230. Students Who Are Teachers

Degree programs designed for practicing professionals need to be flexible and adaptive. In this episode, Kathryn Pole joins us to discuss the online master’s program in Literacy Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. Kathryn is a literacy researcher and teacher educator in the Curriculum and Instruction Department at this institution.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Degree programs designed for practicing professionals need to be flexible and adaptive. In this episode we examine one online teacher preparation program.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Kathryn Pole. Kathryn is a literacy researcher and teacher educator in the Curriculum and Instruction Department in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also the Program Coordinator for the online master’s program in Literacy Studies. Welcome Kathryn.

Kathryn: Hello, it’s a pleasure to be here.

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

Kathryn: I am drinking tea. I have a black chocolate tea from the Tea and Spice Exchange. It’s good, and it reminded me of Valentine’s Day, and it pairs well with Girl Scout cookies.

Rebecca: Sounds like a good combo. You’re rocking the afternoon.

John: And to put that in perspective, we’re recording this a day after Valentine’s Day. It’ll be released a little bit later.

Rebecca: It sounds like a real tea cup with a real saucer.

Kathryn: That is true. I love real tea cups.

Rebecca: I love it. I have just an English breakfast today, John.

John: And I am drinking ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: Yum! We’ve invited you here today to discuss the online advanced graduate teacher certification program in Literacy Studies at UT Arlington. Can you tell us a little bit about the program and the students in the program?

Kathryn: Sure, it’s a master’s degree program designed for already practicing teachers. So these are people who are already teaching in the classroom, but they want to become literacy specialists, or instructional coaches, or curriculum developers in literacy. And currently we have about 325 students in an 18-month program. So somewhere about 100 join in the fall semester or the spring semester or the summer. Many of them are from Texas, but some of them are from other places, and we’ve actually had students around the world in our program. And they range from just a year or two of experience up to… some people say, “Oh, I’m bored with teaching, I’ve been teaching the same thing for 25 years.” And so they decide they want to come back and hone their skills so they can apply for a new job. So they’re kind of from all over the place.

John: And I believe you mentioned that this was an entirely online degree program. Could you talk a little bit about why students might prefer an online degree program?

Kathryn: Yeah, so this is an entirely online program. And over the years, we’ve asked students, we’ve done surveys, or asked even informally, why this program appeals to them. And for one thing, they have to be a practicing teacher to be in the program. And so if they had to come to campus for face-to-face classes it would have to be either in the evenings or on weekends. And a lot of them are women and mothers and they have things to do, they have got soccer practices to get their kids to, or just family time, helping with homework, and all of that. And so they don’t really want to come to school in the evenings or on the weekend. And probably the number one reason is that they appreciate the flexibility of when they work, because while we do a little bit of synchronous work, we have office hours. They’re always optional, and students can either come or they can view recordings that we make following those meetings. So they feel like there’s a lot of flexibility. We have very solid deadlines for things. If an assignment is due on a Friday, it’s due on a Friday, but students can work on it at two in the morning if they want, and a lot of them do. We also have a 100% pass rate on our certification exam for those students who end up taking that, the Reading Specialist exam. And I think a lot of them indicate that that’s really appealing. So those are the two big reasons, I guess. The flexibility and then they know that there’s quality in the program. And then some of them come because they know a faculty member in the program that draws them to us.

Rebecca: So I believe the program started in 1998. Can you talk a little bit about how it evolved?

Kathryn: Yeah, it started in 1998, which was well before my time there, but it started out, they used to call it the “TeleCampus” where the instructors would actually go and be filmed reciting lecture notes and things in front of cameras. And then it just evolved into something that is much more flexible and appealing. And so that’s just evolved a lot. At this point it’s online, and it’s mostly asynchronous. And it’s a 10-course program, so a 30 credit-hour program, that students can finish in as few as about 18 months. Each one of those 10 courses has a lead instructor. And that lead instructor’s job is to select the course materials and set up the objectives and map the course and the assessments to the standards that we’re trying to address. And then that person designs the master course shell. We’re using Canvas right now, and so they’ve got a master shell that they designed so we can easily, pretty flexibly move it from the master shell into a live course shell as courses are beginning so people aren’t constantly rewriting courses. They also create the rubrics and the assessments and the course structure and policies. And then we also have support from our Center for Distance Ed. So if an instructor who’s designing a course needs some help with any aspect of designing a course and getting it up and running they can get help from there. And so we do that because it’s more consistent than those old TeleCampus courses where people were just kind of talking on the fly. And we feel like having this lead instructor idea ensures quality across the program. Our courses change, but if we have an adjunct or a graduate student teaching a course, for example, they don’t change the course at all, they teach what’s handed to them, and it’s pretty standardized at that point. And a couple of other changes. When I first took over the leadership of the program, it was a 36 hour program. And then we were told that we had to shorten it to 30 hours by our university. They were looking to shorten all the master’s degree programs. Figuring out, how do you cut two courses without losing content? That’s been a challenge. And then because we’re a teacher ed program, we have certification standards that we have to meet and our state certification agency change their rules pretty often, and maybe they won’t let us know until about the day after they’ve done it. [LAUGHTER] No, it’s not that bad, [LAUGHTER] but sometimes it does catch us a little bit by surprise. We’ve changed to meet that. And then at the university level, we’ve changed our learning management system a few times. Now we’re with Canvas, but we’ve been with Blackboard, and before that there was this TeleCampus structure. So that kind of changes the way things have worked. And then we’ve also changed, not we but our university, has changed the way we collect and archive important documentation. So that has been all over the place. So there have been a lot of changes along the way. And we just do our best to roll with the punches. I think it’s working really well right now. We’ve maintained this 100% pass rate on our exam, and our students are happy, and enrollment is looking good.

