reminders and things are really good at getting your attention. So we might have to be intentional about how we actually set those alerts and things for, right?

Michelle: Right, right. And really, it’s about active management and being in charge of our tech. And that’s where I think all of us should be if we are using technology, if we do want to rely on it to be really deliberate and ruthless about “Okay, I’m not going to let just every application send me alerts because it feels like it…. A store’s having a sale or maybe even I don’t want to have my text or emails alerting me, particularly during particular times. But here’s what I do want to come through.” I think that that’s a recipe for success.

John: And both iOS and Android operating systems have gotten better about allowing different types of messages during different times . With iOS, I know, you have these new focus modes where you can choose what comes through during certain portions of the day or during certain activities. And Android has very similar capabilities now, so we can fine tune those things quite a bit more depending on what we’re doing. So we can choose to turn off all alerts sometimes or to allow some alerts to come through that are essential. And during other times, we could allow more if that’s appropriate.

Michelle: I think that’s a great point. And maybe there are some times when the phone just to be powered off. And it’s up to us to really have that insight and frankly, that metacognitive ability, to be able to do that. I think that that’s exactly what I would want for my students. And that’s exactly what I would share with them in the times when I do get to talk to them. And I wanted to bring up maybe one other positive when it comes to education, especially those of us who are teaching and are educators. Let’s not forget that technology has opened up incredible ways to take advantage of retrieval practice. So that retrieval practice, of course, when students are effortfully bringing information back into mind, what we now know is this is incredibly efficient way to build knowledge that’s solid and to build it in less time. Well, we always want to be judicious about the technology we bring into our classrooms, I think we all now know that we don’t just want to bring it in for its own sake. But quizzing programs, applications that students can use on their own. I found that many of my students are independently putting together Quizlets and using those. Well, that’s really hard to do with strictly pencil and paper, low tech tools. So that’s another way that technology can really reinforce and strengthen memory, if we let it and if we use it in the right way.

Rebecca: That’s a really great example of how to use some of this cognitive science research in the classroom. Are there other examples that you have of how we can continue to help students build their memory in a classroom setting or in our teaching practice?

Michelle: Oh, well, I would love to share with you this is a very fresh example, because I just did this last night. It’s another technique that I talk a lot about, because I’m really fired up about it. And this is the… I’ll just call it the two-stage exam… and it’s something that I have completely borrowed out of the repertoires of many innovative STEM teachers. So this is kind of the tradition and the practice that it comes out of, but I’ve been using it in my psychology classroom, and it’s just got many, many benefits. So in the two-stage exam, what you do is… well, like last night, which was a final exam, I actually figured out the logistics of how to pull this off in a final exam, because my students really wanted to do it, having had a great experience on the midterm. So, here’s how it works. You have your traditional, no notes, closed book, pencil and paper exam. But here’s the thing, we know that those exams are not just a way to assess knowledge. They’re also, in and of themselves, this great way to reinforce knowledge, but we so often just walk away from them, or we quote, unquote, go over the exam, which is just kind ofme reading the questions and saying, “Well, this is the right one…” and then maybe students come back and argue. And so it can even just devolve and be about the points and not about the learning. So what we do is, say for the midterm exam, the class period immediately after when we took the test is set aside for, I call it the post-test discussion activity. What I do is I give students tests back to them, and I have some different ways of making sure that there’s no funny business with those tests. And those tests are ungraded at that point. I’ve not looked at them. So I randomly assign students to groups, about three to five is ideal. And they sit with their peers, and I let them do this open book at this point, you don’t have to, but I do. They get a new blank copy of that same exact exam. And they fill the whole thing out, again, as a group, really talking about the different questions and coming to some consensus. And I give them a little incentive, I say anything over 90% that the group earns on this exam is added as extra credit to everybody’s exam in that group. So it won’t completely change your grade, but it does give some incentive to really focus. Now, here’s the tie to memory. We know too, that another quirk of how retrieval practice works is that, when I have answered a question, and maybe I’ve gotten it wrong, that’s a point where it creates this very fertile, very receptive, window for re-studying that information. And that makes a lot of sense, right? We’re curious, we want to know, and then sitting with a peer and having them say, “Well, actually, I came to this conclusion, and here’s why…” …you lead to substantive discussion, you take advantage of that receptive window for learning, and a side benefit that I was not expecting too, but I will put out there. Students report to me informally, that this radically reduces their testing anxiety. There’s something about just knowing you get another shot in a way, you get a little bit of resolution to say, “Oh, wait a minute, I did better than I thought, or I got this wrong but now I really understand why.” So I also pitch it to them as hey, I care about the learning… the points, you know, we have points, I do give grades, but I really want everybody to understand on their own terms, what this exam was all about, rather than just kind of closing the book and walking away from it. So that’s something that I think, on many different levels, can reinforce memory. And I think too, it also does bring about what can be a complementary relationship between: “alright, here’s what I wanted you to know, out of your own brain when you were sitting for this exam, but yeah, it’s true that you can look it all back up, and let’s go back to… we can search the net, we can search our notes, we can use that to then hopefully reinforce what the knowledge base is that we have. So, it’s a great technique, I’d say, I always encourage folks, if they do want to know all those little ins and outs of how to pull it off at different kinds of classes, give me a shout, get in touch, because I think it’s really wonderful.

John: It’s something I’ve used for a few years, and it’s worked really, really well. And I think Carl Wieman’s website has quite a bit of information on that and we do have a past podcast on that too. It’s a really good practice, and students have loved it.

Michelle: Right, and it’s a wonderful thing when we can find something that students appreciate, that they see is very fair and very supportive of their learning, that leads to a dynamic discussion and tracks so well with all this memory research and theory.

Rebecca: You’ve been teaching a seminar class on technology, mind and brain. And so what insights have your students brought to this idea in this class?

Michelle: Oh, it’s just been such a privilege to be able to teach this course. I’ve taught it in lots of iterations over the years, and I’ll be jumping into that next semester as well. And I definitely use those insights in writing this current book. So most of the students in this course are… we have to put quotes around this now… but traditional college age, so they are kind of younger people and so it’s, I think, a good kind of reality check for me to kind of balance that against those popular media depictions of today’s younger people, the Gen Z students. And on the one hand, when you do look at those stereotypical conceptions, technology is always there. They’ve got the cell phone. I mean, how many times have we seen kind of that stock photo of the young person [LAUGHTER] and they’ve got their tattoos and they’ve got their cell phone, and they’re kind of glued to it. I think that broadly speaking, all of my conversations with students, yes, they do care a lot about the technology in their lives. And they see how pervasive that it is, and one of the exercises I have them do kind of informally is just a one day technology diary. So when did you first use technology? How did it come to bear in your life throughout your day, and probably like many of their faculty members as well, their use of their cell phone does start as soon as their eyes crack open, reach under the pillow or to the bedside stand or wherever it is, and it starts there, and then you’re off and running for the rest of the day. So that is there. However, what is also very, very clear from my conversations with students is they are not just uncritically accepting that technology is part of life, just like the air we breathe. They question it, and they want to question it. I have perhaps a selective sample there in students signed up for this course. But that is something that I see time and again, that they are there to ask, “Well, what is the research actually tell us? This is what my teachers told me. This is what I’ve heard people say, but what’s actually out there in terms of what it’s doing to my mind, what it’s doing to my brain?” So they’re skeptical the technology, but they’re also skeptical of the narratives that they hear. And they do want to know, what’s the empirical evidence for these different claims? There’s also an exercise that we do, where if we’re online we do it on a whiteboard, or we might actually physically move around a classroom, I ask them, “Well, how much do you even like your technology?” And they’ve thought about that, too. And they can say, “Yeah, I accept it as kind of a necessary evil in my life, but I don’t like it. I got rid of my Instagram, I don’t like to have my cell phone on me all the time” to others who say, “Oh, I love it. I love being on Discord with my friends, I love gaming, I can’t imagine life without my phone, I love my profiles,” and so on. So, there’s also that range of attitudes, acceptance in different ways that students are using technology. Now, one thing they do have in common, too, though, they want to know how can I put this to use in my life? So some of these things we were talking about before of: How can I be in charge of this? What really should I be doing? What are some different suggestions, hacks, apps that I might want to install, apps that I might want to de-install off of my phone to fit my purposes. And I will say too, especially the last time that I taught this class, one of the options that they have for a term project is an adaptation of a type of project that we do a lot in psychology and also in health science, where people really track a behavior that they’re engaged in with the idea of better insights about what leads us to that behavior, and maybe changing it. So students have the option of choosing something… that might be social media, it might be their overall screen time, something that they say, “I really want to moderate this, this feels a little out of control in my life,” or “I’m wondering what would happen if I did this less.” And so I’ve seen students designed for themselves. Usually, they just take a few weeks to do for the project, although they might carry it on further. I’ve seen all kinds of different variations on this. Everything from totally getting off all social media to having a tech fast on the weekend for students with families who are concerned about their family time. I asked them to say “Well, did it do what you’d hoped you wanted to do? Did you feel more clear headed? Was your mood any better? Did you have more time? Did you feel more focused when you were doing your schoolwork?” So students have really, really enjoyed doing those. They really appreciate the factuallybased judgment free zone that’s tailored to them personally, they really appreciate that. And they appreciate having some techniques, because we bring those in as well, just basic behavior change techniques, if you want to do something less, here’s how to do that, and here’s how to know if you’re succeeding. So those are some of the great things that I, again, have been so privileged to have a window into through teaching this course.

John: Are there any other suggestions you have for faculty in terms of how to use technology effectively to enhance learning?

