Category: feedback

326. UDL in Action

Posted in accessibility, active learning, authentic learning, diversity, equity, feedback, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, social justice, teaching, universal design
January 31, 2024

Universal design for learning, or UDL, is a framework to help us design more equitable learning experiences. In this episode, Lillian Nave joins us to discuss how she has implemented a UDL approach in her first-year seminar course. Lillian is the Coordinator of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at the Appalachian State University Hickory Campus and a senior lecturer in a first-year seminar course at Appalachian State University. She is also the host of the ThinkUDL podcast. She is the recipient of several teaching awards and often serves as an invited speaker on UDL issues.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Universal design for learning, or UDL, is a framework to help us design more equitable learning experiences. In this episode, we discuss how one faculty member has implemented a UDL approach in a first-year course.

[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 Lilian Nave. Lillian is the Coordinator of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at the Appalachian State University Hickory Campus and a senior lecturer in a first-year seminar course at Appalachian State University. She is also the host of the ThinkUDL podcast. She is the recipient of several teaching awards and often serves as an invited speaker on UDL issues. Welcome, Lillian.

Lillian: Thank you very much. And I applaud you on all of the monikers that I currently have attached to my name that often don’t make sense. So, very good. And of course you said Appalachian in the way we say it down here in North Carolina and I don’t have to throw an apple at you. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, I’ve heard it so many times on your podcast that I wanted to be sure we got that down.

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

Lillian: I am and I brewed it specially for our interview today, it is Bengal spice, which is a Celestial Seasoning herbal tea that is caffeine free. I went caffeine free a while ago, and it’s fantastic and I don’t have to put sugar or honey or anything in it. It has cinnamon sticks and it’s delicious and my best friend in the world got me hooked on it. And it always just makes me feel warm inside and makes me think of the lovely conversations I have with the people who I’ve drank tea with in the past. And I also have iced tea because I continuously drink iced tea and this one happens to be actually just a Crystal Light [LAUGHTER] iced tea as well.

Rebecca: And I did notice, of course, and must state that there was a Tea for Teaching mug involved.

Lillian: Yes, exactly, and I appreciate that. John saw me at a conference and I was so happy to get my Tea for teaching mug that I made sure I was drinking from it today.

John: And I am drinking a peppermint spearmint blend today… also caffeine free today.

Rebecca: I am drinking a highly caffeinated afternoon tea [LAUGHTER] to make up for everybody’s caffeine deficits.

Lillian: Well, I have plenty of chocolate throughout the day that is not caffeine free.

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your work on Universal Design for Learning. We probably don’t have many listeners who aren’t familiar with UDL, but for those who are not as familiar, could you provide an overview of Universal Design for Learning.

Lillian: Of course, and I’d be glad to. Universal Design for Learning is a way of thinking, I would say, about teaching and learning that relies on three main concepts that include: engaging your students, providing accessible materials for your students, and varying the ways that your students can explain to you that they’ve learned something. And it is all based on neuroscience and also a lot of research that tells us that all of our students are different. Variability is the norm. And so we have students in higher ed that come from all different backgrounds, different cultures, different preparedness levels, different abilities and disabilities. And in order to reach all of our students, it’s important to think about that variability and universal design for learning gives us some really specific things to look out for. And three areas or categories: the engagement, the representation, and providing multiple means for those and multiple means of the student to express their knowledge. And so that’s like the general overview, but there are like so many weeds, that I can have a podcast [LAUGHTER] and talk to people about all of the different intricacies of UDL. But in general, that’s it in a nutshell.

Rebecca: I know we’ve talked about it a bit on our podcast before in terms of the difference between UDL and accessibility. But for those who haven’t heard those previous episodes, can you talk a little bit about the difference between those two ideas?

Lillian: Yes. So, accessibility is a part of Universal Design for Learning. You cannot have universal design for learning without attention to accessibility. But accessibility alone is not universal design for learning, it’s a part of it. And I like to think of UDL as like a three-legged stool. If you take out one of those legs, the stool doesn’t function anymore, it will fall over. And one of those legs is multiple means of representation. It’s typically the center column that’s purple if you look at the UDL guidelines at UDLguidelines.org. CAST puts those out. And that middle column about representation is about providing multiple forms of representation, so different texts or audio files, or making sure your font is readable too, especially for dyslexic students. So accessibility is about making sure that all students can access materials, that they have the ability to make sure they can actually get at that information. And this is less common now, but there used to be like those PDFs that a professor copied out of their book when they were a student and it has all their like markings and stuff in it. And then they would just like make a read really bad copy of it, and hand it out when everybody still used paper all the time, or maybe it’s on a screen. And those oftentimes were not accessible. And that means if a student needed a screen reader to read it, or even if they just needed to make the font bigger, they couldn’t because it wasn’t an accessible document, a screen reader couldn’t read it, meaning if a student was dyslexic or even blind, they had really no way to get at that information. So when you make your documents accessible, and you make your class accessible, you are making sure that everybody really just is on an even playing field, and they can get at that information. But in addition to accessibility, you want to make sure you’re also giving lots of opportunities for students to express what they know in different ways. And you’re also engaging with the students. And those two other things are not included in accessibility. That’s what makes up UDL.

John: How did you become interested in UDL?

Lillian: Well, I started working with our Center for Teaching and Learning in 2016 as a faculty fellow and I started doing faculty development as a one-course release for quite a while. And in doing that, we became part of a grant that was in three North Carolina institutions that was called College STAR. And STAR stands for supporting transition, access, and retention. And it was a two-pronged approach where there was a lot of student development, so tutoring centers and things like that. And then there was this other side, and that’s the part I got interested in and got pulled along with and that was supporting faculty. And to do that we used Universal Design for Learning. And I was just part of that grant. And that ended up me being the Universal Design for Learning Coordinator at Appalachian State. And I started going to different departments and introducing that at workshops and that sort of thing. So I became kind of the UDL girl or UDL lady for App state, which I think is about 2016 when that started, and then I saw it, like I’d never heard of it before, and I’d been teaching since 1997. And then I thought, oh, boy, this is really good, this makes a lot of sense. And so I started implementing it as well in all my classes.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a little bit about UDL principles broadly. So can we dig into maybe a specific example, like your first-year seminar course? That sounds pretty interesting.

Lillian: Absolutely. So my course right now, I teach one called intercultural dialogues, and I get first-year students, and so I love it that they’re small, under 24 students. This past year, I was at our new campus in Hickory, and I only had 18 students there. And we get to work on intercultural competence, which is one of those major things that colleges want our students to know. It’s a 21st-century skill, and it is about understanding our own cultures, and then understanding that other people have different cultures. And then how can you mindfully act and interact with somebody from a different culture. And I have heard some students, at the end of the term, say “this is something everybody should know, like, this is really, really important.” They’ve seen how important it is. But at the beginning of the class, like nobody wants to be there. Nobody wants to take a first-year seminar course. They’re usually there because it’s Tuesday morning and they have an open slot. I’m in that unenviable position of teaching first-year seminar, and it’s that Gen Ed requirement that nobody wants to take. So I want to make it interesting, and I want to make it worthwhile for them, and so we learn about our own culture and then I also match students up with students abroad. We’ve worked with students in Doha, Qatar, in China, in Morocco, in Germany, Thailand, and Japan in the past year, and they work on intercultural competency skills and talk about things like power distance in the classroom, or some of the UN Sustainability Development Goals, like gender equality by 2030. And so they’ve done some things with students in China about that. So the class itself is about intercultural competence. And I have infused a bunch of UDL into this class over the years. And so it wasn’t all at once, but it took a while. And so that means I have multiple ways for the students to get at that information. So there is never just one way to do the reading. It’s either accessible or I’ve recorded a voice audio file for students. So we have a lot of commuter students at this campus, and so actually, we have zero students who live on campus in our new campus in Hickory. It is a new campus, it just started and so there are no dorms, there’s only one building and we’re all in that one building. And so students come in, they have jobs, and so UDL is very helpful for me to think about those students who have various commitments of their time. So they could listen to the audio file rather than read the book, because they’ve got a 40-minute commute to come into campus or something like that. So they’ll have an audio or video. I’ve used H5P, which is on our learning management system, which is like an interactive video, there’s VoiceThread, which is another way to be kind of interactive for students to participate. And so there’s always multiple ways for them to get at that information. And then there’s multiple ways that I ask them to tell me what they know. And they’ve done concept maps, so we have very little like, “write me a paper,” there’s very little of that my class. And that’s also a culturally competent type of teaching thing, because we often in an individuated, Western academic model, we prioritize reading and writing, reading and writing, reading and writing. That’s always what it is. And yes, we need to have very good readers and writers. But there are lots of other ways to learn and express your learning that might be more prevalent in other countries and in other cultures. And so they’ve had to draw some of their answers, they’ve had to give me a visual representation, they’ve written a poem, drawn a cartoon, and tell a story. One of their first assignments is to bring in something that expresses who they are, a cultural artifact. And then the last class that we just had recently, I asked everyone to name everybody else’s cultural artifact, so they learned about each other that way. And it was things like a keychain or one student brought in the T-top of his T-top convertible car. [LAUGHTER] Because the car was really important to get him around and all that stuff. And engagement is the last part. But it’s really the first part that gets students interested in the activities and in the learning and why they should learn. So I start off with a liquid syllabus, which is a syllabus that students can access outside of our learning management system, and they can see what we’re doing, and they get a video of me talking to them. And that’s supposed to be engaging. And then they have a lot of authentic assignments working with students overseas. And this year, because I was finally back in an actual classroom and not doing remote teaching, as I have been since 2020, I took students up to New York City. And Appalachian has this amazing loft that actually anybody can go stay at so all of your listeners could go and stay at Appalachian’s loft, and it’s very inexpensive. It’s like $70 a night per bed, and it’s these two rooms of 10 beds each. And we took students up there to actually learn a lot about culture. We went to the Tenement Museum, they looked around, and it was very cool. So experiential type of education as well. So that took like years before I got to that rendition of how I teach that course. But those are all UDL principles that guided me.

John: You mentioned collaboration with students in other countries, what types of collaborative work did those students do in your classes?

Lillian: They had specific zoom meetings that they had to do personally one on one. So one of them is that students got matched one on one with fellow students in Morocco. And they were supposed to talk about the difference in power distance in an educational setting. So power distance is the amount of power that people in a group expect and believe should be shared or held by the people in that group. So in an educational setting, if you’ve got a first-year student who comes into a large lecture hall on a college campus, there is a larger power distance for that instructor who will pretty much lecture to those students, students don’t raise their hand all that often, there’s not a lot of back and forth, there’s not a lot of flexibility, they probably don’t even know the students’ names. And so that would be an example of a larger power distance. A smaller power distance might be in a classroom, like in my classroom, I say, “You can call me by my first name, you can address me in this very informal way. We’re not going to have a lecture, we’re going to be in small groups, and then we’re going to share our ideas.” And that way, there’s a lot more voices, there’s a lot more talking. And that can happen in various times throughout the semester. I may do a lecture, I may not. And so my students were talking with students in Morocco to find out about their understanding of what power distance was. And do you call your professor Dr. Smith? Or what do you address them by? Are there rules about when you can address your professor and those sorts of things. So that was one of them. And then we worked with students in China, and this one was a series of three Zoom conversations. And all of our students had to set all these up. They were all in English because our partner students wanted to do this in English, and most of them had never spoken to a native English speaker. So this was a really good goal for them. And in China, they can’t have Zoom, not allowed. And so the students had to receive our invite from our students, and their first session was kind of an introduction: who they are, what they’re doing, for about an hour. The second was a second list of questions, which was about: Who takes care of children? Who goes to work? Who do you live with? Do you live with an extended family? Do you live with a nuclear family? And it was really about gender roles. And one of those things that’s a national cultural dimension is something called achievement versus nurturance. And that continuum has also been called in the past: masculinity versus femininity. And it’s how much a culture believes that men and women should adhere to somewhat stereotypical gender roles. So are there women CEOs, and stay-at-home dads? In some countries, that happens in some cities. That happens a lot more than in other countries. Do you put more emphasis on earning a higher wage? Or on having the flexibility to work from home? Like, where are you on that? And so the students talked about that. And then in the last session, they talked about: if you could change anything, what would you see that might improve your country from where it is now and that sort of thing. So they got to do some really authentic conversations with people around the world, and the students in China were 12 hours ahead. So my students were meeting sometimes at two in the morning, but they were up, [LAUGHTER] it didn’t matter.

Rebecca: So it sounds like there was a lot of coordination with counterparts around the world to make sure that you designed experiences for both sets of students that met, maybe not the same learning objectives, but learning objectives that were relevant for each population.

Lillian: That is exactly it. And it was my colleague in China, who said she wanted to do something about the sustainable development goals from the UN. I said, “Okay, well, let’s try and look at that.” And it worked for each one. And it is a lot of coordination for the faculty. And so I would meet with my fellow faculty member several times throughout the semester. And so we got the dates right for when we’d have Thanksgiving, nobody else had Thanksgiving break, and we have holidays, and they started a month early or a month late, and so there was a lot of coordination. And then they had to give me the list of all the students and I needed gender, too, because some students wanted to stay within their own gender, women, especially, in Morocco where some were less likely to speak to male students, who wanted to stay with female students. So we wanted to be culturally sensitive to those types of things. So there was a lot of beginning coordination to set those things up.

Rebecca: I wanted to circle back to one other thing you said too, in that you mentioned your classes developed with all these UDL principles over a significant period of time.

LILIIAN: Yes.

Rebecca: I want to know how you got started, what was the first thing you implemented? And how did that set a trajectory for the others?

Lillian: The first thing, way back when, probably 2016, 2017, like the big aha moment for me, was not doing the same thing all the time, and not having to grade everything, meaning maybe we were just going to do some honestly experimental assessments in class that were kind of fun and authentic. And I didn’t have to grade everything. And when I kind of let go of that, it opened me up to some more ideas. And then I thought, well, I don’t need them to write a paper, because I really have a specific goal in mind. And the goal doesn’t necessarily need to be a paper that then I’d have to read, [LAUGHTER] it made my life easier too. Maybe they just needed to demonstrate their understanding of these concepts. And so like one of the first things we do is draw an iceberg, and talk about how the culture that we see here, taste, feel, smell, all those five senses, that’s about 10% of what makes a culture. And when we think about culture, it’s usually just those things, it’s like, “Oh, you eat this special meal on Lunar New Year, and you have these special foods, and the kitchen always smells this way, or we dress up in cultural clothing, or whatever.” But that’s really only 10%, the tip of the iceberg. And then we have to get really deep into what our values and beliefs and assumptions we make. And that’s typically the hard part of the class. And so I just had students either draw an onion or an iceberg. And then they had to kind of point to where this was, what are your deeply held beliefs and assumptions, and that culture is so much more. And it’s a lot easier, I think, to conceptualize it as a drawing than it is to write me a paper about what your deeply held beliefs are, [LAUGHTER] and where they align with the things that I can see on the outside.

John: You mentioned that the first thing you had done was reducing grading and doing more formative assessments, which is beneficial for students too because it takes some of the pressure off and gives them the opportunity to try something, make mistakes, and learn from that without any penalty. Is that something that you’d recommend for someone who’s interested in exploring UDL, as a first step, if they’re not already doing that?

Lillian: Absolutely, I think it frees up both the student and the faculty member to kind of see what works. And so much of Universal Design for Learning is about feedback, feedback from the students. And that is a major portion of UDL. And I should have said that at the very beginning, that you really want to be figuring out what works for the students and what works for you. So I do think that’s a great way to think about it. And also, the flip side of that coin, to me as well, was whoever is doing the work is doing the learning. So if you are always lecturing to your students, it’s hard, like, you got to put together this great lecture, I always felt like I had a top hat and a cane, you know, walking into my lecture, and yadda-dat-dah, I’m gonna, like dazzle you with my art historical knowledge, and make it interesting. And I was doing a lot of work to do that. And I have slowly moved into kind of the other end of this continuum, from lecturer into facilitator. And if I can facilitate the students working together, or a lot of feedback back and forth with me or with each other, then they’re actually risking some things like “talk to your neighbor about this,” and they don’t have to raise their hand in front of the large class, they’re actually trying and risking and doing these smaller things. And that’s where I see the learning happening. If they’re just listening, that’s fine, that’s great too, but the more they can participate in their own learning, the better it is, that I’ve seen, certainly in my classes, the more they can do, the more they’re learning. But it doesn’t mean I have to evaluate every single thing that they hand in, or that they produce. And I can certainly, on the spot, kind of tweak things and say, “Okay, let’s turn it into this direction,” or something like that. But it was the: “I don’t have to grade everything they do” and “The person who’s doing the work is doing the learning.” And it was like freedom for me to try all of these things that were totally not what I had done as a student, or had valued as a student or an instructor because I was very much in that: “Alright, you’ve got a 15-page research paper, a midterm, and a final, and that’s the art history course.” And I don’t do that anymore.

Rebecca: Well, it sounds like not only is there a benefit to the faculty, in terms of workload, joy, [LAUGHTER] etc, but also an emphasis on self efficacy for students and building confidence.

Lillian: Oh, yeah. Exactly. And they’re trying things out, and they’re seeing what works. And that feedback is really important, a big part of UDL.

John: And you mentioned that it took you time to build to where your courses currently are. Is that an approach you’d also recommend to faculty who are beginning to introduce UDL principles, because it can be a lot of work completely redesigning or transforming your teaching?

Lillian: Absolutely. I don’t know if I could have done this stuff early on in my career, because I was worried about how I looked and was perceived. I was very young, and so I think I needed to feel like I was in charge. And that power sharing was too difficult for me as a young instructor. So I understand that. And now I feel much more comfortable in the classroom. And I feel that being a facilitator is really helpful for the students. And sometimes they just want to sit and listen, but that happens too. But it took a long time to get there. And the course has evolved over a long time. And you try new things. Tom Tobin and Kristen Behling talk about the plus one mentality, just trying one new thing. And that’s what happened, is when I started this course, we weren’t speaking with students in other countries. That just sort of happened when I went to a conference and made some friends in other countries and said, “Oh, I bet this would make a lot of sense to add this in.” It’d be really authentic, which is one of the engagement principles is having really authentic learning experiences. And I used to be like, “Oh, you’ve got to plan everything out, and it has to be perfect.” And now I see that I fumble through a lot of things. And every once in a while something sticks, and it’s good. It’s a practice. They say being a doctor is more of a practice. I think being a teacher is very much a practice to see what works and what worked in my class five years ago, doesn’t necessarily work now. Things that were really fun and hot at some point, you know, like making memes is pretty fun right now, but we didn’t do that 10 years ago, and we probably won’t do it in another five years, like, what did you learn? Let’s make a meme out of it. It’s evolving.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that we’re talking about a course about culture. And you’re describing how the culture of higher ed or institutions or our classrooms also evolve. And that evolution requires risk both on the part of the instructor as well as on the part of the students, and that the UDL principles are really allowing that risk to happen on both ends.

Lillian: Yes, and sometimes there are forces outside of our control that make that more difficult, and it’s not an enviable position. So things like I wish I didn’t have to grade, but we still have to have grades in the end. And so how does that fit into your course. And so I know a lot of folks are using ungrading. I know you’ve talked with Susan Blum and Josh Eyler about various different kinds of grading, which I think is like a later on kind of thing for UDL. Start with accessibility, make sure your stuff is readable and devourable by all of your students, and then start kind of playing around with it. And then maybe I think that ungrading or different kinds of grading structures might be the last step on that process. But to each their own.

John: One of the issues involving student variability is that some students might be resistant to some of the approaches that you’re using, because there have been a number of studies that show that students often prefer to be lectured at. And it seems like they’re learning more that way, despite the evidence that that’s less effective. How do you persuade students to be open to trying new approaches to learning?

Lillian: Great question, I know exactly what you’re talking about, like students, they’re like, “this is how we learn best,” and then you actually poll their knowledge. And students in an active learning situation who kind of hated it are much more knowledgeable than the students that were just in a lecture where they really liked it, because that was kind of safe. And in the last year or so I’ve heard myself saying this a lot when I do speaking, and when I’m talking to folks, is I think everybody needs to be uncomfortable in the classroom, some of the time. We don’t want the same students to be uncomfortable all of the time. So that means varying those different ways that we assess students, so it’s not the “alright, every week, you’re writing a paper,” oh, that also gets boring. But for your great writers, it’s fantastic. But are we really finding out what that student knows? Are we finding out that they’re a good writer. And so maybe that’s a poem, or maybe it’s a concept map, or there are other ways to assess that info. And so I tell my students, like, I’m really conscious about that, like, you probably aren’t going to like some of these things, but your neighbor isn’t going to like the next thing. And so having those opportunities that you have to step out of your comfort zone, to get into the learning zone, but not all the way out to that outer edge of the target, which is the panic zone. And that’s actually an intercultural competence idea that I learned in that field. When you study abroad, the only way you’re really learning is if you’re in that learning mode, like if you go to Germany, but you’re living with a bunch of Americans, and you never speak German, and you go to McDonald’s, and you’re at an English speaking school, then have you really learned much about German culture? So you should go outside of that comfort zone. Maybe you’re living with a local family, and you have to speak German, but you don’t want to go and you are in like a chaotic household and they don’t speak English, and they haven’t made sure that you have any food, and you don’t feel safe, and all the classes you are way ahead of you in your German speaking. And so you’re not learning much either, you’re kind of panicking. So it’s that learning zone we have to be in and so I think in our classrooms, we need to do that too, have multiple different ways for students to express what they know, which is one of our UDL guidelines. And I am very overt when I tell students that. And I found that with student evaluations, like I would get student evaluations where they asked like, “Did you practice critical thinking skills?” And they’d be like, “No, like, I totally didn’t at all.” [LAUGHTER] And then the next year… and I think I learned this at like an academic conference… the next year, throughout the course, I’d be like, Okay, we’re gonna do this critical thinking exercise, this thing that we’re doing right now, this is about critical thinking, you’re going to use your critical thinking skills because this thing that we’ve done, that’s a critical thinking skill. Guess what? The evaluations… way up. [LAUGHTER] Exactly like you’re pulling back the curtain and you’re saying, like, here’s actually why we’re doing it, and this is what you’re doing. And so I think explaining that is really helpful. And then the students know why they need to do something like what I’ve asked them to do, why am I writing a poem or why am I drawing an iceberg? And I think we do need to tell students that and not just have them guessing, because then they’re going to be in the panic zone and not learn so much.

Rebecca: That’s a really good point to remind students that being uncomfortable and taking risks is actually part of the learning process. Can’t remind them too much.

Lillian: Yeah, exactly. It’s necessary. And they do want to just sit and doodle. And not that doodling is bad. But they just want to sit and listen and have us do all of the work. But it’s like, I know this stuff, so why do I need to explain it? You could just watch a video of me talking. We need to get you into grappling with this and doing the stuff that I know you don’t want to do and you don’t want to be here because it’s a first-year seminar and you’re a first-year student. So my heart is with all of those folks that teach Gen Ed [LAUGHTER] to the students who don’t really want to be there.

Rebecca: Switching gears a bit now, can you talk a little bit about how you started the ThinkUDL podcast?

Lillian: Yes, it’s going back to that College STAR grant. We were getting into doing like workshops, and so I was working with other universities in North Carolina. And we had a PI, the head of it was at our East Carolina school. And I said, “Do we have any multiple ways to do this. They were doing research and then some workshops. And it just made sense to me like, we need a podcast, like this would be so off brand for UDL not to have multiple means for us to get this information out. And a podcast has the added bonus of being asynchronous, so people can listen to it whenever they want. I’ve always had transcripts, too. So if you don’t want to listen to my voice, which is totally fine, you could read the transcript and you can get that information, you can see the resources. So there are multiple ways to get it. But there was money from that original grant that sent me and my shout out to Tanner, who was my first sound engineer, and we went to a podcast convention in 2018 in the summer in Philadelphia. And seriously, I didn’t know a thing at all. I didn’t even listen to podcasts then. The only one I’d heard of was the Teaching in Higher Ed with Bonni Stachowiak, and then like, “Okay, we’re gonna try it.” And the very early episodes are, I think, awful. But luckily, Tanner kind of cleaned them up. But there was a Chris Farley on Saturday, live long, long time ago, so I’m showing my age here. But he would interview, in these sketches. He’d interview people that were amazing, like Paul McCartney from The Beatles, right? And he would just fumble the whole time. Like, “Wow, so you were in the Beatles? Wow. Yeah. That’s great. So can you tell me like, what’s it like being a Beatle?” And that’s what I felt like the whole time, [LAUGHTER] like “Wow. Okay. All right.” So it took a while. But the grant helped it and for about three or four years it was grant funded. And now I’ve turned it into its own nonprofit. And Texthelp is now a sponsor. And so they do the editing for me because the grant ended. And Tanner, he was part of that grant. So i had to kind of move on. That’s how it started.

John: So you’ve been doing this for a while now with the podcast, and we’ve been listeners since the very beginning. What do you enjoy most about podcasting?

Lillian: Well, ours came out around the same time. So the nice Tea for Teaching, right? It’s like 2018. And so I enjoy talking to people. If you’re still doing it, you have to enjoy talking to people. But that’s the best thing. I talk to people just all around the world because I do want it to have a worldwide focus. And so I have listeners, the top five are in the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and the UK, and so English speaking countries, yay. But you can see like, all over the world on six continents that people are listening, and I had a listener in Australia say, you know, I was walking on the beach, near my home, on the coast of Australia. And that just blows my mind that people are actually listening. But mostly it’s like, I get to just learn about new ideas all the time. And you would think UDL like it’s so focused on UDL, like, there would not be enough, like I should be done with this, but there’s so much.There are 31 of these checkpoints in Universal Design for Learning, and as you mentioned, it’s really overwhelming. Like if you were to go and just look at the guidelines, it’s like a whole bunch. And it’s like, how am I going to do that? You can’t, you can’t do it all. You can’t just redesign your course right away. And so there’s just all these little conversations I can have to help people understand what you can do. And then I get to talk to really interesting, witty, awesome, brilliant people all over the world. And that’s the best part. If I could just do that, like that was just my job, I would love that.

Rebecca: Definitely something that John and I enjoy too. It’s kind of an introvert’s dream to talk to [LAUGHTER] a lot of individuals one on one rather than having to network through a conference or something like that. It’s a good opportunity to have really in-depth conversations with folks that might not have the opportunity to have otherwise.

Lillian: Yeah, my brain is always seeking out the new. And so I love like, “Oh, that’s a neat idea.” And then I’ll send them an email, and sometimes they write back, and “oh, I really love to talk about this, it’s cool.” And so I’ll read their article or their book or whatever. And then there’s something else shiny that I get to go talk to other people about. And it’s just been helpful for folks. And honestly, I just didn’t expect there’d be listeners, and there are listeners. And so that’s just really fantastic.

John: We started out as primarily to meet our campus audience needs for commuting faculty, and so forth. And then we were amazed at how it caught on and spread. And it’s given us that opportunity that you both mentioned, to talk to some really interesting people doing some really interesting work. Before that in the teaching center, we talked to people at a workshop, and we might hear from one faculty member for three or four minutes, maybe 10 or maybe they’d come in for a consultation. But usually that was about a problem or an issue they were facing, but it just provides a wonderful chance to connect to people that we normally wouldn’t be able to talk to. And we see an interesting article, and then reading through it and getting to talk to the people doing the research in depth, it’s really a valuable experience.

Lillian: Yeah, everybody should be a podcaster just to have these conversations. You don’t even have to record them. It’s just really neat. And so it’s given me that like, “Hey, I have a podcast,” like a reason for me to be intrusive in somebody’s email. Like, I really want to talk to you about this. This is really cool. Would you talk to little old me? If so I have a podcast. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I’m amazed at the number of people who say yes.

Lillian: Absolutely, me too, like, “Wow, you’re actually going to talk to me. That’s so fantastic. I appreciate that.”

Rebecca: We’re definitely a part of a really wonderful community of practitioners.

Lillian: Yeah, it makes a very thankful and it’s so cool, because I have listened to Tea for Teaching for a long time. That’s actually my most listened to podcast for teaching and learning. I enjoy the fact that there’s two of you, and you kind of go back and forth and just interesting topics. So I’ve enjoyed yours, ever since the birth of our podcasts in 2018. They’re siblings. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: They are.

John: So we always end with the question. What’s next?

Lillian: I am so excited about what Appalachian State is doing. About two years ago, they bought a building in a town called Hickory, North Carolina. And our main campus is in Boone. And it’s a beautiful campus up in the mountains. And I happen to live halfway between these two cities. And so I was going up to Boone to teach and it is about 42 minutes to get up. And you have to go over the eastern Continental Divide, over the Appalachian Trail, over the Blue Ridge Parkway in order to get from my house into Boone to teach. And that’s great. And it’s the most beautiful commute I think in the world. But it also gets foggy and icy and weather and I was enjoying it, and it was where I would listen to podcasts. But Appalachian State is now the first university in the North Carolina system that now has two campuses. And so we’ve opened this campus in Hickory, it is a commuter campus, and some brave students, we have about 250 to 300 that have started this past fall of 2023. It has birthed this campus. And so I get to teach there, and I get to do some faculty development. And it’s really exciting to be on the ground floor of a new campus. And it’s the only one in the North Carolina system. We’ll have other campuses, but there’s no multi-campus university for us. It’s like being in a startup, except I don’t think I get stock options. That’s the only bad thing. [LAUGHTER] And so meeting new faculty, some faculty are teaching for the very first time. And so there’s no like institutional culture that they’re jumping into at this new campus, although we are very much a part of the Boone campus. It’s new. And there’s only a very small number of faculty there. So it’s like being at a small liberal arts college in a state system. And it’s just really cool. And I’m loving meeting the faculty there and helping with teaching and learning and UDL and all that stuff. So that’s like the next big thing is Appstate Hickory, and it’s really exciting.