Rebecca: So you mentioned having master courses. How many sections do you usually have of each course?

Kathryn: We have one section of each course each semester, so fall, spring, and summer. And so, sometimes there could be 100 students in one section, but they’re divided into smaller groups, so students really only see about 20 classmates. So we put them into smaller groups, and then we have the equivalent of a TA, we call them instructional associates, who lead those smaller groups as far as discussion boards and those kinds of activities. So one section, but broken into smaller pieces.

John: What would a typical semester’s course load be like for a student in this program?

Kathryn: Every semester, a student will take a full semester-long course that is called a practicum. And so there’s learning within that course, but there also are practical pieces that they need to be able to demonstrate by sending video. And so we assess the video, looking for specific things that they can do that demonstrate how they’re meeting our standards. That’s one course that is an umbrella over the semester, either August to December or January to May. And then they also will take two, seven-week courses. They’ll take one seven week course the first half of that time, and then another seven week course, the second part of that time.

Rebecca: So your practicum is interesting, because we typically think about these as being in-person experiences, and you have an online program, and you mentioned video. Are teachers using the classrooms that they’re already teaching in to do their demonstration videos? Or is there a different structure?

Kathryn: So for the most part they use their own classrooms. And because they’re seeking advanced certification, that’s fine. Typically, each practicum has a different focus. The first practicum is on learning best practices within the field of literacy. So they learn what is good reading instruction, and what is good writing instruction. And how do you move students along based on research. And then the second practicum is working with diverse learners. So they might be looking at working with special education students, or students who speak another language than English at home, or some other form of diversity. And then the third practicum is on literacy leadership. And so in that course they actively mentor another teacher or a paraprofessional or someone who is interested in learning more about literacy within their school. And then they also plan for professional development within literacy. And so they’ll lead, maybe, a workshop or another professional development opportunity for teachers in their school. So they create these videos within those practicum courses. And we have instructors, but we also have people called “field supervisors.” Field supervisors are also experts in the field, and their role is to help the student prepare for these practicum videos. And then to eventually analyze them, evaluate them, and then write up a practicum report helping the students grow along the way. So it works really well to do this online surprisingly. We do think about these in-person practicum supervision, but with these videos we have opportunities to go back and look at things and to call attention to something that we want the student to see. It’s like, “Oh, look, here’s something that you did that was really effective,” or, “Here’s something that if you had asked this question a little different way you might have gotten a different kind of answer or a better answer.” So it gives us really good opportunities to work with our students.

John: One issue that might come up with some of the shorter terms is what happens when there’s some type of natural disaster, say a power outage in the middle of winter as happened in February of 2021. How did people adapt to losing power and internet access and so forth and still keep the online courses progressing?

Kathryn: Yeah, so that was a really interesting thing. I live in a part of Texas where we didn’t have power for… I don’t know, 10 days? Like we had power, but we might only have it for an hour, and then we wouldn’t have power for two hours. And so people’s priority wasn’t hopping on to Canvas to get their work done. It was more like, “Oh, how am I gonna cook dinner?” It was a really tough time. And so what our instructors did was, they just stayed in contact with students as best they could, sending emails and messages through Canvas, and letting students know that we weren’t going to ping them for something that completely wasn’t their fault at all. Even other adults, they need a lot of hand holding. Sometimes they think, “Oh no, I’m going to be in trouble. I’m going to get a bad grade because I didn’t do this work,” and we all understood and so we sent those kind of messages. So if there’s a natural disaster—even if it’s not in Texas, maybe it’s a wildfire in California, or a hurricane that hits the East coast—our university is really good at identifying those online students who are most likely to have been impacted, and they’ll send us those names. And so we can match that with emails that we’re getting from panicking students, and just let them know that we understand and we’re as accommodating as we can be. It’s not that they have forever to finish the assignments, but we do give them grace. We’ll give an incomplete if we need to, to let them catch up. That was a challenge. And of course COVID was a whole different challenge, because we had people who were supposed to be doing practicum in schools and their schools were shut down. And so it was the same sort of story, we just said, “You know, we get it. We’re all in the same situation.” And so we gave a lot of grace for that.

John: Now, you also did a study at some point about the times when students were participating in your classes where you looked at the timestamps on their student submissions. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Kathryn: Yes, another colleague and I, one day we both were talking about how tired we were, [LAUGHTER] and we’re like “Oh, I was up until 11 o’clock working with a student.” And so we thought, ‘Well, I wonder how many of them are actually emailing us, or posting things in Canvas, or trying to get our attention at odd times?’ And so we actually did a study. We requested timestamp data from our Distance Ed office, they were able to pull together all the time stamps that involved students for a period of about two years. And so as we looked at this, we realized there was a really good reason why we were tired, because a lot of our students were logging in and doing work between about 11 o’clock at night and two in the morning, that was a pretty heavy time. And then a lot of them would get up early, and we would see that they were working from 4 a.m. until about 7 a.m. And then, I guess, going on to school. It might not be every day, but it was some days, especially, probably days when assignments were due that evening. They would try to make sure that they had it done in the morning before they left the house. But a lot of our students were working on Saturdays and Sundays, which I guess is to be expected as well. And sort of strange hours then too. Again, early mornings and in the evenings after they were finished with family time. It was very interesting. And so we’ve kind of made a little bit of a shift ourselves, realizing when our students needed us most. I’m not one to be online with my students at 11 o’clock at night, I’m way too tired for that, but I do try to hop online every night between 8:30 and 9:30 or so just to make sure they’re doing okay. And I wake pretty early, and so I’m usually looking at Canvas by about 7:30 in the morning to try to catch those who might have questions in the morning. And also, we’ll hop on Canvas more on Saturdays and Sundays, because we know our students are active and there may be some timely questions. But we’ve also decided… You know what? If I decide to take a nap from one to three, it’s okay, because I’m doing all these other things at different times of day. And I think looking at that has really helped us understand what our students are doing and why it’s important for us to practice self care in this kind of a program as well.

