314. Handbook of Online Higher Ed

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.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are 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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245. Higher Ed’s Next Chapter

During the past two years, faculty have experimented with new teaching modalities and new teaching techniques as we adapted to the COVID pandemic. In this episode, Kevin Gannon joins us to reflect on what we have learned during these experiences and what we are in danger of forgetting. Kevin is a history professor who has recently accepted a new position as the incoming director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence at Queen’s University of Charlotte. He is also the author of Radical Hope, a Teaching Manifesto, which is available from West Virginia University Press.

Show Notes

  • Gannon, K.M. (2020). Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. West Virginia University Press.
  • Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.
  • Whiteside, A. L. (2015). Introducing the social presence model to explore online and blended learning experiences. Online Learning, 19(2), n2.
  • Lewis, S., Whiteside, A. L., & Dikkers, A. G. (2014). Autonomy and responsibility: Online learning as a solution for at-risk high school students. International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education/Revue internationale du e-learning et la formation à distance, 29(2).
  • Whiteside, Aimee, Amy Garrett Dikkers, and Karen Swan, eds (2017). Social Presence in Online Learning: Multiple Perspectives on Practice and Research. Stylus Press.
  • Cate Denial, Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh, and Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt. (2022). “After the Great Pivot Should Come the Great Pause.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 25.
  • Mays Imad. (2021), “Transcending Adversity: Trauma-Informed Educational Development.” To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development. (39(3).
  • Hanstedt, P. (2018). Creating wicked students: Designing courses for a complex world. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Hidden Brain Podcast.(2022). “Do Less.” June 6.
  • Leidy Klotz. (2021) Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. MacMillan.
  • Betsy Barre (2021). Student Workload. Tea for Teaching podcast. April 14.

Transcript

John:
During the past two years, faculty have experimented with new teaching modalities and new teaching techniques as we adapted to the COVID pandemic. In this episode, we reflect on what we have learned during these experiences and what we are in danger of forgetting.

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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 Kevin Gannon. Kevin is a history professor who has recently accepted a new position as the incoming director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence at Queen’s University of Charlotte. He is also the author of Radical Hope, a Teaching Manifesto, which is available from West Virginia University Press. Welcome back, Kevin.

Kevin: Great to be here with you both again.

John:
And we just saw you a couple of weeks ago when you provided a closing keynote address at the SUNY CIT conference. It’s nice to have a chance to talk to you a little bit more.

Kevin: Yeah, it was great to be up there with you all in Oswego and I miss the Oswego weather now that I am here where it is 100 degrees outsideinf Des Moines right now.

Rebecca: That’s a little toasty.

Kevin: Yeah, it was not what I ordered, that’s for sure.

Rebecca: So dare I ask, what our teas for today are? So today’s teas are… Kevin, are you drinking tea?

Kevin: I am actually drinking a Diet Coke. Usually about midday, I moved to the cold and bubbly caffeine. So we have made that transition.

Rebecca: Cold seems necessary based on just the temperature outside.

Kevin: Indeed. [LAUGHTER]

John:
And I am drinking a wild blueberry black tea from the Republic of Tea in a new mug that our graduate student at the teaching center had given us just a couple of weeks ago, as a thank you for working with us. And I don’t know why she was thanking us… she made it so much easier over the past year.

Rebecca: Yeah, big shout out to Anna Croyle for all her hard work on the podcast over the last year. And I’m drinking… is it Ceylon? How do you even say that? Ceylon tea?

Kevin: That’s how I’ve always said it. So if it’s wrong, I’ve been wrong. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Me too. It’s one of those where you read mostly and not say out loud. [LAUGHTER]

John:
So we invited you here to talk a little bit about where higher education is going. You talked a little bit about that in the closing keynote address here and we thought it would be nice to get your opinion on the lessons that we’ve learned from the pandemic and where you see higher education as going, or where it should go, over the next few years.

Rebecca: Yeah, those might be two really different things. [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: Right. And I think that’s maybe where a lot of the stress and the angst comes from… that we’ve identified some places that a lot of us think higher education should go or at least a direction or a set of clear directions in which it should head. But we’re not at all certain that that’s actually how it’s gonna play out. And that dissonance between those two things can be unsettling. And I think that, at least from my perspective, that’s where a lot of the kind of stress and anxiety looking forward in higher education is coming from. And we’re obviously coming out, and not even completely out, but sort of coming out of one chapter and into a new chapter and landscape that’s been fundamentally reshaped by COVID, by pandemic pedagogy, and as a sort of immediate context. But of course, all of that unfolding in the larger context of defunding higher education and the sort of slow motion societal collapse that we find ourselves in as well. And I think there’s a lot that’s been laid bare by that. There’s a lot that I think folks sort of knew about intellectually, or were willing to sort of name but now feel much more viscerally and real and immediately, but we’re also really, really tired [LAUGHTER] and stretched thin. What’s the line that Bilbo Baggins says in The Lord of the Rings… “like butter that’s been scraped over too much toast.” [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That’s exactly it, right.

Kevin: Right? And I think that’s where a lot of us, if not all of us, are in some way or another. And so of course, just as we know when we talk about student learning and cognition, the less cognitive bandwidth we have available to do these sorts of complex tasks, the harder those things are. And I think on a macro scale in higher ed, I think that’s where we find ourselves too, facing some of our most difficult problems with less bandwidth available to address them than ever before.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s kind of funny, less bandwidth, but a lot of momentum and a lot of phase two.

Kevin: Right.

Rebecca: It doesn’t always line up.

Kevin: Right? Like the cars going really fast over the cliff, but we can’t steer it. It feels like, and that’s not…

Rebecca: Yeah.

Kevin: …not a comfortable place to sit.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that we’ve learned in higher ed during the pandemic?

Kevin: This is a conversation that could, of course, go on forever. But I think one of the things that we learned, that’s central to so much of what we’re trying to figure out now is just how much learning or teaching and learning are social endeavors, are community endeavors. And that’s not to say that they have to be done in the same physical space at the same synchronous time, but that sociality, a sense of community, are vital to any sort of meaningful learning. And of course, we’d learned that mostly in the absence of those thing with the shift to emergency remote instruction and then the ways in which what we were trying to do and COVID either partially or completely shut places down was so attenuated, and for folks who didn’t have a lot of experience in online teaching and for students who didn’t have a lot of experience of being online learners, we lost that community piece, that sociality. It became a series of sort of atomized, fragmented, maybe conversations, but not even really that. I think a lot of what ended up happening was instructors sort of broadcasting things out, like we would send out radio signals in the hopes that some alien civilization would pick up on them, and maybe they’ll land somewhere. And I think that’s how a lot of us felt by a good year or so into this thing. And so I think what we’ve realized now is that, yeah, we lost something really meaningful. We did the best we could speaking broadly. And moving all of higher ed online in about two weeks, that’s not something that we should scoff att. But we also risk permanently embedding some of the things that really frustrated us during that pandemic period, if we’re not attentive to addressing those things now. So I think everything else that we need to, I guess “everything’s” probably too broad a word, but so much else that what we need to address in higher ed springs from that fundamental reality about sociality and community. And in particular, the difficulty of trying to do what it is that we do, either personally, or institutionally, when those things are missing.

John:
We had that initial period where everyone moved to remote instruction for a while. And then even when we came back, it was to classrooms with a lot of distance separating people, and with masks and, in general, a lot of barriers that were not there before. And it’s been quite a bit of a challenge. I think we’ve all tried many things to build community in whatever modality or whatever mix of modalities we’ve happened to be teaching in. What are some strategies that we can use to build communities more effectively in our classes?

Kevin: So I think one of the things that I’m really interested in now, and something I think offers a lot of promise, and I actually talked about this in the talk that I gave when I was with you at Oswego, was the research that we have from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the online world, and in particular, the sort of very venerable community of inquiry model, but in particular, the work that’s been done on social presence as a key part of that, so building social presence on the part of both instructors and learners in an online class. And it seems to me that the insights that underlay the idea of social presence for fully remote asynchronous learning, apply very well in pretty much any teaching and learning space we find ourselves in, either online or on-ground, synchronous, hybrid, or asynchronous. And in particular, I’m really indebted to the work of Amiee Whiteside and her colleagues who talk about what are the components that underlay a meaningful social presence, that is, social presence in the sense of to what degree are the people that are in the space recognized by one another as full human beings, not just avatars or not just user names on a discussion board thread? And one of the most important things that underlays this social presence is what Whiteside and her colleagues called interaction intensity. One of the problems that we had in trying to do pandemic pedagogy was like, “Oh, we’ll do discussion boards,” “oh, our students will be ‘communicating.’ they’ll be talking with one another.” But if you’ve ever taught online, you know that it’s very easy for these sorts of discussion board assignments to become very sort of pro forma empty exercises, respond to a classmate, put two comments here, and students resent them almost as much as we resent having to read them [LAUGHTER] as instructors. So those are interactions, but they’re not what Whiteside and her colleagues would say are appropriately intense interactions. That is I’m not expending a whole lot of cognitive or emotional or socially present labor to engage in those sorts of interactions. And so they’re not really accomplishing what they’re supposed to in that we say discussions help build community in a class. Well, not if they’re designed in a way that doesn’t prompt this idea of interaction intensity. So what are the interactions, whether it’s between individual learners, whether it’s between the instructor and students, or whether it’s between students and the particular course material or ideas that you’re addressing? And whatever online or in-person space this is, what are those interactions like and how intense are they? What kind of cognitive labor are we asking students to do? How are we asking students to invest effort, motivation, and the sort of cognitive lifting to do what we would call higher-order tasks of analysis, of synthesis, of creation, as opposed to just sort of rote memorization or regurgitation? And so that’s one example of what I think is a broader thing that we need to be paying attention to is how are we cultivating all across our higher educational spaces, how are we cultivating that type of interaction intensity, that meaningful work to connect and to engage? Because as any faculty member will tell you, other than money, the other two resources that are the most scarce for us are time and energy or emotional energy, and I think the same is true for our students. So if we’re asking our students to contribute both time and emotional labor to a class, we need to make sure that it’s worth it. There needs to be, and I hate to use the capitalist metaphor, but what return on that investment are students getting? Because that’s going to be the calculus by which they allocate energy and prioritization to the various paths that all of their instructors are asking them to do. And so what social presence research and in particular, this emphasis on interaction intensity, has us think about is what are we asking our students to do? How are we asking them to do it? And is it worth it? What is the return for that? In that sense, it’s us making a promise to students that these are meaningful tasks that we’re asking you to engage in, that go toward your accomplishment of the learning goals for this course, and the overall goal of making this course a meaningful space. So we’re not going to waste your time with stuff that isn’t contributing to that. And so I think being really intentional and informed by a scholarship that’s already out there, in many ways, is going to be of enormous assistance to us moving forward.

Rebecca: One thing that I’ve heard a lot of instructors talk about over the past year is this big gap between students who are really achieving and those that just aren’t, they’re not able to, and maybe a lot of that’s tied to mental health and other things, perhaps, but we don’t necessarily know. But a lot of faculty have talked about this, like big gap, like there’s a hole in the middle. What strategies can we think about institutionally and individually as instructors as we move into the fall to make sure that students aren’t just completely left behind or never get to finish their education or barely begin it?

Kevin: So on the personal level, I think anything that we can do to humanize our instruction. And again, no matter what space we’re in, how are we making these spaces human spaces, spaces for actual human beings and not just brains on sticks, so paying attention to what are the affective dimensions of our courses. Are our courses and our learning spaces welcoming spaces, inclusive spaces, the old idea of seeing courses as a barrier or a weed out space, it was never tenable, but it’s clearly untenable now. But one of the things I worry about is, we’re not going, I don’t think, be able to pedagogy our way out of all of this individually. And I worry that the emphasis might be so much on “here are things that you can do in your individual classrooms, which are great and wonderful,” and we need to be doing them. But they’re not going to fix everything, because these are systemic problems. And so systemic problems demand systemic solutions. And so this is where we have to be thinking institutionally, what kind of resources are we allocating to and for students, and it’s going to be everything, I think, from additional academic support, supplemental instruction, emergency grants, food security, all of these things that are going to have to be in place, and a lot of schools are sort of doing or at least making gestures at doing, but we need to be thinking a lot more systematically and strategically about doing those things. And we also need to be advocating in the communities of which our institutions are apart, because we’re not separated from them. We don’t exist in a vacuum. And the barriers that are in front of many of our students are barriers that come from these larger systems of inequity and deprivation that they are coming out of, and then entering our campus spaces already having their experiences shaped by those things. And of course, we know those barriers don’t exist in any sort of equitable way at all. So this is institutional, systematic work. And I worry that in, again, not post COVID, but in this next chapter, are institutional leaders going to be so nervous about their own institutions’ survival, that they’re scared to take on what for some of them might look like social justice oriented type of work? Is that going to be seen as too political or too activist? And are we going to damage our ability to attract funding? Or are we going to get the wrong kind of attention. And I think ethically, that’s a disastrous way to go about it. But I also think practically, that is a non-starter as well. Schools that run scared from these sorts of things in the next couple of years, are schools that I don’t think will survive.

John:
We often talk about humanizing, or creating a more human presence. And we often talk about that in terms of just humanizing the professor. Would it help if we also focus a little bit more on bringing the students’ humanity and their lived experience into the class because maybe one way of bringing students back in is by helping students connect their own lives and their hopes for the future with what you’re doing in their classes. I think everyone advocates that to some extent, but might there be some ways of using that to help reach out to those disengaged students that Rebecca was mentioning?

Kevin: What a radical concept, recognizing students as actual human beings. Crazy talk, right? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.

Kevin: But I think what this underscores is that I just said we’re not going to pedagogy our way out of all of these problems. But having said that, and put in that caveat, I think systematic and intentional attention to our pedagogy ,that is what’s the larger sort of philosophical lenses through which we’re looking to view our work? John, you get right at the heart of that question. How do we see our students? Because our students know what we think of them, even probably better than we know what we think of them, sometimes. What we do, the choices we make, the ways in which we engage or not engage with our students send very clear signals to them. And so I think one of the things that is super important for instructors to be doing in this moment is thinking very intentionally about how am I with my students. And so if we’re going to talk about social presence, in what ways am I present? What does that present look like to others? And can my students trust me? Do my students think that I trust them? What am I saying to my students, and all of the sort of broad ways, textual and otherwise? What am I telling them that I think about them? What am I saying about the reasons that they should be taking this class? What is this class going to do for them? So absolutely, being more attentive to the full and complex nature of the students who are sharing this space with us. I mean, we’ve always known that that is a good pedagogical thing to do. We’ve always known that that helps increase, for example, students’ motivation and interest in a class, which leads to more meaningful learning. But I just think ethically, at this point to0, students are our allies, students want what we want, they want our institutions to successfully fulfill the promises that we’ve made. Students may not define successful in the way that we might define it for them, or that may look different depending on where they are in their particular journey in our institutions. But we want the same outcomes. We want that success. And so recognizing that commonality and inviting students to help do that work with us, as opposed to either passively off to the side or in opposition to us, seems like a much better strategy going forward. And so some of that conversation, I think, in the coming year, you know, maybe there’s a sort of a back to the basics kind of nuts and bolts emphasis on just good effective pedagogical technique for humanizing instruction. When Ken Bain talks about the promising syllabus, boom, there’s a way to frame the sort of formal statement of the class, the first formal context some of our students may have with the class. When we talk about creating a good climate for discussion, collaborative expectation setting, you know, what are we doing for tone setting the first day of class, all of these sorts of bread and butter, nuts and boltsy kind of things are well worth revisiting and thinking about systematically in ways that we might not have been able to do the past couple years quite frankly,

Rebecca: I know one of the things that your talk had me thinking about Kevin is all the ways that we need to humanize all the other spaces on our campus and all the processes that feel like checking this box, go through this door, shove around that corner, go to that office, oh nope, you got to go to that office. Nope, just kidding. It’s this other office. Processes that aren’t streamlined or with the student experience in mind, maybe they work for the administrative shuffle that might have to happen, but not always thinking about the student as the human that needs to experience the process also. So that’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about is ways that maybe the social presence idea needs to take form in other places outside of the classroom as well,

Kevin: Absolutely. Because if it doesn’t, what students are getting is one space on campus that is attentive to these things. And then a whole bunch of other spaces on campus that are not, and that dissonance is going to be more telling to students than anything else. So yeah, we’re talking culture change, institutional culture change, which again, may seem like a really heavy lift, given everything. But I don’t think it’s so much additional work as it is a way to focus what we’re already doing to make it more intentional and meaningful, like bringing a coherence to the things that we’re doing anyway, or should be doing anyway, I think that’s the way to approach this kind of work. So one suggestion I always offer to folks on campus on the student services side and the administration side: do a communications audit. How are you communicating? Like, what are the literal examples of the reminder emails you send to students to pay their bill, to register, to drop by the drop date… you know, all this administrative stuff that we bombard students with… read those communications with an eye towards tone, with an eye towards that kind of, I hate to use the phrase but the customer service aspect of this? Because oftentimes what we find is that a bulk of the communication that we’re doing with students, that kind of routine, everyday communication is carrying a very impersonal, almost adversarial, stance that feels punitive, as opposed to supportive. And even if we don’t mean it that way, if that’s our regular constant mode of communication with students, then what are we doing? And what are the consequences of that? Yeah, absolutely. All across campus, as I said in the talk, and as I firmly believe all of our campuses are teaching and learning spaces. Our students are always learning no matter where they are. And so the question we should all have whatever unit or office we’re in is, “Well, what are we teaching and how are we teaching it?” And I think answering those questions in an honest and systematic way can go a long way towards doing that sort of culture change work that I have in mind.

John:
At that conference we mentioned earlier, one of the things that came up in discussion is how some of our campus offices are named, which ties into that communication issue. We have a “Registrar’s” office, and we have a “Bursar,” those are not things that make sense to people, unless they’ve already had some experience with college and maybe simply renaming offices in ways that make sense to students and their role in the university could help a little bit [LAUGHTER] with some of those issues.

Kevin: Absolutely. And, you know, we should be able to answer the question, why would a student need to go to this place? Is the answer to that self evident? If I’m a student, why would I want to go to the registrar’s office? If I don’t know the answer to that right off the bat, that’s an institutional problem. So again, whether it’s the name of the office, or the way in which the services that they offer are communicated to students, there’s a lot of work that we can do as institutions to do this better. As you mentioned, John, some students are going to be familiar with those terms, who come from families where they’re not the first in their family to go to college, for example. So a lot of times the way our campus environments, in terms of the actual workflow of doing business, a lot of times the way that our campus environments are laid out rewards cultural capital, and, as a result, exacerbates the already existing inequities that we see.

Rebecca: I think one thing that students often complain about too, is the sheer quantity of communication, and trying to sort through it all, and when they’re already overwhelmed. And you mentioned before about having to make choices of where to prioritize time and effort and energy and emotional labor. And so sometimes it’s not on email, I sometimes feel that way as well.

Kevin: Yeah, I was about to say… absolutely.

Rebecca: So not only the quantity of what goes out, but also maybe more than one way to get that information.