Rebecca: Well, I hope you have a wonderful adventure. [LAUGHTER] It sounds like a really fun opportunity.

Lillian: Yeah, in fact, I’m in a group of faculty, we have like a community of practice, a peer mentoring circle we call it, and we’re calling ourselves the Hickory Adventurers, because like, we don’t know what’s going on, [LAUGHTER] and we’re trying to figure it out together.

John: You get to help shape what’s going on, which is a really nice place to be.

Lillian: Yeah, it’s fantastic. I’m excited. And I think I’m just that kind of person. It’s new and shiny. And I’m there.

John: I think we’re both that way a bit. And that is one of the risks of having a podcast, you get to hear about all these great things that people are doing, and there’s always a tendency to try to do many of them. And that can be a bit overwhelming, not just for us, but also for our students.

Lillian: Yes I know I have to peel it back [LAUGHTER] just a bit, don’t go overboard.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us, Lillian. I know we’ve wanted to talk to you for a while.

Lillian: Absolutely. I’m so glad and when you contacted me, I was super excited. So thank you so much for having me on Tea for Teaching. I’m gonna show my mug that nobody can see ‘cause it’s a podcast, but I love my Tea for Teaching mug, and thank you for having me.

John: Well, thank you for joining us. It was great talking to you and we’ll look forward to more conversations in the future.

Lillian: Great.

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

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

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324. Unmaking the Grade

Posted in blogging, engagement, feedback, grading, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, reflective practice, teaching, ungrading, writing
January 17, 2024

A growing number of faculty have been experimenting with ungrading. In this episode, Emily Pitts Donahoe joins us to discuss her ungrading approach and the documentation of this process on her blog. Emily is the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: A growing number of faculty have been experimenting with ungrading. In this episode, we discuss one instructor’s ungrading approach and her documentation of the process.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Emily Pitts Donahoe. Emily is the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. She experimented with ungrading and chronicled her experiences in her Unmaking the Grade blog. Welcome, Emily.

Emily: Thanks. I’m really excited to be here.

John: We’re very pleased to be talking to you. We talked recently at the POD conference, and I’m looking forward to this additional conversation.

Emily: Yes, where I got this lovely tea for teaching mug from John, which I’m so excited about and drinking from right now.

John: And since this is only audio, Emily was holding the mug [LAUGHTER]…

Emily: I’m showing it off.

John: So our teas today are:… Emily, are you drinking tea in that mug?

Emily: I am. [LAUGHTER] I am drinking tea out of my tea for teaching mug. I’m a big tea drinker. And so today I’m drinking my favorite tea, which is a strong black tea called Scottish morn. And I got this tea from a tea shop called Apothica in Niles, Michigan, which I used to go to when I lived in South Bend, so highly recommended if you’re in that area.

Rebecca: Sounds wonderful. I was ready for you to say that you had coffee or something in the tea for teaching mug so it’d be completely blasphemous… [LAUGHTER]

Emily: Never.

Rebecca: …because coffee is one of the most frequent flavors. [LAUGHTER] Emily, you’re doing it right. [LAUGHTER] I have blue sapphire tea today.

John: And I have Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: So, we invited you here today, Emily, to discuss your experiences with ungrading. Your blog is based on your spring 2023 course experiences but your ungrading experience predates this course. Can you tell us a little bit about your initial experience with ungrading?

Emily: Sure. So I have a background in Writing and Rhetoric and English literature, and so a lot of what we do in Writing and Rhetoric, I think, is already pretty aligned with some ungrading goals and practices. So in my courses, students have always had the opportunity to revise their work based on feedback, and include it in a final portfolio, and most of their grade is based on their revised work. So it’s not just that they get graded and then that’s the end of it, they always have a chance to improve based on feedback. The first time that I stopped putting letter grades and percentages on student work was in spring of 2022, when I was teaching a general education literature course at Notre Dame, and so the course was on pre-modern and early modern literature, but with a focus on how the texts that we were studying might help us examine or wrangle with some of the questions that we’re preoccupied with as a culture and society today, and thinking about how those texts might relate to student lives. So it was a course for kind of all levels and all majors, which I think made it a good course to experiment with. So I had first-year students all the way up through senior-level students from engineering and business and English and psychology and all kinds of different majors. So like all teaching experiments, I think there were definitely some kinks to work out after that first course; they never go exactly right the first time. [LAUGHTER] But I would say that, overall, it was a huge success. And that’s not because I did it perfectly, or even because I did it particularly well, but because I think ungrading really helped some of my students move beyond this idea of the school as a points game, to help find their interest and their motivations to study the material that we were studying for their own purposes, and to focus on developing the skills and knowledge that they wanted to develop rather than on attaining a specific grade.

John: And the second time you did this, you created a blog describing the process. What prompted you to create the blog?

Emily: So, I was inspired by a post written by Robert Talbert, who’s the co-author of a recent book, Grading for Growth, which I really highly recommend on alternative grading, and he and David Clark, his co author, also had a blog and substack newsletter on Grading for Growth. And so in December of 2022, Robert posted a stop, start, continue for the ungrading community. And if you’re not familiar with stop, start, continue, it’s an evaluation exercise used for mid-semester reflection, very often in classrooms where the instructor or another facilitator will ask students: “What kinds of teaching practices or classroom practices would you like to stop, start, or continue in the class?” And so Robert’s post was a stop, start, continue for the ungrading community. And one of the things that he recommended that the ungrading community start doing was getting into the weeds and writing in detail about the daily experiences and specifics of upgrading, so: what we’re doing, what kind of successes we’re having, what challenges we’re encountering, how we’re adjusting in real time, and he recommended keeping this as the kind of blog or like a captain’s log of weekly reflections. So when I read his post, I thought, “Well, I could do that. It didn’t sound that hard, and it sounded like a lot of fun.” So that was what prompted me to start writing weekly reflections to share some of the methods that I was using, successes and challenges that I had, and even some of my doubts or misgivings about some of the things that I was doing in the class.

John: And just as an aside, we were so impressed by Grading for Growth, that we’ll be using it in the spring reading group here, both at SUNY Oswego and at Plattsburgh with Jessmyn Neuhaus. So we’re very much looking forward to that. And Robert and David will be giving a keynote address at the start of our workshop series in just a few weeks in early January. So we’re very interested in doing more of this on our campus as well.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your decision to delay posting the blog until after the semester ended?

Emily: Sure. So the selfish reason is that it’s supposed to be an unfiltered look at the ungraded classroom. And part of me thought, what if I messed this up so badly that I’ll be embarrassed to talk about it. So it was partly that, but I would say the more important reason is that I thought it might be weird for students if I was talking in public about what was happening in the classroom in real time. And I was concerned that it would damage the relationship of trust that I wanted to build with my students if they knew that I was reporting on our conversations to a larger audience about the class. So I offered to hold things for that reason. But the other thing that I wanted to do was make it clear to students that I was writing these reflections that might later be published, and then to get their input on them. So some of what I shared on the blog, I didn’t really want to share without getting students consent to do that. But I also wanted to get their input on some of the things that I was talking about. So I believe really strongly in taking a students as partners approach to higher education and learning experiences. And I try to employ that in my educational development work in the classroom. So that means bringing students into conversations about teaching and learning and asking for their experiences and their expertise as students really and then using that to inform our practice. So delaying the posting allowed me also to get some input from students and to be able to share some of their thoughts and opinions on the blog whenever I could.

John: In reading through your blog, your spring 2023 class seemed really interesting. Could you describe that for our listeners?

Emily: Yeah. So this is the second course in our sequence of first-year writing courses here at the University of Mississippi, but it’s a little bit different. So for the second course in the sequence, students have the opportunity to take either Writing 102 or Liberal Arts 102, and I was teaching Liberal Arts 102. And so the goals of each course are really the same. But Liberal 102, as we call it, is conducted within the context of a research area in a specific discipline. So that means that it can have a very specific theme. So some of my really excellent colleagues in the department and in other departments have taught courses like writing about true crime, or the rhetoric of sports, or I believe there’s a course on fashion. So because one of my areas of expertise is teaching and learning, the course that I taught was called Examining Higher Ed Teaching and Learning in a College Classroom. And so I think this is a great course for first-year students as they’re entering this next phase of their education to reflect on where they’ve been and where they want to go. And so what we did was looked at questions like: What’s the purpose of a college education? Why are we all here? What kind of benefits does it provide to individuals or to society? What kind of collective benefits does it provide? And then how are those benefits enacted or engendered in the classroom. And so we explored a lot of debates around higher ed in the US and students have an opportunity to reflect on and draw on their own experiences as students and their expertise as students, and then integrate that with larger areas of research on education or current events in education. And then they communicated their ideas about education to audiences outside of our classroom. And so it was really, I think, an ideal course for ungrading because we could talk about grades, not only as a matter of course policy, but also as a core subject matter. So in the beginning of the semester, we read Alfie Kohn’s piece “The Case Against Grades” and talked about it both as a way to introduce the course grading system and as a kind of larger prompt for reflection about grades as an issue of concern in higher education right now.

John: And it sounds like a great opportunity to have students reflect on what you’re doing as you’re doing it. How did students respond to this?

Emily: So I think every time I’ve ungraded a class now, and I’m currently on my third ungraded class, students have responded a little bit differently every time and of course, every individual student is also different. I think there are three broad categories of response that I see. One is just enthusiasm; some students are really excited about ungrading, and usually that’s students who feel that, for one reason or another, their grades in the past haven’t been representative of their learning or who feel that some of their creativity or their risk taking has been stifled by their desire to get a good grade. So I wouldn’t say this is a lot of students, this is probably a smaller group of students, but some students are really excited about it. I would say another group of students are really hesitant because ungrading is a big unknown for them, especially for students who are dead set on getting that “A” grade. It can be really nerve racking not to know kind of where you’re at in the middle of the semester. When I get negative feedback on ungrading, it’s almost always students who say,”This is really interesting, but I never know where I’m at.” And so they’re really concerned about how they’re going to measure their progress. But they’re not thinking about their progress in learning, they’re thinking about their progress toward a specific grade, which is really understandable because grades are important. And so that’s also a smaller group of students. But I would say, by far, the biggest reaction I get from students is something like cautious optimism. So I always start ungraded courses with a conversation about grades and learning, and I ask students to share with me their experiences of grades and share with each other. And very often, they have a lot of negative experiences to share, and sometimes positive experiences as well. But we talk about the relationship between grades and motivation and grades and learning and they have a chance to reflect on that. And so I use these conversations as a jumping off point to explain why I use the system that I do and how I think it will benefit them as learners. And I think students find it really helpful to be able to talk about their experiences with grading openly and to be heard by a teacher. And I think that that alone makes them more willing to buy into the system. So once it’s explained fully, and once students start to see the potential benefits, I would say that most of them are cautiously optimistic.

Rebecca: I think that largely aligns with my experiences and explorations when ungrading as well. In your class, you included five different assessments and opportunities for revision. Can you talk about and describe these assessments?

Emily: Sure. So the first thing that students had the opportunity to do were weekly writing practice assignments. So these are what you might think of as formative assessments, they’re preparation for class discussion and major assignments that mostly involve reading or short writing prompts. And these students weren’t able to revise, they either kind of did it or they didn’t. But then students had an opportunity to do more longer major assignments, which are more typical assessments for the writing class, a series of papers and a multimodal kind of project or two, with an imagined audience kind of outside our classroom. And so these students could revise up to three times if they wanted to do that. And so I had to, for this class, adjust a little bit and do slightly fewer assignments than I might have done in a traditionally graded class, because the expectation is that students would be doing more intense work on each assignment in their revision. I also asked students to do self assessments periodically throughout the semester. So students would answer a series of questions about their progress toward the learning goals, about their goals for the remainder of the semester. And they would also propose a current grade for themselves based on evidence that they provided. And this is a similar activity to what we did at the end of the semester to determine their course grades. They were also assessed on their final portfolio, which had revised versions of their major assignments. So their work… basically as good as they could make it… their best version of their major assignments, plus another final self assessment of their work in the class. And then they were also assessed on class engagement, so their class attendance, their preparation for and participation in class discussion, the timeliness of their work, their support for the learning community and fellow students and things like that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you provided your feedback on those assessments?

Emily: Sure. So for the writing practice assignments, usually I just wrote a sentence or two in response to students work to let them know if they were on the right track, or they may be needed to adjust slightly as they prepare for their major assignments. For the major assignments, I did do a lot of longer written feedback, and a lot of this looked like feedback that I would give in a traditionally graded class. But I think it was a little bit more oriented toward future growth, rather than reflecting on past work. It was giving them a lot of direction on how they might want to revise to make their work better in the future, not just for future papers, but for this particular paper. And with that feedback, I also gave them a rubric, where I marked kind of where I thought they were at along the specific assessment categories and criteria that we were using for that assignment. So for example, we might have a category for audience and purpose. Students could see whether I think their work on that category was still developing, whether it was at the level of proficient or whether it reached the level of excellent, so I had these different categories and these different kind of progress metrics, where I would indicate this is a skill that I think you’re still working on, or this is a skill that you’re doing really well in. And I also provided feedback to students through our individual conferences. So we met once at midterm, I met with each individual student, and then once at the end of the semester, to have a face-to-face conversation about how students were doing and if they needed to make any adjustments to reach their goals for the rest of the semester. And I didn’t give any feedback through letter grades or points. Those are not really great forms of feedback. They don’t actually give us a lot of information about our progress. So most of the feedback that I provided was kind of qualitative feedback.

Rebecca: You just talked a little bit about rubrics as part of a feedback that we were providing students, can you talk a little bit about how those rubrics were developed?

Emily: Yeah, so I’ve tried several different methods of creating rubrics. And one of the things that I like to do is co-create them with students or get students input on rubrics. And I attempted to co-create rubrics with students in two different classes and have done it a few times. And sometimes it’s a huge success, and sometimes it really does not work very well at all. And in my spring class, it didn’t work very well at all. [LAUGHTER] So basically, what I’ve done previously is ask students what they think makes a good argument or a good piece of public writing, or whatever it is that we’re working on. Or I ask them what kinds of things they believe their writing should be assessed on, and how we would determine whether or not their writing is successful. And then we have a conversation about that. I make notes on the board as we’re talking. And then I go away and distill those notes down into a rubric with about five categories in which student work is assessed. And then there’s the three metrics, so developing, proficient, and excellent. And sometimes this works really well. But in my spring class, I think the students were really at a loss when I asked them about assessment, and even when I asked them what good writing looks like. And I think that’s because that no one has ever asked them to think about that before. They’re used to being told what their work should look like by someone else, and then trying to conform their work to those expectations, or to someone else’s standards. And obviously, we need to have standards and expectations for student work. But one of the things that that does is get the students only thinking about what the teacher wants and not what they want. They’re not thinking about what they want their work to look like, or what their standards are or what they’re trying to accomplish. And so I think, ultimately, if we’re preparing students for the real world, whatever that is, this is what we want them to be able to do, not just to blindly follow somebody else’s standards, but to create and work independently in a self motivated way, and then assess their work independently. So I think we have to kind of start with baby steps in that process. So in the spring course, the rubric activity really turned into a conversation about how students have been assessed in the past and why they’ve been assessed that way. So when I ask them about their experiences, how their writing had been assessed, they would say things like, we were graded on the word count, or we were graded on whether or not we included two sources in every paragraph. And then we use that as a jumping off point to talk about the principle behind those what they viewed as arbitrary rules. And so if your teacher is concerned about word count, it’s because they want you to make a substantive argument. And what does a substantive argument look like? If your teacher is concerned about including sources, it’s because they want you to make an argument based on strong evidence. And so what would strong evidence look like? And so we use that conversation to think about the assessment criteria for their college level work, and how that might be similar or different from what they experienced in the past. So in that way, I do think that conversation was helpful. And I do think based on my few experiences, that it helps to have students extrapolate criteria from some examples, rather than from thin air, kind of as I was asking them to do, but either way, having a transparent conversation about what students are being assessed on and why and a purpose behind the criteria is key to their success.

John: In one of your blog posts, you describe some of the writing assignments that you used in your class, and they seem quite interesting. Could you describe some of the writing prompts that you gave to students?

Emily: Yes, I was really excited about some of the assignments that I developed for this class. And I think I’m going to keep using them or versions of them in future classes. So for this class, I had a menu of assignment options. So the students could, for each major assignment, choose the kinds of projects that they found most compelling, or they would really draw on your strengths. And I thought this was important, partially because we were working some with generative AI in the class. And I’m sure everyone is aware by now some very serious data privacy concerns, ethical concerns around the use of generative AI. So I didn’t want to mandate that students work with AI if they didn’t want to, and some really didn’t want to. So I tried to offer them several options. And I was really happy about some of the options that I came up with. So obviously, one of the things that I was thinking about going into this semester was how to deal with generative AI and I have a lot of thoughts about that. But one big way to think about how to discourage inappropriate use of AI or encourage appropriate use of it is to think really carefully about assignment design. So one of the things that I did to help students navigate AI was lean into some multimodal work, think about argumentation in media other than writing or that kind of worked alongside writing. So we didn’t abandon writing entirely, but I did include a photo essay as one possible assignment in a menu of options. And for this course, I asked students to take a look at a book of photographs by Cassandra Horii and Martin Springborg that’s called What Teaching Looks Like. It’s a really, really cool book with candid photos of college teaching. And so we use this book to talk about visual rhetoric and also to use the photos as a launchpad for this discussion about college teaching practices and students’ experiences in the classroom. And so the assignment that students did based on their work with this book was to create their own photo essay called “What Learning Looks Like.” So instead of what teaching looks like, what learning looks like, with a specific audience and purpose in mind. So that was one of the assignments that I liked. Another one that I thought was really promising was something called “share your story,” which asks students to tell a personal narrative about their educational experience, and then connect that to a larger issue of concern or a body of research in higher education. So of course, this is not totally AI proof. ChatGPT can make up a story, but it can’t tell my students’ own stories. And I think most of us really like to tell our stories to other people. So I think that provided a little more motivation for students to do their own work. And then the last assignment that I really liked was an assignment that actually asked students to work with ChatGPT. So they created a prompt based on a template that I provided for an argumentative piece that they then fed to ChatGPT, so they gave ChatGBT the prompt. And then they took the ChatGPT output and critiqued it. So they annotated it, noting what pieces they thought were strong, whether or not the piece had weaknesses, and what those weaknesses were, where it might need revision or overhaul. And then they had to totally rewrite the piece that ChatGPT produced and make it their own. So they had to do a substantial revision. And then they had to annotate their own work and tell me why they made the revision decisions that they did. And so I want to clarify that I do think it’s important that students learn to generate first drafts on their own, because drafting is an essential part of the writing process, and it’s where a lot of the thinking happens. But I like this assignment as just one assignment in the sequence, because it does help students learn about generative AI and develop some AI literacy. And it also helps students get over that terror of the blank page. So a lot of students procrastinate because they don’t know how to get started. They’ll open their laptop to begin a paper and stare at the blank screen. And I find it really difficult to get over that first hump of starting work, and just close their laptop and go away and try it again later, usually the night before it’s due. So I think starting in this way, with a ChatGPT prompt and an essay gives them a jumping off point, and it’s an easy way to help them start building the confidence they need to do their own first draft.

John: We should mention that we did talk to the authors of What Teaching Looks Like, and we’ll include a link to that discussion in the show notes. One of the things you described in your blog is that having this ungraded environment encourages students to be perhaps a little more open and honest with their instructors, but that could lead to some challenges in terms of additional emotional labor. Could you describe the challenges that you faced in this class with that?

Emily: I think one of the big themes in the spring class in particular was that I asked students to share with the class and for audiences beyond the class about their previous experiences in school, or their current experiences, and I think this also happens in a lot of ungraded classes. One common method of introducing an unfamiliar grading system is getting students to think about their previous experiences with grades. And so one thing that happened in this particular class is that students’ related a lot of past educational trauma to me, and usually that involves bad experiences with previous teachers. And I’m really glad that they were able to speak honestly about that sort of thing. And I think it helped them to have a teacher take them seriously when they related those stories. At the same time, it was pretty difficult to navigate those conversations, because I was managing their emotions, my emotions, and also doing that when sometimes I only knew one side of the story. And so that was a little bit difficult. Another thing is that students in this class didn’t seem to feel that their grade depended on telling me what I wanted to hear. So I think they were a lot more honest about their views than in other courses that I’ve taught. So in my traditionally graded classes, or I think, in any class where students are discussing hot button issues, they tend to think that they’ll be graded more harshly if they express views that the instructor disagrees with. So very often, I think, they try to say what they think you want to hear rather than what they really think. And that didn’t seem to happen as much in my spring course. I had several students endorse viewpoints that I definitely disagreed with whether they knew that or not. And I think that’s good, because students have to sort through their own views and values. But it also required me to do a lot of thinking about how I would approach and address students not just whose views I disagreed with, but whose expression of those views might be damaging to others or to themselves. And so, we need to do some work around community building and relationship building in the class. And then of course, when you build relationships with trust with students, they’re more likely to tell you about the personal problems that they’re facing, whether that’s their mental or physical health or their personal relationships or family emergencies or grieving. And it’s really just a lot. And I do sometimes lay awake at night worried about my students. And there’s a lot of care work happens, I think, in all classes and also especially ungraded classes. And so there’s a lot of work in referring students to other resources and helping them navigate campus resources, and also just a lot of kind of management of your own emotional state [LAUGHTER] that has to happen. So I did want to be honest on the blog about some of the emotional toll of the work of teaching in general and of ungrading too.

Rebecca: You’ve described the care work, you’ve described individual conferences with students, you’ve described students’ anxiety over not knowing where they are sometimes and allowing substantial revision. Can you talk a little bit about how all of those things play into workload and how you’ve managed things?

Emily: Yes, this is a good question. And I feel like I have a very complicated answer to whether or not ungrading has increased my workload, because I get asked this question a lot. In my traditionally graded classes, giving all that feedback felt like a waste of time for a few reasons. First, because I had the sense that students weren’t really reading the feedback. So we know from research that when students receive a letter grade and also feedback on their work, they tend to see the grade and then ignore the feedback, or at least receive the feedback as a justification for a grade, rather than something that’s going to help them improve their work in the future. So I also spend a lot of time in traditionally graded classes worrying about how students would receive my feedback if they got a low grade on their paper. So how could I write feedback that would be appropriately honest, but also appropriately encouraging, so that students didn’t just see a C-minus or a D on their paper, and then give up and throw it in the trash. So I don’t really worry about those things since I’ve adopted ungrading. I provide feedback honestly, and with the mindset of a coach rather than a judge. And I provide it with at least some confidence that students will read it and use it. So they have plenty of opportunity to revise. And in fact, their ultimate achievement of the course is measured by their growth in specific areas and their demonstration of learning that arises from taking a piece of writing from not so good to much better. And so the expectation is that what they turn in the first time is not their best work and they’ll only get to their best work after they incorporate feedback. So I do spend a lot of time responding to student work now that I’m ungrading. But the process is more efficient because it accomplishes my goals rather than wasting my time. And it’s more enjoyable, because it causes me less angst. So I guess it is more work to provide feedback, but it’s also more efficient and enjoyable work. I think I feel kind of the same way about individual conferences with students, that it does take quite a bit of time to do those and it would be, I want to acknowledge, so much more difficult, it may be impossible to do if I was teaching more classes and more students. I’m very lucky that I teach small class sizes. And because I work in educational developments and work in a teaching center for most of the time, I only teach one course at a time. So I think there are ways to do this with larger courses, but I’m very fortunate in my course to be able to conference individually with each student twice in the semester. And those conferences are incredibly time consuming, and they can be really draining, but they are also really joyful. And I think it’s really important that students are able to have those one-on-one conversations with me. And they are much more, I think, effective in accomplishing a lot of the goals that I have for student learning than just simply doing written feedback or peer review or things like that. Having that face-to-face time to give students some individual attention is a really both enjoyable and effective part of the learning process.

John: A question that often comes up from people who have not tried ungrading is how well do students’ perceptions of their learning align with your perceptions of the learning when you do have to assign those midterm or final grades in the class?

Emily: Yeah, this is a really good question. And I would say I’ve had to do a little bit of work on my process to make sure that our expectations are aligning well. Sometimes, there are cases where students don’t automatically start off knowing what I expect from their work and what good work looks like, even when I thought that I was clear about that. So that is an issue that I’m working on. I would say for the majority of students, they do understand what good work looks like. And when they’re asked to provide evidence for their course grade, most of the time they know what good evidence looks like and are able to demonstrate to me in really, sometimes ways that I hadn’t anticipated, that they really had learned in the class and progressed and improved their work. For those students who struggle, and I think it’s more frequent for first-year students to struggle with this than more advanced students, for students who do struggle, I think it is important to be able to show them models of student work early in the semester so that they can get a sense of what a successful assignment looks like or what’s kind of level of expectations we have for what student work counts as really excellent work. So that’s been really helpful. And I’ve also made some changes to my class this semester to help clarify for students a little bit what kind of evidence might be good evidence for specific grade proposals in the course. So if they are really shooting for an A or B in the course, what kinds of actions or behaviors or demonstrations of quality work do they need to be able to show in order to attain that grade?

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I struggled with in some of the classes where I’ve done ungrading is that sometimes the midterm conference feels like it comes too late. So I experimented, I think once with like a one-third, two-thirds, three thirds approach, but then that was so much more conferencing.

Emily: Yeah.

Rebecca: So I’m curious about your timing and how the midterm time works in the classes that you’ve been teaching.

Emily: Yeah, I think that’s where the self-assessment assignments come in. So I do think midterm is quite late for students to be getting the first level of feedback. And so I have students do a self-assessment form, I guess, a quarter way into the semester. So we start that process really early of having them look back at the work that they’ve done, and propose a grade for themselves based on that work. And when they do those self assessments, I don’t conference with students every time they do a self assessment, but I do look at where their grade proposals are. And I’m able to say if our expectations are very, very different, or assessments of that students work is very, very different, I’m able to reach out and say, “Hey, I don’t think we’re aligned here, and here’s why.” And being able to intervene early on that I think is really important.

John: We’re recording this near the end of the fall semester of 2023. And you’re currently teaching another ungraded class, could you tell us a little bit about what types of changes you made from the spring class to the fall class?

Emily: Sure, there are a few changes that I’ve made, because there were some things that I think did not go very well in the spring and I wanted to try to improve that. So what didn’t go well was that I had a real problem with attendance, there were quite a few students who struggled with their attendance, especially in the latter half of the semester, and quite a few students who struggled to submit their work on time kind of throughout the semester. And that made it difficult for me, but I think more importantly, it made it really difficult for the students who once they missed an assignment, they found it really difficult to get back on track. So my challenge is really to figure out how to motivate students to attend class regularly and submit work on time without penalizing them for absences or late work or without a kind of point system to encourage them to show up to class and to submit their work on time. So that was one thing I wanted to address. And then the other thing is that students’ anxiety about not knowing where they stand in the midst of the semester at any given point. So what I developed to address all of those challenges was a course progress tracker. And so this is a document, a pretty comprehensive document, inspired by David Clark’s Grading for Growth post about grade trackers that I read during the summer while I was designing this course. And so the document is really a series of tracking worksheets in three different categories. So the first category is readings and assignments, students can see each week at a glance what work they have to complete, and then they can check off boxes as they complete that work, and then note, if there are assignments they’re submitting late, they can record those late submissions. There’s a category for attendance and engagement where students can check off the classes that they attend, and then make notes about their in or out of class engagement during each week of the semester. And then there’s a section… the most important section… for learning and growth where students can remind themselves of what the course goals are, and then track their progress along those goals, so they can see and make notes about where they’re still developing, where they’re doing excellent work, and how they’re improving their writing as the semester goes along. So, so far, it’s been going really well. And I’ve had fewer challenges with attendance and late work this semester than last semester, though, I can’t say to what extent that’s just a result of a different population of students or the fact that it’s fall instead of spring. So I will add that caveat, but I have surveyed students about their use of the progress tracker last week, and I’m really looking forward to diving into that next week. So the last thing that I think the progress tracker does, which I didn’t totally intend, but which has been really excellent, is that I think it helps students a lot with their self-assessment work, which they also struggled with, to some extent last semester, or I should say, maybe I struggled to teach really well. So I had a realization at the end of last semester, that when I sat down to think about a student’s work over the course of this semester, I was really thinking about three things. And so the first thing is quantity. How much work did students do? How much labor did they put in? How many assignments did they submit at a satisfactory level? How many class days did they attend? How much time did they spend on their major assignments? So that was one category. The second was quality. So how good was the work that they were doing according to the standards that we laid out? Was it still kind of developing work? Or was it excellent work? And then the third thing was growth. So how and how much did student work improve over the course of this semester? And can they demonstrate that they’ve gained knowledge and skills that they didn’t have before? Or can they demonstrate that they’re better off from having taken the course. And so while we’ve had conversations about those things in the spring, I never articulated to myself or to my students, that particular model; I never kind of said it in quite this way. So the last section of the progress tracker includes a guide to determining final letter grades for students. And it gives them space to think about quantity, quality and growth, and how that might contribute to the grade that they propose for themselves, if they’re interested in the specific letter grade. And it gives them a sense of what kinds of evidence they could provide if they want to show good evidence for a specific letter grade. So you can provide good evidence for an A if your work rises to the level of excellent on multiple assessment categories. Or if you attended class every time that you were able and submitted the vast majority of your writing practice assignments. So all of these things are good pieces of evidence if you want to propose an A grade for yourself. So there’s some flexibility there, I don’t prescribe exactly what students have to do for a specific grade, but I do make suggestions and say, here’s a guideline for you. If you’re confused about what kinds of work you need to be doing, or what you need to do to demonstrate that you’ve attained a certain letter grade, you can take a look at this guide, and learn a little bit more about what the expectations are. Currently, it’s just something for the students to use for themselves. I have provided time in class for students to fill out sections of it, because I think that if I did not ask them to do it in class, they might struggle to keep up with it outside of class. But I think maybe in the future, I will consider asking them to keep up with it. And then periodically checking in on those progress trackers throughout the semester so that I can intervene early, if there are any issues and maybe leave comments on the documents to let students know if I think they’re struggling in a specific area, or if they’re doing really well in a specific area. I am playing around with that idea for my next version of the class.