Rebecca: I can imagine. You’ve mentioned family commitments and work commitments of your students. There’s a lot of challenges associated with going to school while you’re a working professional. Are there other challenges that your students have faced or mentioned that you’ve been trying to accommodate in addition to the timing?

Kathryn: There’s always something, you know? [LAUGHTER] Especially now, we’re on the getting better side of it now, but one of the things that was a surprise to us was the impact of COVID. It’s like, well, we knew that they were closing schools, and that that was a disruption. But what we didn’t expect until we started asking students about it and digging deeper into it was that all these other issues, like technology. They were parents whose kids were home all of a sudden instead of being at school and the kids needed to use the computer and their schools were expecting them to be logged in. And maybe that family only had one computer, or maybe if they had two, they had five kids. The parents needed the computer, the kids needed the computer. And so that was a really interesting thing to discover: how much sharing of devices happens in a family. My kids are all grown and they have all their own computers, and so that wasn’t anything that I had to face. But I have a couple of colleagues with younger kids, and they were definitely feeling that as well. But it was a surprise how much device sharing there was. And then also, we realized some of our students were staying at their schools to get their classwork done because they didn’t have internet at home, or they didn’t have stable enough internet at home. And so when their schools were not opened any longer, we found out that they were thinking creatively, I guess. They were going and driving their cars to a McDonald’s or Starbucks and logging into free public Wi-Fi. So those things were challenges and surprises to us. And then just the impact of what it’s like. They’re teaching all day normally, but when it’s your own children, and they’re in your own house, you don’t have quite the same control. And so they were saying, “Well, my kids are just going crazy in my house. If I was at school, I would have everybody at their desk doing work.” And here they were, like, [LAUGHTER] “Oh! Kids.” And also we had students dealing with their own issues. Many of our students reported having COVID themselves or having family members who came down with COVID and they were having to be caretakers. And we had a good number of students and even some of our faculty members who lost a family member to COVID. There’s just a lot of stuff going on. We’ve always got something popping up to deal with and thinking about creative ways to handle it all and keeping people moving along. That’s always an interesting challenge to coordinating a program like this.

Rebecca: Did you find that during COVID, and even now, while these teachers who are also students are handling COVID in their own classrooms, are they using this classroom space or your discussion boards to collaborate and troubleshoot together?

Kathryn: Absolutely. It was fascinating to me to see them because they were sharing. And a lot of instructors, me included, we changed our discussion prompts. Because for a while we were saying, “Okay, well, discuss how guided reading might look in your classroom,” and then all of a sudden it became, “Discuss how guided reading might have looked in your classroom, but now what are you doing in this hybrid, or high flex, or totally online teaching situation?” So they were hopping onto discussion boards, and they were sharing those things, and they were talking about what it was like in their classrooms. And even we as instructors got some really great ideas. It’s like, “Oh, well this might work.” Sharing ideas was a really important piece, but also, this whole sense of built camaraderie. It’s like, “Oh, this is not just me. I am part of this bigger community of people who are trying to find the floor under our feet, while all of this stuff is shifting.” And so they were absolutely doing things like that. They were using the discussion board, I know for sure. They didn’t invite me to it, but they had a Facebook group for second grade teachers who are doing high flex or something. They had several different ways that they were communicating amongst themselves and sharing ideas. And they let me know that they were doing that, and that it was working. So yeah, and I think in a program as big as ours, that was probably one of the more helpful things for them. They got to see what other teachers were doing and what other school districts were doing, or other principals were doing. And some of them would say, “I’m going to tell my principal this.” The things that worked anyway.

John: Now we’ve done some past podcasts where we addressed issues of the emotional pressures put on students or the emotional challenges that our students are facing. We also have talked a little bit on previous podcasts about issues of burnouts among faculty, but the students in your program are kind of getting both sides of that. They’re students working through COVID, and they’re also teachers during COVID. What sort of challenges has that presented for your students?

Kathryn: A lot, even though we’re kind of at this point where we’re almost pretending that COVID is gone, it’s still on our students’ minds. In my county, we’re still seeing 800 or so cases a day, and it’s better than the 4000 we were seeing a few weeks ago, but our students are really feeling this. And I don’t know what the next new thing is going to be because it seems like there’s always something. Probably last year was the hardest because we had both power failures and COVID at the same time, and how do you use technology when you can’t turn on your lights? I think part of the coping that they did was trying to stay in touch with one another and then our faculty being more present than we might have been otherwise, I think we’ve learned to be more present as part of what we learned from that timestamp study. When are our students hanging around? And if we can answer their question 10 minutes after they ask, that’s a whole lot better than making them wait 8 or 10 hours. So I don’t know that there’s a great answer, but I think it has to be something about being present. Both our students being present for one another, which we’ve learned better ways to build into our courses, and then for faculty being more present to our students as well.