Michelle: To kind of pivot back to that idea… In the book, I do take on this very specific question, one that really generated a surprising amount of controversy, to my mind, the question of whether students should be taking notes on laptops in their classrooms. And here, just to kind of summarize, there have been some real questions about replication of some of the key findings of one of the major studies that came out on that topic, the one that you see cited again, and again, from people who say, “No, taking notes by hand is superior.” Well, there’s some questions about that. So, I would really encourage faculty to dive into that question more and to look at some of the more recent research if they’re actually going to set their in-class policies based on that research. Now, there are lots of other things that they might look at to say, “Well, what should be allowed in a classroom? Should we have a strict no-technology policy, covering phones and so on as well?” First, the downside of that is you can’t do something like run quizzes, and so on. I tend to tilt more towards options, and a little bit more flexibility for students, I tend to have a somewhat more lenient and open technology policy in my own classroom, because I do want to give options for students to do things like quizzes, and being able to take notes on laptops, I think, for some students is a really good thing. That said, there are downsides as well. And I always like to have options for students who don’t want to pull out their phone, or, believe it or not, who don’t carry devices with them. So there are ways to do things like engage in in-class quizzes or quiz games that don’t entail those. So that’s something that I would advise faculty to really, really think through. James Lang’s work, his Distracted Students series in the Chronicle of Higher Education and his recent book on the subject also gives a different perspective on how to design appropriate things like policies for different situations, different kinds of classes, and so on. So I would say that, I would encourage them to anytime you feel you have that sort of teachable moment or receptive window to talk to students about their technology, to encourage them to do things like clean up their notifications, see if they might want to use calendar alerts to help stay on top of their classwork and so on, to take advantage of that. So those are some of the specific things that I would say for faculty, but it is something that I think we should all be thinking about. And when we come back to just the issue of memory, I would say be reflecting on what are the key pieces of information that do lead to that fluent practice. So,when you’re putting those backs on the study guide, or saying, “Here’s what I want students to know,” step back for a minute, ask yourself: Why? Should it belong in that kind of pantheon of remembered knowledge? But, at the same time, don’t think that memory, or even memorization, is something to shy away from. I think we could stand up proudly, and I think our students will support us if we presented in the right way to say, “Yeah, part of what you’re doing in my courses is you are memorizing, that’s not all you’re doing. And in fact, this will help you advance towards becoming that accomplished person in this discipline, or perhaps even a future professional in this discipline.”

Rebecca: Such great advice, Michelle. Thank you so much for all of this food for thought.

Michelle: Oh, thank you as well.

Rebecca: We always wrap up, though, by asking what’s next?

Michelle: Well, okay, well, now that this book is off to the printer, [LAUGHTER] off to the press, of course I’m looking at what topics in cognitive psychology and applications of cognitive psychology to dive into next. And I keep coming back to the topic of attention. So, I guess, stay tuned for more projects that specifically focus on that. So, looking at that, also looking at ways to bring these into classrooms that really support students through this incredibly challenging time that we have, I think that we are undergoing a much needed transformation. And I definitely count myself there as well in looking at how to better support students not just academically, but also emotionally and make our classrooms more places for safe and joyful learning for all students. So, engaging in that conversation as well and keeping an eye on what the next few semesters are going to look like not just at my institution and in my classes, but really in higher education in general. So that’s the point I’m at and always looking forward to connecting with faculty, instructional designers, and others across the field.

John: Well, thank you, Michelle. It’s always great talking to you and we’ve learned a lot from you over the years.

Michelle: Oh, you all as well. Thank you so much for all you do.

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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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205. Tutoring

Equity gaps in educational outcomes play a major role in perpetuating economic inequality. In this episode, Philip Oreopoulis  joins us to discuss his research examining how tutoring and computer-aided instruction can be used to reduce disparities in educational outcomes. Philip is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, the Education co-chair of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and an award-winning researcher who has conducted a wide variety of studies relating to education and educational policy.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Equity gaps in educational outcomes play a major role in perpetuating economic inequality. In this episode, we discuss research examining how tutoring and computer-aided instruction can be used to reduce disparities in educational outcomes.

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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 Philip Oreopoulis. Philip is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, the Education co-chair of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and an award-winning researcher who has conducted a wide variety of studies relating to education and educational policy. Welcome, Philip.

Philip: Thanks so much for having me.

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

Philip: My tea is coffee. I love coffee. I once looked for a reason not to drink coffee, I couldn’t find one. I love my black coffee.

Rebecca: A true researcher at heart. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a bing cherry black tea, a custom Tea Republic tea made for Harry & David.

Rebecca: And I have Irish breakfast tea. I really need to get some new tea [LAUGHTER]. I’m going to a tea store this weekend, so I’m looking forward to getting some new options.

John: And we have lots of tea in the office, some of which may not be as fresh as it was a year and a half ago. But this one still is good. It was purchased right before the shutdown.

Philip: You guys are inspiring me. I think I’m gonna have some tea sometime today.

Rebecca: All right, good, good.

John: In a November 2020 Scientific American article, you describe a meta analysis that you worked on with some colleagues that found that tutoring results in significant improvements in student learning. Could you describe this meta analysis a bit and what you found?

Philip: To backtrack a little bit, how it got started: my colleagues at J-PAL, Vincent Quan, Andre Nickow, and I, had heard about the potential of tutoring to be an effective form for increasing test score learning performance. For example, there’s Benjamin Bloom’s seminal article in the 80s, where he had two very small studies done by his students that both found off the charts improvement from offering tutoring in randomized control trials. In fact, that’s why he called it the ‘“2 sigma problem” that he found estimated impact from these two small studies were raising learning performances by enough to potentially solve most of our problems that we would be having in education policy. There were a number of recent studies as well, a randomized control trial coming out from the University of Chicago’s Ed lab, also finding very promising results from an RCT looking at providing in-class tutoring to grade nine students. And so we wanted to explore whether there was some consistency in these results, so we decided to try to take a more systematic look, and we gathered up all the RCTs, randomized control trials, in the last 40 years for about 96 studies, and we took a look and we found that consensus was quite remarkable. About 80% of those studies found significant effects larger than .2 of a standard deviation, and the average effect size was .38 of a standard deviation, which is like the equivalent of almost an entire extra year of school, from receiving these programs. And not only were the impacts really quite meaningful, as about as large as you get from education interventions, but they were consistent across the board. I think that this is about as much consistency as you’re ever going to get in an education policy intervention. So we were quite excited about that. We found that the effects were pretty consistent no matter which type of program that you looked at. They were larger for things like in-school delivery, three days a week, one-to-one delivery, full time tutors, but even in cases where that wasn’t the case, usually there were still significant effects.

Rebecca: Can you talk about what age the students were, what grades they were in?

Philip: It was for K-12.

John: I think it’s probably safe to assume, though, that the same effect would hold in the college environment as well. Those are some pretty dramatic effects.

Philip: Of course, to some extent, maybe it’s not that surprising. Giving instruction one-to-one leads to higher learning gains, and the biggest challenge, of course, is cost. We can’t all have our own teacher when we go to school. And so the biggest challenge, which gets back to Bloom’s point calling this the 2 sigma problem, is I think we have a powerful intervention to help education, it’s just that it costs too much to implement it on a larger scale. So the fundamental problem is to figure out a way to scale this in a way that can complement the classroom instruction.

John: And so that’s one of the things I think you’re looking at now, how this can be scaled up in a more cost effective manner. Could you tell us a little bit about your current research in terms of computer-assisted learning?

Philip: Sure. So computer-assisted learning or computer-assisted instruction is a type of educational software designed to help students progress through topics at their own pace. It has a lot of similar features as what you might receive when you’re receiving tutoring. So a typical example might be Khan Academy, MATHia, there’s lots of other types of software designed to help with different topics, math and reading, but they all have these sort of common features that allow students to progress through topics at their own pace. You receive immediate feedback from trying to work through your own problems and a chance to understand where you went wrong. If you do make a mistake, there’s data that’s generated from going through it that someone like a teacher might be able to follow and respond to. And so computer-assisted learning can, in some ways, simulate the tutoring experience, but of course, at a much lower cost. The challenge is you don’t have a real person guiding you through it. So even though a platform like Khan Academy is easily accessible, your willingness or motivation to go through it on your own is probably not as great as if you had a real person guiding you through the same material. So there has been some experimental evidence on computer-assisted learning, not as much as theories on tutoring, but of the 15 or 20 randomized control trials that have been done in this area, they have also been showing quite promising results. In cases where computer-assisted learning is provided, especially during a school setting, those receiving it also seemed to be performing at significantly higher rates than those in the comparison group. So there does seem to be some promise at using computer-assisted learning to generate the gains that we see from tutoring. But the way to introduce it, the instructions that teachers need to learn how to use it effectively, are not yet maybe as developed as we’d like them to be. So getting to, I guess jump into what I’m working on, I think that there’s a lot of potential for leveraging existing resources to combine with computer-assisted learning in a way that might come close to the tutoring experience. And so what I’m thinking of is in the classroom, that the kind of facilitated practice that might go on, say, in a math subject might be much better through a tool like Khan Academy than paper and pencil that we often give students. And so the question I’m investigating is around reshuffling the classroom in a way where the teacher is trained how to use computer-assisted learning more effectively in the classroom to generate that type of experience. So in the context of the program that I’m looking at now, which tries to integrate Khan Academy more into math classes, the teacher is still instructing and presenting topics, but now emphasizing the students following an individualized roadmap that allows the students to progress at their own pace, rather than having to keep up even if they’re missing on topics and not understanding. So the program which we’re calling “Coaching with Khan Academy,” or CWK, has students receive a roadmap of incremental topics and videos to follow at the start of school that roughly proceed in the same order that the teacher is going through. Now, the teacher has the students to try to work on this roadmap for at least an hour, an hour and a half a week, and tries to facilitate that time during the class and encourage more done at home, and the students then have the ability to hopefully get into a routine of watching a video and taking the exercises, and if they don’t score high enough on the exercises they’re asked to try to understand why they made the mistake using the hints and tips and guidance that Khan provides or gets help from the teacher, and then repeat it so that they don’t move on to the next topic until they’ve mastered that. So the students are not proceeding all in the same pace, but it is just a much better way to learn math such that the students don’t go on to the next topic until they’ve established a strong enough foundation on the first one.