Kevin: The institution that I’m at now, before I take my new position, has moved some of that communication into text messaging that students can opt in, and I think if students are able to opt in or something like that, that’s great. But I think, to your larger point, so many times individual units are communicating with students without any awareness of what other units are doing, too, which leads to all of us getting carpet bombed by emails. And so one way out of that, again, if you’re thinking about doing this sort of communication audit is compare your results. How many times a week are you communicating with students? And in what ways are you doing that? And might there be ways that you could partner up or collaborate across the unit, so you’re not redundant. And I think sometimes what we might find in institutions is that we’re actually communicating to students at cross purposes with one another, or at least tacitly undermining some of the messages that we might be sending to them. But yeah, when we complain that students don’t ever check their email, like I have a Google account where I sign up for something, or I join a fantasy football league, I use that address, because that’s where all the spam goes. And if I open that inbox, I just look at all the stuff that’s there, and I’m like, “Nope, I’m not even going to deal with that.” So if that’s our student’s university email inbox, with all the stuff that they’re just getting bombarded with from various campus units, I imagine that largely the same thought process is occurring there. And that maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re not checking their email, because we’ve made it much more complex and less, I don’t want to say fun, but a much more onerous process for students to wade through that stuff. And again, this may sound like a simple how big of a deal is email really, right. But it’s like the accumulation of all of these things. And I think that we, as faculty and staff felt this over COVID to, like I can’t do one more email right now, in the objective scheme of things. A 30-second reply to an email is not that big of a deal, but I’m looking at it like I gotta roll this boulder all the way up the mountain and I’m not going to do that. So being attentive to that and being mindful about that, even seemingly esoteric point, I think can make a significant difference.

John:
We talked a little bit about some of the lessons that we’ve learned and things that we might want to take forward. Are there some things that we learned early in the pandemic, that we might be in danger of forgetting as we move forward into what seems like a return to something resembling, I hate to use the word normalcy, but as we move back to more on-site instruction.

Kevin: I think we’re in danger of losing a number of insights that are really hard won insights that we should not lose, that I think it would be a disaster, in fact, if we’d lost. So one of them, I think, is the discovery very shortly into this sort of shift and the pandemic pedagogy, that flexibility and compassion are much more effective than they have perhaps been given credit for across most quarters of higher ed. And again, that’s not to say that from here on forward, we all sit around in a circle and sing Kumbaya, but rather the idea that you can ask students to do really hard things, you could do what people would call rigorous education, but you can’t do it in a space where students feel that the adverse consequences of taking a risk and not succeeding outweigh the benefits of taking a risk and succeeding. I don’t know if that was the most coherent way… but the risk-reward analysis… if students are in a learning space that they see as rigid, as inflexible, as one that is not compassionate, where’s the motivation to do the really hard stuff, the risk taking that we know underlays successful learning in higher education. And so I worry that there’s this rush to “get back to normal,” back when deadlines were deadlines, and not all this mushy crap. If we just rushed to reimpose all that structure, without attention to the shortcomings of those structures, without sufficient attention to were those structures actually facilitating learning or acting as barriers to learning. I fear that we’ll lose that in the rush to sort of reimpose structure on what many folks have seen as a structure-less environment over the last couple of years. I think that it’s entirely possible the pendulum may swing too far back. I’m also deeply concerned that, on the administrative institutional strategy side, that we will lose sight and lose the urgency of the attentiveness to the humanity and well being of not just students, but faculty and staff, just because things might be getting “back to normal.” That next academic year, things will look at least superficially like they did before COVID, full classes, mostly in person and all that kind of stuff. It will be very easy to say that, “Oh, we made it past all of that and things are good now” …without reckoning with the fact that the faculty and staff are absolutely depleted by the last few years. And you can’t just all of a sudden return, “Oh, let’s do all sorts of new strategic things. And let’s do this. It’s business as usual.” I know university administrators are loath to say “this year, we’re not going to do anything new.” Because that sounds like a surrender. But what I would say is, this year use the year to refocus on sustainability and effective mission-driven work. And you can’t do that if you’re starting to pile all this other stuff on. And yes, it’s easy for me to say because I’m not a provost. And I’m not a president, but provosts and presidents right now who are not attentive to how little capacity the faculty and staff have right now are courting disaster for themselves and for their institution, and I think, ethically, are failing as leaders as well, and so I worry deeply. And in the United States, the way we wrestle with our history is often to pretend bad things never happen. And I feel like that’s in danger of happening here. Like, oh, COVID was awful. And man, pandemic pedagogy sucked, but we made it through. And now we’re just going to soldier on as if it never happened. We don’t want to think about this bad time that we had this negative messy thing. I’m not saying that we have to sit in the misery and despair of a global pandemic. But what I am saying is if we’re not remembering what that was like, and how that has changed people, then we are going to fail the people that we work with, or that work for us in our community. And to me, that’s a real threat right now. And I worry a lot about the sort of what I see is kind of a general refusal to recognize that faculty and staff capacity, which was already attenuated pre-COVID. Let’s not get that twisted. But where we are now is a real dangerous point, and becomes even more dangerous, because there’s this illusion of normalcy, that people are laying back over the situation that’s covering up some really dangerous faultlines right now. And I worry a lot about that. That, to me, I think, is probably the most urgent and dangerous lesson that we are are potentially forgetting.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: My new position is going to ask me to do a lot of leadership development with my new faculty colleagues. And so I’m dipping back into a lot of the literature on institutional level leadership and governance. And it’s fascinating and interesting, and it’s a new set of problems to solve. But it also, really, I think, just sort of drove home to me again, just how much higher ed leadership sometimes is like capitalism in general, like, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. If we don’t have a 5% growth in the GDP, than our economy is dead. But can you keep growing like that? Is that sustainable? And what are the costs of that? And so this coming year, if institutions are saying, hey, let’s do this new strategic initiative, on top of everything else… like yes, I see how there’s a sort of culture of higher ed leadership that places a real premium on these things, and also a stigma of if you’re not innovating, you’re dying, or you’re withering on the vine, but Cate Denial and Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh, and I think there was one other co-author, wrote a really good piece in The Chronicle, and they call it for the great pause in higher education. That’s anathema, I think, to a lot of institutional leadership, but I think it’s obligatory this year. For example, if you’re in an institution where you’re already trying to recover from an enrollment dip over the last couple of years and your faculty’s burnt out, because you’ve been teaching HyFlex and remote teaching and faculty have been doing that for two years, and many of them have never done it before, so of course, the capacity to continue to do that is depleted even further. If you’re an institution that’s gone through all of those things, and is experiencing now the faculty and staff attrition that those things bring as well and then you decide”, oh, here’s a couple really big ticket strategic items that we’re gonna do for the upcoming academic year,” like, really, is that what you want to do right now, in this moment? Make a major shift to academic programs, or we’re not going to offer three- credit classes, we’re going to do four-credit classes now? Really, that’s what you want to do this coming year, in this moment, that’s a priority. And of course, that example is completely hypothetical, he chuckled. But that’s the sort of decision making process that really worries me, because I just can’t see it ending well, and I can’t see it doing anything but harm in a setting and among a community that cannot handle any more harm.

Rebecca: Yeah, I really appreciate that focus on sustainable work, sustainable systems, sustainable procedures, sustainable everything.

Kevin: Yeah, we’re not going to wellness app our way out of this.

Rebecca:I don’t think a wellness app is going to solve the fact that my daughter has been in 11 quarantines, and I’ve had to figure out how to manage all that. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think that’s gonna work.

Kevin: Mays Imad has written a lot about the collective trauma that we have all undergone as a result of COVID. And I think she’s spot on. And whether it was something that people felt directly or whether it’s the constant disruption, Rebecca, that you’ve been subjected to and your family has been subjected to, or even if it’s just the sort of I have seen all this other trauma unfold in my community, and in my friends, we’re all affected by that and to act as if that hasn’t been a thing, and to say, yes, we need to pay attention to self care this year, self care will be really important, and there are a lot of good wellness apps that you can download for your smartphone or tablet that will help you with this. Like, if that’s all you got, then what are you doing? if that’s what you tell your faculty and just sort of assume that they can pick up the rest from there. And you sit back and say, “Well, I’ve done my duty.” Oh, my gosh, no, not at all. But yet, that’s what’s happened in a lot of places. And that’s what worries me. There’s so much that’s tenuous right now, and so much feels unsettled and raw still. And there’s a sharp edge to so much of the exhaustion, that I worry about irrevocable consequences that come from trying to whistle past the graveyard about all this… which is super optimistic. I know, the guy who wrote a book on hope is talking about the impending collapse of higher education. But again, the things that we say we do in higher education, we’re critical thinkers, we’re sharp people, the capacity to reason our way through these problems. There’s so much capacity in our institutions and leaders of institutions who are not able to draw upon that collective capacity are failing their communities and their institutions. If any place is going to have the tools to work through some of these… Paul Hanstedt calls them the “wicked problems” that we face, right, if any institutions gotta have that, it’s got to be colleges and universities. Will we pick up the tool, though, is the question.

Rebecca: Yeah, the key is, is the collective, bringing the right people to the table and asking folks what they need? And what would help and figuring it out together

John:
…without additional meetings, because that could push some people pass the breaking point, I think.

Kevin: Well, we need to ask what labor are we asking folks to do? Because in order to get through the next year, and in order to redress the problems that we face, there’s some other stuff that’s going to have to go. And so a successful leader, whether it’s a department chair all the way up to a university president are going to be able to answer that question: What is it that we’re going to let go right now to give people the capacity to untie these really complex knots that we’re going to be working on this year,

John:
I’ve seen several podcasts recently, I’m trying to remember the name of the person who was interviewed. One was recently on Hidden Brain, but I’ve seen it on others as well, about the power of subtraction, that we always look at things to add a patch on to fix something which involves doing more and sometimes the most effective solution is to trim out some things or reduce some of the other things that we’re doing that perhaps don’t need to be done in the same way. There may be some ways of simplifying our work and perhaps cutting out some of the things that seem duplicative and focusing on the things that are really essential for the institution and also maybe in our classes, trimming out some of those extra things we keep adding in as we try new techniques. And often we add to the cognitive load facing our students making it sometimes perhaps a bit too challenging as we tried to modify things. We talked to Betsy Barre a while back about that as one of the challenges that a lot of students face during a pandemic, because faculty started learning about evidence-based teaching methods, focusing on retrieval practice lots of low stakes tests, and actually increasing student workloads quite a bit because we’re now requiring students to do the work that we always hoped they did or we always wished that they had done,

Rebecca: dreamed, dreamed… [LAUGHTER]

John:
…imagined they had done.

Kevin: Right.

John:
So yeah, I think that applies in many areas. It may apply in our own classes, it applies to administrators, and I think in our lives in general.

Kevin: Well, that’s another area where some of the scholarship we have about effective online teaching and learning helps us. And here I’m thinking of the work that’s been done on literacy load, how much text do we ask students to read in an online class as opposed to a face-to-face class? And of course, the answer is, if we’re not careful, a hell of a lot more. And of course, what are the effects of that, this increased literacy load? And so what is the broader equivalent of a literacy load? What’s the load that we’re putting on our students right now. again, we have tools that we can use to think about this in a critical way, to address this in a reflective and intentional way. But individually, or class by class isn’t going to cut it again, systemically. What can we subtract? It’s okay to not do all the things. I mean, we’re not doing all the things anyway, we’re just being honest about it. [LAUGHTER] This is what it comes down to.

Rebecca: Yeah, we have to think about our own cognitive load and cognitive lifts as well, not just the cognitive lift of students and the work that they’re doing. There’s work involved with implementing all kinds of things in our classes and stacking them on top of each other and [LAUGHTER] managing that too.

Kevin: Well, and I think that there’s something to that when we look at some of the things that have bedeviled us about student choices and strategies that may not have been effective for students. And this is beyond my expertise. And I don’t know if there’s been research done in it. But my own intuitive sense is, and I’ve experienced this, over the past two and a half years, I’ve been so immersed in the sorts of big ticket really complex things like “Hey, train all your faculty colleagues how to do HyFlex instruction, teach HyFlex courses yourself, do all these things,” that where I dropped the ball was like routine email. I had emails I would just forget to reply. I had a date-sensitive reply for a speaking engagement and I literally forgot to reply. And they were just like, “Well, sorry, we’re not going to bring you to campus anymore. We didn’t hear from you.” And I’m like, “Oh, my God, I totally ghosted this guy.” But I would see the email or occasionally remember, and then my mind was like, “Nope.” And so what happened, I think, was all of my cognitive bandwidth was taken up with so many of these things over here, and then like, basically tried to exist in everything that’s happening in our society, and what could not fit, what I literally had no ability to do, was put things on my Outlook calendar correctly, [LAUGHTER] and reply to routine emails. And I was horrible at it. And I still kind of am, to be honest. And those were not things that were true to that degree before COVID. And so I wonder when we look at students now like, “Why don’t they read the syllabus?” …maybe that’s where that bandwidth depletion is manifesting. I’m sure there’s research on this, I’m sure the psychologists can tell us a lot more than I am sort of incoherently jabbing out right now. But I wonder if going forward that we’re going to be seeing a lot of this, this sort of routine, mundane, seemingly small things, but that add up to a real cumulative weight that can really provide significant barriers in the way of student learning, or in the way of our own effectiveness as teachers and colleagues.

John:
I’ve seen a lot of that myself this year. And if it wasn’t for Google sending me a reminder saying you have not replied to this email from three days ago, or you have sent this and you have not yet received a reply from this person, do you want to send a reminder. If it weren’t for those reminders, I would have missed so much more than I actually did. And that was not generally an issue before the pandemic. And I think part of it is, you mentioned this transition to HyFlex or bichronous or the various modes that we’ve used to connect to students both in the classroom and remotely. It’s a lot more work in many ways doing this. Where do you see that as going? Do you think we will be doing as much of this sort of mixed mode instruction where some students are in person and some students are remote? Or do you think we’ll move back to something a little bit more traditional?

Kevin: That’s the million dollar question right now. And I think that’s something a lot of institutions are wrestling with. I think you have some institutions where you might have administrators who are saying, “Yeah, we’re gonna keep doing HyFlex in certain selected areas, because it’s worked really well. And you have some programs and some disciplines for which that’s an ideal sort of solution. And here, I’m thinking of advanced undergrad and graduate programs in particular. And then you have some places that are like, “Yeah, we’re gonna keep doing these things because students have told us they want to be flexible, but they don’t really know what that looks like and they haven’t communicated that effectively and their faculty is like, “Oh, my God, please don’t ask us to do this.” And I think a lot of institutions are kind of in that space, that there’s this sense that “okay, we’re going to be doing some of this going forward, but we don’t know what that looks like and we don’t know quite how that’s going to happen…” which is, of course, a really stressful place to be for everybody involved, and I think underscores the urgent need for collaboration and communication in ways that we haven’t often done well in institutions even prior to COVID. I think too, as I said in the talk that I gave up at Oswego a couple of weeks ago too, learning has always been hybrid. And I think coming to terms with what that really means, in combination with the expanded set of tools and skills that a lot of us picked up during the last two years, hybridity is going to mean something different going forward than it has up to this point. But that, in some ways, is a difference of scale as opposed to actual nature. I think we have a lot more preparation as instructors for that than we realize. But using that awareness and that preparation and those skills intentionally in an environment that helped us do that, is going to be what’s really important. I think it would be a mistake to say that “Oh, students loved all the convenience of online and hybrid. So we’re going to offer every one of our classes multimodal or HyFlex or if you’re traveling for any reason, just Zoom into class, and we’ll all of us will still use it. Like that’s a mistake. That gets into that territory, where if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail. There’s no one size fits all solution. But I think one of the things that we did learn during COVID Is that we did a lot of what I call micro adaption. At my own institution, we were teaching HyFlex, but a lot of our instructors made all sorts of micro adaptions within that modality depending on the nature of their class, who the students were, what the contextual needs were. And I think that those are the things that offer really rich opportunities for us to learn from going forward. But again, what that requires is faculty voice, and not just our full-time faculty, all of our faculty, and in particular, our adjunct and part-time colleagues who are teaching the large-enrollment 100 level courses, who experienced the whole continuum of these things. It’s those voices that have to be at the table when we have these institutional conversations about what does hybridity look like for us, for our institution, for our community, for our faculty, for our students, and for our mission, because that answer is going to be different depending upon the place.

Rebecca: As we wrap up our conversation, I want to ask, what are you hopeful about, Kevin?

Kevin: I am hopeful that we actually are able to untie a lot of these knots. The collective capacity within higher education to solve seemingly intractable problems is there. What I’m hopeful is that we figure out and I say we, especially for those of us who have at least semi-administrative or leadership position, that we are able to figure out how to honor that capacity and to affirm the colleagues who have that capacity and enable them to do the work in ways that are sustainable and not self destructive, which again, is another one of those really complicated knots that it’s hard to untie. But I think the capacity, and the willingness, is there across our higher educational spaces. It’s a matter of doing it in ways, again, that are sustainable and collaborative. Those are things that higher ed has not always done really well. But we have a context now that requires it of us. And I am hopeful that places will rise to that challenge, because I’ve seen what faculty, what staff, and what students have done for the last two and a half years. And it is amazing and resourceful, even if it was messy and chaotic at the same time. And I think out of that comes a set of aptitudes and a greater understanding of the stakes involved to lead to, I think, meaningful solutions that will work and not just in the short term. So it may seem counterintuitive to be hopeful right now, but I actually find myself remarkably hopeful.

John:
As you note in your book, we got into this ultimately, because we are hopeful for the future. We always end with the question. What’s next? [LAUGHTER] …which is kind of what we’ve been talking about.

Kevin: Right.

John:
But what’s next for you?

Kevin: Well, for me personally, it’s moving a whole bunch of crap to Charlotte to start my new job. And I found a storage unit for all the books that seem to have accumulated in my faculty and my teaching center offices over the last 18 years I’ve been at Grandview. So yeah, figuring that out. But I’m at a point in my career where the educational development piece is most of what I do now. I still teach, but I always saw myself as a history professor who does some of this other stuff, too. And that’s shifting now. And so my professional identity and the way in which I’m spending my time and the tasks that I am working on and entrusted with are different than, certainly they were at the beginning of my career, but even in the ways that I sort of thought of myself as a faculty member and a member of an academic community. And so, for me, processing what that means and experiencing that in this new position and feeling what that looks like and trying to make sense of it in a way that resonates still with kind of who I think I am as a teacher, as a historian, as a scholar, as a person. That’s kind of where I am right now. It feels a little unsettling… that transitions, I guess, are never easy, but I find myself in this sort of transitory space that is both fascinating and a little bit frightening.

John:
As is true of so much we’ve experienced in the last few years. [LAUGHTER] We wish you luck there.

Kevin: Thank you.

John:
…and it sounds like a wonderful position.

Kevin: Well, I’m excited to start it and it is going to be a wonderful position and I’m thrilled to be a part of a community. The folks that I’ve met there have been wonderful to me so far, so it’s going to be great once I get this damn move done.

John:
…and Charlotte is a wonderful place to live

Rebecca: Well thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, Kevin. It’s nice to talk to you again.

Kevin: Well thanks for having me back on. It’s great to be with the both of you.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

242. Student Podcasts

Student research papers have been ubiquitous in higher education, but there are many ways in which students can demonstrate the skills that they have acquired. In this episode, Megan Remmel joins us to discuss the use of student podcasts as a more engaging alternative to traditional research papers. Megan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bradley University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Student research papers have been ubiquitous in higher education, but there are many ways in which students can demonstrate the skills that they have acquired. In this episode, we discuss the use of student podcasts
as a more engaging alternative to traditional research papers.

[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: I guess today is Megan Remmel, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bradley University. Welcome, Megan.

Megan: Hi, thanks for having me.

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

Megan: I am not drinking tea. I have rooibos this morning. But I am now currently drinking my coke zero sugar.

John: It’s not that much different than many teas.

Megan: Yes.

Rebecca: Many other rebels join us as well. [LAUGHTER] I have English afternoon today, John.

John: And I have ginger peach black tea, a return to an old favorite as we move towards the end of our semester here.

Rebecca: We’re both getting to things that are comforting.