Rebecca: You mentioned too, kind of at the top of the episode, about faculty in your program being careful about self care and managing hours and managing time. Could you talk a little bit more about some of those boundaries that you’ve set? And then also the ways that you might be supporting your students in setting some of those same boundaries and finding some similar balance for themselves when they’re taking on quite a bit all at once?

Kathryn: I have a colleague, and I can’t remember exactly how she puts it, but her email signature says something like, “I am responding to this in hours that I have decided are within my work day. Please respond only in those hours that you have decided are within your work day.” And I love that, and I feel like using it on my signature, but I don’t want her to think that I’m stealing it. [LAUGHTER] But I think it’s really important that we do set those boundaries, but at the same time being present. And so being present doesn’t mean being present 24/7. It means being present in those times when our presence is the most helpful. And so we know for sure that our students are not typically working in our courses between 9 a.m. and noon. They might hop on during lunchtime for a little bit, and then they’re not usually in our courses working between one in the afternoon and three or four in the afternoon. And so if we’re going to adjust our schedules, and run our errands, and do those kinds of things, that might be a good way for faculty to think about their use of time. When are the times that we’re most helpful to our students? And when are the times that are best for us to take care of ourselves? And so I think we’re all still working, probably, more than eight hours a day, because that’s just kind of the nature of our work and that’s our passion as well. But we’re not feeling like we have to work all day and late into the night and all weekend, the way that we first thought that we needed to in order to be that presence that our students needed. Did that answer your question?

Rebecca: Yeah, the second part was thinking about supporting your students and also finding balance.

Kathryn: So we also give our students a calendar so they know exactly when things are due. And we typically have them due at some time that is… you know, if they like working at night, we might have something due at 6 a.m. or something like that, just so that those people who want to work at two in the morning can get it done. And so we think about those kinds of things. And we let our students know that the entire course is released at the beginning of the term. And so they can see everything, they can start reading ahead if they want and working ahead if they want. Other than discussions that need to be relatively live within a week’s period of time, they can still prepare in advance if they need to. And if they anticipate something, if their school is having some particularly busy or stressful week, they’re free to work ahead and move things off their plate. And we encourage those kinds of things. And then also, another piece of it is just, again, faculty reminding students that we’re human, and we get it and if things come up, just keep communicating with us and letting us know so that we can be of the most help to them as well.

John: We always end with a question, What’s next?

Kathryn: Oh, we have so many different directions to go. I’m working with a group of colleagues from across the country, about eight different universities in eight different states. And we’re looking at the impact of COVID and beyond. What can we pull out of what we’ve learned from COVID to help refine online teacher education courses? Because there’s a lot there I think. And as we look at it, we find more and more interesting things to analyze. And so we’re working right now on getting that more refined and getting that information out. And then our programs themselves are constantly being refined. We’re looking at new state standards soon and other issues that just pop up. And so keeping in touch with our students and figuring out what’s going to be the next new things that we learn to support them and to keep them moving along, I think that’ll be part of the next steps as well. So there’s kind of no shortage of where to go.

Rebecca: It’s kind of the biz that we’re all in. [LAUGHTER]

Kathryn: Right! [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I think so. These are such interesting times, because we don’t know. I keep reading all these different opinions on whether or not COVID will be over pretty soon, or whether the next new wave is coming. Just thinking about what’ll happen in the future that’s outside of our control, and then figuring out ways to mitigate that in ways that we can control, I think that’s gonna be really important. I don’t think that higher education is going to ever look like it did four years ago. I think that’s gone.

John: Whatever happens with the pandemic, I think we’ve experimented a lot in higher ed, and I think there’s a lot of lessons we can take away. We’ve observed a lot of things that were hidden in the past from faculty as students moved into working from home with very different technology and so forth. So I think you’re right that we are going to see some pretty substantial permanent changes. What they are though is open to discussion, and so your study could be helpful in helping to shape that, perhaps.

Kathryn: Yeah, and some of these things will be decided at levels above our heads. State boards of regents and university administrations will make some of these decisions, but figuring out what it means to be faculty in these programs and then getting everything to align right so that we’re doing the best job for our students I think is going to be really important.

Rebecca: Definitely. Well thank you so much for sharing some of your insights and experiences with us.

Kathryn: You are so welcome. I’ve enjoyed talking to you both.

John: Thank you. It’s great talking to 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]

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

[MUSIC]

218. Blended Learning

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

Shownotes

Transcript

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Perfectly in season.

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

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

Chuck: You’ve always been innovative, Rebecca.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: I’m living that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Many great things do.

Chuck: Oh, they do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patsy: Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun.

Rebecca: Thank you both.

Chuck: You guys are great.

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

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

Rebecca: That’s great!

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

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

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

John: Go Knights!

Chuck: Take care, everybody.

John: Thank you.

Chuck: Thank you so much. Bye bye.

Patsy: Thanks, guys.

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

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

[MUSIC]

216. Fall 2021 Reflections

Since we started this podcast four years ago in November 2017, we’ve taken a break from our usual interview format at the end of each fall semester to reflect on the evolution of our own teaching practices. In this episode, we look back on our experiences in the fall 2021 semester.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Since we started this podcast four years ago in November 2017, we’ve taken a break from our usual interview format at the end of each fall semester to reflect on the evolution of our own teaching practices. In this episode, we look back on our experiences in the fall 2021 semester.

[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: Hey, John, it’s been a while. [LAUGHTER]

John: It has been, we’ve had a few guest hosts filling in. With your new position you’ve been kind of busy recently.