John: During the global pandemic, most high schools moved to emergency remote instruction for an extended period, and there’s quite a bit of evidence that that led to a decline in overall learning, but also some growing achievement gaps which are tied to household wealth and the wealth of the school districts in which the students reside. What types of policies could be implemented at the K-12 level so that students are more equally prepared for entry into college

Philip: On COVID, we’ve all been exposed to online learning now, and most research suggests that it’s not a great substitute for in-person but there are certain benefits from being able to speak with a real person over a computer in regards to tutoring. So the biggest one is convenience, both for the tutor and the tutee. It’s nice to be able to jump in on a call and spend just 30 minutes on that or an hour, and not have to drive to the person’s location or do this after school. The opportunity to facilitate more tutoring, I think, is increased by having this online access. So I think there’s a lot of interesting promises from that. This one particularly interesting study that was done during COVID last summer, where a group of Italian faculty organized a volunteer tutoring experiment where they got the Deans of their respective universities to invite university students to volunteer their time, three to six hours a week to reach out and connect with students who have been struggling in the high schools and lower grades. And on the flip side, they got the school districts of several locations in Italy to ask teachers to identify students that they thought could benefit from having this one-on-one instruction. And then the response was great in both ways, there were a lot of people willing to volunteer their time for this effort, and there was also a lot of perceived need for students that needed this. And so from this large set-up, they randomized who they were able to give this offer of assistance to. And it was done all online, sometimes over the phone, but more often through Zoom, or Skype, or whatever was most convenient for the match to take place. The tutors met with tutees, for three hours a week, over six weeks. The topics were either math, Italian, or English, and then at the end, the researchers collected the survey and found similar gains to what we were finding in the online overall. Not only that, but they also collected data on mental health and found improvements in feelings of connection, more positive outlook on life. And what’s also interesting as they seem to show improvements and positive outcomes for the tutors themselves, as well. So it stands the potential for a win-win, and this was all done online. So it’s like the only online study I know, but it seems to show the potential that it might be done there. One other example I should mention is Khan Academy has also initiated another organization that facilitates free volunteer online tutoring. It’s called ‘schoolhouse.world’ and it’s been interesting to watch that trying to get up and running. Their system allows anyone in the world to volunteer their time as a tutor, and then they try to connect anyone in the world wanting to receive that tutoring. And you get some sense of some of the challenges from doing that. How do you screen for quality? And also, how do you screen for safety? So they’ve had to go away from a one to one model to more of a group model. They’ve had to have systems in place to check the quality of the tutoring, what’s being discussed. They’ve had to switch to allowing only high school students to receive the tutoring and a few other challenges. And so there’s challenges but also a lot of potential in this that wasn’t available from always having to meet your tutor in school or after school or face-to-face. So the potential scalability is enormous, and that’s where the intriguing possibilities are with that tool.

Rebecca: So if we’re looking to reduce achievement gaps, we’ve talked a little bit about COVID and the mix of instruction that students might’ve had during COVID, the quality of instruction, access to technology, to even have interactions with teachers in some cases, and historically even, differences in ability when students arrive in higher ed. What are some of the things that the higher ed community might be thinking about in terms of this research? Should we be advocating for certain kinds of policies or programs in K-12? Should we be trying to institute some of these things in higher ed? What are your thoughts on that?

Philip: So just in terms of advocacy and thinking about facilitating more equality, there’s no question that tutoring has, in general, been an unequal program. There’s the whole private sector of tutoring where a lot of households for more affluent families seem to receive it than those from less affluent households. And so one thing we can do as policy-makers is to try to facilitate more tutoring to happen in schools, especially at schools for more disadvantaged backgrounds. We can also focus on providing tutoring to those who need it most. I think that there is a growing awareness of the potential for tutoring to make a real difference in helping address the learning loss that may have occurred with the pandemic and just helping address education inequalities in general. And so a lot of resources have started going towards trying to increase the amount of tutoring happening in schools. I think that the more we understand how to implement it successfully, the more guidance that we can provide the K-12 sector in trying to introduce that. I think that there is a lot of optimism now around its potential. I think tutoring is one of the most effective programs that we can offer to make a meaningful difference at scale, such that we can get more students arriving into post-secondary ready to handle it and succeed well there. So that’s on that end. I think that there’s no reason why we also can’t consider tutoring at the post-secondary level as well, and the potential benefits that might come from that. Even if we just look at first-year calculus, or other subjects in math, computer-assisted learning is well developed even at that level, the need for tutoring at that level is there as well. And so it really does go from that importance of establishing a foundation that one might benefit from tutoring at earlier ages. But even at the post-secondary level, regardless of what level the student is, we can all benefit from one-on-one instruction compared to being in a calculus class of 500, right? I think there has been less research that’s been done in that area, but the evidence certainly points to the direction that tutoring at the post-secondary level would be also effective and important to consider.

John: And you mentioned that Italian experiment where college students were providing tutoring, and you mentioned that that was a very positive experience for the college students as well. That might be an interesting model where college students could improve their own skills and develop a bit more automaticity and more practice in basic concepts, while helping bring students up to a higher level in secondary schools. That’s a program that I think offers a lot of potential.

Philip: So I would agree, absolutely, the expression is you don’t really understand something until you teach it. I think that there’s something to be said for that. I think that there’s also a lot of skills and experience that is gained from trying to help others, from trying to connect with perhaps younger individuals that have not had the same background as you. I think that the experience is also attractive to employers looking at who to hire. I think there’s huge gains from all the things that you might volunteer or use your time for in college, spending some time to volunteer to do something like tutoring could be a very rewarding thing as well. So I’m also excited about that model. I think that there are ways to try to facilitate that kind of model at scale and more research needs to be done to explore how to do that.

Rebecca: One of the things that I heard you mentioned early on in the conversation is the idea that, historically, folks who had access to tutoring are more affluent. So the students who most need the tutoring are the ones that aren’t always getting it, because they can’t afford it. So I love the idea of having it in schools or it’s a part of our programs. But also I think sometimes tutoring has a negative connotation to it. It’s like a deficit model. Especially I’ve seen this in higher ed, students don’t want to go to a tutor because it makes them feel like they’re dumb or something.

Philip: My first reaction to that is that tutoring can be beneficial at any level. For example, in the Khoaching with Khan project that I’m looking at, the potential is to help all students in the class regardless of their level, because every student can be given their own individual roadmap. And that not only includes those that are behind grade level that benefit from establishing a stronger foundation in that earlier material so that they can catch up, it also includes those at a higher level that don’t have to be held back or wait for the instructor to cover new material can use a platform like Khan Academy or a tutor to work on more challenging material that interest them. And so how to remove that stigma that exists in general, I agree the usual perception is when someone asks, “Do you need a tutor?” it’s because you’re struggling. It doesn’t need to be that way, but at the same time, I think the more we become aware of the benefits from the tutoring, the more we realize that it’s a great resource to take advantage of. Getting back at the college level, I don’t know about your own experiences, but it always amazes me how few students take advantage of all the free tutoring that’s being offered by the universities through, like, office hours. The opportunity for receiving one-on-one discussion is often there, and yet so few students seem to take advantage of it, perhaps because of that stigma or perhaps they’re too busy. Some of us, when we went through college, were pleasantly surprised by how much you can get with office hours of graduate students and extra tutoring and how much you can learn from that process.

John: As in a lot of classes, students are treated as if one-size-fits-all education and students come in, especially in subjects such as math where there is a very rigid structure, if you don’t have a solid foundation and concepts, learning new topics is not going to be very productive, because you don’t have that foundation to connect to. And I see that in my own classes, and it’s a bit of a challenge to try to do that. Because of issues of scale I often teach large classes, I try to rely on peer instruction as much as possible with small group activities. Could small group peer interactions in working through problems and problem sets achieve something similar to the one on one attention?

Philip: In the literature, it’s called peer-to-peer, we did not look at peer-to-peer in our meta analysis on tutoring, but there is some literature and there’s some effort to consider that. It’s a little bit of a different model, because you’re relying on slightly older students or similar students to help assist other students. I think more research needs to be done on how to make that happen effectively. On one hand, the potential is there to make this a scalable, effective program that doesn’t cost very much. On the other hand, monitoring quality and the potential to train to be a tutor and to do a good job with it may not be there as much as with the regular type of tutoring program.

John: In particular, I was thinking of activities in class where students work on problems in groups, and they try to argue out solutions. They work together and they can explain to each other things they don’t understand, but the key aspect of that is they get feedback on whether they’re correct or not, some constructive feedback on where they went astray. But I was just thinking that those types of small group interactions could provide some of the benefits without that stigma of needing to go to tutoring and perhaps at a higher scale than tutoring might work.

Philip: The advice that I often give my students is to study until you feel you can explain it to someone else. And so there’s a similar, perhaps, mechanism at play when we’re thinking about that. When you try to write down a concept or explain it, even to yourself, out loud or to someone else, you quickly realize what you understand and what you don’t. There does seem to be a lot of potential there.