Megan: Ginger is calming. So, [LAUGHTER] you might need that at the end of the semester.

John: Oh, very much so.

Rebecca: So we invited you here today to discuss a podcast project that you’ve been using in your state and local politics class. Can you tell us a little bit about your project.

Megan: So I was trying to think of a way to make students try to approach things in a more neutral way. Because obviously, in poli sci, there’s a lot of soapbox standing. And I’d previously been using just plain old policy analysis papers. And students don’t love them. And so I was trying to think of a way to get them to do the assignment that I wanted them to do, and having some guidance, because they’ve listened to podcasts before, so they kind of know what some of these are structured like. And so I was hoping that that would help tone down some of the opinionation that can come out of these things. And so I YouTubed, and I found John’s YouTube page, [LAUGHTER] and found his podcast project and contacted him just out of the blue asking him if he had any materials he was willing to share with me. And he did. And those came in very handy in terms of being able to guide students in the project. But it was just me trying to give them a different way to do something. Some of them still opted to do a paper this semester, but I wanted to give them the opportunity to try something different, to maybe be able to say to someone in an interview that they’ve done something in this more kind of digitalformat. So it was trying to open up the possibilities for them in class.

John: And was this a face-to-face class? Or was this an online class or a hybrid class?

Megan: So the first time I tried to do it was last spring, and that was a hybrid class and was admittedly a disaster. But that class was a disaster for numerous reasons, I think hybrid being the prime driver of that. So this class was entirely in person. I did allow them to work in groups if they wanted to, and some of them did, and some of them didn’t. And I had them do two rounds of podcasts. The others who wanted to, wrote a paper and the percentages were equal. And so a number of them who worked in groups the first time around did not work in groups the second time around.[LAUGHTER] So they got to choose their own topics. I gave them a list of I think 10 topics from that section of the course. And so there were restraints, but I let them propose if they wanted to do a topic that was of interest to them. Somehow I managed to have a Sports Communication major in the class, and when we talked about special purpose districts, I mentioned to him that there are stadium districts where cities are basically using taxpayer dollars to do massive overhauls of stadiums. And so that’s where he went. So it was still in political science. It was still state and local politics, but it was something of much greater interest to him personally than say, term limits and state legislatures.

Rebecca: Imagine that.

Megan: I know, shocking, right?

John: So, the students worked in groups, how large were the groups that they work in for these podcasts.

Megan: So, I proposed having them work in twos. This class is a 300-level political science class, but it has historically been required for the history secondary education students and criminal justice students. and poli sci students have gotten more interested in state and local politics, but I don’t think they think it’s as sexy as national level or international politics, so I think that they realize that’s where the jobs are, they’re getting more interested. So the audience is not kind of a typical political science class. Because of that, I have these history secondary education majors, who because of how tight their curriculum is, are in classes all the time and know each other really well and work together and collaborate pretty frequently. And so I did allow one group of three to work together. So I basically increased the requirements. So if they worked in a group of one, they had to have eight peer reviewed sources that they could point to in the script. If they were a group of two, they had to have 12 sources, and then this threesome had to have 16 sources. And then it went from a 10-minute requirement to 15 and a requirement to 20 minutes for that three-person group and the three-person group was actually probably the best podcast I got. And I obviously can’t attribute it to whether it was just the number of them or they’ve also been some of the best students in the class this semester, just generally, so I wasn’t surprised that they did a good job anyway.

John: So you mentioned a script. Did you have students submit a script before they recorded or was that done after the fact?

Megan: So kind of both. I had them pick a topic and then I had them submit either an outline or a script and kind of gave the pros and cons, where an outline is obviously a little more freewheeling and allows for a little more conversational style in the recording, whereas a script would be much more definitive, they wouldn’t be scrambling for words necessarily. So they’d probably have fewer filler words and they could be sure that they weren’t fading off and losing track of what they were saying. So I gave them the option of either, I think the students who wrote scripts just generally did better. So I don’t know if in the future when I do this again, if I’m going to get the option of an outline, or if I’m just going to make them write a script, because those seem to just perform better, but with the script I made them include work cited, and they had to tell me where in the script or where in the outline which source connected to that material. So I was trying to make sure that they were still using peer reviewed sources, they could obviously use stuff from outside of that. But I wanted to make sure they were still using peer reviewed sources, the way that my policy analysis paper kids were. But letting them do it in this less structured style, in comparison to like an eight to 10 page policy analysis paper.

Rebecca: How did students respond to having these options?

Megan: I was a little surprised at how few students wanted to do the paper. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know if they’re just burned out from… I assume the last two years has just been a lot of online writing assignments, for instance, and so they were just scrambling at anything that didn’t involve them having to write in such a structured way. So I have relatively few students select the paper option. So I’d say it was probably three quarters picked the podcast and a quarter picked the paper. And the ones that picked the paper… my pattern deducing… seem to be the seniors in the class. And I think they just wanted to get their paper done and be done and not necessarily have to coordinate with other people. And maybe they have prior experience with less successful group work, for instance, and they were just: “I’m going to trust myself.” But that was kind of the pattern, where the underclassmen were more likely to do the podcast and the ones that seem to be picking the paper were the seniors.

John: Was there any apprehension about recording a podcast? Because when I’ve tried doing this, I know students are often a little bit anxious about things like, “I don’t know if I have the technical skills or have theequipment to do that.”

Megan: Yeah, well, what was great was in the material you sent me, you sent me a lot of options that students could use. So for instance, regardless of what they submitted to me, in terms of the outline, I have them use, I think it was Otter’s transcription. And so they were using some of the sources that you sent to me. And so I think they felt more comfortable. And as they went, I think, obviously, from the first round to the second round, the quality of the recordings went up. And some of them realized that there’s ways on their smartphones to record and that it will partly transcribe for them. So I think they got better as they went, I didn’t try to ding them too much for production value in the rubric. So there is stuff in there just about like, “Please don’t have insane amounts of background noise [LAUGHTER] in your podcast. Maybe don’t record it in your car…” or something like that. So I tried to have a kind of minimum standard, but I wasn’t going to hold it against them if it was kind of fuzzy audio, for instance. But they actually didn’t seem all that apprehensive about the idea. They were better at it than I would have felt.

Rebecca: So the burning question is: “Did they move away from so much opinion and they’re more neutral? Or did they stay pretty opinionated? [LAUGHTER]

Megan: So actually, it went better than I thought it was going to, because spring 2021, when I tried this the first time around, I could not get them out of being on their soapboxes. And when I created the instructions for the policy analysis paper, I frame it as though you were working for a state legislator who knows nothing about the policy topic you’re writing about. And they want a policy brief from you and then recommendations at the end. So, the recommendations part is the “opinion” part. But it’s got to be based in all of the research that you’ve talked about earlier. So if it were about legislative term limits, political science agrees on very little, but this is one thing there’s kind of universal agreement on is that they are bad, and they backfire and do the exact opposite of what we want. So if that’s what the research is finally saying, then the idea is that you would recommend to the state legislator to vote against instituting term limits in the state. So I found that they were generally able to do that… it took the scripts, that initial round, to be like, “some of this language is getting a little feisty,” and “some of this, I’m not seeing any citations behind it, so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s reading like your personal opinion.” So I think that stuff was pretty necessary to get them to tone it down. I also had them submit draft recordings before the final recording. So I could ensure that the script was improved upon for the recording and so I could direct them if they were starting to go a little too far into the opinion editorial page of the newspaper. And so they were generally pretty good at it. If anything, I think they might have been overly cautious by the end of it, in that they had all this evidence about something leading to something and it was kind of repetitive so… confident that that’s actually what’s happening and still feeling like they have to do a both sides-ism. So I think I’m gonna have to try to work on that to instill in them that “No, you can take a position at the end, it’s just got to be based on the evidence you presented earlier, instead of just constantly pontificating,”

John: …and once you have your students do that, could you have them work with some journalists out there? [LAUGHTER]

Megan: Yeah, as somebody who gets interviewed pretty frequently with local media, I get a little frustrated with the both sides-ism. And yesterday, I got interviewed a lot about the Roe draft. And the reporters kept wanting to talk about the leak. And I was like, “No, the leak is not the important part, guys.” So yes, I understand some frustration there.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how students either shared or heard each other’s podcasts or whether or not the podcasts were shared more broadly.

Megan: So, inside Canvas, which is the learning management software, Bradley uses, for the ones who gave me permission to share, I posted the files inside of Canvas. And then, strangely, and I don’t know if it was because they were maybe afraid of the quality of it, some of them let me share one podcast, but not the other podcasts. And it wasn’t necessarily like, they wouldn’t let me share the first and they would the second, I just think they thought I like this one better, and so you can let people share this one. And I didn’t like this one, and you can’t share this one. So I just put them on the Canvas website. A couple of them told me, the ones who got maybe low Bs, for instance, on the first one, because everyone did pretty well… the ones who got maybe high Cs, low Bs, on the first one, they told me, they went and listened to some of the other podcasts just to kind of see what the universe looked like. And one of them went, “Yeah, I realized I need to step up my game.” [LAUGHTER] And so I think it was useful from that perspective, I don’t necessarily think they were listening to it to learn about the topic that their classmates have done. But I do think it made some of them realize the quality of their work could have been improved If this is the comparison point.

John: I think that’s a useful benefit of any type of peer review of other people’s work, that when they get to see what other people are doing, they might feel better about their own work. But more typically, they realize that there were things they could have done better. And that’s, I think, a useful experience for everyone, including faculty.

Megan: Well, I think students don’t even realize that for all intents and purposes, we have to use them as guinea pigs from semester to semester to make a class better and to improve. So I realized that maybe the pure hybrid format of spring 2021 was not a good time to maybe experiment with assignments. And so it made more sense to try something now. And it’s unfortunate that those kids maybe didn’t get the best experience, but they are our little guinea pigs, and we also need to learn from their work to see how we can make their work better by improving our assignments.

John: One of the issues I’ve had when I’ve done this, I’ve only used it in online classes so far, mostly because my face-to-face classes are relatively large and I couldn’t listen to two or three hundred of these. But one of the issues I had was that for many students in the online classes, during the depths of the pandemic, it was the only time they really got to talk to other students at the same time and I ended up with these incredibly long draft recordings, sometimes, like 30 or 40 minutes for a podcast that was supposed to be quite a bit shorter. And it did add to the amount of time it took to provide feedback. And included in the rubric was a great penalty if it was too short or too long. So I had to remind them of that. It was a tiny penalty, I think the length was only like five or 10% or so of the rubric score, but I felt bad docking them for that, because when I listened to it, it was clear that they were just enjoying getting to know each other and they were having these great conversations and getting to know their classmates. On the other hand, the focus could have been a little bit tighter. And that is one of the trade offs about having a script versus something which is a little more freeform. But it was really encouraging to hear the connections that students were forming. Although, after many hours of this, I would have appreciated them being a little more concise in some of that discussion.

Megan: Well, to your point. I’m curious, I’m not teaching the summer, but I am teaching an online Intro to American Government class this fall. And when I’ve taught it online before I just used forum postings. And it’s a lot of “I agree with this person,” even though you have directions that tell them not to do this, “I agree with what this person said.” And I’m kind of wondering, and thinking about tweaking this for the fall of kind of doing these voice responses, in hopes that it might limit some of that just repetitive nature and get maybe something a little bit more substantive. Plus, it’s more interesting for me than just reading the same post over and over and over again. And because it’s in an online environment, and it’s asynchronous, though I do have weekly benchmarks so they can access everything all at once, I think it would allow them to have a little bit more of the interaction than they get into the standard asynchronous typical shell. So it’s nice to hear that. I think I would also then have to say it was only supposed to be a 300 word post. So that’s only like maybe two paragraphs so we really don’t need to give a War and Peace sort of opinion. But maybe that would give them some of that more conversational style and make them feel like they’re at least possibly getting to know some classmates, ideally with the idea that maybe they can talk to each other and go over course material instead of being in their own little silos.

Rebecca: There’s something about hearing a voice, or seeing a face that can make all the difference. Of course, from your end, if you just make sure they have to post things in accessible format, you can either listen or read, whichever might be faster. [LAUGHTER]

Megan: What are you implying Rebecca? [LAUGHTER] It was more fun to grade these for sure, it was way more fun to grade these than a standard paper, without a doubt, because I could listen and giggle. [LAUGHTER] Because some of them would throw in a little snarky bit. And you don’t get to have that in these really structured formal papers. So, for me, grading wise, it was definitely more enjoyable.

John: For me as well, it was much more fun. And my impression was students had a lot more fun with it than they would have had doing a written assignment.

Megan: Yeah, I still feel like I’m going to continue to allow them to do a written paper. I know, if I had been in their shoes, I probably would have still pursued a written paper. And I had a couple students in there who were just quiet as church mice. And were probably never going to have the self confidence to even attempt a recording. So I think I still need to provide the option, which I did not do last spring. And I think that’s another reason why it might not have been successful is just given the… I mean, you guys know… class personalities vary wildly. And so that class was just very quiet and reserved and not super engaged. And so podcasts probably not the best approach in that class, in hindsight, but I didn’t know that before they got into the class, and I had built the syllabus.

Rebecca: Yeah, those surprises do happen.

Megan: They do, they do. And it’s a little difficult to overhaul your syllabus quite that radically in the middle of the semester.

John: There is something to be said, though, for pushing students a little out of their comfort zone. And in fact, this podcast, in part, got started because of a similar experience that I had, where I was teaching in the Duke Talent Identification Program…

Megan: I remember that.

John: …and they asked me to be on a podcast they had just started. And I said, “Well, I’m really busy, I don’t really have time for this, and I don’t think I’d really be the best person.” So I gave them a list of people’s names who they should contact to be on this. And they said, “Okay, we’ll contact them, too. But we’d like to interview you.” And after trying to get out of it for a while I agreed to do it, [LAUGHTER] and then realized it wasn’t all that bad. And then I came back from Duke that summer and Rebecca and I were talking and I said, “You know I did this podcast and maybe this is something we might want to consider.” And it’s one of the factors that led into this. I wouldn’t have probably had been doing the podcast had I not been pressured a little bit.

Megan: [LAUGHTER] I feel something similar. 18 year old me would not have done the podcast option. 35 year old me who’s done probably 80 media interviews over the last few years…much more competent doing it now.[LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think one of the things that I really responded to that you were saying, Megan, is that you were offering options. And that there were two that you did two podcasts or two papers and that if students chose a paper the first time but then heard podcasts, there’s a second thing. So they could do perhaps one of each, right?

Megan: Yeah, so there was more flexibility. I did not have any of them do that. But at least it was a possibility for them. I feel like I don’t know if they misread the syllabus, but it was once I picked a path that is my path, I am locked in for that path. But there was the possibility of it. So maybe some of them in the future will get maybe a little more courageous and go from a paper to a podcast.

Rebecca: Or maybe they go from a podcast to a paper

Megan: …to a paper.

Rebecca: whatever works for them. [LAUGHTER]

Megan: Also true, whatever is most appealing to their preferences.

Rebecca: I really like what you were both saying too, about personalities of students coming out. And that when they might be writing a more traditional paper, it’s just like entire personhood just disappears. And that having that kind of positionality a little bit come out and their personality come out helps us to get to know our students better and to help them get to know each other better when they’re reviewing each other’s work.

Megan: Yeah, there were some students in the class who in class itself were really quiet and then I would hear these little snarky asides in their podcasts and be like, where’s that in class, I want that in class, please give it to me in class.

John: And they would often make connections to their own lives. They were trying to connect their own experiences to what they were learning in class, at least in the podcasts they were doing for me, and those are exactly the type of connections we try to encourage students to make so that they recognize the salience of what they’re studying. I think that was really helpful.

Megan: Yeah, with my history, secondary education students. In the first half of the class, we talked about state-level interest groups. And so I gave them the option to talk about the NEA and the AFT. And most of them picked it because I think they all know that they’re probably future members of one, if not both of those organizations. And I don’t think any of them realized how different those two organizations are, I don’t think they realized not only currently how different they are, but the histories and the motivations behind them are entirely different. And so I think some of them may not join both of those organizations now, [LAUGHTER] when they become teachers, because I don’t think they like the motivations of one group necessarily versus another group. So I do like that maybe this is actually going to impact their workplace environments, and actually how they choose to behave. Same thing with the second half of the course, we talk about tax policy, which I love… shockingly, not of super interest to them… and obviously, property taxes are one of the major sources of education funding for K through 12. And so a lot of them picked that. And they knew maybe that it was bad, I don’t think they realized how bad it was. And at least in theory, some of them seem to have a little fire lit under them. How quickly that the real world maybe extinguishes that is a different story. But at least for now, I think there’s a lot of desire, at least within these particular students, to try to change school funding formulas, for instance. So I actually looked at the roster in advance of the class starting and looked at the majors of the students to try to find topics that were relevant to state and local politics as a political science class, but that students of those majors would actually gravitate toward.

Rebecca: To me that seems like one of the most meaningful choices that you made in your assignment design, because that really hooks a student and keeps them engaged.

Megan: Yeah, forcing them to talk about a topic they do not care about is hugely problematic. I teach our research methods class, and basically, if it’s a quantitative social science paper, it counts. I don’t care what topic it is. And they’re just mind boggled. So one of them, he’s a political science major, but he’s writing his paper on how video games affect stress levels in people. And so they just get to poke around in stuff that they don’t feel like they have permission to poke around in otherwise.

Rebecca: The other thing that I found interesting as a design faculty who does similar things, maybe not a podcast, but we do things that are out in the public, and we might share them, is that I often give models for students to look at that are professional, we might even analyze those together. But it’s not until they see each other’s that all the light bulbs go on. [LAUGHTER] It’s something about seeing a peer get it that all of a sudden helps bring the rest of the students along. And so they’re always clamoring for getting to see each other’s work. And it does improve the overall quality of the work, in my experience overall….

Megan: Yeah.

Rebecca: …despite the fact that they might have these professional models to look at.

Megan: Yeah, I did, because of, again, John’s instructions, I found state and local related podcasts, and linked to some of them. So they could see how they’re talking about policies, but not being super opinionated about them. And I’m looking forward to now that I have permission to share some of these, I teach this class every spring next spring, being able to give them these models of colleagues basically having done this work. So that, yeah, it doesn’t have the same production quality, and there’s no intro music and ad breaks, but they can see that their classmates have managed to do well on this. And they too, can do well on this. I mean, I always provide sample papers, I get permission from students and remove all their identifying information and post those so that students can see like “You can write a research design in my research methods class, it is possible. This was an A, this is what it takes to get an A.” So I’m glad that a few of them gave me permission to share their podcasts. And I think I’m going to share some of the better ones and some of the less better ones so that they can see for themselves, the spectrum of possibility. And if they’re cool with just putting in somewhat minimal effort, then that’s what this podcast sounds like. And if you want to put in the effort that’s gonna get you an A, that’s what this podcast sounded like.

John: One of the things that my students have commented on at the end of the class was that some of them have decided that they really enjoy podcasting, and they started their own or they plan to do one in the future…

Megan: Wow.

John: …and a few of them have also said, “I never listened to podcasts before, but now I’m listening to these podcasts.” So I was really impressed. But it did have these other side effects that I didn’t really anticipate it having.

Megan: I can’t say any of them have told me that but I’d love for at least for them to listen to some more podcasts because clearly, that’s all I listen to in the car. [LAUGHTER] So many podcasts.

Rebecca: I’ve had similar experiences. John, although I haven’t taught a podcast class. I’ve introduced students to podcasts as part of learning materials.

Megan: Yeah.

Rebecca: …and having assignments… and many of them say that they really enjoy that format more than others, but they may have never really experienced it previously.