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

Emily: So this spring, I won’t be teaching an undergraduate course, but I will be working with graduate students who are preparing to teach their own Writing and Rhetoric courses. And I’m really looking forward to talking with them about teaching. And I’ll also be continuing to write about ungrading on the blog. So specifically, I’m hoping to share a bit more about what I learned from my experiences this semester. And I’ve been collecting data from my current students about their use of the progress tracker, about their use of AI in their writing this semester, and about their feelings and impressions of ungrading. And what I’m planning to do throughout the spring is share some of those student thoughts with the readers of the blog, and I’m really excited to be able to share students’ ideas about ungrading and other topics as well.

Rebecca: Sounds great. We’ll look forward to reading that for sure.

John: Thank you, Emily. It’s great talking to you and we look forward to future conversations.

Emily: Thanks, this has been fantastic.

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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.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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315. Unessays

Posted in assessment, engagement, equity, feedback, geeky pedagogy, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, pedagogy, teaching
November 15, 2023

An unessay assignment provides students an opportunity to demonstrate their learning in innovative and creative ways. In this episode, Jessamyn Neuhaus and Maggie Schmuhl join us to discuss how they have employed unessay assignments in their courses.

Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. Maggie is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at SUNY-Oswego.

Show Notes

  • Neuhaus, J. (2019). Geeky Pedagogy: A guide for intellectuals, introverts, and nerds who want to be effective teachers. Morgantown, WV, USA: West Virginia University Press.
  • Neuhaus, J. (2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Neuhaus, J. (editor) (2022). Using the Unessay to Teach History. Teaching History: A Journal of Methods. Vol. 47. No. 1.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2023). Mind over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.
  • Jessamyn’s American Promise Unessay Assignment
  • Pittman, Chavella (2022). “Strategizing for Success: Women Faculty of Color Navigating Teaching Inequities in Higher Ed” in Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. Ed. by Jessamyn Neuhaus. West Virginia University Press.
  • Pittman, Chavella (2023). Navigating Teaching Inequities. Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 291. May 31.
  • POD Network Conference
  • Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Education Series. University of Oklahoma Press.
  • American Historical Association Annual Meetings

Transcript

John: An unessay assignment provides students an opportunity to demonstrate their learning in innovative and creative ways. In this episode, we explore ways in which different faculty have employed unessay assignments in their courses

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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 Jessamyn Neuhaus and Maggie Schmuhl. Jessamyn is the Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers. She is the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. Maggie is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at SUNY-Oswego. Welcome back, Jessamyn and Maggie.

Maggie: Hello.

Jessamyn: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Maggie: Good to be here.

John: Our teas today are:… Jessamyn, are you drinking any tea?

Jessamyn: I am. In preparation for this very question, I’m drinking a wild sweet orange.

Maggie: Oooh.

Rebecca: Sounds nice.

Maggie: That sounds very fall. I am drinking a bread pudding tea. It’s a black tea from a little tea shop in Sacketts Harbor.

Rebecca: That’s a first on our podcast for sure.

Maggie: I think it’s called Tea Thyme, the little shop. It’s quite lovely.

Rebecca: Nice. I have Irish breakfast this morning. So we’ve invited you both here today to discuss unessay assignments. Could you tell us a bit about what an essay is?

Maggie: I guess I’ll say an unessay is anything but an essay. Jessamyn probably has some more nuance? [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Not really, that is the basic premise. In classes where you might traditionally ask students to show their learning via a standard essay, either like the five-paragraph essay or a research paper, an unessay project asks students to demonstrate their learning, increased understanding, via any other kind of format.

Rebecca: Jessamyn, can you tell us a little bit about why you decided to use unessays in your class?

Jessamyn: Sure. And this also relates to… I know, we were maybe going to talk about what was appealing for historians, in particular, about the unessay. And some points for history professors generally and me, what attracted us to considering using the unessay. A couple of things about our discipline: first, that the unessay, it’s a good way for students to explore some key historical thinking skills in different new ways for them, so things like citation, research, and historiography. So trying to understand what other historians have written and argued about the past. There’s also been a pretty significant sort of public history turn in the world at large, like trying to better understand different audiences for historical research. Some other more general reasons were issues of equity and inclusion, especially around Universal Design for Learning, trying to offer students some options as a way to increase their learning, increase engagement. And the final thing I’ll say, just for me personally, is that I wanted to make assessment and grading a more joyful and happy part of my teaching life. It had really started to drag me down. And I didn’t want to approach assessing student learning as a soul sucking slog, not just for personal reasons, but also that it was interfering with my ability to accurately assess. If I was absolutely dreading reading a stack of essays, then something was amiss, and I wasn’t going to be able to, in my view, really accurately assess what has this student achieved.

Rebecca: About you, Maggie?

Maggie: I think really a lot of what Jessamyn said echoes in the reasons I decided to incorporate the unessay in my classroom. I was actually inspired by a talk that Jessamyn gave to our faculty, I guess it was over a year ago now, about the unessay and I immediately thought of my senior seminar class. So in criminal justice, in our department particularly, it was common for students to write a 20- or 30-page long research paper, and they dreaded it. It was a source of anxiety for students. It was something in the end that I’m not entirely certain they felt proud of. They just were trying really hard to get the A in the class, to make it perfect, to spend lots of late nights trying to perfect this project and I don’t think it brought about the kind of learning gains that I was hoping to see with my students, it seemed like there was a lot of going through the motions. And the unessay just gave us an opportunity to really turn that on its head and give some of that autonomy back to students and some of that creativity back to learning.

Rebecca: I’m loving these themes of joy, creativity…

John: …which are not terms we often associate with either writing papers as students or with grading them as faculty, and Jessamyn, you were the editor of a fall 2022 issue of Teaching History that focused on unessays. Could you tell us a little bit about ways in which you and other historians have been using them in your classes… some examples of ways in which students have demonstrated their knowledge?

Jessamyn: Sure, and I’ll just give a little promo here, Teaching History: A Journal of Methods is an open access journal. So you can just Google Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, and it’ll take you to the open access platform. It’s hosted by Ball State University. And so that issue is still totally available for anyone interested in reading it. I would say, like some specific projects that were explored in that issue, there was an article about using maps as historical documents, there were a number of projects that were exploring how to present history and historical thinking in a public history setting. So along the lines of museum exhibits, and especially in a digital format, the upsurge in digital humanities is something several of the authors were looking at. And then there’s a whole range of examples that were discussed in the two interviews I did for everything from board games, to graphic novels, to quilt, to the annotated recipes. All those were discussed in that issue.

Rebecca: What are some specific projects, Jessamyn, that you’ve done in your classes,

Jessamyn: A couple that have come up that I used… it’s interesting… Maggie used the unessay with her senior students. And I have helped students in the history department here, they also have to do a major research project. And I’ve been the advisor on a number of non-traditional projects is what I called them at the time, and now would say unessay. So at the senior levels, students did major research projects, like a fictional interview with a historical figure, historical fiction would be another example. I’ve had a couple of students do online exhibits and one person do an in-person exhibit. But I also use the unessay assignment in my intro level class, which is a basic history survey class. And those projects ranged from again, the board game, I had a number of posters, I had one student who was a trained professional baker do a set of cookies with icing, comparing different protest movements, the Bonus Army March in the 1930s with the more recent climate change activism. And one of my very favorites was a video recording that a student did, showing step by step how she made a family recipe. And since the theme of the class was the American Promise, and the way that throughout our history, as a nation, we’ve struggled to achieve the ideals of equality and liberty for all. And we get closer and we fall short. And her recipe was from her family’s background from India. And she took us step by step through it. She had music playing and was describing the importance of this particular dish in her own family history. The unessay was encouraging them to see their location in the American Promise. And it really struck me, in my previous life as a historian of food and food waste. So that was interesting. But most striking to me was, this was a student who had been very, very quiet in class. I felt like I didn’t know her very well. She was doing great work, but she was sort of on the edge of things it seemed like, and with this unessay, it completely changed my perception of her. I felt like I got to know her so much better and so did the other students as well. Having students share their unessays is an important part of the work and It really changed just the whole classroom dynamic in that way. So that was really notable.

Maggie: Nice.

John: Maggie, what are some of the projects that your students have done as unessay assignments?

Maggie: Yeah, so I mentioned before that I assigned the unessay for my senior seminar class. So it’s a sort of capstone project. And there were some really awesome projects that came out of this and I probably don’t have time to talk about all of them. So cut me off at some point when I’ve been going on for too long. But I had a student who wanted to be a elementary school teacher, and had gone through our program and decided that being a practitioner in the field of criminal justice was not exactly where they wanted to be. And so his project was to create lesson plans for second graders to communicate some of the harms of incarceration and how it affects youth when their parents or caregivers are incarcerated. And so it was a really wonderful project, all the students had worksheets, kind of like you can think about having when you were in second grade, and little matching puzzles and games, and it was a really cool experience. And for him getting interested in a master’s of education program, it was a way that he could then take that project and show to his grad school applications and advisors, like, “Hey, this is something that I’m really passionate about. I’ve been working towards this. And yeah, it was a lot of fun.” We had a good time, even some spelling words thrown in there. [LAUGHTER] It was great. Another student project was a choose your own adventure story. There’s various examples of this. But in my youth, it was the Goosebumps choose your own adventure where you read to a certain part in the story, and then it gives you the option of what you want your protagonist to choose. And then you have to flip to a different area of the book and see the fate of that character. And so the students started a really great project, unfortunately, didn’t get to finish it for various reasons, but started a really great project about reentry. And so the main character was someone who was being released from prison and had to navigate all of the barriers and circumstances around reentry that made it difficult for him to assimilate back into society. So that was a big fan favorite amongst the class. They really enjoyed that. Of course, we also had some board games, one in particular, was a monopoly game that examines varying socioeconomic status, and how that influences someone’s path through the criminal justice system. So the players started off with different amounts of money. And as they would pull community cards and have to purchase property and such, they would be challenged to need to pay a particular court fine, and how that would set them back from being able to find a job. It was a very well thought out game of Monopoly. But the goal to show and highlight the inequalities related to income and how that affects criminal justice processing. I could probably keep going, but it really gave a lot of opportunities for students to combine what they were interested in. There was a student who had run their own podcast for a period of time. So she conducted a podcast series on Amber Alerts and their effectiveness. And it was something that when she had been traveling down to Texas, and had received a number of Amber Alerts in the short time that she was there, she was like, “Are these things really working? And how can I explore that through a medium that she was already quite drawn to?”

Rebecca: Unessays always sound like so much fun?

Maggie: Yeah. And they’re fun for us. I know Jessamyn touched on that, too. It’s a whole different experience as someone assessing the work that they’re doing when you know that they’re passionate about it. And it gets me excited about assessment, which I don’t think is something we can typically say.

Rebecca: There’s not a big line of faculty raising flags saying assessment is fun.

Maggie: Right. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: I also wanted to follow up on a point Maggie’s touched on a couple times about student autonomy and agency. I think for both our student populations, this is a really key academic, professional, and personal skill that many of our students need to build, that they arrive to college with a sense of themselves as very passive recipients of education and have not had the opportunity to really see themselves as producers of knowledge. as having agency in academic settings. So for me, one of the great glories of the unessay, is that it’s starting point really is, what do you want to do? What do you want to do to demonstrate that you understand this topic, and for a lot of students, it’s scary at first. A few might think that you’re trying to trick them. And I know this was something we did want to talk about. It does require, on our part, a fair amount of structuring and transparency and communication with students, maybe even especially the highest achieving students. One of my favorite students of all time went on to become a high school social studies teacher. And she did a fantastic job in the intro class with the unessay and then told me like a year later, “You know, I hated that assignment when I did it.” And it was because she was very, very nervous. She was a straight A student who was really nervous about doing something different. But she said, “Now, it’s my favorite, looking back.” So providing that structure and support and transparency, a lot of careful thought on the front end.

John: And one of the things we’ve been talking about in one of our reading groups, Mind over Monsters this semester, at both of our institutions, is the importance of autonomy, in terms of increasing student motivation and giving them more sense of control. It sounds like it’s really helpful in motivating students.

Jessamyn: Yeah, I think so. In both of our disciplines, criminal justice and history, there is a major learning curve to helping students see themselves as having agency in this particular discipline, especially the way they may have interacted with it before. And for me, coming from a lot of their previous experiences with history has been learning what happened and not actually doing history or thinking about those processes and the unessay could really help them move towards that particular desirable learning outcome.

Rebecca: I think one of the challenges that faculty who have been engaged in unessays before see before they enter in is the complexity of having students doing many different kinds of things at one time and managing those projects and also assessing those projects. Can you talk a little bit about how you help provide that structure for yourselves and for students?

Maggie: Yeah, so for my criminal justice class, I spent a lot of time the summer before I implemented this project, creating very detailed instructions and expectations. Jessamyn, I went to your website, and I use some of the self assessment tools, and I adapted them for my class as well. It was a very mindful process to think about how to give students the structure they need to feel confident in their ability to carry out this project, but also give them enough flexibility and creativity to take this project where they want it to be. I also spend a lot of time reading about different alternative grading practices to also incorporate in this, so I use kind of a combination of ungrading and specifications grading as well to help students assess their work. And I met with students quite often throughout the semester, particularly we had a midterm and a final exam meeting where we talked about the strengths of their projects, where they needed to go and what areas they needed to work on, whether it was engaging more deeply in the research and how to communicate that effectively in their projects. It was a lot of work for the faculty, but it was worth it in my opinion. It wasn’t so onerous and it wasn’t boring. It was exciting to meet with students, even if it meant spending my entire midterm week in the office with the students. It was almost every minute of my day for an entire week doing this, but it was, I think, a unique opportunity for making those connections with my students.

Jessamyn: I have been lucky. I have a relatively light teaching load and small classes. So that did make a difference in how I thought about structuring and implementing the unessay. There would be challenges on a larger scale. I would also say that there’s components of the unessay, that it’s not just do anything you want, and then nothing, and then in the end they turn in something. No, there’s stages and components like usually a proposal process and I also was able to meet with students. You could meet with students in small groups as well, if it’s a larger size class to go over the proposals, and many unessay assignments also do have a written component like a bibliography, an intro. At the midterm and end there could be a reflective assignment or sort of summary of work achieved. I did co-create with students the assessment guidelines for their projects. So taking the autonomy and agency a step further, I didn’t leave it totally up to them, we worked together on it, but asked them, “So this is your idea, this is the project you have in mind. How will it show these important skills? How will it show that you’ve met these course learning objectives?” And we work together on it. And that part is always great for me, I just really enjoy trying to de-center myself a little bit as the instructor which again, is something I can do from a place of certain privileges. I have tenure, I’m white, I’m cisgendered. But trying to enlist students as partners more, decentering myself a little bit, and asking them to reflect on what would show that you have achieved this learning outcome with this unessay assignment. A nice bonus is always students, at least one student, will say this is so hard, teaching must be really, really hard. [LAUGHTER] So bringing them in on that assessment process can help them even reflect on what does grading and assessment mean? What would show me that you’ve successfully achieved this learning, this desirable outcome?

John: Do either of you use rubrics for the unessay assignments?

Jessamyn: Well, when I co-created assessment guidelines with students, some of them used a rubric form. A lot of my students found rubrics helpful for things like deadlines. And I did set deadlines for certain benchmarks. And that was something that was easy to map out and help them structure their work time and stay on track as well.

Maggie: Yeah, I created a checklist with that self assessment that was on Jessamyn’s website, geekypedagogy.com. I did have students go through that and rate themselves, and then we got together in a meeting to discuss where we felt the accuracy of each of those points. But I think it gave them some comfort in saying, “Okay, I know I did multiple revisions of this, and I incorporated all of the feedback I was given. And here’s the changes I’ve made, or here’s the areas that I think I probably could have done better, or I could have focused my time a little bit better in this way.” And it just gave them, I think, a nice guideline to be able to talk about the strengths and areas of improvement for their project.

Jessamyn: I’ve used rubrics before, when I was co-creating the assessments. That’s fine with me, if that’s what they want to use. I will say that this part of it, while being very cognizant, like I said, of my own privileges and positionality and aware of that, your teaching context can really shape what kinds of assessments you can implement, for sure. But I also think that it’s at least worth considering the idea of our academic egos and our investment in our discipline and expertise. And what the unessay may challenge us to do is let go of the thing we know how to do absolutely better than anything in the world. So as a historian, a trained historian, I know how to assess student writing better than any other task I do as a teacher. I know so much about it. And it’s easy for me to do, not joyful, [LAUGHTER] but not difficult. It doesn’t push me to think about anything outside my comfort zone. And when I assign an unessay, I have to let go of that and think about things differently. And again, keeping in mind that I know bandwidth is limited, the incredible pressure on a lot of people in the pandemic pivot and for all various reasons, our limited energy, it might be too big an ask, too big a lift. But I would encourage listeners, if it’s possible, to consider maybe it’s not about me. [LAUGHTER] It’s not about us, and what makes us most comfortable as the person with the PhD in the room. That being a little uncertain. how can I assess did students meet this learning outcome with a quilt, with a board game, with a podcast, that it’s okay for us to feel a little bit discomforted. That’s about maybe getting out of the students way a little bit.

Rebecca: When I hear folks talk about unessays, both of you as well as others that I’ve heard talk about unessays, I see a big emphasis on process and the behaviors of a discipline, rather than necessarily the outcomes of something. So often in a research paper, we might assess on some of the polish of something like that, rather than really seeing always the process that goes into the thinking. But I feel like a lot of times with these projects, you end up knowing a lot more about a student’s thinking, because you’re talking with them about their projects in an ongoing way. Can you talk a little bit about that process piece with unessays?

Jessamyn: Well, one thing that jumped into my mind, Rebecca, when you were asking your question is writing a thesis statement for a research paper. Now, this happens to be something I’m incredibly good at helping students do, crafting their thesis statement. But, just like you described, it’s often so much about the academic writing skill that I’m helping them with, and when they have to write a thesis statement for the research paper they’re working on, that’s a great skill to have, if you’re going to be an academic. If you are engaging in scholarly writing, you have to know how to do that. And for a few students, that’s important. And that’s not like written communication skill. I’m talking about the highly academic scholarly skill of summarizing the argument you’re about to make in a paper. So for students who want to go on to be graduate students, I’m all in. We’re going to sit and we’re gonna go through this word by ever loving word to figure out the best way to state your argument. For a lot of my students, though, is that the best investment of their time, and the best way I can help them? There might be other ways to, just like you said, have them articulate and demonstrate their thinking, which, and I’ll just throw it out here in the age of generative AI and ChatGPT, this is at the heart of how we help students navigate is their original ideas really matter, their ideas, and their thinking matters. So if I can support a student being able to demonstrate their thinking and ideas in a way that matters to them, that they feel articulate doing, then, mission accomplished. That’s what I want. That’s what I want for students.

Maggie: Yeah, and I would say that, in my class, the 20- to 30-page research paper does serve students who are going to go on to graduate school. But like said, I don’t know if that is the best way to help them make the connection between what we’re doing in the classroom to what they are going to be doing on a regular basis in their various careers that they find themselves in. I wanted to make this project less about a means to an end for them, I wanted them to really think about how they start with an idea and how if they spend enough time thinking about that idea, and really focusing on how to communicate that expertise that they gained throughout the research on this idea, that they can create something that they’re proud of and they are hopefully less focused on the grade at the end of the semester and more focused on “Okay, I was actually able to start in one place, develop that project, develop this in a way that I can now go to my future employer or in an interview and say that I’ve developed these skills along the way that are mine and mine alone. They’re not ones that have been imposed on me by an instructor.”

John: We have increasingly diverse student bodies in terms of their prior preparation. Some have come through and had lots of practice writing throughout their high school careers and have developed those skills, others haven’t had as much preparation in writing. And we have lots of courses, though, that give them that but writing skills are not always one of the most important learning objectives for many of our classes. And it seems to me that perhaps using unessays can help provide a more equal playing field for students who may not have as strong of writing skills, but might be fairly comfortable creating videos or might be able to engage in some other creative activity that can demonstrate what they learned much more effectively than if they were constrained to having to do it in a written format.

Maggie: Well, I would say that was my experience for sure. I had a group of students make a series of TikTok videos and so they were quite excited about their ability to use something that they are on almost every day, if not every hour of their day, to use that as a platform to communicate the time topics that they were most interested in. And so it did mean that I had to learn a little bit about TikTok, I had to create a profile so I could follow my students and be able to see the videos that they had created. There’s an up voting system, too, I had to navigate [LAUGHTER] but yeah, in terms of equity, it does give students the ability to make decisions about how to present information in ways that they’re comfortable, but still challenging. I think that no matter what mediums students picked, it was challenging regardless. So it didn’t feel like students were just picking something that “Oh, well, I do this all the time.” It really was a strong motivator. And I think in a lot of the conversations we’ve been having in our reading groups about how to channel anxiety about something into a more direct way to accomplish a challenging task. I think it gave even students who are perhaps underprepared for academic writing, or find a lot of anxiety around that to shift their focus away from what they envision that they struggle with to then start in a place of, “Oh, I know I can do this, and I can communicate it in this way.” So I think it gave them some of that confidence back, that perhaps they find disappears when we impose a pretty lengthy paper or academic medium on them.

Jessamyn: There’s two aspects of the unessay and equity minded teaching I’ve been thinking of. One is the universal design for learning concept of providing some choice. It doesn’t have to be unlimited, it doesn’t have to be infinite choice. But providing some choice does increase accessibility. The second kind of key equity minded principle I have in mind with the unessay is that we should not be grading and assessing people’s life circumstances, we are grading and assessing their learning and their ability to show that they have reached certain benchmarks and outcomes. Just to put it in here as a caveat, I do think all kinds of writing is very, very important. Writing skills are very, very important. And a lot of the unessay assignment as I use it does include some clear written communication, because that is a skill we need in this world of ours. So the equity piece comes in though, that if I’m going to be assigning a grade assessing student writing, then it’s on me as the instructor to teach that and create the conditions in the classroom, the practice and the feedback, and more practice and making mistakes, and more feedback to do that writing piece. And if I’m taking into account the wide variety of academic backgrounds, what needs to happen in the course, for students to be able to demonstrate their learning accurately via a written essay, that’s a lot of writing work that I’m going to be doing to provide that equitable classroom. So the unessay as an option, that’s something a lot of people do offer the unessay as an option alongside a traditional essay option, the unessay as an option could increase equity in that way. I think it does convey the idea that our diversity is an academic asset. That all said, it’s interesting that the unessay could also exacerbate inequities without structure, without support. Students who have had very rich and varied past educational experiences may leap at the opportunity and see it just solely in terms of its benefits. Other students with less of that in their background might be extremely nervous about it as a whole new frontier for them. So without some structure, transparency, without all that prep work, Maggie, that you were describing, it could actually exacerbate some of those inequities.

John: And I think the scaffolding that you both described is really important in relieving some of that uncertainty, because I know some students when I’ve given similar types of assignments are really anxious about it and letting them do it a little step at a time and master that step seems to help relieve the pressure on them by just reducing the uncertainty.

Maggie: I know one of the things I incorporated in the project, and I think Jessamyn did this as well, that I gave students unlimited rewrites on any of the written work. So I did have a bibliography and I did have a proposal and a sort of artist’s statement reflection at the end of it. I think, again, I took that from geerkypedagogy[.com] and I gave students the opportunity to just keep rewriting and rewriting. And yes, it was a bit more work on my end. But it was so refreshing that students were actually taking my feedback into their work and they were making improvements. I think that whenever I’ve done drafts in the past, they might go through and make just the easy corrections and leave some of the harder things aside. But in this project, because we started a lot of those elements very early in the semester, we spend weeks and weeks just revising. And it really did give students, I think, a opportunity to make sure they fully were understanding and achieving those outcomes.

Jessamyn: Yeah, that point Maggie about your feedback actually being read and applied is so important for students and for faculty. It’s discouraging and disheartening to provide students a ton of feedback and then feel like it hasn’t been read. It’s up to us, though, to provide the opportunity for students to apply the feedback. If it can’t be applied, it’s very difficult to take it seriously [LAUGHTER] and to see it as meaningful and relevant. And I think another aspect of what you are describing that listeners might be interested in… if we haven’t totally convinced you yet [LAUGHTER] to use the unessay… is that it does get students’ attention, it cuts through the static. We get into a routine we’re just trying to get through, check that box for students who are overworked, overloaded, for whatever reason. I really feel like it kind of cuts through a fog that many of us, students and faculty, are in just by asking us to do something a little bit different.

Rebecca: Sometimes in those cases, and you guys have alluded to this before, that doing something different if they’ve not done it before, is risky and scary. And so all that scaffolding that you’ve built described as so important for students to be able to take that first risk and maybe take other academic risks in the future.

Jessamyn: Yeah, we can’t underestimate the impact of our traditional grading systems and traditional school systems where the stakes are sky high. You can’t overestimate them, financial aid, everything, is so tied to a student’s GPA, their families support, staying in school is often tied to GPA, their own sense of their selves as students, who they are, is defined by the grade they get. So asking them to, Rebecca, like you said, consider the process, not the end point. It is a big ask. So we can’t expect instant student buy-in, that they will immediately jump on board and with ease and joy, even if we are feeling that way about it.

John: So it sounds like it’s been a lot more fun, even though it may sometimes take more work for both of you. How have students responded? You’ve mentioned a little bit about student responses. But how do students generally respond at the end of the semester? Is it something that they find to be equally joyful?

Maggie: Jessamyn touched on this, but there was a bit of student buy-in that I had to get. And there were a couple of students who still wanted to write a traditional research paper. But in the end, they did a podcast element as well with it. So it was the sort of combination of the two, but it was the first time I had ever implemented an unessay in my classes. So I didn’t have a lot of student examples to show them. But I did spend a lot of time creating my own examples of what an unessay would look like. And I think for each of those scaffolded assignments I created a bibliography and a presentation and I tried to create an unessay myself so that they could see what it would look like. I think that gave them a little more confidence in knowing what was expected of them. But really, it took a lot of conversations with students on why I was doing this, what I thought the importance of shifting away from a traditional research paper, what gains they were going to have from that, and every student, at least to my knowledge, really enjoyed the process and much preferred the unessay over their 20- to 30-page research papers.

Jessamyn: The student resistance you just mentioned, Maggie, reminds me that I mentioned teaching context before, but it is important to underscore that any non-traditional teaching and learning practice and assessment, you can expect greater student resistance or reluctance when you quote unquote don’t look like a professor. So when you don’t fulfill the stereotype of what a professor looks like, if you’re navigating any kinds of intersectional biases, you may have to take into account the student resistance component and student biases. It’s a point that Chavella Pittman has emphasized for like an ungraded practice, that it’s very important to take those considerations into account. I will add that the biggest benefit besides my own grading joy is what I see… it’s extremely hard to measure… I couldn’t put it on my end-of-the-year file assessments of my own teaching, but students gain confidence, students gain some agency, some autonomy. I can see it in how they talk about it. If you can have a showcase or a gallery walk, you can see that they are proud of what they have achieved. When we’re doing senior presentations, that’s always very clear, like students’ sense of accomplishment is very notable. And it’s not that that doesn’t happen with the research papers. Well, it can, but the range of students who express and demonstrate to me that they’ve gained some confidence in themselves as students, as thinkers, as knowledge generators, as producers, it’s really heartening.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next? Jessamyn, you want to go first?

Jessamyn: I’m headed to the POD Network Conference. I’m gonna do a session, with Chavella Pittman and Thomas Tobin, on faculty development that acknowledges teaching inequities. And I am working on a book on teaching and learning when things go wrong in the college classroom, and I just recently signed a contract for that book with the new series at University of Oklahoma press called Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Education.

John: Maggie and I will both be at POD and will try to get to your session. And we’re looking forward to that book.

Maggie: I suppose what’s next for me feels like such a loaded question right now because I’m anticipating applying for a sabbatical. And so I’ve been really ruminating on this question of what is next for me. I’m entering into a mid-career stage, and so I feel like my answer is “I’m not quite sure yet.” But as far as the unessay goes, I do plan on bringing the unessay to my courses next semester. I’m teaching two elective courses on death penalty, and women and crime. And I think really any course, but particularly these courses, would be well suited for an unessay project.

Jessamyn: That reminds me, I am lucky enough, I’m going to be going to the American Historical Association Conference this spring and doing a workshop on the unessay, so any historians listening, I hope I see you there.

John: And we will include links to Teaching History, to that specific volume, as well as to the other resources that have been mentioned here. So check the show notes to find more of those resources. And thank you both for joining us again.

Maggie: Thank you so much.

Jessamyn: Thank you.

Rebecca: It’s always wonderful to talk to both of 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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314. Handbook of Online Higher Ed

Posted in authentic learning, classroom community, edtech, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, feedback, globalization, higher education, hybrid, instructional communication, learning, MOOCs, online learning, pedagogy, teaching
November 8, 2023

Since its start in the late 1990s, asynchronous online instruction has spread throughout the world and has been the subject of extensive experimentation and study. In this episode, Safary Wa-Mbaleka, Kelvin Thompson, and Leni Casimiro join us to discuss their new handbook that examines effective practices in online learning from a global perspective.