Rebecca: Yeah, I still have a bit of a teaching load as well as my shift to being in the Division of Graduate Studies. Hopefully things will start smoothing out over the next few weeks.

John: Our teas today are…

Rebecca: I have English afternoon tea.

John: Excellent. That’s a return to an old favorite.

Rebecca: It is.

John: And I have, on a snowy, cold day here in Oswego, spring cherry green tea, bringing me back to a warmer time.

Rebecca: A time that we all wish for. [LAUGHTER]

John: And because we still have this big pile of tea left around in our conference room, because we haven’t been doing too many workshops in person this year.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

John: So we thought today would be a good opportunity to reflect back on pandemic teaching part 3, 4, 5, whatever it is.

Rebecca: Yeah, we’ve lost count, I think.

John: 20 years or so of pandemic teaching, and what our experiences have been like this semester.

Rebecca: So maybe we should first start off by just indicating the kinds of classes and modalities we were teaching in. So I was teaching two sections of my web media classes, which are stacked classes, so 300-, 400-, and 500- level web design courses, and I was teaching entirely synchronously online.

John: And I returned to a classroom with the smallest large class I’ve ever had here, with about 186 students, as well as an asynchronous class, which I’ve been doing for a number of years. They’re both introductory economics courses.

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I have been experiencing, I’ve heard a lot of other faculty talking about, and that we’ve seen through polls of our students, is the mental health challenges that they’re facing. I’ve had many students report extreme depression, anxiety, heightened stress, complete focus issues. We were just talking this week about memory issues. And it’s really taking a toll on their learning.

John: The good news is that students are much more willing to discuss mental health issues than they have ever been in the past. The bad news is they’re just so incredibly prevalent. I’ve heard from dozens of students who’ve been reporting their experiences with depression, or anxiety or stress, as well as, as you said, difficulties in focusing and just problems with being motivated to do their work.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that motivation issue is an important one to underscore. It’s not even necessarily that they’re not interested in the subject matter, because when they’re in class, they might be fully engaged. It’s what’s happening, or maybe what’s not happening outside of class, that I think is really the challenge that students are facing.

John: I think administrators throughout the country were very optimistic about a return to normalcy this fall. And I think we all were hoping for something closer to a normal experience, our students as well as us. When we had the vaccine come out, that looked remarkably effective and we were assuming that everyone would very rapidly be vaccinated and this whole pandemic thing would be completely under control. And that’s not quite the experience that our students ended up with. And it’s not quite the experience we ended up with.

Rebecca: I think, even if we take the emergency remote learning out of the equation, spring of 2020, and we just look at where we’ve been over the last three semesters. I moved to teaching synchronously online. I’ve taught the same way with the same classes for three semesters, and I’ve really seen a shift between fall of 2020, and fall of 2021. In fall of 2020, although students were kind of bummed out that they might not be getting the same college experience that they had hoped for, they were still in fairly good spirits. I definitely had some extra students struggling that I may not have had previously. But they were engaged. They asked for things like more practice assignments so that they could dig in. And a lot of them were taking advantage of the creative nature of the kind of studio classes that I teach to just escape all the things that were causing stress around them. And I’m really experiencing perhaps the exact opposite this semester [LAUGHTER], where all the things that the students requested and needed and wanted in fall 2020 are not the things that the students need in fall of 2021 and now moving into spring of 2022. How about you, John?

John: My experience in my asynchronous online class was in fact, more of a return to normalcy. Because last year’s asynchronous online class was one where a lot of students expected more synchronous components, which in a few decades of teaching online had never been a common request. And a lot of students were really not that happy about an asynchronous course last year, they were expecting more of a synchronous experience. And now that we have so many more face-to-face classes, including the one I’m teaching, the people who are taking this are mostly adults, they’re mostly working. Many of them are parents and they’re very much back to the normal sort of experience of an online class. My face-to-face students, though, are not doing quite as well. They’re younger in general, and they’re experiencing many of the problems that you’ve described. And they’re having a lot of trouble just completing even simple weekly tasks. And I’ve been providing a lot more structure, I’ve been sending them a lot more reminders with emails, with announcements in class, sending reminders to individual students, and it’s not getting through. There’s a remarkable amount of work that’s just not being done. Even things that would only take 10 or 15 minutes are just simply not being done. And it’s really frustrating to see students struggling and not doing the basic work that they need to to be successful in the course.

Rebecca: I know you teach a lot more first-year students than I do, I teach mostly upper-division students in the classes that I teach. And it’s interesting, because they may be students that I’ve had before who have a track record at that college and have done quite well in the past and have hit an all-time low. It’s like the grind is over. [LAUGHTER] There’s no more grind left to kind of move through this pandemic in a way that they need to if they want to have the academic achievements that they’ve had in the past. It’s interesting that you say that these what we maybe classify traditionally as “non-traditional” students in your online class, are quote-unquote, “back to normal” ish. In part because maybe people who are parents, their kids are back to school, and they’re back to work in a way that maybe feels a lot more normal to them. But school still feels really different for students that are more of a traditional college age.