Megan: Yeah, I can assign them a 10-page article or I can assign them a 30-minute podcast. They definitely like the 30-minute podcast better. They seem to actually listen to it in a way that they don’t with the reading. So yeah, I have been more and more frequently been trying to find either like 5-minute local NPR stories or outright organized podcasts for them to listen to,

John: I’ve been doing more of the same. And I try to find podcasts that have both the audio and a transcript, so that people can choose a modality depending on where they’re working and reading. In some cases, it may be hard to find the time to listen to audio, or they may be constrained in some way and they prefer reading the text. And in other cases, students would much prefer listening to a podcast while they’re walking or exercising, or doing something else. So they have appreciated the choice when it’s used as a basis for discussions or some other assignment.

Megan: I hadn’t even thought of that. But I’m gonna have to think about that for the syllabi for the fall.

Rebecca: The transcripts are really helpful too, because if you are listening, and then you hear the name of something, or you’re not really quite sure how to spell it, or whatever, the transcripts can be really helpful… if those transcripts have been edited, of course.

John: One thing I’ve always been amazed by are the number of people who say they only read the transcript, they never listen to the podcast. Because what I enjoy about it is the narrative and the ability to focus on a conversation while I’m driving or walking or something similar. And reading the transcript would be very much like all the other reading I do, and it just wouldn’t seem as interesting.

Megan: I agree, but to each his own.

Rebecca: There’s a few podcasts that I listen to regularly that I might go back and revisit in transcripts to pull out some notes of things that I wanted to remember. And so I really get very frustrated when podcasts don’t have transcripts for me to do that.

Megan: [LAUGHTER] Fair.

Rebecca: To support my needs.

Megan: This is about me. Thank you very much.

John: It’s important for accessibility purposes as well.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. So Megan, you shared a couple of things that you might want to do differently in the future related to this assignment, do you have any other thoughts about how you might frame or structure the assignment a bit differently to continue producing excellent podcasts and your classes?

Megan: I’m curious about the idea of… It’s a 300-level class, and I feel like providing them the topics was a little hand holdy. And so I’m trying to figure out if I should let them pick the topics, because then they have to work a little harder to figure out what might constitute state and local politics. Because I think you can see that in pretty broad ways. But I worry that if I do that, then they’re just going to take some really black and white literal approaches. So I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do on the topics front of things. And it might just, again, depend on who’s in the class. I think if it were more of a straight up political science class, I’d let them maybe wander a bit more. But since that’s not the audience of this class, typically, I might try to give them a little more structure, since they’re probably of all people gonna go, “I don’t know what you want for me in a class that’s not directly my major.” So that’s thing number one. I am also trying to figure out for the groups, for when they recorded together, given that some of the groups fell apart in the second round, I’ve never had great success with peer review, because they don’t seem to want to be telling the truth about each other. And so I’m trying to figure out how to get around that because it was pretty obvious with one group in particular that someone was doing all of the heavy lifting, but that person wouldn’t fess up to it. And so I’m trying to figure out if I should allow them to work in groups, and if so, how to try to ensure that the workload is being done somewhat more equitably. Because when I’ve had them work on group projects that have involved writing, for instance, I can follow the Google Doc, because I’ve required them to give me access to something like that and I can see who’s adding what. I’m less able to do that in this scenario. So I’m trying to figure out how to… maybe in the script writing process, still have them share it as a Google doc so I can follow the trajectory of who’s adding what, when, in an effort to try to get a better handle on making sure that one person is not being carried through the assignment. And that’s just, I think, a general struggle with trying to grade group work assignments. But that’s the only thing that I can think of right now and I’d love advice. But the only thing that I can think of right now to try to address that a little bit. And I knew it was gonna be a problem, I just didn’t know quite what to do with it. [LAUGHTER]

John: While you can follow the editing history, that can be a bit of a tedious path through that. What I’ve generally asked students to do is just to use a color code where they pick a dark color, so there’s still good visual contrast to meet accessibility issues. But they each have their own color that they write their text in. So when they write a section of a document, just have them block it and choose their color. And then when you read through it, all the dark blue will be from one person, the dark green will be from another person, and the purple will be from a third and it makes it a whole lot easier to evaluate the individual contributions. And that’s worked really well.

Megan: That is beautifully simple. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Rebecca: I do a couple of things, also, because I do a lot of group work, and group work that’s not always visible. I often have shared documents where it makes sense and ways of documenting it. But I’ve also done things like having students keep timesheets, just recording what they’re doing and when and how long it takes with the frame that it might be helpful for them to better understand where they use their time. And so that sometimes is helpful. We also tend to do things in design more like a process document. So it documents the process and milestones and summaries of what they’ve contributed at various points. And so I find those kinds of documents really helpful to understand what people are doing. And I always request them to provide a little bit of information about why they made certain decisions. And as soon as you do that, then you know who did it, it becomes very clear. And the other thing that I do is a Google form as review of the other collaborators. But I do things like ask questions about how willing they were to accept feedback, what was their greatest contribution? So it’s framed in a little bit different way than maybe a traditional rating system? Like, did they do all the things?

Megan: Yeah, it sounds more, what did you do versus what did your partners do?

Rebecca: Yeah. It’s more aligned with how you might do evaluations in a workplace or something rather than maybe traditional peer-to-peer evaluation.

Megan: Those are awesome. Thank you.

Rebecca: Megan, was there anything else that you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Megan: No, I just want to thank John for being so willing to share his materials with me because I would have been floundering about how to start.

John: I was really happy that someone requested it.

Megan: It was great. Thank you so much.

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

Megan: I think I’ve got a lot of material to work with with state and local politics. Given the recent political landscape, maybe too much material to work with and state local politics. I think one of the things in the future and I’m nowhere near this yet, I’m interested in letting them explore alternate methods of this podcasting style. So maybe actually interviewing local candidates, working with political parties, the League of Women Voters is actually very, very active in Peoria, and they still subscribe to being non-partisan, so it would be nice to try to team up with them and see if they’ve got some sort of outreach campaign they’d like to do. So I’m thinking of trying to really expand, but next year is busy. So that might be the year after.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Megan: Thank you for having me.

John: Thank you very much. And I’m really thrilled that someone actually found that material useful. [LAUGHTER]

Megan: It was, it was great. [LAUGHTER]

John: It’s an activity I’ve been doing with my class for three years now, and it’s been working really well, and I’ve really enjoyed it. And many of the students really have to.

Megan: Yeah, time two was the charm for me.

Rebecca: Yeah, you have to have a practice round.

Megan: Yeah, unfortunately, those students were guinea pigs, but I learned from them.

Megan: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

[MUSIC]

151. Video Conferencing

Although video conferencing tools are not new, the global pandemic has resulted in a dramatic expansion in faculty use of this technology in their learning environments. In this episode, Rick McDonald joins us to discuss ways in which we can use these tools to create productive and engaging learning experiences for our students. Rick is an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University who has extensive consulting experience in higher education and in K-12.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Although video conferencing tools are not new, the global pandemic has resulted in a dramatic expansion in faculty use of this technology in their learning environments. In this episode, we focus on ways in which we can use these tools to create productive and engaging learning experiences for our students.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca:
Our guest today is Rick McDonald, an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University, who has extensive consulting experience in higher education and in K-12. Welcome, Rick.

Rick: Hello, how are you today?

Rebecca: Great, thanks!

John: Today’s teas are:

Rick: I am a coffee drinker myself, but at least this early in the morning tea is more later in the day for me. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I have Irish breakfast tea today,

John: And I’m drinking ginger peach green tea. We came through a really challenging spring semester, where people suddenly had to move online, and we’ve gone through a really difficult summer. We want to talk a little bit about video conferencing. In general, I think everyone’s become familiar with some form of video conferencing software. Zoom has suddenly become known by pretty much all faculty, one way or another, but there’s Collaborate and other tools as well. How can faculty become more effective in using video conference tools?

Rick: Well, I think, to start, we can all just relax a little bit but teaching with the video conferencing doesn’t have to be tremendously different. There are a few things that are absolutely different, and a few things to just consider that aren’t really such huge problems. First of all, when we’re teaching on video conferencing, we really need to know the software. Some schools are using multiple kinds of software. And I would choose the one that you know best. I would, again, relax and keep a nice and slow pace when we’re teaching over video conferencing, sort of frenetic pace can be very difficult for the remote student to stay engaged with, and at the same time making the class engaging, just like you would in your regular classroom. So, when we’re teaching, we try and engage the students in the classroom. When we’re teaching with video conferencing, we need to find ways to engage those remote students as well.

John: In terms of getting comfortable, one thing I’ve recommended to a lot of people is that, if they’re new to using video conferencing, they should work with other people in their department who may also be new with that, and take turns hosting meetings, so they get to play with all the tools. And if people do that a little bit, there’ll be a whole lot more comfortable, I think, once they arrive at their classroom. Is that something you’d recommend, too?

Rick: Absolutely. And really, I would recommend that those partnerships go on past the preparation stage, if it’s possible to find a faculty member who you can either team teach with, or you can assist when they teach their class and they can assist you when you teach your class. That can be really useful because, let’s say we have a very large classroom, we’re probably going to mute the mics of the remote students so that we don’t hear every dog barking and train going by 100 times. So, as we have been muted, somebody, if they have a problem during the class, we have to have some way of knowing about it. And generally that’s going to be through the chat. So, most of these applications have a chat that can go on simultaneously. And again, in larger classes, it’s not going to be very effective to be monitoring the audio and video of all of the remote students. So, if we use the chat and say, let the students know, “Hey, if you’re simply confused, put a bunch of question marks into the chat. If you have a question, ask it in the chat.” But if you have a partner who’s working with you, and monitoring that chat, that keeps you engaged, and you focused on your teaching, but the person monitoring the chat can say, “Excuse me, Rick, you know, I really didn’t understand that last point you made, could you please go back over it?” or “I didn’t hear it,” or as a partner can say, “Somebody online didn’t hear it” or “There’s a lot of confusion online right now. Could you please go back over that point?” I think that’s really useful. And if you can’t do that with a partner, it’s useful to try thinking about rotating it as a student role. I know there’s some negative issues with that; there’s some problems in that you’re adding something to a student that may have some difficulty keeping up with the content and monitoring the chat at the same time. But, I think it is really important to have a way to monitor and check for understanding and check for technical problems while you’re teaching, and it’s difficult to do that yourself.

John: If faculty want to keep tabs on how things are going with their students, what else can they do besides monitoring the chat?

Rick: In smaller classes, you can keep an eye on the videos as well, just like you would in your regular classroom. If you have a seminar or discussion-based class that’s smaller, then you’re probably going to have enough room to see the students and keep an eye on them and scrolling through them and just visually checking for understanding. Then there are other things that we can do. We can do live polls, we can do quizzes in our LMS and other activities that will help make sure that students are getting the materials that we want.

Rebecca: I’m newer to video conferencing and have been experimenting with recording so if I needed to share something with a student that was sick, one thing that I realized, for example, in using Zoom is that the polling doesn’t show up in a recording automatically. So, there’s things that, if you don’t test it ahead of time, you might not know how to do it or how to set it up. So, I really found being able to practice with colleagues in advance really helpful, because I’ve discovered some of those stumbling blocks that I didn’t realize were going to be stumbling blocks.

Rick: Right? Well, and that’s key. The technology and where we’re going to be teaching, it might not be our own technology. It’s easier for us to practice on our own computers and our own systems in our own homes in locations where we plan on teaching. But in this case, we are probably going to be teaching in a classroom, and that classroom is going to be designed and laid out by, depending upon the school, somebody in IT or in a teaching and learning center, something like that. And we don’t know how it’s set up. We need to go in there and test it. We need to know how to change the camera if we’re going to use a document camera, for example, we need to be able to switch back and forth. We need to know how to do all those things. And that practice is beyond us becoming familiar with it. Like you were saying there, where you did a recording, I really recommend that people go to every room that they’re going to be using and record a session. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a full lecture, but test what it’s like when you’re speaking at the podium and how you need to speak to be clear, make sure that the levels are right on the microphone for your particular voice. My voice is deep and loud, and it carries very well. So, generally, people can hear me, even if I’m a bit aways from the microphone, but that’s not true of everybody. You really need to know where the mic picks up and how well it picks up. You need to know where the frame is in your video. So, if you like to move around a little bit and walk back and forth from one side of the room to the other, that is probably not going to work in this environment. So, if you want to do it, you need to know where you are in the frame, so that you stay in view for those remote students. If you tend to walk around… and this is something that we’ve been taught to do as teachers, or have learned to do… that we want to walk around and engage the class. We want to make sure that people are paying attention. And we can really do that by moving around. Unfortunately, if we’re teaching to a group of remote students, when we move around, they might not be able to hear us as well. But they’re also then staring at a blank wall or the chalkboard or the whiteboard. And that makes it a lot harder to pay attention for those remote students, and even more so for anyone watching a recorded session.

John: And all that’s good advice, not just during a time of pandemic, but before any semester because one of the worst things you can do is go into class for the first day and set the example of fumbling with the controls and not being able to get this class started well, and that negative impression can have a pretty significant impact on how students see you and your class. So, you want to have a really good strong start, however you’re starting, and working with either the classroom or your computer controls, I think is really helpful, as you said,

Rick: I think we can expect some healthy skepticism from the students too. So we want to try and alay those by being prepared. It’s difficult for people who have never done this before, didn’t plan on doing it, would never have agreed to teach using this modality in any other circumstances. I think, fortunately, most people recognize that this is a big issue today and understand why schools are doing this. We may not all agree with every step that our administrations have taken, but I think we all do agree we’d like students to be able to learn this fall. My daughter’s starting college this fall in California in an art center, and he didn’t want to wait another year to start college. Personally, I would have been super happy to take another year. I would have just taken a year off. I’d be in, like Costa Rica or somewhere far away from here, if I was eighteen, [LAUGHTER] but there’s all kinds of life circumstances. People want to keep their careers moving on and it’s also a very different world today than it was when I was in school.

John: I think it’s a very different world than any of us were in school. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Indeed. For faculty that are having to teach from home or from their offices, and they haven’t done that before, can you talk us through some ways we might want to think about setting up our workspaces to be more effective and efficient.

Rick: I think, first off, we want to try and find a room that is relatively quiet and well insulated, sound wise, or isolated. That can be difficult. When we’re teaching at home, our children are at home too. Ideally, if you’re in a lucky situation, there are other people to help keep the chaos away from the room while we’re teaching, as much as we can. Secondly, I think finding a room that is well lit is a good thing. And then go ahead and start your camera, set up the room, turn on the lights the way you think they’re going to be, and then see how it looks. In the room I’m in right now, there’s an overhead light, and if I turn that light on, it’s not actually going to light my face better, because the way the lights going to come down, it’s actually going to hit the top of my head, and then put most of my face in the shadow. So, in that case, it’s actually better for me to have the natural light coming in from the window. But, we need to sort of think those things through in a way that we haven’t before. So, it’s good to bring up any video app really, and look at it on your computer and then adjust the lighting. So, the computer itself is going to provide some lighting, but then you might need to bring in an extra lamp to put on one side or the other to sort of balance the light. The other thing you can do is, if you have a light that directional and adjustable that you might normally use for reading or something like that, if it’s bright enough, you can actually turn it away from you and face it towards the wall or towards a lightly colored object if your wall is dark, and what that’ll do is that’ll bounce the light off of the wall and onto your face, and a light like that can otherwise be too harsh, but that way it can light it and sort of balance your light, keep your face well lit. Things like that can be really useful. And then again, just making sure that your mic is going to pick you up. Generally, the mics aren’t a big problem when we’re teaching at home in our rooms. Sometimes a headset can be useful. Testing and finding what works best for you, I think, is key in just making sure that the video appears in a way that everybody can see well and clearly.

John: And this was implied in your discussion, but having a natural light is really good, but you don’t want that natural light behind you because then you get more of that shadow effect. If you have a bright sunlit window behind you, which I’ve seen in so many faculty at webinars, you just see a dark blur surrounded by this bright light and you want to arrange it so, if possible, that light is facing you. I had that problem in my office and I had to put up a blackout curtain over the window so I didn’t get washed out that way.

Rick: Right, if you can’t change where your desk is facing and the light is behind you, that’s not gonna work. Even if it’s in front of you, if the way the sun shines at certain times of the day is straight in, it’s gonna make you squint, you’re gonna end up washed out, so the details on your face will get washed out. So, then you might want to think about curtains in that case. We want to work on the lighting so that we’re clear, that people can see our faces and our mouths. That helps people understand what we’re saying, but it also helps them convey all the nonverbal communication that’s part of the way we speak, that nobody can see in this podcast. But when we’re doing our video conferencing, they can absolutely pick up all kinds of clues on whether we’re smiling, on how serious we are when we’re speaking, based upon our facial expression. And you can’t really see that if, like you said, you’re backlit, whether it’s from the window or whether it’s from where the lights are in your room. So, we really just want to straighten out the lighting as best we can right from the beginning.

Rebecca: Also thinking about time of day is key and remembering that in the fall, we’re gonna head into shorter days. So, you might have really good sunlight at the end of the day right now, that lighting is great, but it might actually be much darker. [LAUGHTER]

Rick: That’s absolutely true, especially for those of you up in New York. [LAUGHTER] It’s a little less of an issue for my friends south in Tucson or Phoenix or Corpus Christi. [LAUGHTER]

John: I noticed behind you there’s a painting and some artwork on the wall, but there’s nothing that’s really distracting, that’s taking the attention away from you. Is that something perhaps that faculty should also do? Not have something really distracting in the background?

Rick: Absolutely. Anybody doing any video conferencing, whether it’s for anything that besides your friends, it’s not only going to matter because it’s distracting, but you might have things that… I’m looking around this room and right now I think everything… over the past four months, we have made sure that everything behind us is non-controversial as well. Because you may have artwork in your home that’s beautiful and wonderful, but we don’t necessarily want to begin religious discussion at the beginning of our computer science class, or something like that, right? So, we want to just keep everything nice and clean and neat.

Rebecca: Like my bland gray walls behind me. [LAUGHTER]

Rick: Yeah, exactly. The bland gray wall works really well. [LAUGHTER] So does a nice piece of artwork, I think is perfectly fine… and really any artwork is fine. I don’t mean to be too prudish on these things, but especially if we’re teaching 18 to 22 year olds, sometimes they can be a little bit more easily distracted by things like that. Well, actually, really anybody… You see something that’s gonna upset you, it’s gonna upset you. So let’s think about that and just make sure that the room is welcoming, and, and ready for you to focus on your coursework and not on the room.

John: In a lot of ways, the easiest environment to teach in that sort of framework is when you’re in a room where you get to control all that, to control the sound and so forth. Many colleges are going to be using a system in which there is some type of a hyflex structure, without much flexibility in terms of how students choose to engage, where some students will be present in the classroom in reduced numbers and spread out across the room, while other people will be participating online synchronously. And some other people might only be available asynchronously because of other issues, maybe because of healthcare issues, maybe because they’re back at home taking care of relatives, or they themselves are perhaps in quarantine somewhere, and may not be able to always participate at the same time. in that environment. What are some of the challenges that faculty might face in trying to engage in say, active learning type activities, which require some interaction among the students in person, among the students online, and perhaps even between the online and the face-to-face students?