Safary is an Associate Professor of Leadership in Higher Education at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has authored and co-authored more than 40 scholarly journal articles and more than 20 books and book chapters. Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit, and he co-hosts TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast. Leni is a Professor of Education, the Associate Dean of the AIIAS Graduate School and Chair of its Education Department and the Director of AIIAS Online, the virtual campus of the Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies (AIIAS) in the Philippines. Kelvin, and Leni are frequent invited speakers on topics related to online instruction. They are the co-editors of The Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Since its start in the late 1990s, asynchronous online instruction has spread throughout the world and has been the subject of extensive experimentation and study. In this episode, we discuss a new handbook that examines effective practices in online learning from a global perspective.

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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 guests today are Safary Wa-Mbaleka, Kelvin Thompson, and Leni Casimiro. Safary is an Associate Professor of Leadership in Higher Education at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has authored and co-authored more than 40 scholarly journal articles and more than 20 books and book chapters. Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit, and he co-hosts TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast. Leni is a Professor of Education, the Associate Dean of the AIIAS Graduate School and Chair of its Education Department and the Director of AIIAS Online, the virtual campus of the Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies (AIIAS) in the Philippines. Kelvin, and Leni are frequent invited speakers on topics related to online instruction. They are the co-editors of The Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education, which we’ll be talking about today. Welcome Safary and Leni and welcome back, Kelvin.

Safary: Thank you.

Leni: Thank you.

Kelvin: Good to be here.

Safary: A pleasure to be here.

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

Safary: I’m having water this morning.

Rebecca: A key ingredient to tea it might add. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: How about you, Leni?

Leni: I used green tea, particularly this Japanese matcha. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Nice. How about you, Kelvin?

Kelvin: I have deconstructed tea. That’s also called water.

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] Popular globally.

John: And speaking of globally, Rebecca and I are both drinking Moon Bird tea, which is a gift from one of our listeners in France who sent this to us a few weeks ago. So again…

Safary: Wow.

John: …thank you, Myriam.

Rebecca: Yeah, it has a nice hint of pear and elderflower.

John: …which is also a green tea.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the SAGE Handbook of Online Higher Education. Could you tell us a bit about the origin of this book project?

Safary: The origin of this project is actually something that has to do with me having worked with Kelvin several years ago at the University of Central Florida. And right after that, I decided to work in the Philippines and that’s where I met with Leni Casimiro and we worked together. And at both institutions, we were working with online education. And eventually I was transferred to work for two years in Kenya. During the COVID-19. I happened to be in Kenya, and I quickly saw the great need of people wanting to have online education. The resources went up in the place. The things were scattered all over the place. And immediately the idea came that we needed a project that captured the whole world because now this was a worldwide phenomenon, it was no longer something peculiar to Kenya or Philippines or U.S., the whole world was in need of a tool like this. And that’s how I reached out to Kelvin and to Leni.. Thankfully, they both agreed to be part of the project. And I think, from my perspective, that’s where it came from. I don’t know about them… how they think about this? [LAUGHTER]

Leni: Well, for me, it’s really a big project that we did, combining the different parts of the world. You see where Kelvin comes from, representing the West, I represent the opposite, the East. And although Safary comes from the East as well, but he can represent the African continent. And so this really makes the book a global project, really a blend of different perspectives. And so I can say that online learning is represented all over the world in this particular book. And this is indeed, a big surprise to all the readers and a big discovery for everyone.

John: Speaking of readers, what is the intended audience of this book?

Kelvin: Well, I mean, honestly, I would say anyone, anywhere, around the whole planet, who in any way touches online or digital education, should access this book. It’s great for libraries and institutions to acquire and be in their communities. It’s a big book. There’s stuff in there for everybody. So I think it’s a great resource.

Rebecca: Speaking of the size of the book, the handbook contains 50 chapters. Can you talk about how you selected those chapters?

Kelvin: I think the scope and the sequence and the layout of the chapters and the sections sources originally to Safary’s proposal with the publisher, but it was intended to be rather comprehensive with sections like fundamentals and student support and administration and instructional design, instructional delivery, regional specifics, particular regions around the world, and how online education might differ a little bit in, say, the African context versus the European context. But over time, as we were recruiting authors, and as the writing process started, you get a little bit of evolution, the sections might morph a little bit, the distinctives of a given chapter might adjust based on interest and specializations of the authors. So that’s a little bit of the insight into the evolution. But I credit Safary for the vision, which I would say, is probably about 80 plus percent of what he originally had envisioned in the layout. That’s my guess. Safary, would you agree with that?

Safary: Yeah, the thing is that, when you work on a huge book like this, especially a handbook for Sage, they want to have the complete plan when you submit your proposal. Before I can get my co-editors to agree with me, they need to have kind of ideas, okay, this is what I have in mind. So usually, when I work on a handbook like this, I come up with a rough draft. And Kelvin and Leni were very good in catching certain things that I wouldn’t have caught because of their expertise, their experience, and their regions that they represent. And so in the end, what we have here is a product of the Table of Contents was really the product of these three brains that are speaking today.

Leni: I really liked the way Safary has chosen the chapters of this book. Well, we can say that he really originated the choice of these chapters. As you can see, from the perspective of a reader, when you look at the content, you can look in the sequencing, and you will find that you are actually looking into the step-by-step development, or the step-by-step process of engaging in online education. I will say it’s almost like a manual, almost every step that you will go through in undertaking online education in your institution is covered in this book. That’s why it’s really a very important book for every school to have.

John: We had some challenges coming up with a brief intro for each of you, because each of you has done so much with online education in many different roles in many different places. But you also have an editorial board for this book, which is a little bit different than many other books that we’ve seen in terms of handbooks. What was the role of the editorial board in putting this handbook together?

Safary: Yes, we had an editorial board. When you have a project of this magnitude, it is really important to have experts from different parts, especially at the global perspective of experts, and of course, experts on the different topics that are represented in the handbook. As much as we have experience with online education, we cannot assume to know it all… areas where we definitely need help. And so we selected very well known, very well recognized experts from different parts of the world. As far as online education is concerned, all the names that are there are people who are very well respected in the field of online education within their respective countries. The role they played was, for them to be our experts in checking the accuracy and the quality and the completeness of the chapters that were submitted to us. So basically, each chapter went to two to three reviewers and the editorial board members were the primary reviewers to help us really catch everything… and the work they did, I know that some chapters had more feedback than others, but I can say that contribution they gave through their feedback was very substantive in improving this handbook. I don’t know, Leni, how you found that when you’re working with the editorial members who are assigned to you?

Leni: Yeah, actually the editors we chose, I can say they are truly excellent and helpful. During the early parts of the writing of the chapters we lead editors are having like a tug of war with the chapter authors. They tend to bargain their thoughts with us, but when the editorial board came into the picture, it gave a more balanced outlook into writing the chapters. And so we really appreciate their services. The other thing is that this editorial board members are experts in the area and so we can truly depend on them. Their feedback were truly much valued and contributed much to the excellence of the contents of this book.

Rebecca: So the handbook is divided into seven sections. Can you provide a brief overview of each of those sections to give us the lay of the land?

Leni: Oh Yeah, seven sections, it’s nice to give an overview for people to know what the book contains. First section, of course, is the fundamentals of online education. It contains the introduction to the topic of the book, online learning, and some variations in online delivery, like blended, MOOC and ERT, emergency remote teaching, we just really call it ERT, and that became popular during the pandemic. The second section, online education around the world. This section is the most colorful part of the book, at least for me. Because it tours us around the world and gives us a view of how online education grew in varied contexts like US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East. The third section, Online Instructional Design, this section now brings us to the T-cell of online learning, the design of online instruction with focus on how learning happens online. This is now the more serious part of the book. While we came from the most colorful, we now go to the serious part of the book. And then the fourth one, Online Instructional Delivery, this section focuses on the hammer and nail of online learning, the actual online teaching, and this is the most exciting part. Because this is now the delivery, the previous one was the most serious part, this one is the most exciting part. And then perhaps, Kelvin, can you say about the fifth section [LAUGHTER] Instructional Technology for Online Education?

Kelvin: Here’s what I would say about that, if you’ve got the most serious, you talked about the most exciting that you talked about, maybe the fifth instructional technology for online education is the most invisible, maybe that’s what it is. Nobody thinks about plumbing until it doesn’t work. [LAUGHTER]

Leni: Thank you. So that’s technology, I would say this section is essential, because you cannot teach without knowing how to use technology [LAUGHTER]. And the sixth section, Online Education Administration and Management, I would say this is the driver’s seat of online bandwagon [LAUGHTER]. Online education can never prosper without the support of the school administration. So, leading school reforms, like entering the field of online education requires certain strategies to be certain of success. Therefore, I would say this section will indeed equip the readers with those skills, perhaps Safary, can tell us what section seven is?

Safary: I would say the last section is the Customer Service, given that the students are the customers. So the customer service, how to make sure we deliver the best customer service to the online students. And so it discusses all those different aspects of how to really prepare, plan effective service to the students, because many times when people are migrating from face-to-face to online or integrating online education, they forget that online students actually need serious support. And this support definitely needs to be defined. And people who are dealing with the students need to be trained. And so the last chapter actually deals exactly with that.

Leni: For me, because I was looking at the table of contents, and I was smiling in my mind, wow, this is really neatly done. And so this works came to my mind, and I said, Oh, the seventh section, this section focuses on the heart of every online classroom, the students. And so because the students are the reason why we offer online learning, thus we ought to know how we should support them.

Rebecca: One of the things that I love about working on collaborative projects that are really big, and then you have these opportunities to reflect together, is how you summarize what you did. It’s probably really different than while you were right in the middle of it. And it’s fun watching the facial expressions and things as you guys are describing the different sections.

John: With 50 chapters, there’s a great deal of breadth and depth on these topics. In section one, though, you address two topics which are not always considered as part of traditional, at least, online education, which is the use of MOOCs and ERT, emergency remote teaching. But these have played fairly important roles. Could you talk a little bit about the role of MOOCs and Emergency Remote Teaching in the larger environment of online higher education?

Leni: As I see it, MOOC and ERT are connected to the overall theme of the book, because technically they are both delivered online. Online learning can be synchronous or asynchronous. And it’s mostly taken asynchronously while ERT is done synchronously, because it is generally a replication of the face-to-face classroom through the web. However, there are certain arguments in the field as to whether can we classify these two under online learning, because they are believed to not use the principles of effective online teaching. And they say, is their instructional design in ERT? There are more questions to raise to the point that some people believe they should not be called online learning. But for me, we have a common denominator, course delivery through the web. Maybe we can hear from my co-editors here, Kelvin and Safary, what they think about it?

Kelvin: I was thinking, John, when you asked that question, I think the combination of Emergency Remote Teaching and Massive Open Online Courses, it’s part of the popular conception of what online education is, it’s sort of like what a layperson might think, is, it’s just one big thing. So if you didn’t address Emergency Remote Teaching, Massive Open Online Courses, maybe even Blended or Hybrid learning, those mutations, it might not provide quite the same way in for the broadest possible audience. But then, once we’ve ushered you into the house, through the front door, I hope we do a good job of taking you on a more detailed guided tour through the nuances and everything that online education can be, without just being stuck at that surface level.

Safary: If I may add something to the ERT. Personally, the reason why I wanted to see this chapter there was that outside of the United States and maybe Canada, and a little bit of Latin America, when ERT came, Emergency Remote Teaching came, many people call it online education. And as we know, online education, the way we know it traditionally, is much more than translating your face-to-face class to a Zoom class or Google meet class. And let’s face it, that the word there is emergency. This was an emergency modality, which obviously emergency is never the best option, it means better than the chaos that you’re going through. And so many people who didn’t know online education, they came to believe that Emergency Remote Teaching means online education. And many people who were against online education to start with, it was like, “Okay, we have already said that this thing is really bad because it was an emergency.” So it was very important to distinguish what Emergency Remote Teaching is. And in the future, if somebody wants to use that for another calamity that happens, then they know what steps to take, but it does not replace what is known, what we define as quality online education.

Rebecca: One of the parts of your book, The second section is about online education around the world. And getting that tour around the world is not something we typically get the opportunity to have. So can you talk a little bit about what some of the global differences in how online higher education is structured and practiced across continents and regions?

Safary: This section came up as we were trying to make the book global. We really wanted to hear the voices of the people from around the world and not just the United States… the United States being the lead on online education, no question about that. We wanted to know where things are in different regions that were represented. We had to even go online to try to track people down from different countries. It was not easy finding people from certain regions where we didn’t have a network. So as a result, we’re able to bring on board chapters from different parts of the world. We had a chapter from the United States, we had a chapter from Europe, from Canada, from Asia, from Latin America, from Africa, from Australia, and from Middle East. So we were able to see what was happening in each one of them. And these chapters we had, they were kind of similar in a way where we wanted to know what is happening, what are the challenges, what are the achievements that people have in those regions, so that people from those regions who decided to do more work on online education, they have a place where they can learn of what is happening in the whole region from this book. They can have this as a reference to understand what was happening in their region. It is true that when you have one chapter, for example, I co-authored a chapter on Africa, because I was still in Africa at that time. It’s a chapter that’s covering 52 countries, you cannot really cover 52 countries, we just had to have illustration from some of African countries, because there’s no way we have data on all the 52 countries, but at least, there were some common themes that were coming up from a different African countries if I can speak from that specific region.

Leni: I can speak from the perspective of an Asian because I come from Asia. And I would say, we cannot deny that online education started in the West. But because we live in a connected world, it spread easily. Basically, I can see a lot of similarities around the world. The only differences I noticed, because your question says what are some of the global differences in how online education is structured and practiced? Now, I would say the only differences I noticed are the approaches to online learning, depending on the level of their maturity, in using this modality, and the resonance of the context they serve. Institutions that have been engaged in online learning for a long time definitely deal with issues that are different from those of newcomers, the needs of the context they serve also differ, so the strategies utilized also differ. One thing I would highlight, though, is that you can clearly see the creativity and continuity of people in different parts of the world in running online education. And we still can learn from each other. That’s why I said a while ago, the section on the global online education is really colorful.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think is really interesting about that section, is that it can also give us insight as instructors that teach a global audience about what the contexts are that students might be coming from. And that’s something that we often don’t have a little bit of insight into.

Safary: I think that is a very good point. Now that we have online education, people are teaching in many different countries. I remember just a couple of weeks ago, I was approached by one of my former students who wanted me to teach a class in the Caribbean. If things worked out for me, for that class, I would have just glanced at that chapter that covers a little bit of the Caribbean and see what I need to watch out for. So that is definitely a good point for the section on the different regions. In this handbook.

John: When online education first started, there wasn’t really that much known about what would work effectively. And as online education evolved, we saw the role of instructional design become an important part of the practice of online education. And section three deals with online instructional design. And that’s helped facilitate and inform online education, along with a lot of research that’s been done since the early stages. How have instructional design practices evolved since the early stages of online education in the latter part of last century?

Kelvin: That’s a good question. And I guess I’ve been in this field watching this first hand and touching it for about 25 years now. So I sometimes say not exactly the first floor of the building, but just one step above. And what I would say is that when I started in the late 90s, what we saw a lot was adaptation of traditional instructional systems design models and practices, that is constructs that were used quite often in corporate education. See if this takes you back to the past: CD ROM development, military learners. Those kinds of methods, practices, and models were adapted to this online context. And some of that’s constrained, like you’re making a system, like it’s a bounded system that was, quite often the context, like a CD ROM. And now you’re talking about the internet, a network open system. And I remember some of those early days, like, “Okay, what can we learn from these models? How can we adapt those?” Over time though, we learned that this is a unique context, which then began to have its own models and practices and processes and research and iterations and development. And I think of even things like much newer developments, like alongside of constructs like inclusive pedagogy, we see practices and thrusts, like inclusive design, as being a very specialized subset. So we’ve got a very robust research and professional practice literature that has grown up and these, arguably, two and a half decades of online education experience to draw upon. And I guess I’ll just say this, about that. Throughout my time in this field, what I’ve seen is that online tends to make the formerly invisible, visible; formerly implicit, explicit. And I think that evolution of instructional design and development field, it has learned from that. Online education has drawn us along in what does it mean to bring learners in from really anywhere and bring them together in a learning community, and how do we excel in that. That’s been a really rich progression over these last two and a half decades.

Safary: If I may add to that, the reason why we had this section was that many people who are new to online education, they think that online education is about uploading all the files that you have been using face to face, and then let the students read that, and that’s online education. It leads to a lot of frustration from the students because there was no instructional design for online learning. And so we needed to have a section that would guide people into that. And also for instructional designers in college and universities where they already have instructional designers. Some of them have not gotten a degree in instructional design. So they have limited knowledge. They just happen to know a little bit more than everybody else, but they don’t really have a solid foundation. And so that section helps to kind of guide people in the proper instructional design for online learning.

Rebecca: So sections four and five focus on online instructional delivery and instructional technology. These are topics that we love to talk about and have episodes of this podcast on. But given the time constraints, we probably can’t dig in fully here. But can you help us identify some of the most important changes that have occurred in how well designed online courses are taught?

Leni: That’s a nice question. Kelvin also said a while ago, he was mentioning about the early years of online instructional design, I would say, perhaps 1998 to 2000, those are the early years I’ve been involved, still in the planning stages of online delivery. Most of the online courses we developed were primarily text based, and are delivered asynchronously. That was after the military, Kelvin used, online learning, it was already in the university. Why text based? Because even our students, in the context we are serving also did not have the capability or the capacity to access videos or higher level technology tools. That’s why we designed the way they can access us. And so, yes, it was primarily text based and asynchronous. However, through the years, I would say two forces caused the major changes in the way we design online courses, first, technological developments, particularly in instructional technology. And second, changes in the needs or nature of our stakeholders, the students. Well, technological developments without a doubt have increased the repertoire of instructional media that we can use in designing truly engaging online courses. But as I’ve said earlier, technology is not the heart of online learning… it’s our students. And we saw how the nature of our online students change over time as well. While many of them were happy with plain text based asynchronous online courses during the early days, now they want more real-time meetings. And the flexibility they want is indeed tremendous, I tell you. We notice that there is a greater demand now for more flexible and personalized learning approaches. And these topics are dealt with in this handbook. I know Kelvin has written on this. And some other chapters also addressed this flexible learning, personalized learning approaches. These are now the needs and demands of the new generation of online students.

John: This is bringing me back to a time when I started back in 1997 teaching online when many of the students had 300 baud… [LAUGHTER] …or 1200 baud modems, and you couldn’t do much more than text. And I remember putting in some flash-based videos, and many students couldn’t access those because they didn’t have the download speed, especially students in more rural areas. So there was a lot of resistance to online education when it was first introduced, which is one of the reasons why I think instructional design practices became a part of early online education to help ensure the quality of that. And we do have, in most institutions a fairly elaborate process of instructional design assistance and instructional design review for online courses, which is something that’s never really happened in the same way for most face-to-face courses. Might it be time to start applying some of the techniques and practices of design that’s being used for online course delivery to in-person course delivery?

Safary: I remember about 15 years ago, I was training faculty on online teaching in the Caribbean. And I remember many of them, at the end of the training, saying, “I have improved my face-to-face teaching because of the training that I have been going through for online teaching.” So I definitely believe that if people get the proper training in online teaching, they can use that knowledge to improve face-to-face teaching. Because let’s face it, many people are teaching not because they have a degree in education, but because they have a degree in whatever field they come from, they have never learned how to teach. And so when they go through the training for online teaching, they discover a lot of principles that they should have even been using face to face. So I definitely agree with you on that one.

Kelvin: Yeah, it’s true. I say it all the time online makes the formerly implicit, explicit; formerly invisible, visible. And I think that’s why online has been a vehicle for applying thoughtful design and teaching practices and the improvement thereof. Once you sort of concretize the elements that make up an online education experience, then you can see well, how are they arrayed? Are they lined up properly? Does this cause lead to the desired effect, and you can work on improvement, no offense to anyone in this, but when we just are dealing in the ephemeral, we will walk into a space, four walls and a door, and we say words into the air, it’s much harder to see how those parts fit together or don’t. And it’s harder to be reflective. So, I think that’s the reason that online education has brought more emphasis to potential improvements, continuous improvements, and so I welcome it as a vehicle for a more thoughtful process in general. I love this elegant turn of phrase Caroline Boswell says she frames teaching as a student success intervention. Or as I put it, I’m one of those odd people who sees a connection between teaching and learning. And not everybody does.

Rebecca: You’re kind of queuing up our next question perfectly Kelvin. The final section of your book is really about student support. And our students are often distributed when we’re teaching online. So what are some of the biggest challenges in terms of supporting students that are in these online programs or online courses?

Kelvin: Yeah, I would welcome Leni’s and Safary’s viewpoint on this as well. But to me, I’ll keep it simple and say that the biggest challenge is the diversity of student profiles. The different backgrounds, the multifaceted demographics, and resource or not resource, or technological connection or not technological connection, that diversity makes it awfully hard to assure kind of an equitable experience for everyone. So that’s the gap that emerges, that student support is trying to offer… not to mention the diversity of approaches to design and development in the actual experience. But I’m curious what Leni and Safary would say to that.

Leni: I would go for the opposite, on the side of the teachers, I would say the greatest challenge in student support is personalizing your support. It’s related to your diversity. Almost every online student has her unique needs and contexts. So considering different personalities and backgrounds as well, you may be able to personalize your support. But in the name of efficiency, you’ll find yourself dehumanizing the process. What do I mean by this? Well, machines can never replace human touch. And human touch is what every online student needs.

Safary: If I may speak a little bit from experience I had in Kenya during the COVID-19, we migrated our classes to the online delivery. And I quickly realized that… and this was something that was going on in all of Africa, I know this because I was involved in different international association for online education all over the continent…. and so we were meeting and discussing some of these issues. The major challenges that were going on at that time, I don’t know about today, were dealing with infrastructure, because most universities that didn’t have online education platforms, or online education structural systems, so the technology was not in place. Many students there were not access because the internet was extremely slow, some were using loads of data to access the materials and they would run out. Some had issues with electricity. These are things we take for granted in the West. These are the not issues that we will discuss even in textbooks of online education, but they are real issues that cannot be ignored. And so that was a major challenge in supporting online students, because the infrastructure was not in place. And I think the issue is still the same. But more and more work is being done. I remember, for example, in Kenya, what the government did, they gave the free data access to all the faculty in the whole country, as long as it was used only for instructional purposes [LAUGHTER]. If you want to use it for something else, it wouldn’t work. I mean, that was quite creative, to try to help people to help education move forward, because everything was just stuck because of COVID-19.

John: Over the past year, we’ve seen a fairly explosive growth and use of generative AI large language models, including chat GPT, Claude, and a few others that have come out very recently. And that opens up a lot of interesting opportunities, but also some challenges for online education, particularly concerning the assessment of asynchronous learning. How do you see online education adapting in response to the widespread availability of tools like this, which will only become more powerful over the next few years?

Kelvin: It’s sort of the very definition and epitome of disruptive innovation or disruptive technology. And just to be clear about this, I don’t think it’s limited or focused on asynchronous online education, I think it’s everything. For me, it’s really an opportunity to address learning and assessment of learning much more meaningfully, and I’ll use one of Leni’s words, more personalized and relational. I think one of the things we’re seeing with the injection of these various forms of artificial intelligence into the learning setting is the value proposition of the human. And I think it was Cathy Davidson, years ago, from HASTAC said something like, “If we faculty can be replaced by a computer we should be.” That is, if all you’re offering is something that is easily rendered more efficient and scalable by a machine then, well, what are you doing it for? I think that the opportunity to really gauge learning, which is a very personal and a meaningful thing, we act like it’s something that’s kind of homogenized and industrialized, but learning… I don’t know what learning is, frankly, I can’t crack open a human and see what all is happening with the connections and making of meaning in all the background experiences. All I can do is get insight, but in dialogue, in the creation of artifacts I get a glimpse. If we’re product oriented, to the exclusion of the process, and to the exclusion of the human context, well, that can be certainly disrupted, maybe stolen by artificial intelligence in machines. But if we keep the emphasis on humans, on “Well, John, tell me about this…” that’s more meaningful. I learned a practice a long time ago from a faculty member that I studied under, where she adopted a practice of a learning summary. And in any course, again, that’s just one artifact, but it gives a glimpse into the articulation of what learning is really about. So I think we need to push the envelope in “What does authentic assessment mean? What does meaningful learning look like?” Now, that’s hard to do at scale. Are you going to have a personal oral defense with every student for every assignment, probably not. But if we see artifacts, and products, as breadcrumb trails leading to a destination of a more substantive dialogical process, well, then maybe that’s something. So I don’t think we know yet how this is going to play out. And I think your listeners are gonna find cold comfort from me in getting to an easy solution. But I think the future of responding to generative AI is to lean more into the human and the relational than less.

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

Safary: Well, as far as this project is concerned, what is next really, we want to continue building a community of online higher education scholars, practitioners, so that this momentum that has been created by this book can continue, because this is one of the few maybe rare books that really have so much global contribution to online education. Many of the books that are written, they’re usually kind of regional to a specific region of the world. And so this is the first time we have a network of, I think, around 100 people who contributed to this, coming from many different countries. And I feel this has created synergy on the discussion of online education in a way that we should not let that go. So one of the things that we have been talking about is the possibility of holding a summit on online higher education in the next few months, once everybody has gotten a chance to hold a copy of this book, and to bring different experts together from different parts of the world, and try to address online education from different parts of the world, while addressing common issues such as assessment, which is one of the major controversial issues anywhere have been, everybody talks about the challenges of online assessments. So that’s things like this, and probably this artificial intelligence, which is a new thing, we may want to go deeper into that… we’re not able to dig too deep with that, although we addressed it in the book. But we didn’t go too deeply because it was still kind of new ChatGPT was just coming out when we were finishing the handbook. And so that is one of the things that we are looking into, there is another handbook in the making with SAGE that will focus specifically on instructional design in higher education. So that would be like an extension of this project. So we want to continue building on this work, because we consider it’s very important.

Leni: I’m really optimistic about the next steps on this because it’s like a seminal book that really got there’s a global perspective, as Safary says it’s not the same as the other online learning books. So we can also see a lot of developments coming up. And so I will say, this book is just step one, the next steps will really be coming up definitely, because the field is always growing. We have seen its growth, and it will still grow. And so there’s more to follow, I believe.

Rebecca: Well, thank you all for joining us. I know that our listeners will really enjoy the handbook and all that it has to offer.

John: Well, thank you, and it’s great talking to all of you and we’re looking forward to reading the book.

Safary: Thank you so much for the opportunity. Really appreciate that and wish everybody a wonderful reading experience.

Kelvin: Thanks for having us, Rebecca and John.

Leni: Thank you very much.

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

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

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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312. Alice: Finding Wonderland

Posted in access, collaborative learning, edtech, educational technology, engagement, feedback, first-generation, first-year classes, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, pedagogy, teaching, two-stage exam
October 25, 2023

Many of our disciplines are unfamiliar to students until their first encounter in an introductory course. In this episode, Rameen Mohammadi joins us to discuss his first-year course that introduces students to computer science using an approachable hands-on experience.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Many of our disciplines are unfamiliar to students until their first encounter in an introductory course. In this episode, we look at a first-year course that introduces students to computer science using an approachable hands-on experience.

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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.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Rameen Mohammadi. Rameen is the Associate Provost at SUNY Oswego and an Associate Professor of Computer Science. Welcome, Rameen.

Rameen: Thank you. Thank you both.

John: It’s good to have you here. Today, for the first time ever, we’re all drinking the same tea, which is Chimps tea, a black tea with honey flavor, fig, and thyme. And this is a gift from one of our listeners. Miriam in France. Thank you, Myriam.

Rebecca: Yeah, so far. It’s really tasty.

Rameen: Yeah, really excellent tea. We love it.

Rebecca: So we invited you here today, Rameen, to discuss your First-Year Seminar course that combines animation and storytelling using the Alice 3 programming environment. Before we discuss that, though, could you provide an overview of the goal of first-year seminar courses at Oswego?

Rameen: This is not a standard first-year seminar. First-year seminar courses are designed to extend orientation, familiarize students with resources, and things like that. Our perspective about this type of course, which we call signature courses at SUNY Oswego, is that you are welcoming students to the intellectual community that we have. So as first-year students we desire a number of outcomes to be met by these courses, one of them is critical thinking, they have to have a significant critical thinking component. Also, these courses need to have both writing and oral communication embedded in them. And one of my favorites is that they have to enhance the cultural competency of our students, we’re a very diverse student body, there’s quite a bit of opportunity to make sure students experience other perspectives. And I think courses of this type really need to address that. Our provost, Scott Furlong, brought the idea to us even during his interview at SUNY Oswego, about what they had called, at his previous institution, passion courses. Now, as I said, we call them signature courses here. But those of us who love our discipline certainly can understand when somebody uses the term passion. So what makes you excited about your discipline? That’s what the course should help students experience.

John: So, you’re using the Alice 3 programming environment. Could you talk a little bit about the types of things that students are going to be doing in the class?

Rameen: So Alice 3 is a VR programming environment. So what you do is you build a scene, you can bring avatars of various types, could be people, could be aliens, could be dogs, into a scene, and you have props, trees, mountains, buildings, that you could bring into a scene, and then you learn to program something. So they can talk to each other, they can move from point A to point B. And it actually turns out, they’re able to, and they will be, writing reactive programming, which typically is what we do when we design games. So the user acts in some way, and then you program the reaction in the VR world in that context, or things run into each other. And obviously, when you’re designing games cars, or other things may run into each other, and you have the ability to detect that and actually act on that. But at this point, they are already running about a month ahead of where I thought they could be in just about a month of the semester. So I’m really hoping we can get that far.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about why you chose the Alice platform, and what you were really hoping to foster with students.