John: Many of the students in the asynchronous class are part time, they’re taking a couple of classes at a time. But even there, I should note that they are reporting stress at higher levels than I’ve seen in the past. But they’re doing the work, and they’re being very successful. But a lot of that, I think, is age because many of them have been in college at various times for the last few decades, or in some cases for several decades, or have returned to school after being out working for a while, and they’re very well motivated to be successful. And they have a very specific goal they’re often working towards… a very specific career goal… and they see the course as being essential towards meeting that. Our freshmen, though, have been through some pretty rough learning experiences. The quality of the education they received in high school was quite often not very good, but it certainly was very mixed in quality. And there’s a lot of research about some of the learning losses that people experienced with remote instruction. And when you’re 18 years old, and you’re entering college, and you spent a year and a half or so with a pandemic, that’s a non-trivial portion of your life, in terms of pandemic learning. And I think people need to get used to learning how to be in the classroom. And it’s been a challenge for many.

Rebecca: You know, I haven’t been physically in the classroom, but I’ve certainly heard stories of folks who are face-to-face and have students just saying that they don’t even know how to interact with other humans [LAUGHTER], and actually just coming right out and saying that. Can you talk a little bit about what it’s been like to be in person and some of the challenges that you and your students have faced in that environment?

John: One thing I think everyone was hoping was that masking requirements might be gone if the pandemic had been under more control. I’m in a classroom that seats 420 students, but I have 185 students in the class and they’re spread out. There’s often a lot of distance between those students, and they’re wearing masks. And they are participating so much less in class discussions. And when they do, because they’re wearing masks, it’s really hard for anyone to hear them. And that is really frustrating for them, and it’s somewhat frustrating for me too. And it’s been a bit of a challenge. And the mask requirements in theory would be really good, but one of the things I’ve been observing is that some students, at least, have been very reluctant to actually wear their masks over their mouth and their nose. And I’ve had a few students who’ve had to be reminded of that every single class day from the start of the semester. And that is a sort of environment that’s just a whole lot less pleasant. They’re not very happy because they’re being told to wear a mask, and they don’t believe there’s any need to do that. And I’m not very happy because I picked up COVID, most likely from this class earlier this semester. And I’d rather not see it spread any further. But it’s certainly a much less engaged classroom environment than I’ve ever seen in the past. Because students are spread out more, they’re not talking to each other, it’s harder to hear each other. And there’s just not the same level of interaction that I’m used to seeing in that class.

Rebecca: I’ve had some students talk to me about their in-person classes and just the anxiety that they feel and the fear that they feel of potentially being exposed to COVID-19, and that it just really makes them quite anxious to just be around people. And when people aren’t abiding by the policies set, that just heightens the anxiety but also really makes it not safe for particular groups of people, students who might have compromised immune systems and things like this. And so for some students, they were really, really, really looking forward to being back in the classroom but are saying, “Hmm, what online classes are available in the spring so I can stay away from people?” [LAUGHTER] …which is interesting. That’s definitely not the experience of all students, but definitely a subset of students.

John: Our institution, along with the rest of the State University of New York, had a vaccine requirement go into effect at the end of September. And in the first month, there were a lot of students in my class who either had contracted the virus and had to miss class for 10 days or so, or they were in close contact with someone and went in quarantine. So the class began with often a dozen or two dozen people in the class who were not able to attend in person. So I was running the session in Zoom, which is not something I was hoping would have to happen. Because as everyone noted last year, having a class where you have some students in Zoom, and some people in person, it’s just much harder to do. There’s just a much higher cognitive load. I got more proficient at it as this semester progressed, but I certainly would prefer never to have to do that again. And as you said, more and more students were getting nervous about this, and the number of people attending remotely has been increasing, particularly in the last few weeks as people were reporting they were more and more nervous and were staying away to avoid the risk of getting an infection.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we’ve been experiencing, at least on our campus, is certainly there are some cases of COVID-19, but there’s also a lot of cases of other things going on. [LAUGHTER] There’s mono, there’s illness, there’s stomach bugs, but all these things initially may present themselves as seeming like they’re COVID-19 at first, and then many students are sick. And I think, culturally, there’s much more of an expectation to stay away if you’re not feeling well. Which is a good thing, right? That’s a good public health thing, to not make everyone else around you sick. But that does impact what’s happening in classes and who’s in class and who’s present and who’s able to keep up. And so I don’t think that’s going to change, we’re going to need to start responding and thinking about, “What does that mean when students aren’t able to be present in class? Or they’re really too ill to even attend synchronously online or whatever.” So Zoom isn’t always an option if someone’s actually sick.

John: What other adjustments have you made in your classes, given these circumstances? Or what adjustments are you planning to take forward into the spring?