Rick: Let’s take that last example first. From a teaching standpoint, that’s ideal. We’re mixing our in-class students with the remote students. It’s helping us build community. And it’s great. And that can work really well. But, we need to think about the environment. So, if we do one person locally with one or a few students remotely, then the local student needs to have a computer, or perhaps they could do it through their telephone. And we probably want them to have a headset on because, if everybody in the classroom has a computer open, and is communicating with people from off site, we’re going to just sort of have a bit of chaos in all the sound coming from the speakers. But, if we can find a way to do that, if the room is suitable, or if there’s easy ways to break students out, that’s sort of the ideal. Otherwise, I think we’re looking at building breakout sessions within the remote students so that the remote students and… you mentioned Collaborate earlier… students can make their own Collaborates and then work together there and then come back to the central Collaborate that the class is in and we can do sessions like that and then have them present the results of their group breakout. They can communicate that back. That’s another way of doing it. And then the local students can obviously just meet in groups within the room.

In the LMS, we may find that the group tool is something we need to use for these video classes, though, because some schools are not actually doing the work of dividing the section up. So, if I’m going to have a third of the class come on Monday, a third of the class come on Wednesday, and a third of the class come on Friday, I’m going to need some way to decide that. And since most of the LMS tools do have groups, I can either randomly assign students or I could put signup sheets for the days. And then I could also use that group rule to do breakouts, whether they’re asynchronous or synchronous, it will help to have them set up. And so I can, again, either do it randomly or through sign up. And then there’s all kinds of group activities that people can do once we get into that asynchronous realm. In the synchronous realm, they’re meeting, they’re speaking, they’re coming up with a plan and then they’re reporting it back to the group and the asynchronous it might be different. They might meet, come up with something, and then post their work to the LMS. for everyone to review.

Asynchronous environments can still be very interactive and active through discussions, through group work online. There’s lots of different tools that you can use for that. And we can also engage the students with polling. There’s Kahoots!, I’m not sure everybody’s familiar with those. But in, Kahoots!, there are ways of doing polls and you don’t necessarily have to have your institution on board. So, if your institution doesn’t have a polling system, or it’s not built in… like Collaborate has a built-in polling system… I believe Zoom does as well. But, if you can do some kind of polling that can help the students stay engaged. You can also do little quizzes in a similar way with the polling… and just sort of checking for understanding, I think those are great ways of helping students stay engaged.

John: And in terms of Kahoot!s, you can do it synchronously for the people who are in the room and remote, and then you can have some discussion of their questions after you go through them. But, you can then set it up so that you can share the quiz online so that students, at least, would have the option of participating at asynchronously as well. They wouldn’t have the same real-time discussion capabilities of the students who were there synchronously, but at least they would have the same type of retrieval practice as an exercise with Kahoot!.

Rick: When you talk about the recorded version of your video conference or your streamed lecture. That is not an ideal way to learn or to teach, to watch a recorded session of a bunch of other people. People are going to tend to zone out and not be able to follow everything that happens. They’re going to be distracted by the other things going on and there isn’t going to be anything pulling them back in. Because when you say, “Okay, everybody do this poll…” well, on the recorded version, and they’re gonna do it whenever later, they may not pause it, they may not even notice that you told them to do something right away. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t think people should record their classes. I absolutely think we should. But, I think if we have a substantial number of students who are not able to attend live, then we are much better off with a very strong online learning component. At least in my opinion. A lot of these ideas that sort of flex idea came because people read work by Brian Beatty from San Francisco State where he coined the term HyFlex. When I was researching this when I started at NAU, I found that there is HyFlex, but there’s also been other people who’ve done very similar types of teaching, calling it different types of things, but it hasn’t been widely used. But, when you look at what they did, if you read the articles and research around this, which is relatively scant. But, what there is pretty much shows that all of the previous experiments with this involve having somebody there to assist the faculty member, whether it was a partner or a learning assistant or an educational technologist, somebody was there helping. And then the other thing that they really all did is build extremely good and strong online components. And in the San Francisco State one, they didn’t necessarily have to show up in person at all, they could do it entirely through the learning management system. And in my ideal world, schools would give faculty options so we would be able to teach one day a week live, and we would stream that for anybody who wanted it and everybody would have, say, one live session. And then in my ideal world, there would be an online component for the other half of the course for that week. And that would, I think, give students more actual flexibility in learning, but it would also, because the strong online component is so important, it would give them real incentive to create that strong online component.

John: And that would also have advantage if schools have to shut down at some point because if they do shut down, the face-to-face component will go away. And having that ready would make the transition a lot smoother, I think.

Rick: Absolutely. And if you are counting on everybody showing up every week, in the middle of a giant pandemic, you’re probably going to be disappointed. So, if you’re hoping to pass out papers, the one day a week that the students come to class, I think you’re going to find yourself with a lot of headaches. So, I think having your materials online… that’s the whole thing with an online learning course or a video conferencing course. And we didn’t really get into my background with that. I ran, for 13 years, a video conferencing system at a community college here. We’re the second largest county in the country and more rural than the largest county. And so at one point, we were teaching students over video conferencing who were living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. So, those students, they’d have to hike out 12 miles or take a helicopter and then drive for four hours to get to our main campus. So, that was why it made so much sense for us and why we had a video conferencing program that went on to 2015. And that’s why it was like that. It was because there was this real reason to do it. But, when I was managing it, I would tell faculty, we have to build online components. And the reason is, the plan that had been made by the academic leadership was… well, we had this complicated system of faxing papers and collecting things through fax, we were already building online components. We started with WebCT and I said if we use WebCT for this we can do low-stakes testing through WebCT. We can distribute papers. When the students lose those papers, we don’t have to worry about finding a secretary or an administrative assistant, or another professor who’s at the other campus to run and print it out. And in the cases where we were working in even more remote areas, we didn’t have those types of resources. So, we really needed to use the online component. And that’s even more true if your students are going to end up staying at home or if somebody gets exposed and has to self isolate for a few weeks, they’re not going to be in person. So, having that online component really is going to make your life easier. And as you said, right now, when all these plans were being made, our state looked fine. But our state now is one of the highest rates of infection in the world. So, I don’t know what it’ll be like in a month. Nobody does.

Rebecca: I didn’t want to follow up a little bit on this conversation. We’ve talked a lot about what it’s like for faculty in planning, but not really entirely about the student side of remote learning, like what their systems might need to be like or what kinds of rules we might have in place? Or what kinds of expectations we have about participation in terms of a synchronous video component. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Rick: I think one advantage we have that this is happening in 2020 is that, if we’re looking at engaging in something that’s primarily video and audio, our telephones really today can do a lot of that, and even answering short polls we can do on our phones. So, the students do have that possibility. But, ultimately, a computer is a little bit more effective. And one of the things I am worried about, actually, is access to that technology for some students who may normally rely on computer labs at our schools. And when we’re thinking about it as faculty members, it’s tricky for those of us in instructional design and educational technology, who have been doing this our entire careers to remember that not everybody has all the tools that we do. And so I’m really hoping that schools are either making socially distanced labs available, or ideally having equipment that is available for checkout for their lower-income students who may not have all the equipment. And I think the other problem that we’re going to have for students is going to be quiet learning environments. A lot of students live with multiple people living in the same room. A lot of students live in environments that are a little bit noisier, and we’re gonna have to adjust to that and figure out, based upon the size of our class, like I mentioned earlier, do we need to mute them? How are we going to check for their understanding if they’re muted? Are we going to have all the video available? You mentioned what the students have at home. What is their internet connection? Do they have a strong enough internet connection? It probably needs to be at least in the megabit realm for this to work at all. And I think the other problem is that sometimes students are going to be on shared connections. And what I found in the spring, that we had switched from the telephone company, because I was able to get a much higher bandwidth to the cable company, which generally has been great. I’m working at home, my partner works at home and that really hasn’t been a problem. But I tell you what, when my two daughters were both participating in Zoom conferences, my spouse was on a Zoom conference, and I was on a Zoom conference, we were not all doing video, it just didn’t work. And so we had to mute some of those sections. And really, some students may not even want their video on. And so I think we’re gonna have to be open and accomodating for those types of questions that students might have. Because they may be a privacy issue. It may be a technology issue, and if they don’t have their video on, I don’t think we need to spend a whole bunch of time talking to them about their video and why isn’t it on, whether it should be on. I really feel like there’s so many different reasons that are valid for the camera to be off, that we should probably let some students participate without video feeds.

John: And the same argument can be made for audio because if they’re in a noisy environment, they may not be able to even speak without a lot of background noise. It’s one thing to invite students to turn on their video and audio if they can, but we probably shouldn’t require it.

Rick: I think you’re right. I think it’s also one of the real key differences between that built video conferencing environment that was pretty popular a good 10 to 20 years ago. Those rooms were purpose built. Every single room was purpose built, whether it was built for somebody teaching or whether it was built for the student receiving the mat. rials. Everybody went into a room that was, ideally sound isolated, that had a good mic setup. And that’s just not going to be the case when everybody’s at home.

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

Rick: I think what’s next, globally… what a lot of us in instructional technology and instructional design really hope is that this fall is gonna go better than last spring. Because I can’t tell you how many, what I personally think are bogus, articles came out saying, “Look, it proves that distance learning doesn’t work.” No, it proves that distance learning needs preparation, and you can’t do it with a day’s notice. So, hopefully this fall, people will have much better experiences. I really hope people contact all the resources that are available at their schools. If they have instructional designers, those people can really help you build that online component. There are people who have been working in video at your school. I know there’s a number of people at Northern Arizona University with extensive experience. Reach out to those people, they can really help you. They can make sure that the room is the way you need it to be. I would say really reach out. But, as far as what’s next, I hope that what’s next is that people say, Wow, building an online component really made my life easier. And that they’ll start building online components all the time every year. And I’ve been pushing that to the point of obnoxiousness…. sorry, folks who worked with me… for decades now, that it’s more work that first semester you set it up, but every subsequent semester, using your learning management system, even for your in-person classes, is going to help. And now we’ve seen that it helps if there’s a global pandemic, but we can also see that it could help if there was a massive forest fire that went through your town, and everybody had to evacuate and you didn’t want to call this semester a loss. And there have been some, more in K-12, but some experiences where that really did happen. People were able to do it, and it’s also really critical. I don’t know how much you guys talk about K-12. But, that’s an environment, too, where preparing for emergencies is easier to see now. But, also where college students may sometimes forget things, 12-year olds and 13-year olds forget things a lot. And so having the work online for them can really help them. So, I’m really hopeful. That’s what I think is next. What I hope is next is that we have a much better experience this fall under such trying circumstances.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for your insights and some thoughts about preparing for the land of video moving forward.

Rick: 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.

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148. Active Learning: 6 Feet of Separation

During the fall 2020 semester, many faculty will be working in a classroom environment in which they will be in a classroom using a video conferencing tool to work simultaneously with a mix of remote students online and masked and physically distanced face-to-face students. There are significant challenges in using active learning techniques in this environment. In this episode, Dr. Derek Bruff joins us to explore some active learning strategies that may work under these very unusual circumstances.

Derek is the Director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and a Principal Senior Lecturer in the Vanderbilt Department of Mathematics. He is the author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments, as well as his most recent book on Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching. Derek is also a host of the Leading Lines podcast.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: During the fall 2020 semester, many faculty will be working in a classroom environment in which they will be in a classroom using a video conferencing tool to work simultaneously with a mix of remote students online and masked and physically distanced face-to-face students. There are significant challenges in using active learning techniques in this environment. In this episode, we explore some active learning strategies that may work under these very unusual circumstances.

[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: , a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Dr. Derek Bruff. Derek is the Director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and a Principal Senior Lecturer in the Vanderbilt Department of Mathematics. He is the author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments, as well as his most recent book on Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching, which we talked about in an earlier podcast. Derek is also a host of the Leading Lines podcast. Welcome back, Derek.

Derek: Thanks. I’m glad to be here. I’m glad to be back on the podcast. And I just want to say I’ve been very impressed at the work you two have been doing these past several months. I used to say Leading Lines comes out on the first and third Monday of every month. And now I say Leading Lines comes out when it comes out. [LAUGHTER] And so, keeping up the schedule that you guys have had with this podcast and bringing in so many great guests and having so many great interviews, it’s just been a really rich resource for me. And as someone who can’t keep up a regular podcasting schedule right now, I’m just very impressed at what you guys have been doing.

Rebecca: It’s all John.

John: We’ve gotten a lot of help from so many people, such as you, who have agreed to join us and share their thoughts in a really challenging time. And it’s been a really great resource for our faculty too, who are faced with all this uncertainty about the fall.

Rebecca: Me too, because I’m not teaching until the fall. I haven’t taught this spring. [LAUGHTER]

Derek: Now’s a good time to be on sabbatical.

Rebecca: So, today’s teas are. Are you drinking tea, Derek?

Derek: No, I have some dark roast coffee.

Rebecca: Caffeine. [LAUGHTER]

Derek: Yeah.

John: And I have ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: I have a summer berry green tea. See, I’m mixing it up, John.

John: That’s a new one.

Rebecca: I gotcha. I gotcha.

Derek: Yeah, sounds lovely.

Rebecca: Actually, you’d be very happy to know, John, that last time I was in Epcot. I got it. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’re recording this in July. It’ll be released probably in early August. And there’s a lot of uncertainty about the fall. Right now, probably most colleges and universities in the country, with a few notable exceptions, have announced that they’re planning to bring students back to campus for face-to-face instruction with reduced seating, with some students coming in remotely (typically through Zoom or some other video conference app), and you recently released a blog post that discuss options for maintaining active learning in this environment where some students will be there in the classroom, spread out to make it hard for them to be in contact with each other, as well as online with a video conference. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that sort of framework in terms of what possibilities there are for people to interact.

Derek: Sure. I wrote this blog post because I’ve been getting so many questions from my faculty at Vanderbilt, trying to imagine what the fall semester will be like. And I gave a presentation based on the blog post at a Vanderbilt faculty town hall the other week, and one of my slides said, “No one has ever done this before.” And I think that’s really important. So, what I’m imagining that a number of faculty will face this fall, and again, different campuses are making different decisions… and even within a single campus, there’s going to be a lot of different configurations… some faculty will be teaching fully online, some faculty will not… and so this is kind of what we’re trying to imagine is that if I’m teaching a class this fall and I’m back on campus, I’m in a classroom, I have some students there in the room with me, but because of social distancing requirements, they’re six feet apart from each other. Maybe we’re all wearing masks, maybe I have a face shield instead of a mask. There’s going to be some variability here. But some students will not be able to come to the classroom, either because the social distancing requirements mean that you can’t hold as many students in the classroom, or maybe they are unable to travel back to get on campus. A lot of our international students are not planning to come back on campus this fall for a variety of reasons. Or maybe you have a student who’s in quarantine, right? They’ve been exposed to COVID and they’re in quarantine for 14 days, and so they can’t come to the classroom. A lot of us teaching this fall. I don’t know how many, but a lot of us, are likely to have these classes where some of the students are in the classroom, but physically distanced and masked, and some students are participating at the same time, but virtually, perhaps through video conferencing tool like Zoom. And you may have some students who actually can’t do either of those. If they’re 12 time zones away, they may have to participate in your class asynchronously in some fashion. That’s a whole ‘nother level of challenge. In my blog post, I just focused on those first two groups of students, the in-person but physically distanced, and then the virtual students may be participating via Zoom. And I’ve been really careful in my terminology of how I describe this, and so I’m calling this a hybrid classroom, because hybrid is sufficiently generic [LAUGHTER] that it would apply to a situation like this. Hybrid typically means some combination of face-to-face and online activities. It’s not quite hyflex. So there’s this term you may have heard, hyflex, which I think means something more specific, where students really have a choice to participate in person, synchronously online, asynchronously online, and they may actually shift from those modalities over the length of the semester. The flex in Hyflex is the kind of student choice and the student autonomy piece and I’m not expecting we’re gonna have a lot of student autonomy this fall. We have some, certainly. Students are electing to be remote-only students or on-campus students, but it doesn’t feel like it’s quite hyflex in terms of the classic model there. That said, though, the folks who teach in a hyflex environment have developed teaching strategies that can work when you have students participating in the classroom and students participating online at the same time. That said, they haven’t had to deal with the physical distancing and the masks. That’s the part that really is novel, and I think it’s going to be important that we as instructors give ourselves a little bit of grace, knowing that literally no one has taught under these conditions in the past, this is new for us, it’s new for our colleagues at other institutions, it’s new for our students. This is going to be really weird and really challenging for them. And frankly, there are a lot who would argue that it might be easier to just teach fully online; that trying to kind of juggle the constraints in this kind of classroom is going to be really challenging for a lot of faculty. And I’ve talked to a lot of faculty who are like, I would just rather teach fully online this fall. And so I don’t want to speak too much into that choice. There’s a lot of factors that go into university decisions about kind of bringing folks back to campus this fall. Our work at the Center for Teaching, we’re trying to help faculty teach as well as they can in whatever conditions they find themselves. We don’t usually get to pick those conditions, right? And so, I just wanted to try to be helpful and so I wrote the blog posts because using technology to foster active learning in the classroom, that’s my jam. That’s what I’ve been writing about and speaking about for a decade and a half now. I wrote my book on teaching with classroom response systems back in 2009…. clickers and polling software… we have tools, actually. This classroom setup sounds really hard, and it will be hard. And there’s stuff about it that I can’t predict in terms of how hard it will be. But we do have some tools and technologies that can help foster more active learning in these types of environments. And so that’s what I wanted to lay out for my faculty colleagues, who couldn’t imagine how this could work at all. And I could see a few ways actually… a few tools that could make it functional. And so I wanted to share those strategies.

John: Before we talk about the specific strategies, maybe we could talk about some of the mechanics. One of the things you suggest is that you’re assuming that the people who are in the classroom will be able to see and hear the people speaking from outside over Zoom or some other videoconference tool, but what about voice going from the classroom to remote participants. Since the in-class students won’t be able to use their own microphones (to avoid possible feedback effects), how will students who are participating remotely be able to hear what other students say in the classroom?

Derek: Right? And that’s where I don’t know that there’s going to be a good answer to that. The audio piece is one of the more challenging pieces of this classroom environment… the students in the classroom getting to hear each other when they’re sitting far apart and wearing masks… but, even more so, the students who are participating virtually. How can they hear the students in the classroom? Presumably, the instructor will be running Zoom off of the classroom computer or their laptop, and they’ll have a webcam and a microphone. If I’m close to my computer when I’m running Zoom, people on the Zoom call can hear me. So, having the virtual students hear the instructor seems fairly straightforward, but the students in the classroom, they’re not going to come anywhere near that microphone. Now we have a few classrooms at Vanderbilt that have some ceiling mounted microphones that are going to help with that, and that will have some capability to pick up the student voices in the room. But, I’m anticipating that’s going to be a real challenge, actually. And so, again, I don’t have a silver bullet, but it does speak to the use of something like a backchannel tool. So like a text chat in a Zoom room or using a third party tool like Twitter, or GroupMe, or Slack, or Discord… a place where you can have a text conversation with all of your students during class. This is often called the backchannel. The front channel, it’s kind of you at the front of the room talking and having conversations with your students. But the backchannel is the text chat that kind of supplements that. And I’ve been doing stuff with backchannel for years. It’s a really interesting way to build community in the classroom, to give voices to more students to kind of create an on-the-fly closed captioning almost or documentation of the discussion that’s happening. It can be really powerful to have a good backchannel. It can also be really challenging. I think a lot of instructors who’ve dabbled with this have realized that when they are at the front of the room leading class, they don’t have the bandwidth to also pay attention to the text chat and see what’s happening there. And so what I’ve recommended is what I learned from Steve Gilbert and Steve Ehrmann years ago, doing webinars to have someone called the “voice of the chat.” Designate someone, maybe it’s a teaching assistant if you’ve got one of those, but it could be a student in the room, and it could rotate among students over time. Their job is to pay attention to the text chat, the backchannel, and then you as the instructor every so often, you would pause and turn it over to the voice of the chat and say, “What’s been happening in the chat? What are the questions that are emerging there? What are some ideas or comments that are really valuable?” Maybe the voice of the chat is someone on your Zoom call, one of your virtual students, because everyone will be able to hear that student. But that way the students who are in the room and the students who are participating virtually can engage in conversation during class, but in the text chat, and then you have these moments where you pull that conversation from the back channel to the front channel, using the voice of the chat. I’ve done this in a lot of online activities, and it works really well. [LAUGHTER] When I’m going to do an online webinar of some sort, I want to have a voice of the chat, someone who can play that role. And so this is actually a pretty proven technique. And I think it’s going to be fairly practical for our classes this fall. I’m glad you asked about this because class discussion. as we think of it in the generic sense, may be the hardest thing to do in this hybrid environment. For me to stand at the front of the room and show them how PowerPoint slides and lecture to my students, that’ll be relatively easy. That’s also something that you could do without students in the room, right? If you’re just gonna lecture then maybe that’s a pre-recorded something that you share with your students. That doesn’t have to be a live interaction of some sort. But the class discussion, the kind of student-to-student piece is going to be really challenging. And so back channel is one way to try to foster some of that in the classroom.