Rameen: So, just a bit of background about Alice, Alice is supported by researchers in Carnegie Mellon. I think Randy Paudsch, when he was at University of Virginia, is really the person that began the innovation with Alice. And he thern moved to Carnegie Mellon. Many people in computer science would know who he is because of his work in VR, but what he should universally be known for is The Last Lecture, which is a pretty amazing hour plus lecture he gave before he died from cancer. But that group has been working on Alice for a very, very long time, and of course, has had new actors along the way. Don Slater is one of the people that has been part of that group for a long time, and he’s very much involved and was at the time when I met him very much involved in advanced placement. And that’s something I’ve been involved in for a long time, advanced placement for computer science. So one of the things we do in AP readings, we have people do professional development activities, and he gave a talk about Alice and this is a long time ago. But when I first listened to him talk about it, and he showed the features of the system, I really didn’t have a place for it in anything I taught at the time. So it has been brewing in the back of my head as a thing to build a course around for a long time, but really couldn’t have done it until the opportunity came along to build a signature course.

John: For those students who do go on to computer science. It seems like a really nice way of introducing the concept of object oriented programming. Does it work in that way?

Rameen: So the thing to understand about object orientation is that most of us who are software engineers by discipline, database types, we are very comfortable thinking of a student information being an object and the fact that we have a container of student objects and so on. But it turns out that’s not necessarily as comfortable for students as it is for those of us who do this for a living. But when you say, here’s an avatar, and you put this on the screen, and you could tell it to go from point A to point B, that seems like a very natural idea to students, and the fact that this particular avatar, so suppose it’s a bird, has wings, and opposed to a person who has legs, you don’t have to explain that. It’s a concept as inherent in being a human being and 18,19 years old. So some aspects of object orientation that often is difficult for students that are really obvious in this context. So any object like an avatar of a person, dog, cat, whatever, they can all be moved from point A to point B. So they share a set of expectations and attributes. They have a location in a 3D world, and you can move them from A to B, piece of cake, they understand. But then you say, “Well, this one is a bird, it has wings.” So the fact that you can spread the wings or fold the wings would be a characteristic that exists only because of it’s a bird. So inheritance, which is a concept that we like to teach in computer science is just built into the way the system behaves. And no student will say, “Well, what do you mean, a bird can spread this way or fold its wing.” People just naturally know what it all means. And believe me, it’s not always natural, in some of the other things we try to do with students to teach these topics. So it does lend itself extremely well, in understanding that objects have attributes, they have functionality, and it’s all there on the screen, and they can see it.

Rebecca: I think Alice is really nice, because it is so visual. And so you get those immediate, “I can see the thing I did,” whereas I remember when I started learning some code, I was building a database for car parts, and it was completely abstract. And I cared nothing about car parts.

Rameen: Yeah.

Rebecca: So it didn’t make it that accessible to me.

Rameen: It’s not, exactly, then the other aspect of it that I think we need to think about, about the platform, is that you don’t write a single line of code, you generate 1000s and 1000s of lines of code, but you don’t write any. So if you have a particular avatar as the object that you’re processing at the time, in building your code on the screen, you could just drag and drop functionality it has into your code. If you need to loop and repeat steps, you drop a loop into your code and then put the steps you want to repeat inside that loop. So all the typical barriers a student had with syntax or various languages, whether it was Java, Python, C++ kind of wash away, because you don’t really have to know syntax at all you, need to know “what are you trying to do?” and what will enable you to do it, and then you can execute that. So far, clearly, that’s not a problem for them. Here is the screen, this part of it is dedicated to X, that part of it is dedicated to Y and they’ve been able to handle it probably from week one. So all the standard things that tend to take a long time, don’t take any time. And besides doing 3D graphics, if you are a computer science person, in my mind, is super senior level type of activity. You got to teach them an awful lot about data structures and other event handling elements that they must learn because that is what we all had to learn. But guess what, you can learn it with Alice in short order. And this is the course is proving that you can.

John: Now one of the challenges that I could imagine you might have as that students come in with different levels of prior knowledge or interest or engagement with computer science. Some students may have not written a single line of code in any language, while others may also be taking other CS courses at the same time, or have some prior programming experience. How do you address the differences in background?

Rameen: So my sample case here is small, I only have 17 students, but this is not a computer science required course. So this is one that has art students in it, it has biology students, and and it does have a few computer science students and then maybe this one with an AP computer science background from high school, and none of them are doing any better than these other kids. So I guess the point is, it levels the playing field in a pretty significant way. If you can think a thought you can probably write code in Alice. And I’m finding it quite interesting, since I’m not preparing them for another course… not only this course doesn’t have a prerequisite, it’s not a prerequisite for anything else. So the way I designed the course going into it, I went into it with thinking, okay, so if storytelling and writing a really cool story within groups is the best I can get out of them, great. If I can get them to a point where they can write new functionality for objects, and I can help them write reactive programming so they react to the mouse click or collisions of objects and so on, maybe I’m dreaming, but that would be fantastic. At this point, I’m pretty certain I can get him there without other stuff. But that was kind of the key coming into the course, I walked in with a mindset of being flexible, that if they are struggling, I’m not going to keep pushing it like I would typically do in a CS course, which is partly why you would also lose students, but at least in my experience with these kids, and I can’t say until I teach it again (and hopefully I can) whether it will be the way it works is that you show them how to do something, and then they go to work, and they start doing it and then they make mistakes, and we all do, and then you give them a little bit of a hint about potentially maybe a different technique they could have used to accomplish the same task. I’m just going to give you an example. So you want the bird to go from point A to point B, so it’s on the ground, needs to go up on top of the tree. So Alice lets you put a marker where you want it to go on the tree, because you can’t go to the tree, you’re going on a branch of a tree. So you need to know how to put a marker there. So you put a marker there. And then it just goes from point A to point B, it goes from the ground to the top of the tree, then you say “Wait a minute, that’s really not the way birds fly.” So now you got to figure out, well, how am I going to flap his wings to go from point A to point B, to go from the ground to the branch on that tree? So it turns out and I’ve come up with a solution to this myself, obviously, you can’t really teach these things if you haven’t thought about how you could possibly solve them. And one of my students, after like three weeks of instruction, she figured out how to do what we call in Alice a “do together.” So as it’s moving from point A to point B, the step that is happening at the same time is the flapping event of spreading and folding the bird’s wing and she made it very clear that the bird was flying [LAUGHTER] from the ground to the tree with no interruption. Then we need to talk about well, do they really need their legs hanging out as they’re flying? I don’t know much about birds, but I think they fold their legs back. So now we have to learn how to address some kind of a functionality that is about a part of the body of the bird. So this is the way the learning is happening in the course, kind of naturally, you’re trying to make a realistic action on the screen in the animation. Well, how are we going to do that? Well, we have to now address the joints like the hip joint or the knee joint or the ankle joint to make that much more natural in the way it works. And there’s no persuasion here, the student is trying to make an interesting thing. And then I’m there to help them figure out how do you make that much more realistic.

Rebecca: What I really love about these courses, and in what you’re describing with Alice, as someone who’s also taught code to students, particularly ones that are not in computer science, is that they’re thinking like a computer scientist, and you’re really getting them completely within the discipline, you’re hooking them right in because they’re leading with their curiosity. They’re not satisfied with the way something looks, so they’re digging in and digging in and digging in. And unlike our traditional way of structuring curriculum, where we think this is the foundational information, and this is the next thing we build on, it almost turns it totally on its head [LAUGHTER], and does it like backwards from what we traditionally do. And it’s really fun.

Rameen: Well, I think the students are at the center of that type of a decision, that for years, you see human beings that probably could do this kind of work, but shortly after they try and they get errors after errors after errors, they say, “Hey, listen, this is great that there are geeks like you would like to do this kind of thing. It’s not for me,” and they walk away from the discipline, even though they could have had great contributions in computer science. So for me if some of these concepts are introduced this way, where syntax and semantics, which is typically what slows people down when they first begin, even the systems we use… like how do you type your program? And how do you run your program? …there’s a whole bunch of instruction around how do you do anything. You just go to alice.org, you download Alice 3, but once you do, it’s here you go, you click here, and then you set up your scene; you click here, you begin writing code. Well, how you write code? Well, the object is on the left side, you drag the command from the left to the right, how far do you want it to go? Well, you gotta choose a certain distance that it needs to travel… really, really easy for students to take to right away. And I just had no idea what I should expect. You watch a lot of YouTube videos. I mean, I certainly do when I was preparing this course, of all these different people, young and old, building things and being proud of what they had built. And I thought, if I could bring that to a course for our first-year students, that would be really, really awesome. And I think that’s what has happened.

John: You mentioned that the students are able to interact. Are they all in one virtual shared space for the class? Or do they have to invite the other students into the spaces that they’ve developed?

Rameen: So this is a really good question, John. So when I imagined how the course was going to work, I had to think of a number of things. One, I asked our technology people to install Alice on all lab computers because I can’t assume or assert that every single student that will take a course like this will necessarily have the equipment that could enable them to run it. Even the Mac kids who had trouble at first installing the thing, and I needed people to help them to get it installed, even they could continue to work because we had the software on our machines. The type of collaboration that I advocate for in class is a little untraditional. At least I think you could argue that it may be. So like the other day, I gave them a 10-question quiz. So they answer the 10-question quiz. And then I said, “Find a couple of other people and persuade them why your answers are correct and their answer is wrong.” So now the whole room starts talking about the quiz. I don’t know if they’ve ever had an experience where somebody says, “This is not cheating, what I’m asking you to do.” Who gives a quiz that says, talk to everybody else to see what they answered for the quiz.

REBECCA; John does. [LAUGHTER]

Rameen: And that’s not surprising, but in my mind, is it about the learning process? Or is it about assessing or giving a grade? This is a very low-stake experience. So why exactly would I care if you talk to someone else about it? So why not persuade someone else that your answer is right? That’s a very different tactic than to say, “Do you know the answer? And are you right or wrong?” Persuading someone requires talking to them, requires thinking for yourself, first of all. Well, why is this answer right? And then opposite of that, you hear the explanation. Are you persuaded that what they said is accurate? Or do you think they’re wrong? In which case now you’re giving them back a different perspective, and then they change their answer. And of course, you could change your answer for the wrong reason. That’s just one example. I really want them to collaborate and work with each other. And every time somebody does something interesting, like the young woman who built the code that I had not been able to myself, having the birds fly from point A to point B, looking very natural. I had her come to the front of the room, plug in with a connector that is in the room and show everybody how she wrote her code. And we’ve done that at least a dozen times so far, where people just come up, plug their computer and show everybody their code. So we often are worried about students cheating and using other people’s work. And if it is about collaborative learning, then you really have to cultivate the idea that, you know, that was a really good idea, maybe I can do that. And I think hopefully, the course will continue to behave that way where I’m confident everybody’s learning from it. That’s the concern that I’m the only one who knows something, whoever I am as a student, and everybody’s just copying me or whatever. That is not my experience so far in this course. They’re just trying to do it better, and if you have a better idea, maybe I can take that and move with it. Then maybe I’ll make it a better idea. And you see that also with students. One of them figures out how to make somebody walk more naturally, and then the other one even enhances that, even makes it even more realistic in the way you would walk. And that’s kind of what I like to see happen and is actually happening.

Rebecca: So how are students responding? Are you cultivating a whole new crop of computer scientists?

Rameen: So, this is an interesting question. I am wondering, those who are not computer science students, whether or not they decide that this may be something for them. But I’m also… with Rebecca here, is good to bring this up… they might become interested in interaction design as a discipline to pursue and become passionate about. Those of us who do this kind of work for a living and have done it for 40 years or whatever, the engagement aspect is the critical aspect. If they are really invested in the learning process, they can overcome an awful lot of barriers, that frankly, I cannot persuade you to put the time in, if you’re persuaded that you could do something a little bit better, then I’m done. As a teacher, I’ve set up the environment in the way it should be where you are driving the learning process yourself as a student, and they look like that’s what you’re doing at this point. And we’re only within a month into the course and they are behaving that way. Now whether or not they will continue to take more computer science courses, and get a degree in computer science. I’m not really sure, but, hopefully, if they do interaction design, there’ll be better interaction design students, because some of the structures that they have to learn here would definitely benefit them in that curriculum too.

Rebecca: Yeah. When can I come recruit?

Rameen: Anytime. I’ve already had Office of Learning Services. That was one of the things I wanted to point out, that I’ve had Office of Learning Services, they came and they talked about the learning process. And besides what they have done for me and talking about the learning process, and it’s all research-based discussions, which is really critical for students to hear things that actually do work, and we can prove they can work. I talk about the learning process on a regular basis with them. And I’m very interested in them understanding why we’re doing anything that we’re doing. I mean, they may be used to somebody standing in front of them talking for an hour and I just don’t do that. I may talk for 10 minutes and then have them work on stuff and then as we see gaps in what they understand then I talk for 10 more minutes, maybe. I try not to talk a whole lot. I want them to be working. So the time I’ve spent is on building what they are supposed to do to learn, not so much talking to them on a regular basis during the 55 minutes that the class goes on. Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure that that’s the experience they’ll have in other courses that they take, because to me, there is a freedom embedded in the way the course is designed that is hard to replicate if you have to cover from A to Z of some topic. You get to “H” and people are having trouble, well, you just keep going. Well, I don’t if everybody has the luxury to say, well, maybe we need to pause longer because we can’t get past this point. I mean, what’s the point? We get past this point, you’ll never catch up to where the end is. So I am hoping some of them will decide to be CS majors as a result, but I’m more interested in seeing how they will do if they take more CS courses. I mean, if they take a CS 1 course, are they going to do better than a typical person taking a CS 1 course if they move on and take data structures and other courses we require? Will it come to them easier? I think it’s a really interesting question. And I think there’s a lot of research that advocates for the fact that they will do better, but I like to see it firsthand.

John: One of the things I believe was mentioned in the title of the course was storytelling, what types of storytelling takes place in the class? Is it the design of the scenes or is there some other type of communication going on?

Rameen: So the way you do animation, in general… and I probably should back up and say I spent about an ungodly amount of hours trying to learn how to do this, but I went about it backwards because I went after event-driven programming and interesting things that I knew Alice could do to write games. But then you step back from it and say, well, students can’t start there. I mean, that’s just not a good place. So then you look at the alice.org website, which gives you tremendous amount of resources and say, “Oh, designing scenes happens to be the first thing they teach you to do. Oh, maybe I should learn how to design a scene.” So you put the pieces that you want in your story on the screen, and if you don’t want them to appear, you could make them invisible. But the way Alice works, you have to put all the components in on the front end. It’s a little different than the way we do object-oriented programming. When we do object-oriented programming, you create things when you need them, you don’t think about setting up the scene on the front end. So that took a little getting used to, but that’s what you do. And then the characters you put on the screen can move, they can talk, they can fly, they can do whatever you need them to do. And my biggest interest was storytelling, when I was conceiving of the course was that I really want students, especially those from other cultures, other backgrounds, to tell their story, find a way to tell their story. And this is probably going to be starting as a group project for my students in a few weeks. And we’ll see how that actually goes. And obviously it has to have a beginning and middle and an end for it to be an actual story. But I’m just excited to see what they will actually decide to do and how they actually do it. Along the way, though, they’re going to need some tools. And that’s kind of what my contribution will be in making sure that they can tell the story the way they want.

John: It sounds as if developing this course required you to learn quite a few new things that were outside your normal teaching experiences. Do you have any advice for faculty who are working on the development of similar courses?

Rameen: So for those out there who teach for a living, the opportunity to build something from the ground up, especially something that frankly, when I first thought of it, I thought it’d be a lot easier than it turned out, because there was so much that I didn’t know how to do, but when you don’t know something you don’t necessarily know that you don’t know something. People who were doing it and I was watching them do it made it look very easy to me. But once I began to do it, I discovered how much work there was to come to a point that actually orchestrates a course, I mean something that is meaningful, and has a clear direction to it. So if you have that opportunity, even after 40 years of teaching, to start over in some ways and build something that you feel not particularly comfortable about, I really highly recommend people do that. Because that is what your students are experiencing every single day when they are trying to learn this stuff that you know so well. So having a little bit of a taste of what it takes to learn something you know very little about, I think is critical. So my message to the faculty who are listening, is that if that opportunity arises, by all means, take it.,

Rebecca: You certainly get a lot more empathy for what it feels like to not be an expert, when you’re learning something brand new again.

Rameen: Well, that’s the thing about most of the things we do. I’ve been programming for 50 years. So it’s one of those things where you’re completely in tune with the idea of: understand the problem, solve the problem, whatever. But where should the camera be in a 3D world in order for it to point at the person talking just the right way? I had to figure that out. It didn’t come naturally to me. The first bunch of programs I wrote the camera was always in the same spot and then I began learning that “Oh I have control over where this camera goes. [LAUGHTER] So maybe it needs to be somewhere else when this person is talking versus this other one.” That’s been a lot of fun to get a sensibility back into the system here that this stuff is not as obvious as it may seem.

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

Rameen: So I certainly would like to teach the course more, and I also want to do some presentations with the faculty in computer science, and if there is interest in graphic design faculty to do some for them, too, because I think the platform is extremely powerful. It doesn’t cost anything, the resources that exist have been getting developed for a very long time and they’re pretty mature. And again, back to no cost. We all know how much books cost. You really don’t need one, you just use the exercises that they give you at the Carnegie Mellon site for Alice and go with it. So I really want to advocate for faculty to consider using it beyond just this first-year signature course.

John: Well, thank you. This sounds like a really interesting project that can really engage students.

Rebecca: Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun. I can’t wait to come visit.

Rameen: Yeah. Thank you both. Really, this was fun. Thanks for the tea also.

John: Well, we have Myriam to thank for that.

[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.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

[MUSIC]

311. Upskilling in AI

Posted in artificial intelligence, edtech, educational technology, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, teaching, writing
October 18, 2023

With so many demands on faculty time, it can be difficult to prioritize professional development in the area of AI. In this episode, Marc Watkins joins is to discuss a program that incentivizes faculty development in the AI space. Marc is an Academic Innovation Fellow at the University of Mississippi, where he helped found and currently directs the AI Institute for Teachers.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: With so many demands on faculty time, it can be difficult to prioritize professional development in the area of AI. In this episode, we examine a program that incentivizes faculty development in the AI space.

[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 Marc Watkins. Marc is an Academic Innovation Fellow at the University of Mississippi, where he helped found and currently directs the AI Institute for Teachers. Welcome back, Marc.

Marc: Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca. It’s great to be back.

Rebecca: We’re glad to have you. Today’s teas are:… Marc, are you drinking tea?

Marc: I am. I have a Cold Brew Hibiscus, which is really great. It’s still very warm down here in Mississippi. So it’s nice to have something that’s a little bit cool. That’d be refreshing.

Rebecca: That sounds yummy. How about you, John?

John: I am drinking a peppermint spearmint tarragon blend today. And it’s not so warm here. In fact, my furnace came on for the first time yesterday.

Rebecca: Yeah, transitions. And, I have English tea time today.

Marc: Well, that’s great.

John: So we have invited you here to discuss your ongoing work related to ChatGPT and other AI tools. Could you first describe what the AI Institute for Teachers is and its origins?

Marc: Sure, I think that when I was last a guest here in January of this year on your show. And it seems like 1000 years ago [LAUGHTER], but during that spring semester, I really took a much deeper dive than the original pilot with a lot of the generative AI tools in the fall. And we started noticing that the pace that big tech was deploying these tools and integrating these with existing software from Microsoft and Google was only accelerating. So in about April or May, I went to my chair, Stephen Monroe, and said, “I think we need to start training some people to get them prepared for the fall,” because we kind of thought that fall was going to be what it is right now, which is a chaotic just sort of mash up of sort of everything you can imagine that some people dive in deeply, some people tried to ban it, some people are trying to do some critical approaches with it too. So we actually worked with the Institute of Data Science here at the University of Mississippi, and we got some money. And we were able to pay 23 faculty members $1,000 apiece to train them for a day and a half about everything we knew about Generative AI, about AI literacy, ethics, what tools were working in the classroom, which wasn’t. And their whole goal was to go back to their home departments over the summer and serve as ambassadors and help prepare them for the fall semester. And we started that, we’ve had funding for one Institute, and now we’re doing workshops, and searching, as we all will, for more funding for doing,

Rebecca: How did faculty respond to (A) the incentive, but (B) also [LAUGHTER] the training that went with it?

Marc: Well, not surprisingly, they responded really well to the incentives, where you can pay people for their time, they generally do show up and do so as well. We had quite a few people wanting to take the training both internally from the University of Mississippi and then people started finding out about it, because I was posting it out on Twitter, and writing about it on my substack. So when we had interest from graduate students in Rome, interest from other SEC schools wanting to attend, and even interest from a community college in Hawaii. Definitely seen a lot of interest within our community, both locally and more broadly, nationally.

Rebecca: Did you find that faculty were already somewhat familiar with AI tools? I had an interesting conversation with some first-year students just the other day, and we were talking about AI and copyright. And I was just asking, “Hey, how many of you have used AI?” And I and another faculty member indicated that we had used AI to make it safe to indicate. And many of them really kind of shook their heads like “No, they hadn’t,” and they were unsure. And then I started pointing to places where we see snippets of it, in email and in texting and other places where there’s auto-finishing of sentences and that kind of thing. And then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I have seen that. I have engaged with that. I have used that.” What did you find faculty’s knowledge?

Marc: Extremely limited. They thought of AI as ChatGPT. And one of the things we did with the session was basically frame it out as “Look, this was not just going to remain as a single interface anymore.” One of the things that actually happened during the institute that was completely wild to me was the last day, I woke up that morning. And I’d signed up through Google Labs, and you can do it as well, to turn on the features within the Google suite of tools, including in search and Google Docs, and Sheets and everything else. And they gave me access that last day, right before we began. And so I literally just plugged in my laptop and said, “This is what it’s going to look like in Google docs when you have generative AI activate in Google Docs. it pops up and immediately greets you with a wand with a phrase “Help me write.” And what I tried to explain to them and explained to faculty ever since then, is that it makes having a policy against AI very difficult when it shows up at an existing application with no indication whatsoever that this is in fact Generative AI. It’s just another feature that’s in the application that you have grown up with, from many of our students’ perspectives their entire lives. So yeah, we need to really work on training faculty, not just in the actual systems itself, but also getting them outside of that mindset that AI that we’re talking about is just ChatGPT. It’s a lot more than that.

John: Yeah, in general, when we’ve done workshops, we haven’t had a lot of faculty attendance partly because we haven’t paid people to participate [LAUGHTER], but what’s been surprising to me is how few faculty have actually explored the use of AI. My experience with first-year students was a little different than Rebecca, about half of the students in my large intro class had said that they had explored ChatGPT, or some other AI tool. And they seem pretty comfortable with it. But faculty, at least in our local experience, have generally been a bit avoidant of the whole issue. I think they’ve taken the approach that this is something we don’t want to know about, because it may disrupt how we teach in the future. How do you address that issue, and getting faculty to recognize that this is going to be a disruptive technology in terms of how we assess student learning and in terms of how students are going to be demonstrating their learning, and also using these tools for the rest of their lives in some way?

Marc: That’s a great question. We trained 23 people, I’ve also been holding workshops for faculty too, and again, the enthusiasm was a little bit different in those contexts, too. And I agree that faculty, I feel like they feel overwhelmed and maybe some of them want to ignore this and don’t actually want to deal with it, but it is here and it is being integrated at phenomenal rates in everything around us too. But if faculty don’t come to terms with us, and start thinking about engagement with their technology, both for themselves and for their students, then it is going to create incredible disruption that’s going to be lasting, it’s not going to go away. We’re also not going to have things like AI detection, like it is with plagiarism detection to come in and save the day for them too. And those are all things we’ve been trying to very carefully explain to faculty and get them on board. Some of them though, just aren’t there yet, I understand that. I empathize, too. This is a huge amount of time that you spend on these things to think about and talk about as well. And we’re just coming out of the pandemic, people are exhausted, they don’t want to deal with another, quote unquote, crisis, which is another thing that we’re seeing too. So there’s a lot of factors that are at play here that make faculty engagement, less than what I’d like to see.

Rebecca: We had a chairs’ workshop over the summer, and I was somewhat surprised based on our experience with other interactions with faculty, how many chairs had used AI. The number was actually a significant number. And most of them were familiar. And that to me was encouraging [LAUGHTER], it was like, “Okay, good, the leaders of the ship are aware. That’s good, that’s exciting.” But it’s also interesting to me that there are so many folks who are not that familiar, who haven’t experimented, but seem to have really strong policies around AI use or this idea of banning it or wanting to use detectors, and not really being familiar with what they can and cannot do.

Marc: Yeah, that’s very much what we’re seeing across the board too, is that the first detectors that I’m aware of that really came online, I think, for everyone was basically GPTZero, there are a few others that existed beforehand to IBM had one called the Giant Language Testing Lab. But those were all based on GPT-2, you’re going back in time to 2019. I know how ridiculous is it to go back four years in technology terms and think about this… that was a long time ago. And we really started adopting that through education or seem to be adopted in education based off of that panic. The problem is in incidents of education putting a system like that in place, it’s not necessarily very reliable. TurnItIn also adopted their own AI detector as well too. A lot of different universities began to explore and play around with it, I believe, and I don’t want to be misquoted here or misrepresent TurnItIn. I think what they initially came out with it, they were saying there was only 1% false positive rate for detecting AI. They’ve since raised that to 5%. And that has some really deep implications for teaching and learning. Most recently, Vanderbilt Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning made the decision to not turn on the AI detection feature in TurnItIn. Their reasoning was that they had, I think, in 2022 some 75,000 student papers submitted. If they had the detector on during then that would give them a false positive grade about 3000 papers. And they just can’t deal with that sort of situation through a university level..No one can. You’d have to go through it investigating each one. You would also have to get students a hearing because that is part of the due process. It’s just too much. And that’s one of the main concerns that I have about the tools that it’s just not reliable in education.

John: And it’s not reliable both in terms of false positives and false negatives. So some of us are kind of troubled that we have allowed the Turnitin tool to be active and have urged that our campus shut it down for those very reasons, and I think a number of campuses, Vanderbilt was one of the biggest ones, I think to do that, but I think quite a few campuses are moving in that direction.

Marc: Yes, the University of Pittsburgh also made the decision to turn it off. I think several others did as well, too.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, if we don’t have a tool to measure, a tool to catch if you will, then you can’t really have a strong policy saying you can’t use it at all. [LAUGHTER] There’s no way to follow up on that or take action on that.

Marc: Where we’re at, I think, that for education, that’s a sort of conundrum. We’re trying to explain this to faculty. I think much more broadly, in society, though, if you can’t have a tool that works when you’re talking about Twitter, I’m sorry, X now, and understanding if the material is actually real or fake, that becomes a societal problem, too, and that’s what they’re trying to work on with watermarking. And I believe the big tech companies have agreed to watermark audio outputs, video outputs, and image outputs, but they’ve not agreed to do text outputs, because text is a little bit too fungible, you can go in and you can copy it, you can kind of change it around a little bit too much. So, definitely it’s gonna be a problem, too when state governments start to look at this, and they start wondering that the police officer taking your police report is writing this with their own words, the tax official using this as well, too. So it’s gonna be a problem well outside of education.

Rebecca: And if we’re not really preparing our students for that world in which they will likely be using AI in their professional fields, then we’re not necessarily doing our jobs and education and preparing our society for the future.

Marc: Yeah, I think training is the best way to go forward too and again, going back to the idea of intentional engagement with the technology and giving the students these situations where they can use it and where you, hopefully if you’re a faculty member, you actually have the knowledge and the actual resources to begin to integrate these tools and talk about the ethical use case, understanding what the limitations are and the fact that it is going to hallucinate and make things up, and to think about what sort of parameters you want to put on your own usage too.

John: One of the things that came out within the last week or so, I believe,… we’re recording this in late September… was the introduction of AI tools into Blackboard Ultra. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Marc: Oh boy, yes indeed, they announced last week that the tools were available to us in Blackboard Ultra. They turned it on for us here at the University of Mississippi, and I’ve been playing around with it, and it is a little bit problematic, because for right now, what you can do is with a single click, it will scan your existing materials in your Ultra course and it will create learning modules. It will create quiz questions based off that material, it will create rubrics, and will also generate images. Now compared to what we’ve been dealing with ChatGPT and all these other capabilities, this is almost a little milquetoast by comparison. But it’s also an inflection event for us in education, because it’s now here, it’s directly in our learning management system, it’s going to be something we’re going to have to contend with every single time we open up to create an assignment, or to do an assessment. And I’ve played around with it. It’s an older version of GPT. The image version I think is based on Dall-E, so you would ask for a picture of college students and you get some people with 14 fingers and weird artifacts all over their face, which may not be the one that would actually be helpful for your students. And while the other learning modules there are not my thinking necessarily, it’s just what the algorithm is predicting based off the content that exists in my course. We have that discussion with our faculty, we have them cross that Rubicon on and saying, “Okay, I’m worried about my students using this, what happens to me and my teaching, my labor, if I start adopting these tools. There could be some help, definitely, this could really streamline the process, of course creation and actually making it aligned with the learning outcomes my department wants for this particular class.” But it also gets us in a situation where automation is now part of our teaching. And we really haven’t thought about that. We haven’t really gotten to that sort of conversation yet.

Rebecca: It does certainly raise questions about, obviously, many ethical questions and really about disclosing to students what has been produced by us as instructors and what has been produced by AI and authorship of what’s there. Especially if we’re expecting students to [LAUGHTER] do the same thing.