Rebecca: I’ve been taking some mental notes and having conversations with my students about, really, the barriers that they’re facing in success, like what’s keeping them from succeeding in the way that they hope. And I had moved into having more low-stakes assignments that were structured and scaffolded, really in response to some of the things that students had wanted prior to the pandemic. And then also, really, in that first fall semester when I was first teaching synchronously online. And the students now are like, “Whoa, there are too many things to keep track of!” Even though it’s structured, having to do more than a couple of activities in a week just seems completely overwhelming. Because they’re reporting memory issues and other things that are likely side effects of the mental health struggles that they’re facing. I’m finding that they’re pretty engaged during class, and I want to seize the moment on that, and continue doing some really engaging activities. I’ve ramped up community-building activities in every class period. I’ve even had them submit ideas and have implemented them, and they get so excited when I’m using one of their ideas. And switching some things around, I had some review assignments that were Google Quizzes, then I did a Kahoot!. And all of a sudden, somehow, even though it’s practically the same thing, that’s way more amazing. So I’ll likely shift more of those over to Kahoot!. And I’m also thinking of, instead of doing low-stakes assignments, I may just do no-stakes assignments. Those are the things that we’re working on in class, it gives them the opportunity to do things. I’ll probably reduce how many of those we’re doing, because the students are just not able to get through as much as they had in the past. Their capacity of being able to do that has been lessened, as it is for all of us. Things are taking longer amounts of time to do things. So I’m trying to respond to that and really think through ways of structuring the class so that there’s options, too. So one of the things that I did just recently, like literally last week, I was noticing there was a lot of assignments still missing. And for some students that might mean 15 or 20 things. And even though they’re small things, that’s a lot of things. And then that almost paralyzes a student from moving forward. They’re not able to move forward, they just don’t know what to do. They freeze and they’re unable to move forward. So I offered the option of doing a small project instead that would demonstrate the things that those assignments were meant to do, as an alternative. And so some students have responded that that seems way more manageable because it’s one thing even though it has a checklist of things that they would need to do in it. It’s a little more creative, it’s an alternative option. And I think I may just start with having an alternative option from the beginning [LAUGHTER] next semester so that they just have a couple of different pathways that they can choose. Group work is also at an all-time struggle this semester. Although if you’re doing collaborative work, there’s always a team or two where things need micromanagement, you need interventions. That always happens as students are learning to work together in how to be a teammate and how to be a collaborator, but it’s at an all-time high this semester. And so I’m thinking of ways that we can still do collaboration, but in a way that really doesn’t depend on another person to follow through on something, especially follow through on something outside of class. So it’s a major rethink of a couple of things that I do in my classes. But I think it’s necessary in order to respond to the moment and really, where students are right now. How about you, John?

John: Well, I had shifted some last year and more this year to more low-stakes assignments, including some short videos I created with embedded questions. And the main issue is many of the students are just not doing those. I’m using a Lumen Learning Waymaker package, which is a personalized learning system, which is very well designed. We actually talked to the primary author of that, Steve Greenlaw, on an earlier podcast, and one of the basic things that students have to do is just read some text with embedded questions, and they get a small amount of credit just for completing those questions. And that should be the first thing that they do each week, but it’s often the last thing that they do. So reading the basic readings before coming to class is something that probably a majority of students just are not doing. And in the past, I got a much larger proportion of the students doing that. Because when they’re in class, we work on problem sets. I do a lot of work with iClicker where I give them problems, and they work either individually or in small groups on those and half to three quarters of them, depending on the day, are coming in without the basic concepts that they need to have understood to be able to participate in that flipped environment. So it’s been a challenge. And I talk to them about that every day, and it just hasn’t been making a difference. And I’m not sure what to do about that in the future. The next time I’ll be teaching this class will be in fall 2022. And I’m hoping we’re in a better environment and we get back to more normalcy. For my spring classes, I’m teaching very different classes, and I had revised those quite a bit last year. And I think I’m going to move more in the direction of more group work on all of those classes than I had used in the past.

Rebecca: I know flexibility is something that I have continued to try to embrace more and more for students. And this semester, it’s meant accepting more late assignments or just not really paying attention to when things are submitted. And although in some ways it’s good for students, in other ways it’s not. In some ways, if they’re not completing things by a particular time, then it’s not helping them build the skills either. So I’m trying to find ways to be flexible in a way that gets them excited about what they’re doing so that they become really interested in what it is so that they want to do it, and that they want to get lost in it outside of class. And sometimes smaller assignments, or smaller homeworks and things, are harder to get invested in in that way. And given that I’m in a creative field, I have this opportunity to perhaps seize the desire to find that space, but also recognize that some students may find it very difficult to be creative in a time like this, and offering different pathways for those students where that’s not a good option for them. So I’m going to really need to find a couple of different pathways for the information. And what I’ve really been reflecting on and thinking about is, “Well, what are these course objectives? What are they meant to achieve, and can they demonstrate that at the end of the semester?” I’m really moving in this ungrading direction for sure, I can feel it. I’m easing in slowly, not all the way there yet. But I think that’s definitely the framework that I’m thinking through and wanting to embrace because I want the learning to happen. And I don’t really care how it is that they’re demonstrating it to me, other than they can demonstrate it to me. So I just need to figure out a structure that will work for all of us moving forward.

John: In my asynchronous class, I’ve been doing a lot more work with student reflection. And with making connections where, in weekly discussions, for example, I often used to give them some readings and ask them to analyze the readings and discuss it using the terms and concepts that they had just learned. And I’m leaving those discussions much more open-ended, where I’m asking them to make connections to things that they’ve read or stories in the news. And that’s been much more productive in that class. The other thing that’s worked really well in my asynchronous class again, which has been working much better in general is, again, doing a podcast project and the connections that they form when they work on it together is just coming through as a really positive experience where they do get to engage with each other in ways that they don’t always get to do when they’re taking an online asynchronous class. But it’s a lot harder to scale that when you’ve got a couple hundred students.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that the scaling of things is what becomes a challenge. Even scaling flexibility can be a problem in a relatively small class, in comparison to the classes that you’re teaching. Allowing fluid deadlines and then everybody waits until the last minute to do something, means you might get hundreds of things all at once. So you have to really think through what’s also going to work for you as a faculty member as we’re making some of these decisions about how to adjust. But I think the key thing to underscore here is that we can’t just keep doing the same thing, because our students are in a different space than they were before. And they’re coming with different backgrounds. We need to respond to the moment which may mean things that we have traditionally relied on are not working, and that we need to come up with new things.

John: And I think we’ve all seen that to some extent, that ways in which we have taught in the past just are not working that well. And I think most of us are experimenting with new things. But, it’s a challenge.