Rebecca: Sounds like one of the keys to reducing stigma around all of this is making the coaching or this tutoring model just something that’s normalized. Maybe it’s normalized in class, it’s normalized through the school day, and then people might be more apt to take advantage of it because they have access to it. But also, it becomes a standard way of being, that’s what other people around them are also doing.

Philip: Absolutely! I think if we can reframe tutoring as just individualized instruction or personalized instruction, then we can all understand the potential benefits of receiving more personal help than in a classroom setting, and that goes for pretty much anyone.

Rebecca: It really also matches up well with a lot of universal design for learning principles of flexibility as well, and allowing students to go at their own pace and finding ways of teaching and learning that match well for students and where they’re at.

Philip: And of course, the issue is scale. Getting children to learn in a classroom of 25 to 30 students, when these students vary enormously in academic levels, is just really difficult. And trying to figure out a way to provide that individual attention is the challenge that all teachers face and have been facing for many, many years. And if we can find a way to scale adding on or providing more and more individualized attention, it has the potential, I think, to make a real difference in education. Of all the potential policies that we can be looking at, I do think that, at the school level, leaning towards more individualized instruction is where we should be looking at, for a solution.

Rebecca: It’s so interesting to me that we’re having this conversation early on in our semester, because after teaching online for a year, which I hadn’t done previously, I’ve really worked to make my classes more flexible and actually offer some of those kinds of models that you’re describing where students are going more at their own pace, and that they can get some individualized instruction when they need it and that they need to do this mastery learning so that they build on things over time. It looks to me like maybe I need to look more into tutoring and coaching models that have worked really well to see if I can’t implement some of that more during class time.

Philip: There may be different ways to do it. Some may be more effective than others, but I do think, getting back at what John was saying, it’s harder to provide that individual support or help to students arriving in college without that foundation. I have done some other work at the college level, trying to facilitate more personal attention to students arriving, trying to help them out and encourage them to get into better habits, and it has proved quite difficult to change behavior, and so I have found myself reacting to that by focusing more on earlier grades to see if there might be more promise on trying to foster better study habits, better learning habits, earlier on with the hope that students arrive in college more prepared.

John: I think that’s one of the things a lot of behavioral economic studies have found. Interventions that result in long-term changes of behavior are challenging in general.

Philip: Absolutely.

John: And I think you’ve done some research on that.

Philip: Absolutely. So if we have to change one-time actions, like helping students through applying for college, applying for financial aid, those types of interventions are much more promising at affecting one-time goals than to change habits or routines that involve much more continuous behavior. So helping someone study more effectively, spend more time studying, these are much harder problems to solve. And maybe low-cost nudges that we’ve been looking at in the literature may not be as effective. I think that does tie back into how my perspective has changed over time. It’s hard to have significant influence without personal connection. It’s a lot more expensive, but there’s only so far you can go with sending an email or a text message or a one-time meeting in trying to change someone’s learning trajectory or life trajectory. And the more you sort of look at education policies that have been successful, the more you notice that they often come with this personal connection that’s been important for making that meaningful change.

Rebecca: It seems like we should all be really advocating then for these much more early interventions. It’s much more cost effective if we get those habits in place really early [LAUGHTER].

Philip: I will say there’s surprisingly not enough research on the long-term effects of tutoring. I’ve seen one study that has found that the benefits of receiving that tutoring continued one year past the program ended; the effects faded, but not by that much, and that’s the only study I’m aware of that actually does a long-term study. So on the question of whether we can have these life-changing impacts from targeting earlier ages, certainly, there’s a literature for the very young… like, almost helping at the household, but at the school, I think that more work could be done.

John: And that could be a really productive research area. Before we started recording, we were talking a little bit about, with the pandemic, creating our own videos. Could you talk a little bit about how you try to implement what you’ve learned in your own classes at the college level?

Philip: Yeah, I think that using the situation last year to put my lectures online has freed up space in the actual lectures to be more interactive. So I think it was a benefit both ways. The videos of the lectures themselves became more streamlined, I got a chance to break them up into smaller parts, sort of like Khan Academy videos, where instead of one video that’s two hours long, that goes all over the place, and you’re staring at me and the Blackboard, I created five- to ten-minute videos of vignettes that I could focus on with slides and have a series of these videos that students could watch at their own pace. I could edit them and make sure that the video is as succinct as possible and gets across what I really want to say. So that was good on the video side, and then on the actual lecture side, we spent that time going through problem sets and answering questions and it was much more interactive, closer to the spirit of more personalized instruction. So there was more opportunity for questions, more opportunities for the students to get more involved, and I think it did lead to more satisfaction of that approach. Obviously, the big question is, ‘Do they really watch the videos when they’re asked to do it on their own?’ I think there are ways to try to incentivize that, but just like any class, the students really perk up when they’re working on a problem that was, say, a previous exam question.

John: I’ve used a very similar approach. I’ve used videos for like 20 some years in my classes, but one thing I started doing last year is I embedded questions in the middle of the videos, and that’s a pretty effective incentive structure. It does get them all watching the videos, and at least thinking about it and trying to make some connections while they do it, and that’s worked pretty well.

Philip: Not only that, but you can make them mandatory for class participation. So you stick those questions in and they have to watch the video to find the questions when they pop up, there’s software that can do that. And then you can make it as a way to encourage them to have to watch the video.

John: Do you think that more use of computer-aided instruction is going to be helpful in allowing more students to be successful?

Philip: I’m very optimistic on this potential of leveraging computers with teachers and parents working together on trying to facilitate high-dosage practice. We’ve been talking mostly in math, but it could also be language as well, and maybe other topics. But I think this really is a good way to learn, as long as the practice time is long enough, and the student’s not stuck. I think that it takes a while to get into the habit, getting used to the software, getting used to the routine, both for the teacher providing this and for the student doing it, and so that, for me, right now, is the biggest challenge. I am optimistic that if we can facilitate a way to help teachers and students get to that higher-dose practice using computers, then very good things will happen. I think that the evidence is highly suggestive that the high dosage is a worthwhile thing to get done. I’m hoping that we can generate evidence that that’s the case, but we are finding that there are challenges because there’s a learning curve, it is changing the way that the classroom is done and changing the way the student usually learns, but I’m optimistic that if we can get past that, the students and the teachers will come to like this approach, and that we can do more of it at scale.

John: And I think a lot of people began experimenting with some sort of a flipped approach where they created videos and then use the classroom for more interactive activities, ast least at the college level, I don’t think that’s happened quite as much at the secondary school level. But I think that has helped provide at least some professional development for faculty. But it is an adjustment that students are not adjusting to perhaps as easily as I would like, I know I always have trouble getting across to students that there is some benefit of working through problems in class and watching videos and learning some of the basic concepts outside of class. Students would rather be lectured to, there was that big study that was done at Harvard not too long ago, where students were asked about active learning classes versus lecture classes, and the research certainly showed that active learning in the classroom led to significant learning gains, but students perceived a higher learning gain from lecture classes, and that’s where I think that issue of students’ adjustment is a challenge, and until we get to see a large amount of this occurring, it’s going to be a while convincing students of this, because it’s really easy to sit there in a lecture and nod and smile and have it all make sense and it seems to fit together very logically, but then when you try to apply it, there’s a bit of a problem, and then the questions are somehow unfair. But when students are faced with problems and interactive work in class, they’re confronted by not knowing things as well as perhaps they thought they did, and it’s not as pleasant of an experience. And I think that’s the source of that metacognition, that students perceive that lectures are more effective, because it’s easy to sit there and listen in, and it all seems reasonable. But the problem is when they try to work through problems and realize they don’t quite have those connections fully there yet.

Philip: The lecture seems to make so much sense until you sit down when you get home and try to go over it again, but I do think there’s the potential for this middle ground that even in the experiment we’re looking at, we’re not entirely flipping the class, in fact, we want to work with the teacher to understand what their own preferences are, while still trying to hit this high dosage of practice, which may occur in class, but also could occur at home as well. And I think that there is something to be said by having a lecture of a new topic being done in class, in person, with the real person. It gets back to that importance of personal connection that the computer is not able to provide. And so maybe there is a sweet spot around providing real instruction, real empathy, but also enough time to be working through these problems at your own pace. My vision for the Khan project is that students say, in grade four, getting 90 minutes of math a day, maybe half an hour of that would be the teacher’s own instruction of a new topic, but then a lot of the other time would be students working on their own devices, while the teacher takes the time… instead of just sitting up at their desk… walks around and spends a lot of time looking over the student’s shoulder, using the data that they’re seeing to understand who’s struggling and where, and spends a lot of time working individually while the student is using the computer. So there’s still that interaction going on and taking advantage of the personalization. I think they too can go really well together.

Rebecca: That’s definitely something I’ve been experimenting with. I went all the way flipped before, and right now I think I’m right in the middle. There’s some flipped, there’s some demos that are live so that people can interact and ask questions, and then there’s lots of practice with individualized attention. And it does take a little time to get everyone on board, to get everyone trained to do things in a new way. So in a 15-week semester, it might take two full weeks to develop new habits and workflows for everyone, but really after we get over that two- week hurdle at the beginning of the semester, my classes tend to settle into a routine that seems really productive and that students have been pretty positive about.