Marc: It is mind boggling, the cognitive dissonance, with having a policy and saying “No AI in my class,” then all of a sudden, it’s there in my Blackboard course, and I could click on something. And, at least at this integration of Blackboard, they may very well change this, but once you do this, there’s no way to natively indicate that this was generated by AI. You have to manually go in there and say this was created. And I value my relationship with my students, it’s based off of mutual trust. I think almost everyone in education does. If we want our students to act ethically, and use this technology openly, we should expect ourselves to do the same. And if we get into a situation where I’m generating content for my students and then telling [LAUGHTER] them that they can’t do the same with their own essays, it is just going to be kind of a big mess.

John: So given the existence of AI tools, what should we do in terms of assessing student learning? How can we assess the work reasonably given the tools that are available to them?

Rebecca: Do you mean we can just use that auto-generated rubric right, that we just learned about? [LAUGHTER]

Marc: You could, you can use the auto-generated rubric separately from Blackboard. One of the tools I’m piloting right now is the feedback assistant, it was developed by Eric Kean and Anna Mills. I consulted with them on this, too. She’s very big on the AI space for composition. It’s called MyEssayFeedback. And I’ve been piloting this with my students. They know it’s an AI, they understand this. I did get IRB approval to do so. But I’ve just got the second round of generated feedback, and it’s thorough, it’s quick, it’s to the point. And it’s literally making me say, “How am I going to compete with that?” And maybe the way is that maybe I shouldn’t be competing with that, maybe it’s I’m not going to be providing that feedback. But then maybe then I should be providing my time in different ways. Maybe I should be meeting with them one on one to talk about their experiences, maybe that way. But I think you raise an interesting question. I don’t want to be alarmist, I want to be as level-headed as I can. But from my perspective, all the pieces are now there to automate learning to some degree. They haven’t been all hooked up yet and put together a cohesive package. But they’re all there in different areas. And we need to be paying attention to this.Our hackles need to be raised just slightly at this point to see what this can do. Because I think that is where we are headed with integrating these tools into our daily practice.

Rebecca: AI generally has raised questions about intellectual property rights. And if our learning management systems are using our content in ways that we aren’t expecting, how is that violating our rights or the rights that the institution has over the content that’s already there.

Marc: A lot of perspectives of the people that I speak with too, their course content, their syllabi, from their perspective is their own intellectual property in some ways. We get debates about that, about the actual university owns some of the material. But we have had instances where lectures were copyrighted before in the past. And if you’re allowing the system to scan your lecture, you are exposing that to Generative AI. And that gets at one aspect of this. The other aspect, which I think Rebecca is referring to is the issue with training this material for these large language models itself could indicate that it was stolen or not properly sourced from internet and you’re using it and then you’re trying to teach your students [LAUGHTER] to cite material correctly too, so it’s just a gigantic conundrum of just legal and ethical challenges. The one silver lining in all this, and this has been across the board with everyone in my department. This has been wonderful material to talk about with your students, they are actually actively engaged with it, they want to know about this, they want to talk about it. They are shocked and surprised about all the depths that have gone into the training of these models, and the different ethical situations with data and all of it too. And so if you want to just engage your students by talking to them about AI too, that’s a great first step in developing their AI literacy. And it doesn’t matter what you’re teaching, it could be a history course, it could be a course in biology, this tool will have an impact in some way shape or form in your students’ lives they want to talk about, I think maybe something to talk about is there are a lot of tools outside of ChatGPT, and a lot of different interfaces as well, too. I don’t know if I talked about this before in the spring, the one tool that’s really been effective for a lot of students were the reading assistant tools, one that we’ve been employing is called ExplainPaper. They upload a PDF to it, it calls upon generative AI to scan the paper and you can actually select it to whatever reading level you want, then translate that into your reading level. The one problem is that students don’t realize that they might be giving up some close reading, critical reading skills to it as well too, just like we do with any sort of relationship with generative AI. There is kind of that handoff and offloading of that thinking, but for the most part, they have loved that and that’s helped them engage with some really critical art texts that normally would not be at their reading level that I would usually not assign to certain students. So those are helpful. There are plenty of new tools coming out too. One of them is called Claude 2 to be precise by Anthropic. That just came out, I think, in July for public release, it is as powerful as GPT-4. It is free right now, if you want to sign up for it as well too. The reason why I mentioned Claude is that the context window, what you can actually upload to it is so much bigger than ChatGPTs. I believe their context window is 75,000 words. So you can actually upload four or five documents at a time, synthesize those documents. One of the things I was using it for as a use case was that I collected tons of reflections for my students this past year about the use of AI. It’s all in a messy Word document. It’s 51 pages single spaced. It’s all anonymized so there’s new data that identifies them. But it’s so much of a time suck on my time, just go through to code those reflections. And I’ve just been uploading to Claude and having it use a sentiment analysis to point out what reflections are positive from these students, in what way, and it does it within a few seconds. It’s amazing.

John: One other nice thing about Claude is that has a training database that ends in early 2023. So it has much more current information, which actually, in some ways is a little concerning for those faculty who were trying to ask more recent questions, particularly in online asynchronous courses, so that ChatGPT could not address those. But with Claude’s expanded training database, that’s no longer quite the case.

Marc: That’s absolutely correct. And to add to this rather early discussion about AI detection, none of the AI detectors that I’m aware of had time to actually train on Claude, so if you generated essay… and you guys are free to do this on your own, your listeners are too… if you generated and essay with Claude, and you try to upload that to one of the AI detectors, very likely you’re going to get zero detection or a very low detection rate for it too, because it’s again, a different system. It’s new, the existing AI detectors have not had time. So the way to translate this is don’t tell your students about it right now, or in this case, be very careful about how you introduce this technology to your students, which we should do anyway. But this is one of those tools that is massively popular, a lot of people just haven’t known about it because, again, ChatGPT just takes up all the oxygen in the room when we talk about Generative AI

John: What are some activities where we can have students productively use AI to assist their learning or as part of their educational process?

Marc: That’s a great question. We actually started developing very specific activities for them to look at different pain points for writing classes. One of them was getting them to actually integrate the technology that way. So we built a very careful assignment, which called on very specific moves for them to make both in terms of their writing, and their integration of the technology for that. We also looked at bringing some research question, building assignments that way. We have assignments from my Digital Media Studies students right now about how they can use it to create infographics. Using the paid for version of ChatGPT Plus, they can have access to plugins, and those plugins then give them access to Canva and Wikipedia. So they can actually use Canva to create full on presentations based off of their own natural language and use actual real sources by using those two plugins in conjunction with each other. I just make them then go through it, edit it with their own words, their own language too, and reflect on what this has done to their process. So lots of different examples, too, I mean, it really is limited only to your imagination in this time, which is exciting, but it’s also kind of the problem that we’re dealing with, there’s so much to think about.

Rebecca: From your experience in training faculty, what are some getting started moves that faculty can take to get familiar enough to take this step of integrating AI by the spring?

Marc: Well, I think the one thing that they could do is, there are a few really fast courses. I think it’s Ethan Mollick from even from the Wharton School of Business put out a very effective training course that was all through YouTube, I think it’s like four or five videos, very simple to take, to get used to understanding how ChatGPT works, how Microsoft’s Bing works as well too, and what sort of activities students can use it for, what sort of activities faculty could. Microsoft has also put out a very fast course, I think takes 53 minutes to complete about using generative AI technologies in education. And those are all very fast ways of basically coming up to speed with the actual technology.

John: And Coursera has a MOOC through Vanderbilt University, on Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT, which can also help familiarize faculty with the capabilities of at least ChatGPT. We’ll include links to these in the show notes.

Marc: I really, really hope Microsoft, Google and the rest of them calm down, because this has gotten a little bit out of control. And integration of these tools are often without use cases, they’re often waiting to see how we’re going to come up and use them too. And that is concerning. Google has announced that they are committed to releasing their own model that’s going to be in competition with GPT4, I think it’s called Gemini by late November. So it looks like they’re just going to keep on heating up this arms race and you get bigger models, more capable and I think we do need to ask ourselves more broadly what our capacity is just to keep up with this. My capacity is about negative zero at this point… going down further.

John: Yeah, we’re seeing new AI tools coming out almost every week or so now in one form or another. And it is getting difficult to keep up with. I believe Apple is also planning to release an AI product.

Marc: They are. They also have a car they’re planning to release, which is the weirdest thing in the world to me, that there could be your iPhone charged in your Apple Car.

John: GM has announced that they are not going to be supporting either Android or Apple CarPlay for their electric vehicles. So perhaps this is Apple’s way of getting back at them for that. And we always end with the question, what [LAUGHTER] is next, which is perhaps a little redundant, but we do always end with that.

Marc: Yeah, I think what’s next is trying to critically engage the technology and explore it not out of fear, but out of a sense of wonder. I hope we can continue to do that. I do think we are seeing a lot of people starting to dig in. And they’re digging in real deep. So I’m trying to be as empathetic as I can be for those that don’t want to deal with the technology. But it is here and you are going to have to sit down and spend some time with it for sure.

John: One thing I’ve noticed that in working with faculty, they’re very concerned about the impact of AI tools on their students and student work. But they’re really excited about all the possibilities that opens up for them in terms of simplifying their workflows. So that, I think, is a positive sign.

Rebecca: They could channel that to help understand how to work with students.

Marc: I hope they find that out, there’s a positive pathway forward with that too.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you and you’ve given us lots more to think about.

Marc: Thank you guys so much.

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

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

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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308. Design for Learning

Posted in chunking, diversity, engagement, equity, feedback, higher education, inclusion, learning, mobile, online learning, pedagogy, teaching
September 27, 2023

We tend to design courses for ourselves because we are the audience we know best. In this episode Jenae Cohn joins us to explore how user-experience design principles can help us create effective and engaging learning experiences for the students we have right now. Jenae is the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Skim, Dive, and Surface: Teaching Digital Reading. Her newest book, co-authored with Michael Greer, is Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning.

Show Notes

  • Cohn, J. (2021). Skim, dive, surface: Teaching digital reading. West Virginia University Press.
  • Cohn, J., & Greer, M. (2023). Design for learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning. Rosenfeld Media
  • Global Society of Online Literacy Educators
  • Horton, S., & Quesenbery, W. (2014). A web for everyone: Designing accessible user experiences. Rosenfeld Media.
  • Web Accessibility Guidelines
  • Copies of Design for Learning may be ordered at the Rosenfeld Media website. The discount code for listeners is TEA20. It’ll be available on Wednesday, 9/27 and will give listeners access to 20% off the book for one month (i.e. 30 days).

Transcript

John: We tend to design courses for ourselves because we are the audience we know best. In this episode we explore how user-experience design principles can help us create effective and engaging learning experiences for the students we have right now.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Jenae Cohn. Jenae is the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Skim, Dive, and Surface: Teaching Digital Reading. Her newest book, co-authored with Michael Greer, is Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning. Welcome back, Janae.

Jenae: Thank you. I’m so glad to be back.

John: It’s good to see you again.

Jenae: …Good to see you, too.

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

Jenae: I sure am. I’m always prepared to drink tea. Especially when I’m talking to the two of you. But I went for a classic English breakfast tea this morning. Do you both have some tea with you?

Rebecca: Yeah, I have English tea time.

Jenae: We’re matching…

Rebecca: Yeah…

[LAUGHTER]

John: And, I’m not. I have [LAUGHTER] ginger peach black tea today.

Jenae: That sounds really good, though.

John: It is.

Rebecca: Sounds like a good way to start the day, for sure. So we invited you here today to discuss Design for Learning. Can you talk a little bit about how this book project came about?

Jenae: Absolutely. So my colleague Michael and I have a lot of shared interests. Michael and I both are trained in rhetoric and composition. And we both are people really interested in online writing, online reading, and online learning, broadly speaking. We both served on the board for the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators, which is an organization dedicated to supporting folks who teach reading and writing online, broadly speaking. Through that organization, we got to know each other better. And we just realized how much we wanted to talk about what it really meant to create quality online learning experiences. And something that kept cropping up for the two of us. And I should say that both of us have had like a hodgepodge of jobs in and around higher education. We kind of joke that we were both sort of like these misfits in higher ed, people who have kind of done a bit of teaching, a bit of admin. He’s worked in publishing, I did a lot of work in instructional design and just higher education pedagogy. And something we noticed, just in the various roles that we were in was that educators, professors, faculty could learn a lot from user experience frameworks. And we were reading a lot about UX and UI in the work that we were doing around instructional design and for him publishing, and it just dawned on us like, why are we not bridging these conversations between the work of thinking about designing learning interfaces and the work of building really good, high quality learning experiences. I think we notice that in higher ed, there is this tendency to kind of try and reinvent the wheel around defining what a good teaching experience, especially what a good online teaching experience is by just creating really kind of exhausting templates and tons of checklists and rules. And we really thought those are useful, but wouldn’t it be more useful just to remember that students are people navigating devices online? And can’t we use the frameworks that help inform those design decisions to inform the design of learning experiences to make them better? So that was really the genesis of this project. We started off thinking we’d write a bunch of blog posts and then it struck us that blogs and articles were great, but wouldn’t it be even better if we wrote a book [LAUGHTER]. So we put it all together, and it resulted in this book.

John: So who’s the intended audience of this book?

Jenae: We really are targeting a broad audience with this book, I’d say primarily folks who do instructional design style work in mind. So in higher ed, that could be faculty, a lot of faculty play the role of instructional designers, as well as facilitators and teachers, of course. But, we also hope that this book would really reach folks who do dedicated instructional design support. We also hope that this would just reach people who are having to teach online or do trainings or workshops online, and who are still really struggling with it. This book, I would say, was written before the pandemic happened. We were, I would say, drafting and conceptualizing it before the pandemic. And of course, the pandemic shaped the drafting as we went, there’s still COVID-19 out there, so I don’t want to say we’re beyond the pandemic. But in this moment where we’re beyond perhaps like a peak point of the pandemic, let’s just say. There may be folks who are still wanting to be more intentional about what it means to provide more equitable access to online learning experiences, who want to be designing in a more intentional way, and who want to be really thinking critically about how to create more sustainable online learning experiences, as well, that really work. I think we were also on a mission with this book to prove that really, anyone can do this, you just need to keep some known principles in mind that, again, this is not totally new territory, and scholars and user experience and human computer interaction have been thinking for a very long time about how to make information accessible online, and how to make sure that information and interactions are easily navigable. And so that was really the literature we wanted to tap into. So that’s all to say that I think people who benefit from reading this book is really anyone who wants to be creating a better online learning experience for whatever teaching situation they’re in.

Rebecca: I’m, of course, super excited about this book, because I’m a UX designer. I love that you use that framework to write this book. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose this approach?

Jenae: Absolutely. I’m so glad that you appreciate this book exists. We’ve gotten really good reception from the UX community on it as well. I would say that we use this framework because we felt like it really centered the learner in an important kind of way. I think that in a lot of teaching situations, people who educate or design learning are often more thinking about the content: What information do I have to deliver? What are the main things that I need to make sure people know how to do? Those aren’t bad things to focus on, we need to cover content, and we need to make sure that there are clear outcomes. But I think it’s most important to really think about how is someone engaging with that content? How are they understanding it? What are their opportunities to understand that content in a variety of different ways. And I think what a user experience framework allows us to do is to center that reminder. Learners have these embodied experiences that shape how well they’re going to be able to learn, how well they’re going to be able to interface with the information. And if we’re talking about that in an online context, in particular, it’s impossible to do so without addressing what it means to, again, engage with and use these online environments effectively. So I think a UX framework really just allows us to be more centered in reminding ourselves who really benefits from the learning experiences we design, and who really needs to have access to [LAUGHTER] the information to be successful. And I think UX frameworks just really help us center that.

John: Can you talk a little bit about how this approach centers the user in terms of practical ways in which that’s built into the design process?

Jenae: Sure, one way to sort of think about that is to really take a step back and try to remind yourself just who is taking your class in the first place. Starting there, starting from the place of trying to be curious about who your learners really are. I think that it’s easy to make assumptions, I’ll just say in higher education, in particular, since I think that’s primarily the audience for this particular podcast. I think a common misconception, for example, is that all students entering their class are traditional college age, 18 to 21 years old, but like, I should put a big asterisk on that and say, that’s probably not the traditional age at most institutions anymore. But that’s the stereotype of kind of who a college student is. And there may be some assumptions about what their prior learning experiences were like that brought them into a college classroom… about the prior knowledge that they had. And so what I think a user-centered design encourages us to say, “Do we know that? How do we know that? What information do we need to gather to remember who’s actually coming into our rooms?” And I’m not suggesting that any educator has to like, do deep dive demographic data work to find out who their learners are. But I think most of us can kind of anticipate the range of people who are coming into our classes. We might anticipate just the different types of learners that we may encounter. And by that, I mean, it’s worth, I think, before you start designing, just trying to remember, what are the different motivations that students have for coming into the class? What are their purposes for being there? What are the main things that students are going to want to do by being in your class or your training or your workshop at any given moment? So starting by just sort of trying to map out who those people are? And then try to anticipate, okay, given this motivation, or this purpose that this learner may have, what kinds of things might they be looking for… literally looking for my online course? What things will they click on first? Which links are they going to want to access most frequently? Which resources are going to benefit them on the site most? And then trying to design your learning management system course site, or if you’re not using learning management system, your course website, broadly speaking, to really privilege the resources, the links, the activities, the pages that are going to be best aligned with what you anticipate your users or your learners may need. And Rebecca, I’m sure, can speak to this given her expertise, too, but UX design really is a whole process of trying to consider how the visual information, how even like the tactile information, say how your keyboard was set up, how your device is set up, how that allows you to most easily use and engage with products, so to speak, that you’re building. And in this case, we want to think about how can you build the best online course that you can, in a way that allows users to most easily find the information you anticipate they will most frequently need?

Rebecca: So one of the things I’m hearing you say, is really thinking about the wide variety of learners that we have and the different needs that they have and trying to address that. One of the things that’s really popular in UX design and that you talk about in your book are personas. Can you talk a little bit about how learner personas can help us think through the different kinds of learners that we have in our class in a really practical, tangible way. You just kind of provided that theoretical framework, but I love that the personas is such a practical application of that.

Jenae: Yes, thanks for asking that. Rebecca, I was debating whether to dive into that with the last question. But let’s dive into it now. So for those who aren’t familiar, personas are an exercise where you really try to create a character sketch, I would say, of the user you’re imagining is going to engage with your course or in this case, try to imagine an example of a student who’s going to be in your class. And by creating a character sketch, I mean, I encourage instructors, if they have the time to sit down and say, “Okay, what might be the name of someone in my class? What might be their age? What might their prior experiences with learning my topic have been? Why are they here? What brings them to college? Or what brings them to this class in the first place? What are going to be some of their biggest challenges? What are going to be some of their biggest hopes? What are the things that they’re going to be most excited about doing in this class?” And again, it’s a bit of an imaginative exercise. And so I think it’s easier to do with more teaching experience. But it’s also not impossible to do even if you’ve had relatively limited experience. It’s really just an exercise in trying to think through who might be the real people that you are engaging with, I do want to say that there’s been a lot of conversation in the UX community, and again, Rebecca, you may have some thoughts on this, too, about sometimes the stereotypes that personas can perpetuate. For example, I think there have been concerns in the UX community that when you try to characterize, say, an older user, of an online interface, a stereotype might be that they struggle more or are more challenged with using technology than, say, a younger user. And that that might be a challenge to anticipate. And so I want to be mindful, for example, that if you are going to be in the practice of building personas, which we talk about in the book, because I do think is a useful exercise to kind of try and make concrete for yourself who is going to be on the receiving end of your experience, that you do try to check yourself a little bit on reinforcing stereotypes to the best of your ability. It’s easy to do, stereotypes exist because we notice patterns sometimes in how people behave. And that can sort of reproduce some harmful assumptions about who those users are. But again, to the best of your ability, attempt to anticipate what the needs might be based on what you do know about who might be in the room, just again, kind of reminding yourself that you’ll want to think about your personas in nuanced ways, and not necessarily make assumptions about who they are. And I would say one solution to that, how am I supposed to write a generalized description of a persona, while avoiding all possible stereotypes about who they might be? I would say again, time allowing, try to run your personas by other people, and just see what their reactions are to reading them. For example, if you have a trusted colleague, or a friend who teaches a similar class, or who you work with regularly, just show them what you’ve drafted and say, “Does this feels like a real person to you?” And to attempt to ask diverse people about how your persona sketches are landing or how realistic they feel to them. That’s always a good way to kind of gut check, and just make sure that as you’re anticipating your users’ needs, you’re not falling too much into your own biases about who the people are that you’re supporting in your course.

Rebecca: So one of the things, I think, people do sometimes run into when they’re making personas is to create the ideal student that doesn’t exist, and also to recreate themselves. And so one strategy that I often recommend is thinking about creating aggregates of people that you do know. Because then they’re more realistic in terms of the way they might interact. So if you’ve taught a class before, you might have a real pool of people you could draw from [LAUGHTER] and to create a persona from, obviously, that’s more difficult when it’s a new place. And I was also going to offer up in terms of thinking about disability and thinking about accessibility, that there’s a book called A Web for Everyone, and they have a lot of resources. It was published quite a while ago, but they have a lot of resources still online, they have some personas for people with a wide range of different kinds of disabilities. And sometimes that can be really useful in just thinking through kinds of scenarios that you might not think of on your own.

Jenae: That’s fabulous. I would love to see that resource about sort of supporting accessibility, especially. That’s such a huge issue in designing online learning experiences, particularly. I’m so glad you mentioned those resources. That’s fantastic.

John: And while there may be those types of biases that you might have, those who’ve taught classes multiple times do know some of the types of problems that past students have had. So those issues that they’ve experienced in the past could be built in. But one of the other things you suggest is doing a pre-course survey, so that you get some more information about the actual students in the room rather than those who may have been thinking about when you initially designed the course? Could you talk a little bit about that survey?

Jenae: Yes, I’d be happy to talk about the pre-course surveys. So this is a practice that, I think, has multiple benefits. So in a pre-course survey, I think instructors have this wonderful opportunity just to ask students what their motivations are for engaging with the class, what brought them here, how they would characterize some of their prior experiences with learning similar topics, if any, and just to voice what concerns they have, or what things are exciting to them about the term ahead. I’m giving a lot of examples of possible questions and I just want to acknowledge that not all instructors will want to ask all of those questions all at once. But those kinds of questions that really get at motivation and concerns, I would say, in a nutshell, can be really critical, both for adjusting, I think, those persona expectations. So, creating personas should be an iterative process, I should say, as well. It’s not a one and done thing where you anticipate who your learners are prior to the course starting and then you’re like, “Okay, I figured it out, I know who all the students are. Knowing who the real students are, can then allow you to go back to what you anticipated. I think, and both of you, Rebecca and John, were speaking to how you could use prior information from prior terms to inform your kind of current term or current course. Great, you could sort of just align your prior understanding with this current information you might get from these surveys to then go into your course website, or your course learning management system, your syllabus and say, “Okay, is this design going to work for the group of people who are actually here based on what I’m reading?” …recognizing, of course, that nothing’s gonna be perfect for everyone. But you can do the best you can to try and make the materials as good as possible for the group that you have. In front of you. I would say that you want the survey to feel less burdensome for your students to complete. I’m giving a lot of examples of questions that I think are ideal as open-ended questions. Some of these, you could turn into multiple choice or kind of Likert-scale style questions, because you can just use it as an opportunity to take the temperature. “On a scale of one to 10, for example, how confident do you feel in your understanding of your ability to pick up new quantitative concepts?” …for example, if you’re teaching in a STEM-style discipline. Or “On a scale of one to 10, how comfortable do you feel as a writer or with writing tasks?” …if you’re teaching something more humanities- or writing-centric. You can get really creative in trying to solicit some feedback. And I also encourage instructors to be judicious in what they’re asking in these pre-course surveys to kind of try and ask questions, with the end goal of helping you as the instructor make small tweaks to the design of the course. Think about this information as a way to say “Okay, are there certain links I should put on the homepage that I didn’t think needed to be on the homepage? Or should I reorganize the menu on my learning management system in a way that highlights some resources more than others based on the information I’m getting in the survey? Should I reorganize a module to introduce some content before other content, because I’m seeing a trend in the surveys about less confidence in one area of the course than I was expecting in another?” So thinking about how the answers might inform your design, a research-based perspective really, I think, can make your course really even stronger. And I think it’ll feel better, both for you and the students because it helps the students see that you’re curious about them, you want to know who they really are. And we know that engaging personally with people really matters for good teaching. But the instructor too, it can be really frustrating. If you design something and it doesn’t land with your students. You feel like you spent a lot of time building something that didn’t work. That’s a really disheartening experience. So getting the feedback might allow you to avoid [LAUGHTER] having or feeling so disappointed if the information didn’t land the way you were expecting it to. And this isn’t foolproof. There’s always room, again, for iteration. But I do think the surveys can at least help you anticipate a little bit better how the progression through your course could go.

Rebecca: I can imagine that some of those surveys with open-ended questions could lead to better understanding how students name things or label things which could give you a lot of clues about the actual user design of a course by just how you might name or provide quick descriptions of things. In your book, you talk a lot about instructional text design, which obviously has lots of skills in online learning from instructions for assignments to just how we might label a folder [LAUGHTER]. There’s lots of skill there. Can you talk a little bit about the basic principles that you’d recommend for course designers to follow when they’re writing instructional text?

Jenae: Absolutely, and I realized, as you were talking and responding, I was nodding along. And then it struck me. It’s like, “I’m on a podcast, no one’s going to know that I’m nodding and agreeing with you right now.” So [LAUGHTER] for the listeners sake, like I was nodding along quite vigorously with that entire response. Instructional text, I think, is one of the most underrated and one of the most important things to design for any online course experience. I think that online course designers have a real tendency to rely too heavily on video and on images. There’s an assumption that if you’re working online, everyone’s just using video all the time, or everyone’s just wanting to engage with the flashiest multimedia possible. That is still important. I mean, we have two chapters in the book, all dedicated to video. So I don’t want to undermine that. It is important to engage with multimodal artifacts and building multimodal interventions, when you’re teaching in a multimodal environment like the internet. However, for students who may have low internet access and low bandwidth, for students with disabilities, text remains one of the most accessible and easiest ways to find information in an online course. I’d also say text is one of the most mobile-friendly pieces to think about. And we know that increasing number of students are accessing their courses or coursework through their smartphones. I’ll answer your question directly now, but I wanted to provide that context. I would say when it comes to designing instructional text, I really encourage instructors to think about two big things, to think about the hierarchy of the information that they’re writing, and to think about the discrete chunks of information that they’re wanting to communicate. So when I talk about the hierarchy of texts, I think it’s important when we’re writing to consider what are the sections of our text? Most academics, most instructors, are used to, when they’re reading or writing, creating headers, and sub-headers, and paragraphs that denote a certain order of information. And when you’re teaching online, especially, I think even more critically about how are you labeling the text? How are you indicating which things are instructions versus content? How are you labeling the order of the content that you want students to read in? How are you even labeling the order of instructions, like there is usually multi-tiered sets of steps. So using header text and different layers of header text, is a really important web accessibility measure. And again, it helps readers see visually and if they’re using a screen reader tool, it helps them navigate that text more easily. So I should take one step back and say when I’m referring to header text, I mean that when you’re working in a rich text editor, on any website, you can typically see an option to select different layers of headers, like the header ones are usually the highest, biggest level header, header twos go below that header, threes go below that. So just being mindful that just increasing text size is not the same thing as using headers is one really, really simple way to create hierarchy. And again, to denote the correct order of reading the text information. And when I say chunking text, this is as simple as just thinking about paragraphing, making sure that you are spacing out pieces of content in really critical ways. So anyone who’s read a piece of writing with super long paragraph knows, that’s a lot harder to kind of discern, it’s a lot harder to see how one idea moves from one to the next. Shorter paragraphs are typically easier to get a sense of when you’re moving from one idea to a new idea. And so even though long paragraphs have their purpose, perhaps especially in scholarly writing, or even in more, I would say kind of creative writing, in some cases, when you’re doing really instructional or technical work, which you’re often doing when you’re designing a class, shorter is better, more chunked is easier to access, because you’re assuming that people are doing things with your information. So those are the two qualities I would just be thinking about with instructional text. There’s a whole other component that we didn’t really address in the book, but I’ll just stick to very briefly here, which is also thinking about just the visual appearance of your text. A lot of accessibility folks speak to some best practices and guidelines around font face, and font size, and some of these factors when you’re designing text as well. I’m not an expert, I should say, in like type of graphic design or font size, but I want to point out anyway, because I think if you are designing online, it’s important again to do the best that you can to try and anticipate those needs. So I think as a general rule, making sure your font sizes are not super teeny tiny, or super large. Making sure that you’re using standard font faces: Arial, Helvetica any sort of sans serif font is typically considered a best practice. The rules around this change all the time, Web Accessibility Guidelines change as technology evolves, so I never like to give super hard and fast rules, and again, it’s not my area of expertise. But it’s another piece to keep in mind that visual and verbal information is intertwined. Text is a visual medium, online learning experiences are largely a visual medium, by default. And so the more mindful we can be of what that looks like, and the more mindful we can be of how the visual experiences we design online, are compatible with accommodations for disabled users. We just anticipate our users’ needs, our learners’ needs more proactively, and it raises the boats for everyone. It just gives everybody a deeper chance to succeed if we’re just thinking about these interface choices in more deliberate ways.

Rebecca: I love that you’re really talking about how the instructional text is also part of digital accessibility. It’s important to have plain language, it’s important to chunk your content and these sorts of things. So I’m really excited that you’re incorporating that into the work that you’re doing.