John: So, the students in the room would be encouraged to bring a mobile device to participate in the text chat and to avoid the feedback loop that would result if they were participating in the video chat using audio. That sounds like a really effective solution.

Rebecca: I think one of the other things that you had some interesting ideas about too was group work. One of the reasons why being in class could be appealing to someone is the idea of being able to collaborate or work on something together. But again, same problem as discussions.

Derek: Right. Yeah. So here’s where I’ve done this a couple of times, just because it was fun in my regular classes, is to use a Google sheet as a way to structure groups and their work and their reporting out. And so, years ago, in my stats course, we had an infographics project. So they had to do some data visualization. And so to get them ready for that, I had them look at some sample infographics. And I invited them to essentially crowdsource the rubric that we would use for the infographics they created. I set up a Google sheet that had across the top, it was kind of levels of quality from poor, acceptable, good, to excellent, and each row was blank. And the idea was that the students would work in small groups, they would look at these sample infographics and they would start to identify what are the components of a really good infographic, and each group would pick a different row on the Google spreadsheet and start to flesh out that component and how you would assess it from kind of poor to excellent. I think I had 100 students in the room when I was doing this. And they were working in groups of two or three, and there were all of these anonymous aardvarks all over the Google sheet, adding their ideas for the rubric and it was a little chaotic, but what I wanted from them was more than just a polling question, this wasn’t a multiple choice question. I wanted them to produce something. It was free response, but not just free response, it was a kind of structured free response. And so the Google sheet was a really nice tool for doing this. And so this is what I’m imagining doing thi fall. You can do this in a fully online, kind of a Zoom session, class. Or if you’ve got this kind of hybrid situation, imagine giving your students three questions to discuss in their small groups. You set up a Google sheet, put those questions at the top, one in each column, share that Google sheet with your students, and then send them off to do their small group discussion. As students in the room…. hopefully, this is part of the unknown… if you have two or three students in the classroom, six feet apart from each other wearing masks, will they be able to have a useful discussion as a small group? I hope so. Again, that’s part of the reason for being in the same place at the same time is to have that kind of student-to-student interaction. I don’t know that I would try groups of size six this fall, I might do groups of size two or size three. And the idea is, they would work in small groups. Meanwhile, on Zoom, your students are probably in breakout rooms, again in groups of size two or three, and they’re talking about the questions that you’ve given them, and they are reporting out, each group on a different row of the Google spreadsheet. Now this does a few things. One is you can monitor the Google spreadsheet as students are putting their responses in there. And that allows you to get a sense of how fast they’re moving through the work, when they’re starting to wrap up…. Oh, most of the students have answered questions one and two, but they’re really slowing down on question three. This is helpful information. You can also start to preview their responses and see what ideas are they bringing to the conversation, and that’ll set you up for whatever you do after the group work, to have a sense of what they’re saying. But, I’m also imagining, it’s a nice structured way for the groups to report out, to share, maybe even to focus. It may be that in the classroom, it’s hard for students to hear each other a little bit. And so you could even imagine, if we’ve got three people in our group and three questions, that each of us will draft a response to one question, and then we’ll rotate and revise each other’s drafts. And you can do that right there in the Google doc. This will take some creativity, it may take a little more coordination than you’re used to needing to do for in-class group work. But it’s also nice that, in this case, the Google sheet as a reporting structure would be the same structure for both your in-person and your online students. And so that simplifies things a little bit. And so, I can imagine that kind of technique working pretty well. Again, there’s a bit of an unknown about the students in the classroom and how well they’ll be able to hear each other. But, that would enable a form of group work that I think would be pretty functional. And it wouldn’t have to be a Google sheet. There’s lots of other online collaborative tools that you could use to have students report out in some fashion. There’s these kind of Whiteboard apps where you’ve kind of put sticky notes all over the board. So it could be something more like that. Or maybe they create a PowerPoint or a Google slides, each group has a different slide where they’re gonna put their answers, they’re gonna put their deliverable of some sort. Again, this is not maybe how we want to do group work, but I think it would be functional in the settings that we’re looking at this fall.

Rebecca: I think one thing that you mentioned in your article, which I also strongly advocate for is if you’re going to use some group work techniques, if you establish something that’s consistent so that you don’t have so much startup cost every time you do group work, that that might help too, for that consistency, and then you might get better responses I would imagine over the course of the semester when there’s less cost in terms of figuring out how to do the thing.

Derek: Absolutely. The first couple of times you do it, it’ll be awkward and hard and slow. But after your students have done it a few times, then it’ll be a lot easier to just kind of slide into this mode with your students.

John: You mentioned the use of polling. And when we moved to remote instruction, I continued that using Zoom, but we were completely remote. The way I did it, and I think this was something you recommended, something Erik Mazur had done, is you poll students with challenging questions, and then you have them work in small groups. In Zoom, that’s pretty easy. You send them into breakout rooms with groups of two (or maybe three, if you have an odd number of students.) How would you do that same type of thing in a classroom setting where you want people to engage in active discussions? Might that be a little challenging in the physical room where everyone can hear everyone else, given that they’re spread equidistant apart somehow?

Derek: Yeah. And so you know, I can imagine doing a polling question, having all of your students respond using the same polling tool. And again, this would assume that your in-person students have a device with them that they’re going to use to participate. Now it may be hard for them to do that via Zoom. You’d have to make sure everyone in the room had their microphones turned off and their audio muted because otherwise you’d have too much audio feedback. But if the students in the room were also in Zoom, but kind of silenced and muted, they could participate in the Zoom polling questions. Or you could go to another tool like TopHat or Poll Everywhere, something that lives outside of Zoom and do all of your polling there in parallel to your Zoom session. Either way, this does not seem to be the semester where you want to put a laptop ban in your classroom, we’re gonna need those tools. And you guys know, I’ve been advocating for years for effective intentional use of digital devices in the classroom. [LAUGHTER] So, we’re gonna need it, we’re not gonna have a choice. But now, let’s say you want to have your students turn to their neighbor and chat about the question. Again, in a normal classroom situation, that’s one of the easiest things you can do to build some active learning into your classroom. Give them a good hard question, have them answer it via the poll, then turn to their neighbor and talk it out together, see if they can put their heads together and get the right answer, and then maybe do a second round on the poll and see where things have shifted. It’s a great pedagogical structure. In the hybrid classroom, the turn to your neighbor and chat is going to be challenging, and so you could try to send your online students to breakout rooms and have them talk there and your in-person students pair up and talk to each other six feet apart. Again, until we do some more testing, I don’t know how practical that’s going to be in the classroom, I’m hopeful that it’ll kind of work. It may be that, what in a normal classroom, you might have them turn to their neighbor and talk for 60 seconds, and then move on, that may be too hard to do. And so if you’re going to have them do group work, you’re going to have them spend 10 minutes doing group work because they’re moving to a Google sheet or they’re doing something kind of bigger and more structured. The kind of quick informal pair work may be too challenging. One option that someone suggested to me that I thought was kind of interesting, though, was to have your students in the room, if you have paired them up with your virtual students, you can have the student in the room pull out their phone, put in their earbuds, and FaceTime with their virtual student partner to talk about the question. Again, the first time you do it, there’s a matching problem there, there’s logistics, there’s audio to figure out. The third or fourth time you do it, this may be a lot more fluid and an easier way to have students chat about the question at hand. It also has the added benefit of connecting your virtual students with your in-person students in more intentional ways. And so that could be really helpful for social presence and things like that. Again, a lot of this is going to be trial and error this fall and figuring out what works and what doesn’t work.

John: Since you won’t necessarily have the same number of students online or remote, and it may be difficult to do that pairing, the pairing could work no matter where the other student was. If you’re in a lecture hall that seats 400, and you’ve got 100 people there or 80 people there, they might call someone 100 feet away… 200 feet away…

Derek: Sure. [LAUGHTER]

John: …which could work in the same way as if they were calling someone remotely.

Derek: Yeah. Right. [LAUGHTER] I’m in the southwest corner of the room and my partner is in the northeast corner. Sure. That could work.

Rebecca: We’re far away.

Derek: Right. I want to circle back to this question of why aren’t we just teaching online to begin with? And I think that’s a legitimate question. And I think it’s something that faculty and administrators have to really struggle with. What’s the value pedagogically of classrooms like this? Because a lot of it’s going to be really hard and awkward and, shall we say, sub-optimal. These are not the ways that we want to foster active learning and, like I said, the folks who aren’t fostering active learning, the folks who were just kind of, as the literature says, practicing continuous exposition by the teacher…. That, actually, is going to work no matter what you do this fall. If you’re fully online, if you’re hybrid, if you’re just going to do that, I would argue that that kind of instruction can work just fine online. And maybe that’s not a reason to have people in the room. So, why would you have people in the room? What is the kind of value added there? And one piece, I think, is that we’re all in this together, that this is challenging. I think we’re going to find some students this fall, who don’t want to be in the classroom, taking a health risk of some sort, encountering their instructors or fellow peers, and they’re going to really embrace the online option. I think you’re going to have some students who don’t want to have to stay where they are this fall, they need to come back to campus where they have reliable internet access and laptops that they can access and a library that they can access. We have a lot of students who, when they’re home, are not in conditions that are really conducive to teaching and learning. And so for some students, they’re going to actually welcome the chance to be back on campus and to be a part of that learning community again. And this is hard to talk about, because I think a lot of faculty have very strong reactions and opinions about what the fall is, and being required to teach online or being required to teach in person. But, I just want to put it out there, that I think our students are going to come at this from different perspectives. And so for some students that chance to come into class and awkwardly communicate a little bit with some peers may actually help them feel like they’re more engaged and more part of the learning community. I would also argue that, if we look at not just the individual class session, which may have this weird hybrid, physically distanced quality to it, but if you look at the semester, this fall, a lot of universities are announcing different calendars for the fall, they’re starting later, or they’re starting earlier. They’re finishing by Thanksgiving, they’re not doing fall breaks. We don’t really know what’s going to come this fall. And there’s pretty good odds that at some point, some campuses may need to pivot back fully online. And so if you think about designing a course for this fall, where you’ll have some virtual students, you may have students in vastly different time zones, you may have to pack the whole thing up and move it online at some point during the fall semester. Maybe you’re not assigned to teach the course online, but it’s still, I think, helpful to think about it as an online course, if you could design the course to really function well as a fully online course, and then treat your face-to-face component as a kind of add on, as a supplement, almost like a recitation section. So, there’s a little bit of this in a big lecture hall where you don’t have a lot of kind of student-faculty interaction, anyway. The recitation section is the kind of smaller space where you get to actually engage with peers more and talk about the stuff. And so if you’ve got a course that functions well, so that your assignments are online, a lot of your course communication is online, your key learning activities are online, but the face-to-face components, in this weird hybrid modality, are useful to that and supplemental to that, but if you had to give them up the course wouldn’t fall apart. I think that’s the way to think about this fall: as kind of online first, and then using the face to face to enhance what you can of the learning experience. Build the learning community, have that social interaction, give students a chance to practice and reflect on what they’re learning That’s still super useful. The other way to think about it, I would say, is maybe you’re not willing to kind of think about your entire course moving online right now. But, are there some key elements of your course that you can go ahead and move online at the start of the semester, so that if you have to move the rest of it online later, you’re in a better position. So, I think it was on your podcast that Jessamyn Neuhaus talked about having to learn how to do online assignment submission this spring; that she’d actually never gotten around to learning how to do that, which is fine. It was fine to have paper assignment submission up until the spring but then it became a requirement to do online. So this fall, make sure that you know how to use the assignment submission tool in your course management system and go ahead and plan on having students submit assignments that way. Make sure that you’ve got a good communication pathway with your students using email or the course management system or another tool like Slack or GroupMe, something where you can connect with students, maybe more informally. Go ahead and start using those tools from the beginning, so that if you do have to pivot fully online this fall, you’ve already got some essential components there.

John: That’s basically the approach we taken with our workshops here, and we’ve tried to help sell that to faculty, because it’s a bit of a lift for people who’ve only taught face to face before, by saying anything you create now is going to be something that you can use as a basis for future semesters of your course; that if you have these elements there, you can do a more flipped environment in your classroom, you can use your classroom for more active learning activities, and to the extent to which it results in more possibilities for active learning in the future, I think that’s going to be helpful.

Derek: Yeah, and I’ll add, we’ve been running an Online Course Design Institute at my teaching center all summer… every two weeks, all summer. We’re up over 300 participants in it at this point. A lot of faculty this spring figured out that online wasn’t necessarily as terrible as they thought it might be. They were able to connect with their students in meaningful ways and continue teaching in spite of the circumstance. And so we had a lot of faculty who woke up to some of the possibilities of online teaching this spring and then we’ve been working with faculty. he’ll spend two weeks with us in a pretty intensive institute, learning how to teach online, and a lot of them have a big shift in their opinion about online instruction over the course of those two weeks. They were initially skeptical that it could work nearly as well as face-to-face instruction. and they end the institute thinking, “Okay, this could be pretty exciting, actually, I see a lot of potential here.” And so that’s the other thing that I would suggest, that faculty keep an open mind about really the potential of online teaching. A really well designed online course can work just as well, sometimes even better, than a really well designed face-to-face course. And so it’s okay to kind of lean into that. And to let that be a bigger part of your kind of teaching toolbox this fall.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that you mentioned a little bit earlier in our conversation is like, why are you in person in the first place? What motivates being in person, I think you’re right about the social connection. even seeing other people who are also dedicating time to learning a particular thing could be useful, even if they’re not interacting with each other, and just in the same space at the same time. But also just if you’re there for equipment or other reasons, there might be ways of teaching using a lot of online techniques with the opportunity to have access to tools that they might not have otherwise. And it might be down to like access to a laptop or higher end technology or something that is in a lab or… I teach in a design studio, so some of the more expensive software, faster computers or things like that. So, we’re thinking through the ways that, maybe we don’t really need to be teaching so much, like there could be a lot of learning happening in the classroom at that time and not necessarily a lot of teaching… maybe some coaching and some interactions. But those interactions might actually be happening virtually,

Derek: Right. And you can imagine more of a kind of flipped model where some of the heavy lifting in terms of the teaching, the first exposure to the content is going to happen fully online through pre-recorded lectures or videos of some sort or other resources. And then that class time, as awkward as it is, is still an important part of having students apply things, practice things, get some feedback from someone else. That’s going to be a good model for the fall, I think.

John: Going back to something else you said earlier, the issue of the students who can’t be physically present during class time, there’s also the related issue of students who may not be able to be present virtually during class time if they become ill, or are remote and have limited computer access or bandwidth, or are in a different time zone. Would you recommend that faculty also start thinking about what types of asynchronous activities they can use to provide equivalent learning experiences for those students?

Derek: Yeah, that’s a good question. And again, I think this is the other thing that we’ve seen our faculty, most of our faculty don’t teach online. Our school of nursing has a really robust online program, but outside of that school, most of our faculty don’t have a ton of experience teaching online. So this has been kind of new territory for them. And one of the takeaways that many of them have from our Online Course Design Institute is realizing that you can do a lot of really valuable learning asynchronously online. For a lot of faculty this spring, online meant they had Zoom sessions with their students that essentially replicated what they would have done in the classroom face to face. But if you look at the last 20 years of online higher education, most of that work in higher ed has been asynchronous online learning. You build your course to work well asynchronously. And it’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve had the video conferencing technology that would make a synchronous online component something that you could really lean into in an online course And so thinking about some of your major learning activities and assignments and assessments, not just being online, but being asynchronous online, that’s a really good model to think about. I think one of the impulses is to say, “Well, I’m going to teach in this weird hybrid modality this fall, I’m going to have students in the room, I’m going to have students on Zoom at the same time, some of my students can’t make it during that time, so we’re going to record the Zoom session, and they can watch it later.” And that’s better than nothing, certainly, but watching someone else participate in class is not nearly as effective as participating in class yourself. And so I wouldn’t want faculty to just do that. That’s fine to do. But, I would want them to add something else intentionally to help those asynchronous students engage with the material. And it could be as simple as saying, “I want you to watch this Zoom session. And here are three questions I want you to answer by the end of that 50 minutes.” It could be a different set of questions than the students in the classroom are given to discuss… something a little more active to help them draw out some learning from those recordings. But again, it’s also fine to say, you know what, for this piece of learning, for this module, for this unit, the core learning is going to happen online asynchronously first. And for those who can attend the synchronous session, either in person or via Zoom we’ll do this supplemental piece. And so that’s okay, too. I just keep giving lots of options here. And I’m hoping that helpful. Faculty are gonna have to figure out what’s going to work for them and their students and their comfort zone. I also think faculty are going to have to learn to do new things this fall. During my town hall, I said, “This is going to be an exceptional semester. And so we are going to make some exceptional teaching choices. And that’s okay.” I think for most of us, 2020 has been suboptimal. There’s been massive disappointments in lots of ways and life has gotten harder in so many ways. And yet, we can either stay in bed and not try, or we can get out and try to make it a little bit better somehow. It’s this growth mindset. I think we need to approach the fall semester with a growth mindset to say: “This is gonna be hard. This is gonna be challenging. I’m gonna have to learn some new skills as a teacher. I may have to learn some new technologies. I’m going to try to do that in a way that doesn’t overwhelm me.” Don’t try to take on too much, too fast. But you’ll have to take on some new stuff this fall. And whether that’s active learning with technology in a hybrid classroom, or that’s designing an online course, or using some part of your course management system that you’ve never touched before, but might actually be helpful this fall, we’re all going to be stretching out of our comfort zones this fall. And that’s okay. It’s going to be hard work, but I think if we collaborate and lean on each other a little bit, we’ll be fine.

Rebecca: And it won’t be perfect. And that’ll be fine, too.

Derek: Right. It’s never perfect the first time out.

John: But with all these new tools, it can improve teaching effectiveness in the future. And that’s something we keep reminding people, that, yes, this is a challenge, but you’re learning a lot of new tools that have value beyond this. It’s not just for this one-time emergency, that this could result in some significant improvements in the effectiveness of your teaching later, even though it will be tough.

Derek: Yes, so one of the tools that we’ve been showing people this summer in our online course design institute is a social annotation tool like Hypothesis or Perusall. And it’s mostly our humanities faculty, but they love it. They are just over the moon with what they can do with these social annotation tools. And most of them just haven’t seen it before. It wasn’t on their radar. And it’s super useful in an online course. But, a lot of them are saying, “Oh, I’m just gonna make this a regular part of my courses going forward no matter how I’m teaching, because having students engaged with the text this way, where they’re annotating collaboratively and discussing it in the sidebar, that’s just a really useful learning process that I want to build into all of my courses no matter how I teach them.” So, we’re finding lots of things that we didn’t know were there that we’re going to make use of in 2021, and 21-22. These are going to be permanent parts of our teaching toolbox.