Philip: A key feature of the coaching with Khan program, is that every teacher gets their own coach that we spell with a “kh,” and our coaches meet with the teacher prior to school to go over our suggested recipe to follow, but then they don’t just leave it at that, they keep working with the teachers to check in and try to troubleshoot or brainstorm or reassure and remind the teacher until things are going smoothly. But it can take longer than two weeks to figure out how things are going, and then on the student side, it can take a while for them to adapt and understand that there’s some independence on their own for wanting to do it. The hope is that the students start to gain confidence when they see their own progress, when they see that maybe they didn’t consider themselves a strong math student, but if you start them at the right spot on this roadmap, and then they proceed incrementally, and they can see that they are advancing, then they start to understand the potential benefits and internalize the desire to keep going on their own.

Rebecca: Yeah, that autonomy and that empowerment, I think, is really key to the whole puzzle. And I think something that probably tutoring historically helps students achieve is that they can do this. They might have a little extra guidance initially, but then they achieve it and can do it, and that’s really empowering.

John: That’s our hope

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Philip: What’s next? I think I made some notes on that. [LAUGHTER] So I think the issue around tutoring and individualized learning is all about, now, scale. I don’t think we need another study to demonstrate that one-on-one instruction, or one-on-two is an effective additional tool for learning, that more should be done if it were possible. A lot of resources are now going into trying to provide individualized instruction. I think a lot of policymakers and governments are looking to tutoring as a way to address some of the learning loss that may have gone on during the pandemic, and I think, in that space, there’s some optimism by researchers and policymakers to try to understand what types of scale up are better than others in a way that we can make a meaningful difference at the aggregate level.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much. I’m really excited to hear more as your research develops and more information becomes available!

Philip: It was a pleasure to get a chance to chat with you guys. It’s a topic I’ve been spending a lot of time on and losing a bit of sleep on trying to get things to work. The experiment that we have going on, this is going on in Texas, and one of the challenges of doing a field experiment is that so many things go wrong while you’re trying to deal with real people, real students, and provide evidence that this is a good idea. And it’s always a bit frustrating to face these challenges, like just account issues, students have trouble getting on to Khan Academy and the teachers getting frustrated, and it would be a shame to have those issues that can be worked out actually create this wedge from the program going smoothly and making the difference between having these great impacts or not. So it is stressful, but I think it’s worth it to try to keep at it, and I hope to be able to do so. With funding and policy support we’ll just keep trying. I think there’s a lot of interest in it, I think that it hasn’t been difficult to motivate these ideas and wanting to do more on it. So thanks a lot for giving me the chance to share these thoughts.

John: Your work is incredibly important. And so much income inequality is associated with differences in educational attainment, that understanding these achievement gaps and what we can do to narrow them can have a really dramatic impact on society.

Philip: Fingers crossed!

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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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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197. Humanized Teaching

Looking to the future as an instructor in higher education can seem daunting, especially as we plan for a more equitable future.  In this episode, Jesse Stommel joins us to discuss some of those challenges, search for hope, and discuss ways forward that are ethical, humane and flexible. Jesse is the Executive Director of the Hybrid Pedagogy nonprofit organization, and organization he founded in 2011. He is also the founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab. Jesse recently served as the Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. He is the co-author,  with Sean Michael Morris, of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, and, with Dorothy Kim, co-editor of Disrupting the Digital Humanities.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Looking to the future as an instructor in higher education can seem daunting, especially as we plan for a more equitable future. In this episode, we discuss some of those challenges, search for hope, and discuss ways forward that are ethical, humane and flexible.

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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 Jesse Stommel. Jesse is the Executive Director of the Hybrid Pedagogy nonprofit organization, an organization he founded in 2011. He is also the founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab. Jesse recently served as the Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. He is a co-author, with Sean Michael Morris of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, and with Dorothy Kim, the co-editor of Disrupting the Digital Humanities. Welcome, Jesse.

Jesse: Hi, it’s good to be with you all. Looking forward to our chat.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Jesse: I’m actually drinking peach honey sparkling water. It’s sort of tea infused.

Rebecca: Okay, that’s good. That counts. Also, it sounds really good. [LAUGHTER]

John: I have ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: …and I have a decaf Assam.

Jesse: I feel jealous of both of your teas.

Rebecca: It’s sad that we don’t have you in person in our office where we have a giant selection that you could choose from, we’ll send you a picture so you know what you missed out on. [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: Well, we’ll have to do that in the future.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

John: They’re slightly aged teas compared to when we last saw them about a year and a few months back, but they are there and some of them we’ll probably have to dispose of. [LAUGHTER] You’ve been a really important voice on behalf of inclusive teaching and very vocal on topics like trauma-infused pedagogy, designing with care in mind, ungrading, and equity more generally. What does it mean to be an ethical instructor as we approach the fall, still amidst the last stages of a pandemic?

Jesse: I wrote a piece with Sara Goldrick-Rab a few years ago, and for folks who don’t know, Sara Goldrick-Rab is an expert in higher education policy, particularly focusing on food and housing insecurity. And she and I wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Teaching the Students We Have, Not the Students We Wish We Had.” And ultimately, the thing that that piece charged me to do, and I’ve been working with Sara for, I think, close to eight years now and her work and the research that she’s done has really put a kind of specificity to my work on inclusive pedagogies and critical pedagogies that has charged me to think really carefully about how the material circumstances of our students affect their learning experience, and also how the material circumstances of teachers affect their teaching experience. And so if I think about how we begin to move back into classrooms, to find our way back to our institutions, to find our way back to the collaborations and colleagues we may have worked really closely with, I think that the key is for us to do really deep work thinking about who are our students? What do they need to be successful? How have they been affected by the last 18 months? And to do that same work with ourselves and our colleagues. Ask ourselves: who are we as teachers? What do we need to be successful? And I think institutions have a charge that they have to be really careful about how they quote unquote, pivot back to business as usual. I don’t think there’s a neat and tidy pivot back. And I don’t think business as usual is the appropriate place for us to turn to at this moment. So for institutions to ask hard questions of themselves, interrogate the things that they may have done to exclude many of the people who found themselves struggling during the pandemic, the things they did to exclude those students and faculty members well before the pandemic, to assure that they don’t continue the kind of exclusive practices that I’ve seen so many institutions coming to grips with in the last 18 months.

Rebecca: I really appreciate the focus that you’ve put on both students and also caring about colleagues and making sure that we’re being reciprocal in thinking about each other as humans and not just robots that we work with or something. In this conversation of getting back to campuses in the fall, what can we do to continue to humanize this practice with our colleagues too, that you just kind of focused a little bit on students, but what does this mean when we’re thinking about our colleagues and our relationships with our colleagues,

Jesse: I’ve been at several institutions that were struggling. So many of the people listening have found themselves at institutions that were struggling, I feel like the whole of public education is struggling at the current moment, but I’ve had some very specific circumstances at the last few institutions where I worked. About 10 years ago, I worked at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon, and Marylhurst University ended up closing down because of financial insecurity. And I was there a few years before they closed down and sort of dealing with the environment and watching the writing on the wall get darker and darker. After that, I went to University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the Governor, Scott Walker, obliterated tenure across the system, taking one of the best public education state systems in our country and making it a mockery. And his decision had a rippling impact across the entire institution. And what I found in both of those situations was that in situations of precarity, situations of financial austerity… and in many cases, those are manufactured, and they’re manufactured, especially in the case of Scott Walker, for very particular political reasons. In situations of austerity and precarity, people start to turn on each other, the sort of fabric of the community that existed prior to those moments that I found myself in at those institutions, I watched it erode and it eroded very quickly. And so the importance of being kind to one another, the importance of supporting each other, supporting our students, certainly, but also supporting our colleagues, and the importance of administrations focusing their efforts not on finding a new contract to a remote proctoring solution, which will do harm to all of the students and all of the teachers at the institution, but to focus their investment and their energy on finding ways to support the community that beats at the heart of the institution. That’s ultimately what we have to do. And it’s so important right now, because I saw over the last 18 months, the same thing starting to happen at a lot of institutions. I saw institutions beginning to create cultures that were inhospitable to the kinds of work that we really want to do in education.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that comes up in addition to food insecurity and housing insecurity with our students is that during the pandemic it became visible, I think, for some folks, that part-time faculty, adjunct faculty, also have some of those insecurities that we often just don’t address or think about. How do you see us, as a larger higher education community starting to support those faculty more and really addressing those insecurities? What can we do?

Jesse: I think there’s an easy answer… that we should all commit to having a permanent full-time academic workforce at all of our institutions. And the truth is that when you look at what the expenses are of our institutions, there are ways to cut costs. Imagine an institution that has just spent $500,000, or if you’re the State of Illinois, just spent $23 million on a multi-year contract with a remote proctoring solution. Think about all of that money, and how many adjunct or precarious faculty that money could support. If you think about the pedagogical benefits of making faculty full-time non-precarious, versus the pedagogical deficit that gets created by creating a culture of suspicion at our institutions, there is money being spent on things doing harm to students that could be easily re channeled towards something like certainly student support, supporting students basic needs, or supporting the basic needs of faculty who are struggling. I think that there is a need right now for us to be really honest about how money is getting spent at institutions and how that money signals what our institutions value and what our institutions don’t value. It is quite clear, across the entirety of higher education, that the vast majority of our institutions do not support teachers or the work of teaching. And that is quite clear via the mass adjunctification across our institutions, as well as the failure to properly invest in the preparation of teachers or pedagogical support for teachers. And that didn’t change in the pandemic. I have not seen a huge amount of money suddenly getting funneled into faculty development and support… at most institutions, anyway.

Rebecca: I think many of the things that we’re talking about right now are all things that were happening before the pandemic, they just became more visible to some people during the pandemic.