Jenae: Thank you. It is exciting. I think it’s one of these things that, when Michael and I were first discussing this book, it was a real lightbulb moment for us that there was such a robust literature out there that discussed all these great principles for making sure that online information was easy to find. And it just was striking to us that a lot of folks in teaching professions weren’t getting access to that information or exposure to that information. And we started thinking about this, again, prior to the pandemic, kind of in the mid 2010s. And even at that point, online courses were growing, mobile access was becoming a more common way that students were engaging with courses. So, why not tap into these existing sets of conversations that are industry best practices, for engaging with online interfaces, in spaces like higher ed, and in spaces just like learning and development, where these dialogues seem not to have met each other as fully as they could.

Rebecca: Our chief technology officer and I were having a conversation about some of these things yesterday as we’re talking about our student body is diversifying and that we have far more students with disabilities who are able to attend college and have access to college in a way that maybe they haven’t in the past. And as you were talking about headings and paragraphs and things, something that people might not know, is that if you use a screen reader, you’re not necessarily visually interacting with the text. Instead, you’re thinking programmatically, and so just like kind of vision centered [LAUGHTER], the user might skim headings visually, it’s the same way someone might use a screen reader. So by choosing a heading level two, it allows someone to find that section easier. And by breaking things into paragraphs, and delineating that’s that kind of content that allows a screen reader user to be able to jump to a particular part of the content. When we don’t do that, a screen reader user has to listen to everything from the top to the bottom of the page.

Jenae: Great example. Yes, and that’s such a frustrating experience to have to do that. If we can be just a little bit more attentive to the information architecture of sort of what we’re trying to communicate and convey… information architecture is a technical term, but it’s also a metaphor [LAUGHTER]… we have architecture and we have design to help create solid foundations for places that we live. Similarly, when it comes to information, we need to be building solid infrastructure to help people navigate their way through a course. One of my colleagues a while ago used a metaphor for online learning design I’ve never forgotten and we’ve alluded this a bit in the book, which is that when you’re building something online, it’s like you’re just building a whole house [LAUGHTER]. When you walk into an in-person classroom, the architecture is literally there, and you make assumptions about the room in the space, the second that you walk in the door. When you’re designing text online, or just when you’re thinking about the whole online learning experience, it’s a total blank canvas, you have to build that architecture and those hierarchies. If you’re not attentive, you’re absolutely right, the consequence is that it can be a big overwhelming mess of information. And I think it’s a useful practice for instructors, even when they’re not teaching online, to think about these things. It’s also just a great exercise and getting really very focused on what information do you want to prioritize when you’re communicating assignment instructions or when you’re picking out content-based readings for your students? What do you want them to focus on? What are the big things you really need them to learn or pay attention to? And so if your course design, your visual design can align with the hierarchy of choices you’re making as an instructor or the priorities that you’re setting, it just makes it easier for everyone to have equal access that information so that more time can be spent for students to focus individually on how they’re processing, applying, doing higher-order thinking with that information. They don’t have to spend so much energy just trying to intake the kind of basics before they have the opportunity to really work with it and apply it meaningfully,

John: You provide a lot of other information in your book, and we encourage people to read your book. If they want to find out more about creating videos, about providing effective webinars, and so forth, there’s some really nice hints and suggestions throughout. But one of the things you end with in there, is ways in which instructors can continuously improve their courses, in terms of soliciting feedback to make the course better each time. Could you talk a little bit about how you would encourage instructors to continuously work on developing their courses?

Jenae: Sure. So I really like that section of the book, because what I hope that section communicates is that thinking about your course design is a reflective and an iterative process. I don’t think a course is ever really fully perfect and done, there’s always things you can do, and modify each time you teach or offer the experience. So, I don’t think getting feedback on the course has to be hard, I don’t think it has to take a ton of time. We talk about multiple ways of getting information about how the course is working. And I’m going to start with I think some of like the easiest and most passive ways to get information and then we’ll sort of work our way to some of the more perhaps active or personalized interventions for getting information about the course. So one thing I think is worth really paying attention to, after you finish teaching a course, are some of the analytics that are available in your learning management system or your course website. And I recognize that some folks are really reluctant to look at the analytics, because there is a surveillance economy implicated in the tracking of course analytics. Every site on the web tracks your movements, every site in the web knows how long you’ve stayed on a certain page, what things you’ve clicked on. And a learning management system is no exception to that. Unfortunately, that information can get weaponized to discriminate against students, discriminate against users in problematic ways. In the web, outside of learning, for example, analytics can be gathered and sold to advertising companies to spread information about your activities for profit. So I just want to note that context, but you can also use this information for good and for some useful things as well. So seeing which resources students are clicking on the most in your class can be really useful information for you to say, “Huh, seems like a lot of people found that resource useful.” You don’t have to necessarily identify which individual students looked at which resources but you can look at this data, typically in aggregate, and again, most learning management systems have an analytics dashboard, you can access to look at this. I think that’s incredibly useful just to see what was clicked most often and what wasn’t. You might also want to track, for example, which pieces of information students did spend more time on. It could indicate a couple different things, it might indicate that something was really challenging, if students spend a lot of time on one particular piece of content over another or if they found it useful. You’d have to contextualize that data based on what you were seeing in the course. But I think if you’re willing to look at that information, again, in the context of how your term went, it might just give you some passive information that could surprise you. I would even look at, for example, with assignment submissions, how many delays were there on certain assignments versus others? In which assignments did students request more extensions more than others? Again, this is just information that might help you inform whether the pacing was appropriate for the course, whether assignments were sequenced appropriately. That kind of thing. If you want to get more active, if you gave a pre-course survey, you can do a post-course survey. Most institutions, of course, have formal evaluations of teaching, but we know that institutional student evaluations of teaching can be fraught. Sometimes they ask the kinds of questions we don’t always want to ask or find most useful as instructors. So if you do your own very brief post evaluation, you could focus it on the design of the course itself. I think it’s worth asking students at the end of the course, how easy was the course site to navigate? How accessible did the materials feel for your ability to learn? You could return to some questions from your pre-course survey. If you asked a Likert scale about rating your confidence with learning something on a scale of one to 10 at the start of the course, you could ask them by the end, “How does your ranking change?” Even referring back to the original data that they might have submitted to you with the pre-course survey. So those are another way to ask them. I think if it’s possible to, what I love to at the end of the course is even a little brief post interview with students if possible. We mentioned this a bit in the book. Again, it’s time consuming. But if you have a small-ish class where you could have conferences at the end of the term, and have a moment with just a five-minute conversation to ask students: “How did it go? What aspects of the course design did you like most? Which were most challenging to you?” That’s another way to get information. Finally, I’ll just do one more technique we write about in the book, which is never discount your own reflection on your experience as well. This is another form of user research. Even though you are not the end user for the course, you are the designer, and so I think it’s always useful just to jot down a few notes and treat that as research when you’re done, too. What did you notice about user interactions on your course site throughout the term? What things surprised you? What things went exactly as you expected? You can use those notes to iterate and improve your experience for the next time that you offer it. So those are just a few techniques and many, which again, are drawn from the field of user experience research surveys, and interviews, for example, are pretty common user experience research practices… other UX research practices that, again, just depending on your time, depending on your resources, it’s great if you can see students engaging in the course as well, asking them, just really seeing what it looks like for them to interact in the course. That’s a good way to get at good information about it. I just want to encourage anyone who’s teaching not to shy away from getting that kind of feedback, because it does make, I think, teaching more satisfying when you’re getting more information about what’s working and what isn’t.

Rebecca: So, you know this question’s coming…[LAUGHTER] We always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Jenae: Yes, I do know it’s coming, and it’s funny, because I was thinking about it. What am I [LAUGHTER] doing next? So to be honest, I don’t have a clearly defined project, I’m doing a lot of little things, I might be taking a little break, because I have written two books in about two and a half years [LAUGHTER]. So that’s been a lot… wonderful. I think I’ve been bitten by the writing bug, for sure. And so I suspect there’s more writing in my future, but nothing immediately next. I’m still very curious about what it’s going to mean to keep designing really good online learning experiences in the future, I don’t think we’re done with that conversation. I’m really curious about how that’s going to evolve in the context of creating more inclusive and equitable learning environments for students. So I imagine those are topics I will continue to explore to some extent, but we will see how, of course, with AI too, and the impacts of that on online learning, I’m sure there’s gonna be a whole set of ways to think about these topics that will continue to evolve. So I’m kind of keeping my eyes open and my ear to the ground on how things are developing. And we’ll just kind of see what ideas emerge from there.

Rebecca: Well, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Jenae. Thanks for all the work that you do.

Jenae: Likewise, thank you, again, for having me and for engaging with these excellent questions. And if you listened to this podcast, we’ll put in the speaker notes, I’ll give you a little gift of a promo code. If you’d like to buy the book, we can give you a 20% off discount with thanks to Rosenfeld Press who published this book.

John: Well thank you. We’ll be sure to include that in the show notes and it’s always great talking to you.

Jenae: Wonderful, and likewise, thank you again.

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

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

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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306. Gender Bias and Timing of SETs

Posted in equity, feedback, gender bias, grading, higher education, learning, pedagogy, SET, student course evaluations, teaching
September 13, 2023

 A number of studies demonstrate gender bias in course evaluations. In this episode Whitney Buser, Jill Hayter, and Cassondra Batz-Barbarich join us to discuss their research that looks at the timing of when these gender differences emerge and theories for why they exist.

Whitney is the Associate Director of Academic Programs in the School of Economics at Georgia Tech. Jill is an Associate Professor of Economics in the College of Business and Technology at East Tennessee State University. Cassondra is an Assistant Professor of Business at Lake Forest College. Whitney, Jill, and Cassondra are the authors of an article entitled “Evaluation of Women in Economics: Evidence of Gender Bias Following Behavioral Role Violations.”

Show Notes

Transcript

John: A number of studies demonstrate gender bias in course evaluations. In this episode we discuss research that looks at the timing of when these gender differences emerge and theories for why they exist.

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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 guests today are Whitney Buser, Jill Hayter, and Cassondra Batz-Barbarich. Whitney is the Associate Director of Academic Programs in the School of Economics at Georgia Tech. Jill is an Associate Professor of Economics in the College of Business and Technology at East Tennessee State University. Cassondra is an Assistant Professor of Business at Lake Forest College. Whitney, Jill, and Cassondra are the authors of an article entitled “Evaluation of Women in Economics: Evidence of Gender Bias Following Behavioral Role Violations.” Welcome Whitney, Jill, and Cassandra,

Whitney: Thank you for having us.

Cassandra: Thank you so much.

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

Whitney: I am. I have some jasmine tea.

Rebecca: Always a good choice. Jill. How about you?

Jill: Harney and Sons Hot Cinnamon Spice.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s such a good choice. I love that one. It’s a family favorite at my house. How about you, Cassandra?

Cassandra: Yesterday, we made a sun tea on the porch. So it’s sweet peach tea.

Rebecca: This is a good variety. How about you, John?

John: And I have ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: So we’re combining choices here [LAUGHTER]. And I have Awake tea, despite the fact that it is early afternoon here.

Jill: I also had three cups of coffee this morning.

Rebecca: It’s one of the most popular kinds of tea, Jill.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your research on gender bias instudent evaluation of instructors. Could you tell us how the study came about?

Whitney: Jill and I have been working on this for about six years, believe it or not. It’s been a long process for us. And actually at the very beginning we had a different third working with us. And the original three of us, we met at the conference, and we had just attended a session that talked about teaching evaluations. And afterwards, we just naturally began talking about this, because we all had these really, really strong feelings about teaching evaluations. All three of us at the time were young, young in our careers, young age wise. We were female PhD economists. And we were all earning tenure, or I think Jill had just earned tenure. But we’re all in this similar experience of having what we felt like was a very positive class climate, and a lot of camaraderie between ourselves and the students until the grades were returned for the first time. And then we could feel a definite shift and it was upsetting to all of us. We all got into this because we love teaching and we want to do a good job in that. It was just something that we were picking up on. So that was our anecdotal experience, Jill had a little data on it herself, because she would do mid-semester evaluations herself, just to gauge the class climate and see what students were needing. And I had an experience where in my first position, they did a surprise midterm evaluation, just to kind of see how the new professor was doing, that I didn’t know about. And I got glowing reviews from the students, everything was very, very positive, wonderful and six weeks later, same students but grades returned, evaluations looked a little different. And the comments were a bit different. So we had a little data to backup this idea too, and one thing if the people listening today haven’t read the literature, there’s an extensive literature on course evaluations. And it consistently finds gender bias in those. But the thing about that literature is it only looks at evaluations, which are typically done on the very last day of class, maybe even after that, maybe a couple of days before, but at the end of the semester. And we really haven’t seen anyone look into how these opinions of students evolve over the semester, or how students feel at the beginning or the middle of the semester. So that’s what we wanted to do with that. And in my opinion, and this is just me speaking here, Jill can have her own other motivations, or our other co-author that has worked with us before could feel differently. But for me, it was really important to acknowledge that society has come a long way in the past several years with gender bias. And I don’t think that modern students are shocked by female faculty any longer, I don’t think they have an explicit distaste for female faculty. Anecdotally, I feel that my students are actually happy when they meet me. And they have expectations of me to be warm, comforting, approachable. But I do think that when you expect someone to be more comforting and approachable, and they give you a grade back, that’s not always an “A” in a difficult quantitative subject like economics, you can get a bit of a Grinch Who Stole Christmas effect. I thought it was going to be one way and now my expectations are taken down. We all know no one likes that dopamine depletion of having expectations not met. So, to me, if we’re going to talk about gender bias, we really have to talk about it in this nuanced way, so that it doesn’t get automatically dismissed by people who don’t see an explicit bias and then say, “Oh, hey, there’s nothing here.” And then the last thing that I think is really important here for the motivation for the paper is that we have this expectation that bias would grow over the semester. So if bias grows over the semester, that means the earlier in the semester you evaluate, the smaller the bias will be. And one thing that the literature is missing is a very concrete objective way to deal with bias. What we were hoping to find was: move the evaluations up in the semester a bit, and you minimize or eliminate bias and that’s a concrete objective. Towards the end today, we’ll talk about what we actually found and whether or not we knew that. But that was one of the motivations.

Jill: So that’s how the original paper found in terms of motivation, but then Cassandra, she is a PhD in Psychology until she had read and she was doing work in the area. And she had reached out to Whitney and I. She had read our paper, she had read the results of our paper. And so then a second paper with Cassandra takes a more psychology approach in terms of a lot of what Whitney is talking about and Cassandra is going to talk about it later, with respect to the role-incongruity theory, social role theory, and she’s going to talk more about that later. And Whitneys described the motivation of that first paper, the second paper takes a very different perspective and looking at it from a more psych perspective. Cassandra, you might want to chime in?

Cassandra: Absolutely. I think you summarized it well, I joined the paper, as Whitney and Jill were trying to find a home for it. And we thought that our interests, though coming from very different backgrounds ,would blend nicely for this particular topic, as there’s a lot of scholarship in psychology that looks at understanding reasons behind this bias. And so I was brought in to really help kind of think about how do we frame that in a way that might appeal to even a broader range of audiences.

Rebecca: At the beginning of the paper, and Whitney, you’ve kind of pointed to this today about being a young faculty member, you also noted in the paper that women are underrepresented among economics faculty, especially at the level of full professors. Can you tell us a little bit about the extent of this under-representation?

Jill: Women have earned more than half the doctoral degrees for over a decade. But particularly among tenure-track faculty are underrepresented. In the paper we cite 36% of full professors are females. In economics, that’s a smaller percentage, 17 and a half percent of full professors are females, in the area of economics, although 35% of PhDs in econs represent females. It’s a smaller percentage of female faculty receiving full professor rank in economics. That’s what we mean by that under representation. In terms of economics, specifically, it’s oftentimes left out of the STEM fields, and depending on which university or college that you’re out at, economics can sometimes could be found in the social sciences and in the arts and sciences, or it can be found in the business school. So at my institution, Whitney’s institution, I believe, and Cassandra’s I think we’re all represented in the business school. But sometimes, you know, economics wanted to put in there with the social science field, it’s not thought of as being this more quantitative, heavy subject, and it oftentimes is, it is by nature of it. And so females in those more math heavy classes, like the STEM classes. I think my students when I started off, and I think Whitney was getting at this, with us being more junior faculty members. I can considered by students peer, instead of the professor in the course. And that made it tough, because to Whitney’s point about that returning grade feedback and the perception that students had of me a day one versus midway through the course, I was now coming across as someone that was handing back maybe less than 100% or “A” grade. So in my business school, my principles of economics courses are required. They might not even want to be in there, but they have to be in there to get a business degree. Earlier on, that was a challenge I faced, I’m 13 years into my career. I’m going up for full professor this summer. But starting off was really a challenge. And I remember having female mentors in my graduate program. They tried to prepare me for this, they tried to say it’s going to be challenging early on, you’re going to have to go against some of these perceptions, alot of the perceptions that we measure in this paper..

John: To what extent is the underrepresentation of women faculty due to a cohort effect where women have become a larger share of PhD economists in the last few decades, but that was less true 20 or 30 years ago and how much of it might be due to the impact of gender bias on evaluations on career pathways for women?

Jill: Really what this paper looks at, the standard evaluations of teaching and the bias or potential for bias, that exists there. So I’ll just speak to that and that where I currently am, evaluations of teaching are weighted heavily for retention of faculty, promotion of faculty, tenure and promotion decisions. And then when we’re hiring new faculty, looking at any previous course evaluations and experience with teaching. At every level in academia, these are used as some gauge for teaching effectiveness. I think one of the questions that we’re looking at and accrediting bodies are looking at is whether or not this is the measure that should be used. And looking at different measures that might be options for measuring teaching effectiveness, we know that they’re flawed, that our study is showing that they’re flawed, but also previous literature has suggested that they’re flawed as well. And so the fact that for most schools, this is the single measure that’s being captured… and I know that it’s different depending on again, at my institution, some departments don’t give them a whole lot of weight in tenure and promotion decisions. But certainly, my experience in my College of Business and Technology that these are weighted heavily. And so in thinking about a junior faculty member starting off, when Whitney and I met at the conference, if my evaluations were lower, I’m putting a lot of time into my teaching and improving and bringing up those scores. My male colleagues, in discussion just with them, didn’t have the same experience that I was having with respect to these SETs. And so we think about allocation of time and resources as a tenure track junior faculty member, I’m putting more in what I would consider just catching up, getting those SET scores higher, so that it’s reflected in my tenure and promotion packet. And that’s less time that I’m allocating toward research or other things. That’s my view on it. I think Whitney has a couple other thoughts on that.

Whitney: One of the things we tried to make clear in the paper is that the literature is very clear that evaluations do have a gender bias. And if these evaluations are being used, and they are, in hiring decisions, annual evaluations, promotion, tenure evaluations, and merit pay raise decisions, then they’re being used at every single level of advancement. It’s not one small piece. It’s a piece that’s used throughout and very integrated late in the process.

Rebecca: You mentioned at the top of our interview that the second paper shifts more towards psychology, and specifically describes ways in which both social role theory and role-congruity theory may explain the bias against female faculty in student evaluations. Can you briefly summarize these arguments for our listeners?

Cassandra: So social role theory was a theory that has been put forth for decades by Alice Eagly, a very prominent scholar in the social psychology world, as well as her colleagues. And this has been used as a framework to really understand the complexities and origins of gender gaps in our workplace in particular, whether that be inequities and experiences, the expectations that are different for women, and of course, the outcomes such as promotion at work. Essentially, social role theory suggests that the reason we see these gender inequities today in society or that they originated from men and women being distributed into social roles based on physical sex differences, so that women biologically were able to have children, men, on average, were physically stronger, which those differences 1000s of years ago, had an evolutionary benefit to a well functioning society, people were supporting in the ways in which they were best equipped to do so. And the assignment of men and women into these roles led get them to adapt role-specific qualities and skills. So women who were bearing children were friendly, helpful, sensitive, concerned with others, kind, caring. We refer to these now as more communal qualities, and men and the provider, the protector, role led them to have attributes such as ambition, being assertive, authoritative, dominant. These are qualities that now we label as agentic. So while technology of course has since caught up and made these biologically driven role assignments unnecessary, society continues to see a division of labor along these lines in the modern world and society at large. And society at large still holds the belief that women do possess these traits, and should possess these traits, these more communal qualities, and men do and should possess more of these agentic. Relatedly, role-congruity theory helps us understand the consequences when men and women fail to fulfill these expectations. And we know the failure to fulfill these expectations are more consequential for women, this experience of bias driven from the failure to behave in communal ways. In other words, violating these cultural expectations can be seen in all areas of society, but particularly in traditionally male-dominated positions, like college professors, or in male-dominated fields like economics [LAUGHTER]. And so women that are in these roles are already going to experience some degree of backlash for being in gender-incongruent positions. But that is especially true if they are also going to behave in traditionally more agentic ways, being more assertive, demonstrating their power, which we argued was what was occurring when you give critical feedback back to students.

John: To approach this, you gave evaluations to students at two different points of the semester. Could you tell us a bit more about the study design, how large the sample was and how many faculty and institutions participated in the study?

Whitney: Sure, we had a really rich data set for this study. That’s one of the reasons we were able to get two different papers out of it, and maybe even some future research, because we took all of this data, and we collected it in person on paper and entered it, which was an arduous process. As I said, we had been working on this project for about six years, about a year and a half of that was just data collection. And we have a lot of people to thank that did that for us for no author credit on this paper, so we had males and females across the United States gathering that data for us, that we’re really appreciative to have. So in the end, we wound up with about 1200 students in total, we weren’t quite 50/50, we were 60/40, favoring men, which is typical for economics classrooms, even though it is required in a lot of majors (that’s where you’re getting a lot of the women taking it). And like you said, John, we surveyed them twice. We surveyed them on the second day of class, we wanted as close to a first impression as possible without having a major sample issue with drop/ad. And then we surveyed them the day after they got their first midterm grade back. So we got the first impression, and then we got the way that they felt after they had had their first grade returned. We did this at five different colleges and universities, we had three male professors contributing data and four female professors contributing data. One of the big questions that people have asked us over the time is “Well, how does race play into this?” And that’s something that’s beyond the scope of our research, I will say that we only had one underrepresented minority in our sample, again, typical of economics professors, it was one of our male instructors. So, we would expect a downward bias from race and maybe an upward bias from gender, or getting those two, at least watching one another out in the paper. And when we asked these students about how they felt after their grades were returned. This was about four weeks into the semester, so still pretty early in the semester. What we did was we really wanted to ask about the specific qualities that had been hypothesized in the literature as drivers of bias or drivers of differences. So we just asked students to rate their instructor on a bunch of different qualities. Cassie really helped us out here because she came in and she says, “Well, you know, we can categorize these qualities into communal qualities and agentic qualities and neutral qualities…” which was really the way to approach it because of course, we get different things in communal versus just qualities. So we asked our students things like: “How knowledgeable do you find your professor? How challenging? Do you find them to be approachable? Do you find them to be caring? Are they interesting?” And then we asked a couple of very general questions: “Would you recommend the course?” All of this set us up to have a really nice dataset where we could look between genders and across time as well.

Rebecca: So I think everyone’s probably dying to know exactly what you found. [LAUGHTER]

Jill: I’m just going to provide an overview of the results because we do a number of different specifications and use different econometric methods in the findings. And so you can get all of those results there in detail. But in general, on the second day of class, we find that women are receiving lower ratings across the five agentic and gender-neutral instructor characteristics that we measured. They were rated higher on that second day of class on those more communal characteristics. And not all of those differences were statistically significant. Immediately after the first exam grade was returned to students, women were receiving lower ratings for all seven measured characteristics. Each difference was significant except for those caring and approachable, more communal characteristics. And then men were now having higher ratings in all the different aspects relative to time, or the second day of class. Over time, what we see was that men’s evaluations were getting higher on all characteristics from the second day of class to the period after the first exam was returned. And then in contrast, women’s evaluations were not trending upward. So we had a couple that were staying the same, but overall, they were going down. So those are just some overview findings. Again, those more specific results, by specification, can be found in the paper.

John: We will include a link to both papers in the show notes too, so people can go back and review them. To summarize, what you found is there was relatively weak evidence of significant gender bias on the second day of class, but that gap increased fairly dramatically after the first graded exam. So what do you attribute that change to, was it because of the feedback students were getting from grades as Whitney had mentioned before?

Whitney: We were attributing, and Cassie can talk about this with more authority on the theoretical point, but we’re attributing that to backlash theory, this idea that if I expect one thing, and I don’t get it, there’s this need to back off so that things go in congruence.

Cassandra: Exactly, Whitney is spot on there. What we thought this was evidence of was women behaving in gender incongruent ways, women are supposed to be warm and caring and friendly. And when you get a perhaps grade that maybe wasn’t an “A,” that feels harsh and critical, and a woman is asserting their power and dominance in the classroom, which again, they already are in a male dominated field profession. And those two things together combined can result in this backlash.

Rebecca: So if we take these findings, and think institutionally, what are some things that institutions might want to think about moving forward?

Whitney: That’s a good question. If you remember, from the very beginning, we were saying, we’re really hoping to find this nice objective concrete solution, we anticipated finding it through timing. And that’s what I would really like to do with future research is to be able to find something concrete and objective to treat this with. We weren’t able to do that because we found bias from the beginning. And we found that it came so quickly in the semester that it’s not something that we can just move back evaluations to midterm or something like that. Since we can’t do that, we’ve talked about other ways for institutions to take this. And one takeaway really is just an awareness that these gender biases exist and that these evaluations are flawed. This is really well established in the literature, but not necessarily in the general sphere of knowledge. When we published this paper, Georgia Tech did a little feature in their daily digest, and I had two female engineering faculty email me and say, “I knew this in my gut for years, but nobody’s ever quantified it.” That to me, is just evidence that it’s not in the general sphere of knowledge, even though the literature defines it well. Some of the impact of the concrete solutions that we have seen is we’re seeing a lot of schools and accreditors, like AACSB, they’re starting to require multiple indicators of teaching effectiveness and evaluation. So evaluations and peer reviews, or maybe something else to see the observation, something to that effect to where we have more of a global and inclusive way to look at someone’s teaching effectiveness. So this is a great takeaway, hopefully that will reduce the weight of the impact of evaluation just by having other factors in there. And just one final point that I want to make. And this is just a really big sticking point to me for the paper is that all of us are researchers, we all deal with statistics and statistical significance, and robust research methods. And then when those of us in Chair and Dean roles go to look at evaluations, all the sudden, all that training completely goes out the window, and we look at the difference between a 4.2 and a 4.4. And I know those differences sound really small, they are that small. And we say, “Oh, well, this person does better than this person, this person deserves to be hired over this person.” Never in our research, or in a formal presentation, would we ever compare two means that small without significance testing, number one, and without making sure they’re actually comparable, and say, “Oh, there’s a difference.” It’s just something that I think we need to recognize, we would not recognize this as good research or good methodology in any other area of our work. It’s just something that we should keep in mind as we move forward with this.

John: Now, you mentioned the use of peer evaluations as another way of providing, perhaps, more balance, but might they be subject to the same type of bias?

Whitney: Yeah, all the things that we would see for student evaluations, I can imagine how you would see with peer evaluations as well.

Jill: But there are creative ways to do peer evaluations that I think here at ETSU, we have a Center for Teaching Excellence. And I’m confident Georgia Tech, and Lake Forest has their own version of that. And so there are creative ways. And again, not that SETs are necessarily bad, but knowing what we know about the flaws in them, that, coupled with an additional measure or two, can be a lot more insightful, I think, to the teaching effectiveness, like true teaching effectiveness of instructors.

John: And one thing I’m wondering is if the measured effect might be larger in economics, because at least at many institutions, grades and economics and STEM classes are often lower, which might magnify the effect of this difference. It would be interesting if there was to be a study that also included some classes, maybe in humanities, to see if perhaps there’s less of an effect because of that role-incongruity issue there. It may not appear to be as severe in disciplines where grades across the board tend to be higher.

Whitney: I think you’re right about that, most people when they take economics, it’s a required class and certainly the grades are a big factor, then the two things that showed the most significance outside of our key variable of interest was interest in economics, and expected grade. Those were the things that across the board… now we still found gender bias controlling for those things, but it mattered.

Rebecca: So we talked a little bit about things that institutions might want to start thinking about: institutional policy and things that might shift how we use teaching evaluations. Are there any other strategies that institutions or instructors can use, or adopt, to try to reduce this bias in the short term?

Cassandra: That’s really the million dollar question. Because this type of bias exists in a lot of different domains, whether we’re talking managers and their subordinates, teachers and their students. One thing that’s often suggested or recommended is simply making people aware that this bias exists, and providing training on how to better approach evaluations, whether that’s how to use a rating scale and ensuring that you aren’t engaging in a halo effect, for example. Another strategy is requiring that people justify their ratings that are provided with qualitative comments… that if you’re just asked to fill out on a scale, on how competent is this person? Well, bias may creep in more if you aren’t asking for a justification of why that particular rating was given for competence. A last recommendation that I’ll share here is making these evaluations more public. So if there are a couple of people, say peers, that are evaluating myself or Whitney or Jill in the classroom, well, they need to come together, share and publicly disseminate their evaluations that they had given to us. This social accountability can help to mitigate bias and for people to ensure that the ratings that you’re giving are, in fact justified.