John: In our course redesign workshop for faculty, we included some samples and documents with Hypothesis, and people have been really impressed by the ability to engage and share and give feedback to each other. And I think we’ve got quite a few people who plan to be using it this fall. It’s a great tool. One of the things you recommend in this document is the use of a fishbowl technique. Could you talk a little bit about how that might work in this sort of hybrid environment.

Derek: Sure. And this is a technique that’s been in the literature for a long time, a way to foster discussion in the classroom. And someone mentioned this as a possibility for the hybrid classroom. And I was like, “Oh, yes, actually, that’s a perfect match.” The fishbowl technique classically works like this. You have a small group of students who have a discussion about whatever the topic is. They’re in the fishbowl. The rest of the students are observing from the outside and they’re quiet during the discussion. They’re taking notes, they’re observing. And then after the discussion, you then ask something of the observers, ask them to summarize what they heard or reflect on what they heard. And it can be really helpful if everyone in the fishbowl is advocating for one point of view. And then the folks who are observing have to then kind of summarize that, even if they don’t agree with it. It can really foster intentional listening. There’s lots of things you could do with the fishbowl, but when I thought about the audio context of these hybrid classrooms this fall, having some of your virtual students be in the fishbowl is totally practical. They’re the ones that are going to be easiest to hear across the entire class. You can have five or six students on Zoom, be the fishbowl, have the conversation, the rest of your virtual students and all of your in-person students are then the observers. They’re listening. They’re taking notes. They’re summarizing. I think that’s gonna work really well, actually. And as I’ve shared that idea with a number of faculty here, they’ve been excited to say, “Oh, yeah, that actually fits this context quite well as a structure for discussion.” And especially on some campuses, the virtual students and the face-to-face students are going to flip flop from day to day, there’ll be some students who come to class on Mondays and they do virtual on Wednesdays and the rest of the students are vice versa. And so you could have most of your students have an opportunity to be in the fishbowl at one point or another with this technique. And that way, you get to have some of the richness of that student-to-student discussion. It wouldn’t involve everyone at the same time. But, if you’re really intentional about what you ask the observing students to do with the discussion, I think it can be really productive. Because frankly, if you’ve got 40 students in the classroom, it’s hard to hear from all of them, anyway. You’re only going to hear from five to eight students in a typical discussion. This just centers them in a way and then guides the other students to participate well, in that type of small-group discussion.

Rebecca: I think what you’re pointing out here is the different ways people can participate in speaking isn’t the only way to participate.

Derek: Yeah, or like collaborative notetaking. This is something that a lot of faculty do as a matter of course, anyway, is have students have some shared document where some of the students in the classroom are taking notes on the class discussion. So their role in the discussion is different. They are not there to participate verbally, they are there to do the note taking piece. And that’s an important role. And that would work just fine in this hybrid classroom as well. And so part of this is thinking intentionally about how you want different groups of students to participate in the learning activities, and it’s okay to give them different roles and guide them to different ways to be meaningful participants.

John: You did mention collaborative note taking, wondering how that might be structured in a class of three or four or 500 students. Would it be reasonable perhaps to do that within your LMS using a groups tool to create that, having a shared google doc or something where you share it with a copy link?

Derek: I think if you’ve got 400 students in your class, that’s just a very different teaching context, and it is something about moving online. So I would say that having 75 students in a classroom and 300 students in the classroom, pedagogically, you’re going to use very similar techniques. If you want to foster active learning, then you’re going to have a lot of think-pair-share, a lot of peer instruction, you’ll have some polling. Anything over 50 is going to kind of look the same, pedagogically at least. Some of the logistics change when you have hundreds of students in the room. But, the kind of pedagogical moves that you’re making, I think are somewhat similar. Once you move online, I think there’s a much bigger difference between 50 students online and 300 students online. And so there’s almost a bit of the kind of MOOC mania that may be useful here. Right. So when we had massively open online courses that had thousands of students, there’s less difference between 300 students and 1000 students. And so we might even look to the MOOCs to see what are some techniques that work well at that kind of scale. And that’s where I think having an asynchronously design course makes a lot of sense. If you’ve got 400 students in the course getting them all together on Zoom is going to be a technical nightmare anyway. Let’s just make this course work well as an asynchronous course. The other piece that I would say that if you’ve got a big class and this gets to your point about collaborative note taking or other group structures that you might use, is that social presence is going to be really challenging. When you’ve got that many students, it’s going to be hard for students to feel connected. In the physical classroom, if you’ve got 400 students, at the very least, a given student has the five or six students they sit near every day to form a bit of a local learning community. And even if you don’t ask them to talk to their neighbor about something, they’re still going to talk to each other after class. And so there’s a bit of social presence, social identity, that comes just by virtue of the seating arrangements. In the online class, you’re not going to have that to fall back on. And I would advise instructors that have big classes to really think intentionally about permanent small groups, and to build in some learning activities and maybe even some assessment activities that leverage those permanent small groups. If you put students in groups of five or six students each and they’re going to meet with that same group every week, doing something useful during the semester, they’re gonna feel connected to the course a lot more than if they didn’t have that small group to lean on. We’ve seen this even in our Online Course Design Institute where we have 70 or 75 faculty participate over a two-week period, but we put them all in cohorts of size five or six. And you really get to know your cohort members, and what their courses are, what they’re teaching. And so that would be my recommendation for the bigger classes. And it could be collaborative notetaking. It could be every time you do a small group activity in class, you send them to the same groups so that they begin to develop working relationships with those group members, those are going to be really important for online classes that are large.

John: And you can always create Zoom rooms that have the same groups that you have within your LMS. So that way, the same students would be working together in both environments, synchronously and asynchronously.

Derek: Yeah, absolutely. You will have to learn how to do that. And again, we’re all going to be learning new tools this fall. I totally know that’s a thing you can do. I don’t know how to do that myself yet, but I would have to figure it out.

John: I haven’t done it yet, either. But I am preparing for one of those large classes in the fall. There’s a lot of questions I still have. One of the things I’ve been wondering about is perhaps the use of peer evaluation. I had done some of that earlier, but we had another tool that was specific for that. I’m not quite sure how well that will work within the LMS. And it’s a little scary at this point. But it’s something I am going to explore.

Derek: Yeah.

Rebecca: That’s something when I’ve taken a MOOC, even if I don’t feel overly connected to other people, there’s still some sort of peer evaluation piece where you feel like you’re getting peer-to-peer feedback, at least, even if it’s anonymous feedback, essentially, because you don’t know those individuals. And that can be effective in at least feeling like you’re learning with other people who are also learning. It’s not as effective as some other things, but it still does it a little.

Derek: Yeah, it does.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next? [LAUGHTER] …and I don’t know, John seems to have me asking that question more frequently, because it feels really stressful to ask someone that right now. [LAUGHTER]

Derek: Well, I keep making the joke that it feels like March 97th. [LAUGHTER] Like, this has just been one long March. There was life before March, and now there’s life now… and time and space have no meaning anymore. So, next is a little ambiguous. What’s next? August…. August is next, right? [LAUGHTER] I can predict that. I think we’re going to have an August this year. [LAUGHTER] It’s really hard to kind of look beyond that. I would say, we’re focusing at my center on getting our faculty ready for the start of the fall semester. And what’s going to happen in the first three weeks of this fall semester, like, we don’t have that figured out yet. We don’t know what kind of programming we’re going to offer. We don’t know what kind of responsiveness we’re going to need. It’s been a lot this summer just to kind of do what we’re doing. And so it’s really hard to look very far out. I will say that, among many other complexities in the year 2020, it’s an election year in the United States, and more generally, we have a lot of protests that happened across the United States and across the world earlier this spring. There’s a lot of hard conversations that people are having right now, whether they’re pandemic related or not. And I don’t think that’s going to go away. I’ve been in triage mode all summer, trying to get faculty ready to teach online or hybrid. And so its been hard to think about all the things that may be challenging about this fall semester, but I do think the hard conversations that we need to have with our students and to help our students have productive hard conversations. That’s something that we’re going to spend at least a little time on in my teaching center in August, trying to help faculty get ready for what will likely be a contentious semester, regardless of the kind of modalities, the online, the hybrid, all that kind of stuff. Just the kinds of conversations that we want to have our students are going to be really challenging this fall. And so I think getting ready to do that well, it’s going to be an important component of what’s next for us.

Rebecca: And I don’t think any of us will be bored. There will be an August, and we will not be bored. [LAUGHTER]

Derek: Yes, those seem like certainties.

John: Well, thank you. It’s been wonderful talking to you and, we really appreciated the blog post as well as all the very many resources that you share on your website.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much.

Derek: You’re quite welcome. We have a great team at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching and I’m glad to be the Director and to get to share all the great work that my staff do all the time. So, thanks for that.

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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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99. HyFlex Courses

The traditional college model of full-time face-to-face class attendance does not work well for people with difficult work schedules, those that live at a distance from campus, or who face other barriers to attending classes on campus. In this episode, Judith Littlejohn joins us to examine how the HyFlex course modality can break down these barriers and allow more people to realize their potential.

Judie is an instructional designer and historian from Genesee Community College in Batavia, New York. She is a 2014 recipient of a State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service and a 2015 recipient of a State University of New York FACT2 Award for Excellence in Instruction. Judie chaired a committee that established procedures for HyFlex courses at Genesee Community College.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The traditional college model of full-time face-to-face class attendance does not work well for people with difficult work schedules, those that live at a distance from campus, or who face other barriers to attending classes on campus. In this episode, we examine how the HyFlex course modality can break down these barriers and allow more people to realize their potential.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Today our guest is Judith Littlejohn. Judie is an instructional designer and historian from Genesee Community College in Batavia, New York. She is a 2014 recipient of a State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service and a 2015 recipient of a State University of New York FACT2 Award for Excellence in Instruction. Judie chaired a committee that established procedures for HyFlex courses at Genesee Community College. Welcome, Judie.

Judie: Thank you.

Rebecca:Today our teas are:

Judie: Mine is a blueberry green tea.

John: I have Tea Forte black currant tea.

Rebecca: I have Prince of Wales tea.

John: We invited you here to talk about HyFlex courses. But first, perhaps you could define what a HyFlex course is.

Judie: A HyFlex course is a regularly scheduled course in which all the content is provided online so that students can choose to participate in the classroom live, or they can video conference into the live class, or they can participate asynchronously online. So, students can also choose every week or during each class time which way they’re going to participate. So, if a student regularly attends class, and then has a medical appointment, and has to miss class, they can catch up later on online. Or if somebody has to travel in this class, they can participate online. Or if somebody registers, planning to take the course online but then decide they’d rather be in the classroom, they can change their mind and come to class. So, it’s literally highly flexible, in that the student has full choice of exactly how they’re going to participate from course session to course session.

Rebecca: Sounds to me like if you’re going to have something that’s that flexible for students, then there’s a lot of planning that needs to go up front on the part of the faculty. Can you talk a little bit about what the requirements are for a class like that, and what some of the things are that a faculty member might need to think about to have a good experience across all those different options?

Judie: So that’s exactly the most difficult part, I think of a HyFlex course, is just the amount of preparation the faculty member needs. So literally, you have to create the entire online course, so that you can think of it as two course preps really, because you have your full face-to-face course and your full online course. And it’s key that before the course even opens, you have the entire course schedule all fully developed so that the students can look ahead and see, week to week, or if you’re meeting two or three times a week from one class session to the next, exactly what’s going to happen in the classroom, or how they would have an equivalent learning experience online if they chose to be online. So it’s tons of work. And then on top of that you have to be comfortable with the equipment. So you have to have students video conferencing into your live classroom, you have to manage those remote participants; you have to be able to include them in what’s going on. So if you’re having a debate, you need some virtual attendees to be able to participate in a debate or in small group work. And you just need to be able to manage all that… respond to questions from virtual participants, and pay attention to your face-to-face students too. And make sure that the students in the classroom and the virtual participants can all see each other.

Rebecca: Why would I want to do this?

Judie: So, it is a lot of work. But the faculty who do it say that the students get a lot out of it, because they do have that freedom to choose how they’re going to participate. The way our college is set up, we have our main campus in Batavia. And then we have six, we call them campus centers. So they’re like little satellite campuses in our region. And we have a four-county service area; it’s about the size of the State of Delaware. From one corner of our service area to the other is almost a two-hour drive. So if you think about how spread out our students are, if they’re in our area, and then the size of some of our programs, or how complex some of the equipment and materials are in the programs, we can’t offer every course at all those campus centers. So many times the students will be driving over an hour, just to get to our main campus to take a one-hour class. And it just doesn’t make sense. So we struggle with enrollments in some of these programs. But if we offer the courses this way (HyFlex), the students can stay where they are and still participate in the class. Some of these rural, remote areas don’t have very good wifi access. So the students can just drive to their nearest campus center and participate from there. So it does help with student access to the courses. And just with work schedules, family life schedules, it helps people stay in college, even if work and family are disrupting what time of day they can participate.

John: You mentioned the ability to go to other campus centers, would there be separate meeting rooms where students might meet in or would they have to do it on their own from some location on the campus center, if it’s not offered at that site,

Judie: Well, there’s a mix of that type of thing. So if you’re at a campus center with an empty classroom, you could go in and watch it from there if the staff help you get set up for that. If you have your own laptop and headset, you could participate from just about anywhere. It’s funny that you mentioned that because currently, the Dean of Distributed Learning is working with the Campus Center’s Associate Deans on a grant project where they would come up with funding for eight or 10 little workstations, like semi-private workstations, at each of the campus centers so students could participate in this type of course in the future,

Rebecca: Especially because of high speed internet and things, it would be really important if you’re going to participate synchronously remotely, that all students necessarily have that available to them at their homes.

Judie: Yeah, exactly. So, these workstations would be excellent for them.

John: What sort of software are you using for doing the live streaming in the remote sessions?

Judie: Right now we have a small group that is using WebEx who had been using it historically for other purposes. But the college as a whole uses Zoom. So Zoom has been working out really well. There’s a Zoom learning tool integration with Blackboard. And so we can have it set up right in the course so it’s seamless for the students to access it. We also use the Ensemble video server, and there is a Zoom to Ensemble link. So they call it ingestion. So when you record in Zoom to the cloud, then ensemble will ingest your video and publish it for you. So it’s right there in your Ensemble library ready to pull into Blackboard into your class. There’s an additional step where you have to trigger the captioning, and then go back through and double check the captions. But other than that, it’s pretty seamless.

Rebecca: How many classes have you offered in HyFlex method so far? And can you give us a sense as to how they’re working or what’s unique or really exciting about some of those classes,

Judie: Just off the top of my head right now I’d say we have about a dozen running. So right now our Computer Information Systems and Computer Networking, people use HyFlex in their program. And we also have Paralegal Studies offering all of their courses this way, so that they can extend their reach. Paralegal in particular, had trouble with those students who lived about an hour from campus and weren’t able to make the drive to all the classes. The way this all came about was: our Provost… her name’s Kate Schiefen, and she’s our Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs… she came up with this idea last fall to really kind of get our hands around HyFlex, because faculty were trying to do it independently, and they didn’t have much guidance or support. So we put a team together to come up with guidelines or requirements for what has to be present each course and what you need in each classroom that’s going to offer courses this way. What are the expectations? Where are the definitions? We looked at it holistically because we need our registrar to be able to schedule these courses with the meaningful code, so that when we report to SUNY what types of classes we have, they’re coded correctly. Everything from that to how the courses are posted on the website in the schedule so that students understand what kind of course they’re getting into, and what kind of equipment they need, and what the student expectation is. We looked at everything from top to bottom, how it affected the whole college and all the different offices… So like our success coaches, and how do they explain the course to the students that they’re advising… and put together a big manual, it’s a 43-page guidebook, that should be referenced in your show notes, I think, for anyone who wants to take a look at that. And we do have condensed versions for people, so they don’t have to read all of that.

John: I thought the 43 page was the simplified version. [LAUGHTER]

Judie: So yeah, we have the whole process the faculty member has to go through to make sure that their course meets the online course quality standards and all accessibility standards, and has all the content and schedules that they need… and then how we have the room setup with the microphones and the carpeting and soundproofing and things like that, and how the messages get out to the students. At this point, we use Banner as our student information system. And so we have it set up so that once a student registers for a HyFlex course, then within 24 hours, they receive an email that explains “You just registered for a HyFlex course that means…” …you know, and then this explanation. So the student knows that they should have a headset or a webcam and a microphone. And if they choose to participate remotely or of course they’re welcome to come on campus. So a lot of different things are going on right now. In our college in Batavia, we’re working on getting two rooms a year upgraded to be labeled HyFlex classrooms. So that carpeting is coming in, different furniture, desks on wheels, so that people can form into small groups easier… just more useful and versatile learning spaces are being created. So that’s helpful. And in the meantime, we have to train the faculty and make sure that they’re comfortable and come up with their whole timeline of development. Because on our campus, I’m the instructional designer, but I’m the only one. So I can’t really develop a dozen HyFlex courses at a time. But I can work with the faculty who are developing their own materials. So we have a couple different timelines depending on if you already have a fully developed online course that’s already been through all the different review processes or if you’ve never taught online at all. So there’s a big spectrum of faculty that are interested in teaching in the HyFlex modality but have different levels of experience with all the technology. So you might be looking at a year and a half, like three semesters of development, before you finally have your HyFlex course. Or you could start developing today and have it ready in the spring if you’ve already been teaching online and are comfortable with that.

John: And it sounds like the pathway is from online teaching to this rather than primarily from face-to-face to HyFlex…where it would be an easier pathway. Is that correct?

Judie: Absolutely, that’s an easier pathway. And we see it, we can see it in the courses that we have running now. Because there’s a couple of faculty members who have been teaching online historically, who are very student focused and very aware of the importance of active learning, and are used to working with students that they’re not seeing right in front of them. And their courses are fine, they had them set up, they had their schedules ready, a nd we really didn’t have much of a problem. We have other faculty who have never taught online before and are unfamiliar with active learning, and really unfamiliar with some of the changes in learning theory that have come out over the last 20 years…

John: or more.

Judie: Yeah…. That’s a struggle. They’re sort of unaware of the deficiencies in their courses. And it’s hard to help them understand how much better the students would do if they could change some of their faculty-focused materials into student-centered active learning projects or activities.

Rebecca: I can imagine that no matter whether it’s a HyFlex, or just moving to online, anytime you’re changing, and now you’re re-looking at the class as a whole, we don’t always do that. This forces us to have to look at it and a lot of faculty don’t have training necessarily in teaching. And so maybe someone that’s been teaching for a long time, now they’re like, “Oh, we’re having some assistance in moving into something, someone else is taking a look at it, I need to get familiar.” So there’s a lift of having to get from familiar with learning science, then getting familiar with a new modality, whether it’s online or face-to-face, it really could be either. And then on top of that layering in an idea of HyFlex, which they’ve never experienced as a student.

Judie: Yeah, and some of these particular people probably have never taken an online course either. So they have very limited exposure to much of this, they may have strong opinions about it, but they don’t really have any personal experience of it. So that can be a little challenging.

Rebecca: I can imagine it being a really exciting experience, trying to set something like this up, but also like a real brain puzzle in some ways. As someone who doesn’t really teach online, I teach mostly in person, I can imagine the complexity of that. And when I’m teaching in person, and I don’t have people also online or in other places that I’m also having to worry about, we can easily make a decision in class, “Oh, we’re all struggling with this, we’re going to pause in what we already have planned…”

Judie: Right.