Jesse: Yeah, and you mentioned food and housing insecurity, and then alluded to other struggles that people were having… mental health issues… certainly, we are all experiencing acute mental health issues because of the last 18 months. But there are so many people who were experiencing acute and chronic mental health issues prior to the pandemic that weren’t getting properly addressed. And if you also think about disabled students and faculty, and the ways that their needs were not being met prior to the pandemic. We figured out how to do remote work and remote teaching in the midst of the pandemic, or we figured out how to do it as best as each individual institution might have done, which is… your mileage may vary, I guess. [LAUGHTER] But, the truth is that there are so many faculty and students who are disabled in various ways who needed that kind of support well before the pandemic.

John: On a positive note, though, didn’t the pandemic help make some of these issues much more clear to faculty and administrators, when they saw the problems that students had in continuing and when they recognize the need to provide support for faculty who didn’t have computer access at home to even connect with their students remotely? Might that perhaps help lead to a change in mindset?

Jesse: On my Twitter bio, I am called an irascible optimist. That was a moniker given to me by Sean Michael Morris. And when he said that I thought: “That is indeed me.” And I’ve worn that moniker ever since he gave it to me, irascible optimist. I’ll be honest that I have been less optimistic in the last 18 years. And I recognize I’m being less optimistic in this initial start to this conversation than I would have been if we had talked two years ago. And part of that is because of what I have seen over the last 18 months, and the deep, deep struggles that I’ve seen so many of my students having, and so many of my colleagues having, and also the failures of so many state governments, the federal government, and institutions to really figure out what to do and how to handle this particular moment. So if I think about what we’ve learned, is that we’ve learned to listen to our gut, we’ve learned to acknowledge the things that we were already seeing. It’s not like suddenly we saw new things over the last 18 months, we were already seeing them. And so we learned that we actually have to take action. One of the sad things and this is going to keep us maybe on the pessimistic place for just a few more minutes, is that I worry that so many institutions came to grips with these things, because these things started to hit them in their pocketbook. And I hate that that was the reason that many institutions started to solve these issues. On the other hand, what I will say is that the kinds of conversations that I’ve had with fellow teachers over the last 18 months have felt incredible. I have felt more connected, even if my work has been harder than it ever has been. I have felt more connected to that work and more deeply connected to the colleagues that I work with. And I have found new connections, because I have seen so many individual teachers struggling and working so hard to help meet the needs of our present moment.

John: And I’m still fairly optimistic because of that. A lot of faculty were able to avoid some of those issues, even though they may have been generally aware of some of the challenges our students face. When they interacted with them in the classroom it wasn’t quite as clear as when they were hearing from students who were dealing with problems of just being at their class because they had work commitments or because they had other responsibilities. And they had network issues because they didn’t have stable network connections, or they were using a laptop that was 10 years old, and it wouldn’t work consistently. And I think faculty in general have become much more aware of the challenges of our students. I’m hopeful, at least, that that’s not going to disappear. And that that could help lead to more consistent support of students once we do return to whatever the new normal happens to be as we move back to more campus instruction.

Rebecca: I’m really hoping that faculty, given this kind of acknowledgement of a wide variety of struggles, will really work together and push administrators and push universities and push systems to change. Because if we don’t speak up together in a unified way, it’s not gonna happen.

Jesse: Yeah, Paulo Freire and bell hooks both talk about what they describe as critical hope… that hope is an action that we take not a passive state, that hope is a work… that hope is struggle. And just that idea that hope isn’t passive, we don’t sit back and wait and hope. Instead, we take the action of hope. And Maxine Greene, also a critical pedagogue, talks about imagining the world as though it could be otherwise. And so her word there is “imagination.” Again, something active, imagining the world as though it could be otherwise requires us to recognize our agency and how we can have a positive impact and a positive effect. And so pushing back where we can, drawing students into these conversations where we are able, insisting that student voices be centered in these conversations, these are things that we can do and that will have a necessarily good impact, even when we’re precarious and where we feel like our job might be at risk, there are still actions that we can take, and it’s a matter of figuring out how do I engage in the work of hope or the work of imagination.

Rebecca: See, we got to a more positive place. [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: Just give us a few minutes. [LAUGHTER]

John: One of the things you’re really known for is your work on ungrading and creating an environment that’s more conducive to learning. Could you just talk a little bit about that?

Jesse: So I’ll just say that I have been quote, unquote, ungrading for 21 years, it’s a practice that I started my first semester of teaching. And it’s a practice that has grown and changed over time. But, I often say that I have never put a grade on a piece of student work in my career. The truth is that that’s not exactly true, because I love co-teaching and when you co-teach you negotiate a pedagogy with your co-teacher, and so I have put grades on individual students’ work but it was always a discussion and a sort of process that I came to with another teacher. The interesting thing is that I’ve been doing this work as part of my practice for 21 years, but I didn’t start talking about it publicly. I mean, beyond just having conversations about it publicly. I didn’t start publicly writing about it, giving keynotes about it, etc., until 2017. So four years ago that I really started writing publicly about this. Ungrading was a word that I had used, but it wasn’t something that an entire way of my pedagogical thought was centered around. So it has been interesting to watch the transition in me as I’ve moved towards talking about this more publicly. And I’ll tell you the reasons I didn’t talk about it publicly. I was a road warrior adjunct for about nine years of my teaching, teaching at up to four institutions, nine classes a term, dealing with the rules and restrictions at four different institutions. And I also felt like my pedagogical approach to grading felt like something between me and the students I was working with. It was no one else’s business. It was a conversation I had with them. And I felt like I wanted to protect that space for students and me to work through that together. The reason that I changed my thinking and started writing more publicly is because, over the last 20 years, I’ve watched education become increasingly quantitative and watched the reliance on learning management systems, which turn students into rows in a spreadsheet and their work into columns in a spreadsheet. I’ve watched institutions grade and evaluate their teachers in increasingly quantifiable ways. And then I’ve watched, obviously, the turn towards algorithms and the Internet of Things and weird tools like plagiarism detection software that again, feels like it reduces us to cogs, and reduces our work to bits, ones and zeros. And so I felt the need to create a larger conversation and dialogue on this because increasingly, I recognize that grades were the biggest thorn in the side of critical pedagogy and the biggest thorn in the side of my pedagogy. And so many people felt like we’re increasingly struggling with grades as the thing that got in the way of them creating productive relationships with students. And ultimately, when I started writing about it, I was amazed at the response. And to some degree, I feel like there were so many people that had hit that wall, and that we’re feeling that increased quantification over many, many years, almost like frogs boiling in a pot of water. And the other amazing thing was how much conversations with the larger community of teachers, a larger community of students, helped continue to evolve and change my practice. I guess one of the other reasons I started writing and talking about it more publicly was because I needed a push. I needed students and colleagues to ask me to work even harder to ask even harder questions of myself. And the last thing I’ll say is that ungrading is just a word. The one thing I can’t stand about the word ungrading is it tries to take a huge variety of practices that push back on traditional grading, and tries to lump them into one word as though there is upgrading tm, you know, the thing Jesse invented and that you can buy from him for $19.99, [LAUGHTER] three payments, and that he’ll deliver it to you and it will be a stack of 20 best practices that if you implement will change your life and make your relationships with students better. And that’s just not the way pedagogy works. That’s not the way teaching works. And that’s certainly not the way something as complex as assessment works. And so ultimately, this has to be an ongoing dialogue, conversation between teachers, between teachers and students. And what works for one teacher in one context with one group of students won’t necessarily work neat and tidily for another.

John: You mentioned that your practice has evolved in some way. Could you talk a little bit about how your practices involving… I don’t want to say ungrading again… [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: No, I did help coin the term.

John: Ok.

Jesse: So I’m all right with us using the word “ungrading.” I think it is good for us to have a word for us to rally these conversations around because we need the energy and the catalyzing force that that term has caused, and so it’s useful and productive in that way. So I’ve done self evaluation, asking students to write process letters, to analyze their own learning, to reflect on their own learning. I’ve asked them to reflect on group and peer learning. And I’ve asked them to grade themselves. And over the course of my career, I almost always give students the grade they give themselves. For the most part, when I change a grade, it’s to raise the grade, especially in situations where I feel like bias has influenced the grades. The thing is bias, even self-internalized bias, affects how we review and evaluate our performance. And the thing that I’ve changed most about is I’ve started to get this nagging feeling that when I have students self evaluate and self grading that I’m taking everything that I don’t like about grades, everything that the research shows is ineffective about grades, everything that is emotionally harmful about grades and giving grades, and taking that and kind of passing the buck on to students. And so my project in ungrading, or my project in my own assessment practice, has always been to turn grades over on their back and inspect them and ask hard questions of them and wonder at them and raise our eyebrows at them so that we feel like we have more agents within a quantified system like we work in. And I don’t think I can necessarily do that by just taking all the problems of grades and passing that over to students. So I’ve started to rethink how I ask students to do that work of grading themselves. One of the things that I found is, over so many years, giving A, A-, B, B+, B, B- is that when students went to grade themselves, they would give themselves something like, “Oh, it’s either an A plus, or an A minus, or it’s a B plus.” And they would quibble these tiny details, which that kind of evidence suggests to me that I had passed the anxiety of grades and quantification on to them. And so recently, in the last two years, I’ve removed A minuses and pluses from the approach that I use, I tell students just round up. And it’s interesting, because the second that I did, that students stopped quibbling the tiny details, and this is really drawn from some writing by Peter Elbow, where he writes specifically about minimal grading, which taking 100 point scale or 1000 point scale and reducing it to a 10 point scale, or a five point scale, or a three, two, one point scale. And the more we reduce it, the more clear it becomes, and the more it communicates, and the more effective it is as an assessment tool. And so giving students less gradations to quibble about. But on the other hand, I also recognize that these are decisions that I’m making, that I still have power in the classroom and trying to think about an inspect my own power and privilege in the classroom and how I can begin to at least dismantle that, not to remove it, because I think classrooms need strong leaders, but at least to dismantle it enough that I’m leaving space for students to sort of carve out their own space within their educations.