John: So we’ve got a long ways to go with this. It’s a problem that’s been recognized for quite a while with a lot of studies. But there hasn’t been that much done to address that. And those are some good suggestions that institutions may want to try. We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Cassandra: [LAUGHTER] That’s a good question. Of course, I think that the three of us collectively would say we do hope that administration and decision makers start asking questions about their use of student evaluations of teaching and how they might seek to mitigate this bias, based on the recommendations Whitney had already shared. But we also hope that women faculty perhaps feel more empowered to advocate for themselves when it comes time for promotion and tenure decisions to be made. My Institution, a part of the promotion process, is writing letters, and going through interviews. So speaking to this, bringing an awareness to the people who are making the decisions that this exists, and that it is not just an opinion, that there is empirical evidence of its existence. But we are really interested in exploring more fully how providing feedback, particularly critical feedback, like in our study, where the professors are giving back grades might impact the perceptions of men and women in other contexts as well. So is this a phenomenon we would see, for example, between a manager and their team? Do people respond differently to critical feedback from a manager because of their gender? And how much are these differences, perhaps, driven by perceptions of how communal or agentic they are in their delivery of that feedback? So in other words, are we seeing the same pattern in other contexts? Ultimately, we hope that by better understanding how perceptions of communion and agency impact interactions that women have at work, particularly women in male-dominated or gender-atypical roles, this greater understanding will allow us to also discover ways to alleviate some of that backlash through more targeted interventions and training and perhaps better timing. Because at a minimum, it’s important to highlight the various ways gender bias continues to persist in our society. Because without that awareness, nothing can be changed.

John: Whitney, Jill?

Jill: I think that was great. [LAUGHTER]

Whitney: Yeah, I think, Cassie, you did a great job. And Cassie certainly helped us out with bringing formal language and theory to things that we felt as intuitive and we felt in our gut as important. We don’t have a lot of language for that in the economic space. And so blending these two disciplines together has been very helpful for looking at the situation.

Rebecca: Well, thank you all for joining us. And the research that you’re doing is really important and impactful. So we hope our listeners will use it.

Whitney: Thank you so much.

Cassandra: Thank you.

Jill: Thank you so much.

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

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

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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304. ChatGPT Inspired Course Redesign

Posted in assessment, authentic learning, critical thinking, edtech, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, simulations, teaching, writing
August 30, 2023

AI tools such as ChatGPT have the potential to significantly disrupt how we work and how we learn. In this episode, Don Donelson joins us to discuss a course redesign strategy that could help prepare students for a world in which AI tools will be ubiquitous. Don is a senior lecturer in the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami. He is a recipient of the Spring 2016 University of Miami Excellence in Teaching Award and the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award from the Miami Herbert Business School.

Show Notes

Transcript/h3>

John: AI tools such as ChatGPT have the potential to significantly disrupt how we work and how we learn. In this episode, we discuss a course redesign strategy that could help prepare students for a world in which AI tools will be ubiquitous.

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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 guest today is Don Donelson. Don is a senior lecturer in the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami. He is a recipient of the Spring 2016 University of Miami Excellence in Teaching Award and the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award from the Miami Herbert Business School. Welcome back, Don.

Don: Glad to be here.

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

Don: I am. It’s the same tea that you’re drinking, black currant, and it’s great.

Rebecca: It’s a John favorite for sure. I have a Tazo Awake tea today.

John: Does that mean you’re woke? That may be an issue down in Florida.

Don: …not in a private school.

Rebecca: It means that I couldn’t make a pot of tea. I didn’t have time. So I had to use a single tea bag. [LAUGHTER] That’s what it means.

John: And I am still using the mug from Australia that Clare McNally gave me with kangaroos all over it.

Rebecca: I like that mug.

John: I do too.

Rebecca: I look forward to seeing it in person.

John: Soon.

Rebecca: Yeah, you’ll be back soon, right? A couple weeks.. I’ve got my grad studies mug. We’ve invited you here today to discuss your plans to revise the graduate and undergraduate core courses in critical thinking and business communication at Miami Herbert. Can you tell us a little bit about this course?

Don: So this course started at the grad level, MBAs in particular, in 2008. That’s what I was hired to teach. And it grew with the program, expanding into specialized master’s programs. And then it went out into the undergrad program. And it’s a core course required for all full-time business students, undergrad and graduate. This past year, we had 46 sections of undergrad courses and 21 sections of graduate courses, about 900 students or so in total.

Rebecca: So a really small situation going on here.

Don: Oh, yeah, very small, [LAUGHTER] no problems with scaling or anything like that.

John: What was the typical focus of this course in the past before this revision that you’re working on?

Don: So the course was called “Critical Thinking and Effective Written and Oral Communication,” and it lived up to its name. It was about those three things. At the time that we started in 2008, we called them soft skills. We don’t use that phrase anymore. We like to call them fundamentals, something of the sort. We think that soft skills sends a bad message. But it’s been overhauled three times, this will be the third overhaul since. And the things that we would do in the courses, from the very beginning, the main evaluations would be based on writing memos and giving presentations

Rebecca: Which should be about the kind of communication you’d be doing in business. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Yeah, it’d be based on hypothetical cases, some non-hypothetical cases, the standard Harvard Business publishing 10, 20 page case on “How did Netflix beat Blockbuster?” or something of the sort.

Rebecca: What prompted this big overhaul?

Don: Well, the accreditation body, AACSB, required program evaluation. And it’s sometimes an annoying task that people do just to go through the motions. But what we found, the first time I went through it, was that we actually learned a lot from going through those motions. And so in my department, at least, we institutionalize curriculum audits on a semester basis. And so, in between the fall and spring semesters, we have a shorter meeting, where we kind of look at what happened in all the instructors, faculty teaching in that space in the fall, what happened and what worked, what didn’t work, and we might make some minor revisions. And then at the end of the spring semesters, we’d have a little bit of a longer meeting. And the last few of those had turned out some opportunities for change.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what some of those opportunities were?

Don: Yes. So we found that this is a challenging course to get buy-in from the students. And so we still haven’t figured out 10% of what we can figure out about teaching in this space, I’m sure. But one of the things that we’ve seen is that it is somewhat of an innovative curriculum, and one of the challenges with being innovative is students haven’t had material like that before. It’s a core course. And so students have to take it. And there’s always challenges with that. But this is a bit of a different challenge. And so I was talking with John the other day, he has some core required economics courses for business students, and some of the challenges that come with that. But this is a bit different in that those students know that economics is a field of study. And they know that people take economics courses, and there’s a textbook and critical thinking and communication. They’ve been taught kind of as separate. They’ve been add ons in other courses, not as a discrete course itself. And so we think there’s some challenges with that. And really, the challenge that we’ve seen, in addition to that, is that from the faculty view, critical thinking and communication are not separate things, they are one thing. And so critical thinking, I would call it problem solving, is really what we’re teaching. But communication is a component of that. And from the student view, we’ve had a hard time getting them to see those as integrated. And so when they do a memo, that’s an evaluation metric, they see it as: “Well, that’s just looking at the writing and not critical thinking.”

Rebecca: That’s interesting. Some of the things that we’ve done in our design courses around critical thinking and writing across the curriculum, my department, which is art and design, is doing some of those same things. We would do projects and embedded in those projects would be things like memos and other ways of communicating as a way to critically think about the decisions that our designers were making on things. But we would run up sometimes against the same kinds of challenges, like how do you really make that feel practical, that’s relevant, and then also keep it interesting. And it helped, I think, in those cases, because it was tied to a project. So is that a challenge that you face in this particular class is because there are these kind of standalone case studies, and it’s hard for students to buy in or get them into a business space?

Don: That’s one of the things actually I think that’s going to be changed is more of an arc to the course. And one of the things that I’m looking at is more integration of assignments. And so things building more towards the other assignments, and so we have skills building on top of each other. But, ideally, the assignments that they’re doing all build towards one culmination assignment, capstone type project.

Rebecca: Where does this course fit into their other required courses? Is it something that happens in the beginning? or in the middle? towards the end?

Don: So that’s partially an administrative question that is dependent on staffing. We see some students wait until the very last semester to take it, particularly the students who don’t have English as a first language, but they can start taking it as early as their sophomore year. But usually, it’s junior.

John: What’s the difference between the undergraduate and the graduate versions of the course?

Don: So the graduate versions are taken on a quarterly basis, and the undergraduates on a semester basis and so there’s more contact time in the undergraduate version of the course. They use different materials, and they’re more in depth. And so much like you would see with undergraduate economics classes, the graduate version of the economics classes might have similar titles, but go far more in depth into the material.

John: So one of the main issues is that students don’t see the critical thinking aspect of it as being important in their writing. How are you going to change your course to focus a bit more on the development of those critical thinking skills?

Don: Well, this is where I need to go back and add more to what Rebecca asked before about what prompted this because of course, ChatGPT prompted a lot of the revisions as well. And so ChatGPT, AI in general, while it’s kind of an independent axis of revision, we were thinking about some of these other problems well, before ChatGPT even became a thing that people were aware of. But they go hand in hand, really. A lot of the problem that I’ve seen with the writing assignments, and why students don’t necessarily view them as critical thinking and focus on the writing, is because there’s writing for aesthetic, and then there’s writing for substance. And if you’re teaching anything about writing, you kind of have to be teaching both. But when you’re teaching both together, the students tend to focus more on the aesthetic. And they connect it back to English composition classes that they might have taken in ninth grade or 10th grade. And those classes are certainly very important. But they’re a bit different than what we’re doing in these classes. And so I think it primes them to approach the course in a way that is not really conducive to getting what we want out of it. And so with AI, well, it remains to be seen, but it looks to me like you don’t need to be teaching the aesthetics of writing so much anymore in a class like this. And so I’m going to experiment with just not. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It’s interesting, because in design classes where we were doing some similar kinds of things, aesthetics obviously always come about, because if we’re doing visual design, aesthetics are a part of that conversation. But we would have the same thing. It was like, “Well, that looks nice. That reads nice. It just doesn’t say anything.” [LAUGHTER]

Don: Right. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So it’s interesting that we bump up against these same kinds of challenges across a wide variety of disciplines. And that ChatGPT does offer some opportunity to focus on some different things.

Don: Absolutely.

Rebecca: I’m curious what exactly you’re going to focus on and how you’re gonna leverage ChatGPT in the context of this class.

Don: So I think ChatGPT is an insane, wild, amazing tool. And it’s going to only be more wild, more insane, more amazing next month, [LAUGHTER] or six months from now. But I see it really changing the way that I teach, the way I prepare for teaching. So kind of on the end of creating lesson plans and what it does for me as a teacher and the kinds of things that I can do in a class that I wouldn’t be able to do in a class before without a lot more hours in the day. And then also, from the student side, changing the way that they do assignments. They’re not going to be writing memos outside the classroom in the way that they have in business for decades and centuries. They’re going to be using ChatGPT. And so if, in this course, which is meant to be a practical course, we can’t make it practical if we’re not allowing them to use the tools that they’re not only going to be encouraged to use, they’re going to probably be required. And so if they don’t use ChatGPT in the future, they’re going to have bosses saying, “Why are you spending X amount of hours on this client memo instead of doing something else.” And so we really need to prepare them for that world. There’s been some early research and I’ll get John the citations, but we looked at research over the break between fall and spring, this past year, some preliminary research about the kinds of jobs in the way the labor market is going to be affected in the future by AI and ChatGPT and the jobs that were predicted to be the hardest hit in terms of reduced wages, and just reduced demand are jobs that involve writing and the jobs that were predicted to be the most insulated from Ai were jobs that involve problem solving and critical thinking. And so really, when you look at that research, it doesn’t even give us a choice. Even if we weren’t thinking about making some kind of revisions before, we’d probably need to just on that alone.

John: So is the focus now shifting more to the critical thinking skills and a little bit less on the basic structure of writing?

Don: Yes. And that’s really where even though the impetus for the revisions were independent, in practice, they’re not going to be that independent. And so it really dovetails nicely. And so I’ll give you an example, if a student is writing a memo, where a business is making a decision between two or three different courses of action, and one of the main criteria is the profitability of those courses of action, the structure is kind of guided by the math of profitability. So if you’re not talking about revenues, independently of talking about costs, you’re not proving profitability. And so when we talk about structure in this course, that’s really what we mean. But students very often, because of some of the things I’ve talked about previously, they’re looking at it as far as like the five-paragraph structure. And that’s not really what we mean. And so by being able to focus less on the aesthetics of writing, and more on the substance, I think we’ll be able to undo some of that priming,

Rebecca: …almost like this shift to articulating the decision making…

Don: Yes.

Rebecca: …rather than talking about writing, because articulating, it could be verbal, it could be in written language, it could be in a lot of different formats. But the point is that you thought critically about the issue, and how you made the decision. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Yes, exactly. In presentations, I’ve never had as much of the same problems as we have in the memos. Part of that, I think, it’s because of contemporaneous feedback. My students early on learned that this comment is kind of a trolling comment. And it’s not really meant as a attaboy or attagirl. But, sometimes a student will give a speech, and when they’re done, I’ll say, “I’m very impressed with your public speaking skills.” And they think, at first in the early parts of the class, that that’s a compliment. But they realize that that’s actually not a compliment. What I really mean is “No one would be buying what you’re selling, no one would be buying this stock, no one would be making a decision based on this, but you have very impressive charisma and confidence.” And that’s not really what we’re about, maybe in politics, but that’s a different question.

Rebecca: I’m curious about integrating ChatGPT as part of the process. Are you thinking about requiring students to reveal and discuss how and why they use ChatGPT in particular instances, and how they leverage the tool.

Don: So I think part of it is going to be first showing them how ChatGPT is not a critical thinking tool. And so I think it’ll be kind of walking on the escalator backwards for a bit just so that we can walk forward. It’s not going to be ChatGPT’s here, so you should use it. Go. ChatGPT is like a personal assistant, who is extremely capable and competent, but will do precisely what you tell it to do, and nothing else. The input you give it determines the quality of the output. And so if you go to ChatGPT, and you say, “I’m writing a letter of recommendation for Rebecca, and she was a great student, and she’s applying to law school period,” it’s going to give you about what you would imagine…it’s going to make up some stuff about Rebecca, it might even not get what program you’re in right. It’s not going to use the last name because I didn’t give it one. And it’s going to give you a very fluffy, perhaps disingenuous response. Now if I give ChatGPT a really robust stream of consciousness almost about Rebecca Mushtare was a student in the spring of whatever and she got this grade and she did phenomenal in these areas. And this assignment she really stood out most because of this, this, and this, it might give me a much more usable response that I can then play with. And so I think that’s going to be the first to instruct students on: what it does not do, which is critical thinking. And from there, I think they’ll have to use it however they feel comfortable. We’re still going to have some writing assignments that are scored. But what I’m hoping for is that these changes will make it so that they’re focused much more on the critical thinking parts of it. And so for some students that might look like writing a fairly complete draft on their own, and then putting it into ChatGPT and telling it to edit this for brevity and clean up grammar mistakes or do something of the sort. For some students, it might be much more of a back and forth kind of a conversation with ChatGPT, which I think a lot of students will be surprised to learn that it functions in that way. And when I find myself using it, it’s mostly as a conversation. Like, I didn’t like what you did here, cut that part out and do this again.

Rebecca: It’s funny that we don’t always think about it as a chat tool, despite the fact that chat is in its name.

Don: Yeah, exactly.

John: Before making this major change in your curriculum, have you experimented with any changes in this course recently to put more focus on critical thinking skills before introducing ChatGPT?

Don: Yes, so in some of the sections, especially at the graduate level, since we have so many different master’s programs, when I first started, it was MBA, and pretty much that’s it. Now with where the business world is going, there’s a lot more demand for specialized skill sets. And so we have, in addition to MBAs, we have a Masters of Science in Finance, a Masters of Science in Sustainable Business, so on and so forth. And each of those sections afford some opportunity to take things in a different direction, really, not even just an opportunity, but we kind of want to, to be more responsive to those fields. And so in the graduate sections, we’ve had some isolated ability to experiment with more problem-based learning, which I think ChatGPT goes really, really well with on the faculty end as far as creating problem-based learning curriculum. But we haven’t experimented with the AI component of it yet, really, because it’s so new, and it doesn’t feel like it right now…it kind of feels like it’s 20 years old, but yet haven’t used it. But it’s very new. And so I don’t know about every other institution, but we don’t move at the pace of jets when it comes to curriculum revision at the University of Miami. We move, I think, faster than probably most but still, it takes time. And so we haven’t had the opportunity to do anything with the AI yet. But we’ve revised in the past couple years to focus more on some of the problem solving in some of the graduate sections.

Rebecca: The faculty member in me heard I can use ChatGPT to help me with problem-based learning classes, and I want to know more about that.

Don: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] So if you type into ChatGPT, you have to give it really, really good direction: the who, what, when, where, why…that you are a professor teaching a negotiation class. And it is a upper-level, undergraduate course. And you are going to create simulation practice for negotiation in which you play one role and the student plays the other, and you will create a scenario and interact with the student, but wait for the student’s response after each of your responses. And then at the conclusion, give the student feedback based on what you know about the science of negotiation from a management sciences perspective, as well as a legal perspective. And then you hit go, you will be blown away with what ChatGPT starts to create. And so it will give you a little blurb. A couple of weeks ago, I did something of the sort, and it said, Sally is the owner of a handmade furniture manufacturing company in North Carolina and has been contacted by so and so that owns a furniture retail store. And so and so has been impressed with Sally’s furniture and wants to arrange a distribution agreement. The meeting begins over the phone and so and so ask Sally what her goals are in this arrangement. And then that’s where I would type in and I said my goals are to reach this level of profitability and to have a productive long-term relationship with the other party, and it responded back. So it can create an entire dialogue that you can then ask afterwards, once you tweak it and say, “Well, I liked this part of it. I didn’t like this part of it, write the Python code for this, and it will write the whole Python code and allow you to turn it into a web-based interactive program. It’s really quite wild.

John: So basically, it gives every faculty member the ability to create interactive simulations for their classes, which could be done for pretty much any topic I would think.

Don: Absolutely. In the past that kind of thing was in some courses, probably a bit aspirational. It’s the kind of thing that would probably require some kind of course leave to develop it. And for faculty who become really comfortable with it, it will get to a point where it’s doable within a day or two of a lesson. And so you can on kind of miniature scale, you can do these on a daily basis, really high quality ones.

Rebecca: It sounds like something that we can use in a lot of contexts in higher ed, including if we want to do simulations for interviews for new positions or other things as well, if you’re trying to better understand how someone might approach a problem.

Don: Absolutely. I think that’s a very good application, in fact.

John: One of the things though, that I think has generated some panic for a lot of faculty is the effect that this may have on how we assess student learning. So how can faculty address issues related to the ethical use of artificial intelligence?

Don: Well, I’ve never known any faculty to ever panic over a technological innovation…sarcasm ended. So I think faculty have to assess this on their own, but also part of the community. One thing that I think’s going to be an early problem are faculty doing things in a different way, I think that’s probably unavoidable. And so I say all that as kind of a disclaimer that my approach and what I think our approach is going to be in my department, and even if the disclaimer applies to that, I don’t even know that for sure, is perhaps going to be different than others’ approach. And so since this course is supposed to be so much of a practical course, and the writing is on the wall, no pun intended, well, it’s in the AI software, I view that we really have no choice. And so there’s been a lot of commentary in The Atlantic magazine, a lot of commentary in the higher education journals. And most of that I have seen focused on this question, but using as an assumption that it’s wrong to use ChatGPT. And so the easiest way to make it not a question of cheating is to allow it to be used, and then it’s not cheating. And so that’s the direction that I’m leaning in. And I think, ultimately, for the practical tools, for the practical courses, that’s going to be the direction it goes. But again, I can’t even speak for my own department on that, because we’re so new in this.

John: And that will be an issue, I think, everywhere, as it has been in the past with things like calculators, or smartphones, or even Apple watches, I remember getting all these memos coming in from various places at one point to make sure your students are not using a smartwatch while they were taking an exam, because somehow the answers are going to miraculously appear on that tiny little screen for the test that you’re giving them.

Don: Right. And I think you can’t really separate the assessment design and the student response to the assessment in this. There are going to be some courses, I can imagine, in different disciplines, that they’re focused on more fundamental foundational skills, that it’s going to be more of a challenge for them. Well, I’m not saying that students don’t need to know and learn about the aesthetics of writing; that has to keep happening, but not in this course. And so I don’t know how the faculty in those spaces and really the 9th and 10th grade composition teachers that I talked about before, I don’t know how they deal with it, probably in person assessments, that sort of thing. But for this practical application course, I would view it really as kind of training track runners to hop on one foot. And so that wouldn’t be very practical. And so if you have a cheating or plagiarism or honor code policy that requires them to only use one foot, then it would be plagiarism for them to run on both feet. But that wouldn’t be very helpful. And so I really viewed ChatGPT as the same thing in a practical sense, if you’re plagiarism or honor, code policy defines ChatGPT as out of bounds, you’re training them to run on one foot.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about the writing component, and really building in stronger structures to focus on critical thinking. One of the other issues that you identified was that students don’t necessarily see the intrinsic value of the course or like get the buy-in. Can you talk a little bit about the ways that you’re redesigning to help with that piece of it as well?

Don: Yeah, and so certainly a lot of students do get that. But it really depends on how intrinsically motivated they are. And I think it requires faculty to kind of sell it somewhat. And so in my courses, I’ve found success with selling it in that way, which I really don’t like to do. And it’s something that a lot of faculty probably think is kind of an icky thing to do. But for instance, I will repeatedly tell students, I’m not here to make myself feel good. I’m not here to make myself feel smart by putting you all down. I’m here to help you all get jobs and to get promotions at those jobs and do well in your careers. And so I will focus a lot on kind of pointing things out as criticism that I also tell them these are not affecting your grade, however, X, Y and Z. And so little things like in a presentation if they go…you know, we have to have time limits for presentations because it’s basic math, we have X number of students, 75 minutes in a class session, we have to have time. And so when it comes to a student has five minutes and they go over, what do you do? I’m not going to take off on grades for that. But I am going to point out for a student that, in some settings, if you’re given a time limit, that’s because the CEO has another meeting five minutes after you start and you will be cut off, not because they don’t like what you’re saying not because you haven’t followed the directions, but because they’ve got somewhere else they need to go. And so a lot of the problem I think, is just students are so focused on grades, to the shock of everybody, [LAUGHTER] that when the things that you’re grading and are affecting their grades are these kind of…and aesthetic isn’t the right word, but they would view grading something like that as a bit ticky tack. And when you’re scoring things like that, it’s much harder to have a serious conversation about the nitty gritty substance, and how, if you’re trying to prove that this course of action is more profitable than the others, and you didn’t provide any support for the change in costs, you really can’t have accomplished your goal. You don’t get the same attention from the students in the same response, if you’re also talking about things like, well, “you went five and a half minutes when you only had five minutes,” or “You didn’t use 10 point font when you were told to use 10 point font and that ChatGPT, with that second example with that 10 point font, if the instructions said 10 point font and the students input the instructions it produce it in the appropriate formatting.

John: And I know in the past, when I’ve graded student papers, I, as many other people do, spend far too much time correcting grammatical errors, reminding them that there’s a difference between singular and plural or the difference between all the various homonyms out there. Might be easier for us to evaluate student work when we can actually focus on the arguments they’re making, and their ability to engage in critical thinking, rather than getting ourselves so tied up in all this minutia, which I always try to avoid doing, but when I see so many errors in student work, it’s hard not to at least correct some of it so that they could become more proficient. In the future, they may not need to have that type of correction.

Don: Yeah, John, I think you really hit the nail on the head there. You really feel like you have an obligation to correct those. And when communication or writing is one of the titular topics of the course, even more so. But I have always felt that you get diminishing returns on the things that you focus on. And every time you’re talking about grammar, you are not talking about the critical thinking, and the grammar does matter. I can tell you that I have lots of conversations with CEOs with HR directors, etc, in the ongoing effort to make sure that my curriculum is responsive to what’s happening in the market. And one thing that I consistently hear is grammatical errors, spelling errors on slides or in cover letters are catastrophic. And it’s not because they’re nitpicky, it’s because the markets are so competitive, that they get a window that’s maybe 5% or less of what someone’s actual quality as a candidate may be. And that’s just something that there’s going to be some other candidate that is just as qualified and equal in every other way that didn’t make grammatical mistakes in their PowerPoints, and so on and so forth. And so it is important, but it doesn’t matter how good your grammar is, how compelling your vocabulary is, if you are missing some of the logical components of the argument, you cannot be correct.

John: And when students get feedback, where they see dozens of comments on it, the easiest strategy is to focus on correcting those small grammatical errors that are riddled through it. You might also have told the student that they don’t have a very substantive argument. But if they’re going to make a lot of corrections, it’s easier for them to focus on correcting the grammar and ignoring the more fundamental problem.

Don: Right. The very first writing assignment I ever did as a graduate student was a 50-page memo and I got back no comments anywhere except for on the front page: “Do you talk like this?” I think probably somewhere [LAUGHTER] in between those two is ideal. But you’re exactly right, that the more that we focus on things like grammar and tense and such things, the less we can focus on the meat and the critical thinking.

Rebecca: It’s funny how that often is the level of polish would be something that goes from someone that’s got like a really high grade to like an excellent grade.

Don: Right, exactly.

Rebecca: Something that’s foundational, that’s often not how our feedback structures work. And even if we keep form and function feedback separate and even weight them very differently. It’s really easy to address the form issues, because it’s almost like a series of checkboxes and it doesn’t require a lot of thought because the critical thinking part’s the hard part. And so it’s funny that even if they’re weighted differently, and to keep the comments separately, students will always flock towards the thing that’s kind of easy to fix. I mean, who wouldn’t? Then it becomes a checklist.

Don: And that’s exactly really kind of where this boils down to me, it’s not to say that those things aren’t important. They’re still very important. But in the world in which ChatGPT is a real thing, which it now is, and will continue to be and only be more powerful than it is, the juice that we get out of spending time in class or in feedback, in office hours, whatever it may be, talking about those sorts of things, is getting much less of a return than it did before ChatGPT. I am not a walking detector of 100% perfect polish by any means. But it seems to me that the product that ChatGPT can produce, in terms of those things that you were speaking about, Rebecca, is pretty dang good and hard to distinguish for me from highly polished products. But again, where it is easy to distinguish is this is a load of crap [LAUGHTER] that is fluff and has no substance to it, but a very polished load of crap, but nonetheless…

Rebecca: It’s pretty crap. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Exactly. It’s very pretty crappy with a nice bow,

John: …which reminds me of some work that I graded just the other night, where spelling and grammatical issues have mostly disappeared in student essay responses since the advent of ChatGPT, but the substance is not always there. And there were many responses that I provided feedback on which said, “this is a really nice response, but not to the question that you were asked to address.”

Rebecca: Yeah, or you spent two paragraphs and you haven’t actually said anything yet.

John: So teaching students how to use ChatGPT or other AI tools more effectively might allow them to be more productive in their learning as well as beyond their college experience.

Don: And might allow us to make for more productive learning environments as well.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about course content, and what to maybe focus on and not focus on. One of the most important things a course has is its syllabus or course outline. Can you talk a little bit about course policies and the way that you might make change in that realm?

Don: Yeah, so I think you’re gonna have to be more detailed than you probably are used to being in terms of putting language and syllabi, very specific and upfront. And so some of the policies that I’ve seen that I’ve liked elements of and are going to end up including in the syllabi the explicit weaknesses of ChatGPT. It is not a critical thinking device, it will produce responses only as deep or as shallow as you instruct it to. You are still responsible for the critical thinking, essentially, and very explicit in terms of what’s allowed, what’s not allowed. And I think also, it would probably be a good idea for faculty to be putting in explicit language that what is allowed in this course, is not necessarily the same as what will be allowed in other courses, and it is incumbent on students to navigate those differences themselves.

Rebecca: And part of the reason why things might be different across courses is because the focus of those courses is different and really helping students understand that there’s reasons why policies might be different in other classes. It’s not necessarily arbitrary.

Don: Right, exactly.

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

Don: Well, what’s next is I figure out how to do all this stuff, [LAUGHTER] and not just to talk about it.

Rebecca: …and you’re gonna send us a memo, right with that in it. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Oh yeah. Yeah, I’m happy. [LAUGHTER]

John: …or at least have ChatGPT generate a memo explaining….

Don: Exactly. So yeah, what’s next is to put this stuff into action. Of course, as I mentioned, some of the things here have already been experimented with, the non-ChatGPT parts of it at least, but really kind of integrating them and seeing if what I am imagining is what comes to fruition in terms of do these things dovetail as well as I think. I really think that they do. …that kind of pre-existing urge to go more towards the critical thinking element, and really, I think, does dovetail well with the AI, but putting it into practice, it will be over the course of probably all of next year. And so there’s going to be some experimental sections, most of the sections are probably not going to look very different than they did in the spring. And I think that’s probably a very good plan. But there’s going to be some experimenting in some of the sections at the undergraduate level, and part of a faculty learning community on problem-based learning. This course is going to be participating in that in the fall. And so a lot is going to come out of that, I think, as well.

John: Do you think there’ll be much buy in from other people teaching the course?

Don: So, students, by and large, do not like writing. Faculty, by and large, do not like grading writing. And so I don’t think this is one of those political monsters of how are we going to get this through? How are we going to make these changes work? I think there’s probably a lot of people who have nervousness about how you would make these changes. But with those two facts that I don’t think you’d get much disagreement from, I think even across disciplines, I don’t think it should be that difficult for this to be implemented

Rebecca: Well I hope you’ll join us after you’ve implemented some of the things to share some of your reflections and let us know how it went.

Don: I’m happy to.

John: Well, thank you, Don.

Don: 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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303. Higher Ed Then and Now

Posted in access, assessment, attention, authentic learning, cognitive science, diversity, edtech, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, feedback, first-generation students, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, sleep, teaching
August 23, 2023

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.

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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 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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