Rebecca: …to do this other thing. So I can imagine that that ends up being much more of a challenge, or that flexibility in that way becomes a challenge in a HyFlex course.

Judie: Right. So part of what we encourage and what we’ve seen, especially in paralegal, the faculty do is start the semester before they want to be in HyFlex. And they’ll be in there face-to-face classrooms and they’ll say, “Okay, next week, how about if half a dozen of you stay home and try to log in and join the class from home.” And so they’ve practiced incrementally week to week, got used to seeing themselves on camera, hearing their voice in the video, and managing the students that are accessing the course remotely. And other faculty have been practicing just using Zoom as just a recording tool to make small informational videos. So they’re getting more familiar with the Zoom software and recording and all of that. So I think all those little steps that people take, before they start the HyFlex helps a lot too. And they’re always invited to stop in to watch a live HyFlex course and see how the instructor is managing. And frankly, part of what our team recommended at the end of our work was that, particularly, new HyFlex instructors have some sort of technical person in the room with them for the first few weeks until they feel confident that they can manage this on their own. Unfortunately, that recommendation requires funding that we don’t have at this time. But that is the hope, that one day faculty would not have to worry about that layer of the technical aspect and know that there’s somebody in there to support them

John: …until they get comfortable themselves.

Judie: Right now, when they start it up we’ll try to walk by or they know who they can call. But it’s a little bit different when somebody’s standing right there and can help them.

Rebecca: It just provides this whole layer… like anxiety just goes away… someone else will solve this problem and I can just deal with the other things that come up in the first day of class that aren’t technical issues.

Judie: rRight.

John: One can only wish. [LAUGHTER] But, going back to Rebecca’s point, I think one of the difficulties for people, especially those transitioning from face-to-face to a HyFlex format is that in face-to-face classes, you’re used to be able to adjust on the fly so that if students are stuck, you can stretch something out; if they’re able to pick something up more quickly, you could accelerate some things. But those teaching online are already used to a structured format where the tasks for the week are set in advance; students know where they’re going to be. So it seems like that would be a more natural transition. But I could see some problems in adjusting the first time you’re doing this in terms of coming to class expecting to have a whole class period worth of activities, and students either get stuck on something and you’re not able to finish it in that class period, or students just breezed right through it, they picked things up really quickly and they’re ready to move on or to leave. Have people had many issues with that.

Judie: These are courses people have taught before. So it’s not like they’re going through this material with students for the first time. So they know where the stumbling blocks are for the students. And they’re pretty prepared, they’d schedule in extra time for those content parts that students need extra time with. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with having a scheduled course and with your online component and then decide to make a change and then post that in the online part of the course for the people who aren’t attending right on the spot. So I think that may not be as much of an issue as it may seem.

John: If people are having trouble with it in face-to-face classes, it’s likely it’s also a bit of a stumbling block for the online classes so that alignment between the two might make it easier to identify those issues and adjust the pacing, particularly for future iterations of the course, too.

Judie: I teach online, and I can see when students are struggling with something and I can send out a clarifying announcement or add some additional content or extend a deadline. And there’s no reason you couldn’t do the same thing in a HyFlex course,

John: Are some courses better suited to HyFlex, and others. How do faculty decide if HyFlex is right for their courses,

Judie: it all just comes back to the learning outcomes. If you have some sort of a course, where students can do a lot of independent work that might be ideal for HyFlex, if you want students to work in small groups a lot, there’s really no problem with that in HyFlex either. I would say big challenges would be if you had wet labs and things like that, that are difficult nuts to crack in the online only format too. And some courses, honestly, I think don’t need to be HyFlex. There’s nothing wrong with just offering them 100% online, if students are just engaging with the material and kind of doing independent work. But really the beauty of HyFlex is that the students can be 100% asynchronous, but still be part of that community and they can see the class and they can feel like they’re part of the group and they can interact with the students. It’s just so important that all that is built in correctly from the start, that the student-to-student engagement is all built in. Because I think that when we tell students, if we advertise that you can take the course from wherever you are anytime of the day and have an equivalent learning experience, and then when they get into that experience, they’re not feeling engaged, and they’re not communicating with the other students. I just think that we can do a lot to recruit students. But really, it’s once they’re in the course and having that experience, that’s what’s going to retain our students and help them be successful and stay with the program. So it’s just a matter of ensuring that all those pieces are built in so that the students aren’t isolated and they’re not passive learners. One of the pitfalls that I think people fall into is they think that all I have to do is lecture and we’re going to throw that video in the class. And then that’s good enough, the students can watch my lecture, and they’re going to know what they need to know. And we’ll move on. And that’s just a huge issue, because that’s just passive learning on the part of the student and they’re not engaged and they may have it on and be washing the dishes or doing other activities and it’s just not a good learning experience for students. There has to be that attachment, that engagement, has to be built in to make sure that students are successful and feel like they’re part of the learning community.

John: It’s’s also a requirement for federal funding too, that there’ll be some degree of interactivity in the classes.

Judie: And we use the OSCQR rubric, that’s the Open SUNY course quality rubric that OLC, the Online Learning Consortium has also adopted. And it’s one of the requirements in OSCQR too, that the students have active learning and student-to-student interaction.

John: One practical thing that you touched on a bit earlier, but I think might be worth emphasizing a bit, is that with demographic shifts, which have lowered the number of college-age students in many areas, particularly in community colleges, this provides a way of offering courses where there may not be enough students face-to-face or online for the courses to carry. And it provides a way of maintaining a larger variety of courses that might not work at any one of the campus centers.

Judie: Yeah, that’s exactly right. For years, we’ve had what we call video linked courses. So you could be in the main campus and link it to one of the campus centers where they might have six or seven students. And we may have six or seven students in ours, but together, it’s enough to have the course run. And so that works pretty well. And in some instances, I think faculty have thought maybe they would turn a course into a HyFlex course, and then decided that really all they need is a video linked course, so that their students don’t have to drive to campus but they’re all participating at the same time. And that’s absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with a video linked course. And some people think that they may want to offer their course HyFlex, because they want to record their lectures and have them all in the course. And basically all they really want is lecture capture to have as a resource to subsidize what the students are already doing. And there’s nothing wrong with that either. It’s just not a HyFlex course.

John: But this type, of course, would seem to benefit a lot of students who might not be able to take the other formats…

Judie: Exactly.

John: …the students who have more challenging schedules, people doing shift work, or who are taking care of ill parents or relatives, or who just can’t have a regular schedule. Are there other students who might benefit besides those who can’t meet synchronous times regularly?

Judie: Well, the students who are not in the area, really. We do have online learners from all over the place. Occasionally, we’ll have an international student who has to go back home for a time for whatever reason, and you know, that would be excellent for a student like that, who’s starting off on campus, and then having to move elsewhere geographically later on. But yeah, it is good for what we call, in air quotes, are truly distant learners, then they can participate in a HyFlex course just like they would in any other online course.

John: Or even sometimes distance students, those who are in the National Guard and may get called away for a few weeks, or who might travel a lot for work.

Rebecca: There probably are some challenges that do arise. Have you had any experiences where there’s maybe not enough synchronous students to do synchronous activities? Like too many students maybe have decided to just be online or be asynchronous? So what about that inconsistency there? One week, there might be a lot of people synchronous. And then another week, nobody’s there.

Judie: You’re absolutely right. A couple years ago, I was helping out a new adjunct who was trying this out for the first time, and he only had one student in the room when I was in there helping them get started. And then a second student came in and all the rest of them were online. So in that kind of situation, it would be tough to do a group project in the classroom. And I think that could be problematic. And you’d have to, depending on what you’re using, like Zoom has a groups tool. So if they’re all tuned in at the same time, you can easily put all your virtual students in small groups with each other. The tougher problem, I think would be when you want to do the group projects, and then all of your students decide to be asynchronous, because that can be a little bit trickier. And you need a little bit more time. So one of our recommendations was to schedule a HyFlex courses that only meet once a week, or twice a week at the most. Because if you think about what you have to do as the asynchronous student, so if you have a monday, wednesday course, on Monday night, they’ve got to try to watch that recording and do all that work. So Tuesday, do whatever reading and prep to get ready for the Wednesday course, it would be tough to try to fit in a small group asynchronous project too. And I also think that with HyFlex, it’s kind of like a catch 22, because you need to schedule the course. Typically, our cap is 32, because we have 32 desks in a room. So now you’re scheduling for 32. And you only have three, and you still have this big empty classroom and maybe another class could have been scheduled at that time. But the minute you try to move it into a smaller location, what if all 32 show up? You always have to be ready to have the 32 students, regardless of how many show up.

John: In economics, we call that a peak-load problem… that you have to be able to meet the peak demand period.

Rebecca: HyFlex is just more resource intensive in general, because you have to support all those things all at once. Right?

Judie: Yeah, absolutely. I think it is resource intensive. And I don’t think it’s for every faculty member. But the people who’ve been doing it for the last couple of years really seem to enjoy it. And so I know the Director of our Paralegal Program is just thrilled that now she has a course that last year at this time was in danger of being cancelled from low enrollment. And now she’s got 25 students in it, and it’s HyFlex. And that’s exactly what she was going for. And as she grows more comfortable with it and adds more resources and other materials to the online part of the course, the course becomes more robust each time she does it.

Rebecca: Do faculty get additional resources if they’re doing a HyFlex class, because now they have to be constantly checking their online version of their class as well as the in-person? You kind of mentioned that it’s almost like having two preps? How was that accommodated for faculty?

Judie: I think it is two preps, honestly, and how faculty are accommodated or compensated for it is something that’s always under discussion between our faculty and our union and the administration. Currently, there’s no additional compensation for a HyFlex course… down the road, hopefully some of that can change. But right now, it’s just considered one course.

John: Could you give us an example of some private projects or activities that might be done in classes, where students are getting the same learning objectives in different formats?

Judie: Well, one of our team members, her name is Karen Wicka, and she teaches criminal justice. And she has not taught HyFlex yet, but she’s preparing right now to do so in the spring. And she’s already been working on her schedule. And she said that she does a lot of debates in their criminal justice classes. And she sees now in the face-to-face class that she has students who struggle with the debate because they’re really not comfortable speaking in front of their classmates and having all the attention on them. So now in her face-to-face class, she’ll say “The debate is Thursday, and you have to be prepared, and if you do not come to class on Thursday, then before we meet again next Tuesday, you have to turn in an essay…” and she gives you the parameters of the essay, which would be the alternative assignment. And she said she would easily transfer that to the HyFlex course so that the students who are participating synchronously virtually or in the class room would all be having the debate and the asynchronous online students would be writing the essay.

John: So it has some aspects of universal design to it, that you’re providing multiple formats and multiple means of people demonstrating their competency on these particular skills.

Judie: Exactly. And the students in the HyFlex, they’ll be able to look ahead and say, “Gee, there’s a debate, two months from now, I don’t need to get stressed out about it, I can choose to stay online that week and write the essay,” or “Gee, that’s an essay, I’m not comfortable writing the essay, I’m much more articulate. So I’m going to go to the class and I’ll participate in the debate.”

Rebecca: I can imagine that that would motivate some students to just make choices like ”Oh, I really want to be in class for this,” whatever it’s going to be or that I’m going to schedule my life around this particular couple of times when I want to be in class, and then also make choices about “I would really like to avoid that.”

Judie: Exactly. That’s why I think that schedule at the beginning is so important, so that students can make those choices and make those plans.

Rebecca: I can imagine that with all the time and energy that would need to go into the HyFlex course the thing that would draw faculty in the first place is probably the rewarding experience of students having such a positive experience or having positive outcomes. Is that what you think motivates most of the faculty? Or is there something else also.

Judie: I think that has a big part of it, because we see students who we know they want to come to class, and they can’t because of different life situations. So definitely the faculty want to see the students be able to be successful, no matter what kind of format you have to teach the course in. And honestly, I do think that declining enrollment has something to do with it also, because we are trying to find more ways to reach more students. And we’re trying to reach out to adults who want to change their careers or have never been able to finish college in the past. And this could be a way that they could continue working their full-time jobs and still participate in courses. Some people honestly like the technology, and they just want to try all different things. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of different motivating factors. But definitely, the faculty generally have the students’ best interest at heart and they want to do whatever they can to help the students be successful and meet their goals.

Rebecca: Of course, embedded in my question, was the assumption that students are responding positively. [LAUGHTER] Can you talk a little bit about how students are actually responding.

Judie: Yeah, the students… they are happy to be able to have the choice. And students have commented on different things like some have said, “I thought I would just stay in the classroom. But as I got comfortable with the learning materials and the format, then it was easier for me to stay home and just tune in virtually.” And where we live in western New York, especially in the spring semester where it’s, you know, January, February, March, the weather’s so bad that it’s great for students to be able to stay in a safe location, and not have to drive to campus. And those students particularly are happy to have that choice. So if we wake up in the morning, and there’s a whiteout or something, and in being in such a big region, we can have a whiteout in one county and have a sunny day in another county, then they’re still expected to come to school. So the students don’t have to take those risks of driving in bad weather. But, yeah, they have responded favorably. We’ve also had students who thought they would stay online and then saw what was going on in the classroom and really felt like they wanted to be there and be able to participate live with the group. So they came to campus more often than they had planned. So I think it works both ways. But they definitely like the choice. There were surveys that I read in one of the articles that are mentioned in the resources list, where students were more satisfied with the class, just knowing there were those options, whether they took advantage of them or not. So the students definitely are pleased with that.

Rebecca: I can imagine that for students who are a little bit tentative about returning to school, or going to school for the first time as an adult maybe, that online learning can be really intimidating. So, getting to know your faculty in person and having some exchanges with students, I could understand that first student you’re discussing, like the idea that I have an experience in class, and now I feel comfortable being online, or those that felt really confident that they could be online and maybe it just wasn’t a format that they were familiar with. They could go in person, get some feedback, or get some help where they feel stuck, get un-stuck and then go back online.

Judie: Right. Yeah, I think that’s good …that flexibility.

John: In several of our recent podcasts, including those by Linda Nilson on specifications grading and on self-regulated learning, and the podcast with Sarah Rose Cavanagh, where she was talking about the role of emotions, a concept that’s come up quite a bit is the notion that students tend to learn more when they have a greater degree of autonomy, and this type of class environment seems to provide that. And that’s very consistent with what you were just saying, I think.

Judie: Well, I think any of us, as humans, we like to know we have options, because things happen. You just may not feel well one day and not feel up to the drive. And then now you know, you don’t have that pressure to make the drive no matter what, you can still stay home and earn the A where you would have been penalized, otherwise, if you didn’t show up to class,

John: As part of the planning for the HyFlex courses, what types of support are being provided by the college?

Judie: Well, we have a team that works together with the faculty, we have myself as the instructional designer, and we do have a person who is an accessibility technologist, and that helps a lot. We have media, our media department, and our librarians will help out with any resources that we need. And our computer services people will also work with faculty, if they need particular software, things like that. Our media people will work with the faculty one-on-one in the classroom that they’re going to use. So they have some mandatory training before the class starts. And we already said that they become familiar with Zoom ahead of time, but we will activate it, you know, fire it up in the room prior to the course starting so they are used to where they should stand and what the cameras are picking up and what the students will see from their view. We also have a group of faculty who are really interested in sharing ideas and supporting each other. So that is our HyFlex Users Group, which is the “HUG.” [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That’s cute.

Judie: So, yeah, I think that’s cute. But they that way they can talk about what’s working well and particularly the nuances in the different classrooms. If you’re sharing the same room and you know that this particular microphone isn’t working very well or whatever, or picking up too many student noises, then that’s the kind of information you can readily share with each other. So it’s good. It’s nice that there’s some faculty like cross-departmentally working together to solve some of the technical problems and to support each other as they try to do this, because it is a lot to take on. But I think they find it rewarding in the end.

John: Very good. Well, this has been fascinating. And I think this is something that probably more and more colleges would adopt and it seems like you’re probably a little ahead of the curve on this as compared to many other campuses.

Judie: Well, the articles… some of the research that I read has come out… It’s Brian Beatty, who wrote, I thin, what we think of as the seminal article about HyFlex, and they came out in 2014. And he was doing it before then. And some of the research that he refers to was even earlier than that. So I think it’s probably been around a good 15 to 20 years, but is really starting to take off now as the technology becomes more readily available. And students have this equipment, you know, you can Zoom from your phone, they don’t need that much of a setup, if they’re comfortable with the devices that we have now. But yeah, I think it’s great. I’m glad that it’s an option. I like seeing that we have full programs going this way so that a student doesn’t just start off in an introductory course. And then they’re left high and dry when they can’t access the rest of the courses to finish their program. So the commitment, I think by these program directors to do their full program HyFlex is just great, so that the students know when they come in the door that they can really finish the entire program and be successful. So I think our next thing is to get some of the general education requirements online because the programs that are online now are AAS programs. So they’re applied associates where students are preparing for the workforce. But I think if we can get some transfer programs and general electives in the HyFlex format that could be helpful.

Rebecca: Yeah, it sounds like an exciting time and some interesting things getting developed. I can imagine that, from your seat, it can be kind of interesting seeing the different kinds of classes evolving, and what’s working and what’s not working.

Judie: That is interesting. Sometimes as an instructional designer, you can get bogged down in watching somebody’s video or you start reading these articles like ”Oh, I didn’t know that about…. Well, wait a minute, what am I supposed to be working on here?” [LAUGHTER] But we’ve seen it over the years with online… and so many courses and programs are online and I think that’s wonderful because you have access from wherever you are. But for the students who really want more of the community experience in the classroom, I think HyFlex is a good choice for them.

John: I think that one thing that makes it easier from the faculty side is that there are so many workshops online and so many meetings that are being run through Zoom or other systems, that faculty are just necessarily getting more used to that type of interaction. So that should make the transition a little bit easier for many people.

Rebecca: …or even that type of flexibility, like attending a department meeting virtually is becoming a thing.

John: We’ve done that many times. We had a member who is in Pennsylvania for much of last year and so she came in through Zoom. We’ve also used it for all of our workshops here that where nearly every workshop is available through Zoom. And we have a lot of faculty attending remotely. So that familiarity is growing.

Judie: Yeah, I think it’s good. And I think as far as administration goes, or while you’re planning, looking ahead to course scheduling and program scheduling, you just have to think about who are your adult learners? They’re you and me, they’re your neighbor and your brother, and they can’t drop everything and run to the classroom and sit there from 10 to 2, or 8 to 11 or whatever it is. They have to be able to have that flexibility if they’re going to stay with the program and finish it. So I think it’s great.

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

Judie: What’s next in the world of HyFlex?.

John: …or in general for you.

Rebecca: …for you.

Judie: For me, we’ve got a lot of different projects going on in our area. We have an Accessibility STARS program, we call it. We’re trying to create different modules to help faculty and staff be able to create accessible digital content from the start instead of trying to retrofit everything for accessibility later on. So that’s exciting. We have that about a third of the way completed right now. And I think that’ll be a good program. We’re also working a lot on open pedagogy projects and trying to get some of our faculty working with students online to develop their e-portfolios and different things like that through the SUNY Creative Grant.

John: The IITG grant.

Judie: Yeah, that is based at SUNY Oneonta. So that’s exciting too. I know you guys are working on that also.

John: We now have 10 faculty members who’ve joined into that.

Judie: Yeah, that’s great. And SUNY Geneseo is also involved.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. It’s really interesting.

Judie: Thanks for having me and thanks for sharing tea.

John: Thank you, Judie. It’s always great having you here. We’ll have to get you back for some future podcasts too.

Judie: Sure….

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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.