Rebecca: Seems to me that a lot of the ungrading work is really tied to this idea of flexibility that you’ve talked about pretty frequently: being flexible as a teacher and offering options, but it’s also in popular in frameworks, like UDL. But I also know that the idea of providing flexibility can cause a lot of anxiety to a faculty member in trying to figure out how to do that and make it manageable and make it sustainable. Can you share some ideas about making that a sustainable practice and also what you mean by flexible options for students.

Jesse: So the interesting thing is flexible does become more complicated. If we are engaging in the work of teaching as a form of policing student learning, or even not policing, just monitoring, even, monitoring student learning, or collecting or gathering student learning or gathering evidence for student learning. The second that we as teachers move away from that role of feeling like we are the evaluators, we are meant to rank students, we’re there to police their learning, we’re there to ensure compliance…. which honestly, even good teachers, so much of that is baked into just how our system is structured, that we do it without even realizing that we’re doing it… even the structure and shape of a syllabus has so much of that baked into it. I think that flexibility becomes a lot easier when you hand that over to the students. So people often say, “Oh, well, you let your students do five different things for an assignment or you let them just pick something… anything?” And I say, “Well, I don’t let them I invite them to do that, first of all.” Second of al, “Well, then how do you manage all the different things you get at different times?” I say, “Well, I don’t consider myself the primary audience for student work, I create a space in my course where they can share this work with one another. And they can give one another feedback.” And then, “Well gosh, how do you deal with all of the requests that you might get?” I don’t ask my students to ask permission. I invite them to modify, remix, to take advantage of flexibility. So in other words, the more that I remove my bureaucratic burden, the more flexibility becomes super easy because if a student says to me, “Well, can I” I can say, “of course you can. I invite you to change, remix,” in some ways, I don’t even have to do the work of considering the request. Because the request isn’t necessary to the relationship. I’m sort of there to offer feedback to students, and to be surprised and to marvel at whatever it is that they end up doing for the course. The other thing that we often do is we think that our role is to rank students against one another. That’s one of the reasons why I can’t stand rubrics, because I feel like the entire structure of a rubric is set up to put student work into neat and tidy boxes. And when we do that, we essentially are ranking students against one another. And so if one student does something that is just in a completely different universe from another, how do you assure that they both earned the A ? Well, ultimately, if you just remove the idea that our work is to compare students to one another. One student does a traditional academic paper and the other gives you a piece of installation art that moves around campus and that you can’t even quite make sense of it. You don’t have to hold them up and say, “Well, how do I really justify giving that piece of performance art an A?” You take it on its own merit, and you recognize what it is, and you marvel at it. And you allow yourself to be surprised by it. The more flexible I am, the more fun teaching ends up being, people often when I say things like that think, “Oh, your classes, just chaos.” And actually, no, I’m a pretty type A person. I’m pretty OCD, I actually structure a really neat and tidy syllabus, the structure of my course, is very organized, partly because I sort of subscribe to improvisation within a frame, which I take from jazz music, but I don’t know much about jazz. So feel free to tell me if I’ve interpreted that completely wrongly. But this idea that we need a frame and a structure in order to improvise within it. And so you set up the sort of guardrails for students, to some extent their boundaries, but it’s more like their guardrails, you set them up so that students feel like they can experiment within the space of the classroom. And then, to some extent, it allows you and gives you the freedom to play without worrying if you’re just going to go completely off the deep end,

John: You mentioned being surprised by some of the things your students have come up with as ways of demonstrating their learning. Could you give us just a few examples of some of the more interesting projects your students have selected?

Jesse: I kind of alluded to it in our last conversation. But this was at University of Mary Washington, and the assignment was to reinvent, rebuild the internet. And the assignment had a very short prompt that gave space for students to interpret the instructions in so many different ways. And the answer to this assignment for a group of students was to create a pile of trash. And that pile of trash had multicolored bits of crumpled paper in it. And it was a piece of installation art that migrated around campus. And they took pictures of it in different locations around campus. And then at one point it showed up in our classroom, and they wrote an artist statement that talked about the detritus of the web, the deep and dark web and all the bits you can see and the bits you can’t see. And that was marvelous. The sort of meat of the project was how captivating and how just seeing this thing, and wondering at how this fit as an interpretation of the assignment. I often come into class, and when I’ve just picked something like a reading or designed an assignment, and I’ve kind of done it instinctually maybe it’s because I’m doing that reading for the first time, I’ll often go into class, and I’ll say, “Why did I choose this reading?” And I mean that honestly, it’s not a rhetorical question. It’s like, this is the first time I’ve taught this and I’m trying to figure out whether it fits and how it fits. And so ultimately, that’s what this group of students’ project did for me, is it forced me to ask myself, “Well, gosh, what is this course even about?” And to me, that project managed to get at the biggest question of the course, which is, what are we even doing here? Why are we talking about the internet, and for me, that was marvelous. On the other hand, another teacher might look at this pile of trash and say, “Hey, that’s just a pile of trash.” And so there’s something idiosyncratic about how we engage with student work. I’ve also read really, really good academic papers. And so even some of those have surprised me, in part because sometimes it’s that punctum in an academic paper where the academic paper is just going along, going through the motions of a traditional academic paper, and then it just veers. And then you have this moment like Roland Barthe’s punctum where all you can see, you almost have it burned into your retina, this sort of moment of friction within the work. And truthfully, those are the most interesting parts of education in general, is the parts where we do something that we weren’t expecting, or where students turn something in that we never would have imagined for a particular assignment.

Rebecca: One of the things that sometimes comes up with flexibilities not just the trepidation of a faculty member, but also of students. When there’s a lot of options available, students sometimes can freeze and not know what to do. You mentioned the guardrails. So how do those function? Or how do you make sure that those students that are overwhelmed by choice feel included?

Jesse: One thing is to have very clear parameters, and I tend to have really short provocations for students… let’s call them provocations instead of assignments, because even the idea of assignment suggests a transactional relationship between a teacher and students, I still haven’t found quite the right word, invitation doesn’t feel strong enough, but maybe provocation is what it is. So I try and be very, very clear to have very explicit instructions. And also to have them very short. I find that so often, we create assignment sheets that end up being longer than the papers themselves. I’ve seen two-page responses that have an assignment sheet that’s three or four pages describing what students should do and their two page response paper. And I think partly we do that because we’re anxious about the questions that we’ll get, and we’re anxious about students falling through the cracks. When what happens is the more words that we put in our assignments, or provocations, whatever you want to call them…. I think I’ll, for the purposes here, I’ll keep calling them assignments. I think that’s fine. We fill our assignments up with language that’s all there, in some ways defensively, but every single word we put in there is a pothole that a student might fall into. It’s a rabbit hole a student might fall down. And I find that the shorter my assignment descriptions are, the less questions I get, the longer they are, the more questions they get. And people just think, well, if I just answer all the questions in advance that I won’t get any questions. And that isn’t how it ends up working out, because students are really worried about what our expectations are. And I think we have to break that down. And the reason that a student feels overwhelmed by choice is because they’re worried about meeting our expectations. And so we have to make sure that, in our language, we make clear, this isn’t about my expectations, it’s about what you expect of yourself. And here’s the thing I don’t necessarily know that works if we’re using traditional grading systems, because ultimately, if you’re putting a grade on a thing, your expectations are what matters. But if you’re giving over some, or even all of that work to students, it starts to break down this idea. They recognize, “Oh, he’s not grading this anyway. So this really is about my expectations.” And if, when I engage with the work rather than approving of it or disapproving of it, instead, I encounter it the way a reader would, by having a reaction to it and telling students what my reaction is. And then I encourage students to do that for each other. Peter Elbow talks about ranking, evaluating and liking… ranking being the thing that we shouldn’t do, we shouldn’t rank students against one another, evaluating being a thing that still has a place because certainly there are times when students do need some amount of evaluation from an external mentor, I think those moments are much fewer than we end up doing. And then he talks about liking, which is just giving ourselves space to appreciate student work, to not have to evaluate it, to just enjoy it, and to respond to it and to be an expert reader for students.

John: Could you elaborate on that notion of being an expert reader for students? What sort of feedback do you provide them as an expert reader?

Jesse: Well, I think one of the things is that so much of our so many of our traditional grading systems call for us to be objective. And we can probably have a whole other podcast around objectivity versus subjectivity and whether they’re even possible. There’s a lot of research that shows the idea of objective grading is just a fallacy to begin with. But I think that it’s about allowing ourselves to have a subjective response, allowing ourselves to bring our full humanity to that moment of engaging with student work, to laugh at it, to wonder at it, to marvel at it, to be silent, to be struck silent, to raise our eyebrows at it, to ask hard questions of it. And so what that might actually look like with a group of students is letting them see me puzzling over it, letting them see me just work through my thinking about what I’m seeing. And so oftentimes, I have students do sort of expos in class where they bring all of their work and they just lay it out, whether it’s a paper, whether it’s a pile of trash, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a documentary, they lay their work out, and we just hang out together and go around and look at each other’s work. And what I sort of see my role there is just to model what it looks like to appreciate the efforts that they’ve made and to encounter their work and talk about my experience of it, as opposed to saying, “Oh, you did this? Well, this needs improvement.” …to sort of hold back that this needs improvement, because there are moments when that’s really important, but then other moments where it isn’t. For example, I taught first-year writing for a long time, and in first-year college writing, it’s not getting to success, it’s about just getting comfortable writing, just getting comfortable in your skin as a writer. And that means not a lot of that kind of evaluative feedback, it means more just here’s what happens to me when I encounter your words.

Rebecca: Some of what we’ve been talking about with this flexibility and ungrading is really starting to get a sense that individual students and members of a learning community really being members and belonging to that community. Can you elaborate on ways in addition to this flexibility idea that might help students from a wide variety of backgrounds feel like they belong, especially those that we saw during the pandemic and we know they existed before that, really struggling or having barriers and helping them really feel like “You really do belong here. You really should be here. We want you here.”

Jesse: I think that we do that from the very beginning and how we structure education at so many of our institutions, the reliance on the idea of seat time. classes that meet two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday for a set amount of hours, classes that meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday, really bizarre ways of thinking about hybrid learning or online learning where there’s too much of a reliance on synchronous engagement. Ultimately, when we make those kinds of decisions with how we structure education at our institutions, we’re telling whole swaths of students: “This isn’t built for you, this isn’t made for you.” And increasingly people talk about adult learners. Well, at the college level, all of our students are adult learners. And increasingly, the vast majority of them are working adult learners. And we’re not doing enough to structure education so that it acknowledges their experience. I had a student who was disabled, he had chronic migraines. And, luckily, at the time I worked at an institution where I was developing a new hybrid degree program. And I had in a sense developed the program not just for him, but for all of the students I was working with, who were like him in various ways, who had no access to education, without serious rethinking about how we build our curriculum. So thinking about when we move online, relying increasingly on asynchronous ways for students to engage asynchronously, because most of the students who turn to online need more flexibility, their time is not their own in many cases. And when we’re designing degree programs, rethinking things like the 15-week semester, rethinking things like seat time, rethinking things like classes that meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday for 50 minutes over the course of a 15-week period. Honestly, I increasingly think that’s absurd. What a weird structure…50 minutes three times a week, how is where a student is at on Monday any different than where they’re at on Wednesday, is 15 minutes really enough time for us to develop the kinds of thinking that we’re trying to get at in our courses. Ultimately, I think, just asking ourselves, are we continuing to teach students in the way that we are just because this is the way we have always done it? Or is this actually what will help students learn and give space for students to learn? Also, if we go back to those adjuncts, when I was a road warrior adjunct trying to teach a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class that met for 50 minutes, that was 45 minutes from my house, trying to fit that into my schedule with my other eight classes, was nearly impossible. What I needed more than anything was not just one approach, I needed to be able to teach one course asynchronously, one course on a tuesday, thursday schedule. So I needed a variety of different things in my schedule. And that’s what a lot of students are needing. The students at my institution, where I’m currently teaching still at University of Mary Washington, so many of them are quote unquote, traditional students who want face-to-face interaction. And so the institution says we are on ground residential institution, we will be back full time, everyone will be back at their desks in the fall. But that’s not what the students actually want. The students want most of their educational experience to be face to face, but they’re struggling to fill a schedule, because they’re also working. And so they need to be able to take some courses online, some courses hybrid, some courses face to face. And they really want to be able to build a much more thoughtful approach to education. And also, when we think about specific classes, some disciplines, some courses, lend themselves to one format, some lend themselves to another. So I think that that’s the way we invite students in is, from the start, actually building with the students. And not just for the students building for those students would be great, but also finding ways to build with them, and to design curriculum alongside of them. So it really meets their needs and challenges them appropriately.

John: One of the things that’s going to be a bit different this fall is that we’re going to have some students who are sophomores, even, who’ve never been on campus. And most students have not been interacting in person in classrooms for the last year and a half or so. What can we do to help create a sense of community when we bring these people together for the first time after this long break from face-to-face interaction?

Jesse: The first thing I’m thinking about is something that I started saying, from the very, very start of the quote unquote pivot to online, right around the beginning of the lockdown last year, I started to say, we need to make sure that it isn’t continuity of instruction that we’re trying to maintain, but continuity of the communities at the heart of our institutions. I don’t know if many institutions figured out how to support those communities online. I think they figured out how to keep the lights on and to keep people taking classes. But, I don’t necessarily know that the communities were maintained. What I worry about as we return to campus is that we will try and pick up right where we left with that continuity of instruction. Rather than realizing that where we need to most place our efforts is not just starting up the wheel of delivering content to students, what we need to do is figure out how to revitalize those communities. And that needs to be a huge part of our efforts. So if every teacher is imagining that they’re going to go back to teaching the same amount of content that they taught before the pandemic… one, they were probably trying to teach too much. They were probably teaching too much at the expense of developing community even two years ago, but recognizing that we need to put a lot more breathing room into our courses. And also a lot more conversation between courses, because communities don’t just exist in a vacuum, you don’t just have a community in your first-period class, and then a community in your second-period class community is living, breathing, and it’s sort of echoes between those spaces. So thinking about what happens between period one and period two. How are those two courses connected? What are students doing on campus? Where is the life of the institution? And how can we invest as much as possible into supporting that, and I don’t think it’s with algorithmic retention software. That is the worst possible thing that I see institutions turning to to try and support community. Algorithms are not going to help us build and maintain community, human beings are the ones who are good at that. So any dollar you’re spending on an algorithmic retention software, please give that to adjunct and contingent instructors.

John: In terms of reducing the amount of content in classes, I think a lot of faculty realized that when they switch to remote or online instruction. Is that something you think people will automatically recognize or do you think people are going to try to go back to how things were before and forget the lessons that they’ve learned about this during the pandemic?

Jesse: I think a lot of individual faculty, individual teachers, individual students will take so many of these lessons back to their work this fall and beyond. I think institutions are much harder to shift. And so the problem is, I don’t know that institutional culture will change in the way that it needs to in order to support the efforts of those students and faculty. And so this is really a charge to institutions and administrators to put that breathing room also in the institutional culture and important ways.

Rebecca: And maybe even really, to push it within a department because that might be a place where faculty can start to expand it out. And think about it. When you were talking, I was imagining a time that seems so long ago now. It may have been 10 years ago, and seems like a really long time now.

Jesse: Yeah, it feels like it’s either a week ago, or like 10 years ago, to me,

Rebecca: I had colleagues that we would, if we had classes at the same time, we would actually schedule activities together. We would cross pollinate to have some of that community. We’d have design challenges and investigate and do different things with each other. We’ve lost some of that play, just over time with assessment requirements and this and that. It has fizzled. So I’m hoping that this fall will bring back the play, bring back the fun for that community that to marinate a little bit.

Jesse: And if I can think of some really practical things institutions can do in order to seed that community that you’re describing. If your institution is not paying adjuncts and contingent staff for faculty development, it needs to. Even Walmart and Subway and Starbucks pays their employees for required job training. But then the other benefit is that those are the spaces where community germinates. Another example is there are so many barriers to collaborative teaching at our institutions, “Oh, well, who’s going to get the credit for it? Whose load is it going to count towards?” If that’s your answer to collaborative teaching, you need to stop right there and ask yourself, “What kind of environment are we trying to create?” And if we want a collaborative environment, if we want a community amongst our faculty, then right then and there, decide and commit yourself to figuring out the obstacles to collaborative teaching, which I’ve watched get worse and worse and worse over the last 21 years that I’ve been teaching. And those are just two small things. And the truth is, they’re relatively easy. There are bureaucratic systems that feel like “You can’t possibly… how are we going to deal with that within our institutional database?” Like get over it, figure it out. [LAUGHTER] The truth is that those are things that we all know we want. I’ve never talked to someone who says “no, no, we don’t want people collaborative teaching” then why don’t institutions charge themselves to figure that out?

Rebecca: So many good questions raised in this conversation, Jesse. As always, I wouldn’t expect anything different with a conversation with you. We always wrap up by asking, “What’s next?”

Jesse: Oh, wow, that’s a really, really large question. What’s next? Okay, well, I’m gonna say that, as some folks listening to this may not know, my husband and I and my four-year old daughter just opened a game and toy store which has a classroom and a makerspace in it. And I am really thinking about how helping my husband with this endeavor is going to push me to think about my teaching in new ways. So, it’s a small retail space, 1600 square feet on the main street of Littleton with a retail section and a classroom and a maker space. We’re going to offer classes for kids and adults, so that it isn’t just about selling people toys and games, but teaching them how to design and make and manufacture their own toys and games. And it feels like a respite for me in some ways… one, to have my own project that I’m focusing on, but also to have a space where nobody’s telling me I have to grade. I just get to decide how I approach the work inside this space. So I’m excited to see how helping my husband with this project informs the rest of my practice and thinking about education.

Rebecca: That sounds so fun. Can I come? [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: Yeah. yeah, yeah, ou can. Do you want to be a teacher? We haven’t hired our first teacher. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That sounds really fun. Actually. I’ve taught makerspace things before with kids. That sounds totally fun.

Jesse: And I guess that what’s next is to find joy in this work, because the last 18 months have been so hard. And I think that joy… bell hooks also writes a lot about joy. Joy is also a practice, joy is also struggle… but figuring out how to find the kernel of the work of teaching that has kept me doing this work for 21 years. That’s really something I feel charged to do.

Rebecca: Perhaps a charge we should all have moving into the fall.

Jesse: Yeah, I’m determined to become an irascible optimist again. We’ll see. Check back with me in a year maybe I would have gotten there. [LAUGHTER]

John: And perhaps shifting some of our focus away from grading can help restore some of that joy.

Jesse: Absolutely,

Rebecca: Indeed, indeed. Thanks so much, Jesse.

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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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