Rebecca: Yeah. I do like what you were saying, John, about reflection. And I’ve also been doing more of that in my classes, too. And I’m finding that really valuable on many levels. It’s a really great way to connect with students when they’re sharing their own experiences, and the ability to even just make one comment on one thing that they say, I think, connects us a little bit. And they feel more willing to be open and have real conversations about what it is that they’re working on, instead of an artificial or transactional relationship. So, it’s meaningful, and it’s also helping me see where they really are getting stuck, or how they have misconceptions, or the way they see themselves as makers in the world. These are design classes so it’s also, how are they seeing themselves? And I think it is helping to move in that direction. It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I kind of seized the moment of the pandemic to move more in that direction. And I’m really glad that I have and I think that’s one thing that is working particularly well, as you also noted.

John: And another thing I’ve tried this semester is building in more growth-mindset messaging. It’s not working quite as well as I’d like, because people are faced with a lot of challenges. And all those struggles make it a little harder, perhaps, for them to see that sort of growth taking place. But it has inspired a few students to not give up, to stop by and talk about ways in which they can improve. And I keep hoping that by continuing that messaging, even if it doesn’t work for everyone right now, it may help them in the future.

Rebecca: I’ve also been really uplifted by some of the observations I’ve made of students. Bringing students along, really accepting the fact that other folks are struggling for a wide variety of issues and really approaching each other with a very non-judgmental approach, and just meeting their colleagues where they’re at. So they’re working collaboratively with someone who’s seemingly very unprepared and they just say, “Okay, let’s get you through this,” or, “Here’s a thing you can do, how about you do this thing so that you have a way of contributing?” And I’ve witnessed it in many different occasions this semester, and it does restore my faith in humanity.

John: I’ve seen the same with the podcast project, where there were groups where one of the people were not participating at all, and they’d submit their draft. And then a day or two later, they’d submit a different draft with someone else integrated into it. It may have been after the deadline, but I’ve been more flexible on those deadlines. And the people would show up, and they’d go back and redo it, integrating them into it. And I’ve been really pleased with how well they’ve all worked together, especially where they’ve been recognizing the challenges that other students are facing.

Rebecca: Of course, that’s not to say that some students aren’t frustrated.

John: The frustration has come through, but it always ended up with them not abandoning their fellow students, but ultimately supporting them.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think when students have been nudged in that direction, like it’s a collaborative assignment, you have to collaborate, they’re definitely pulling through and figuring it out, and having tough conversations. I’ve been using a thing called a “retrospective.” I’ve mentioned it before, at the end of a part of a project that asks students to think about what their team can start to do, stop doing, and continue doing, and using that as a way to facilitate a difficult conversation about a relationship that’s not working. And I think that that tool has been helpful to provide some structure around that and to deal with it. I’ve also noticed that when collaboration is optional, then they’re just kind of opting out. And I haven’t overly pushed it and accepting the fact that maybe there’s moments where we need to not be collaborative or we really don’t want to be and that’s okay, too… and so, leaving space for both activities to happen. But it’s exhausting, huh?

John: It certainly is. I feel like I’m not working as hard as I was last year, but I’m more exhausted than I was last year. And I’m not quite sure why there’s that perspective, but it’s one I know I’ve been feeling, and I think many people have been feeling.

Rebecca: I know I read a New York Times article, I think it’s a couple weeks ago now, about languishing. The feeling that we’re having that’s just kind of numb is called languishing. And I shared it with my students, and they responded like, “Yes, I understand this thing.” But I think we’re all experiencing the emotions and mental health challenges of the people around us, and that’s weighing on us. It becomes an emotional labor that we’re not thinking about or not realizing that’s eating up our time, it’s eating up our energy. It’s necessary work I think right now to support our students, but it’s also incredibly tiring in a way that maybe a more traditional non-pandemic semester doesn’t have. So naps? Time for naps.

John: In theory, that would be great.

Rebecca: Yeah, neither one of us are nappers for sure. [LAUGHTER]

John: Yeah. So what’s next for you, Rebecca?

Rebecca: Well, I’m looking forward to rolling a little bit more into my role in graduate studies, and maybe bringing more graduate studies topics to the podcast occasionally, but also finding a little bit more balance in my time. We’re talking a little bit about how exhausting this semester is, and I’ve gotten away from some of the things that bring me a lot of joy, like taking walks and reading and writing. And that’s in part just because I’ve moved to survival mode at the end of the semester. I was really good at preserving all of those things at the beginning of the semester and that was really helpful, and then it just started falling apart. And I know that many other faculty probably can relate to that. So I’m looking forward to being able to, after the semester, trying to rebuild some of those things back into my schedule, and getting to do a little more deeper thinking about things that I just haven’t had the capacity to do during the semester. How about you, John?

John: Well, in terms of providing more balance, one of the things that I really enjoyed this fall, for the first time in quite a while, was I had started playing some music with a band this summer and we did a three-hour show. That was just a tremendous amount of fun. And I’m hoping I get to do some of that again, moving forward. It was so nice. It was at a location where everyone had to show proof of vaccination, it was outdoors. So I felt pretty comfortable there, pretty safe there, and it was just a really wonderful escape from being cooped up on Zoom all the time.

Rebecca: Yeah. It’s a good reminder to kind of get back to the things that we love to give us the energy to do some of the other things that we need to do. And to provide some of that support that we need to provide for our students when some days it feels like I just can’t do one more thing.

John: And I think many of us have reached that feeling at this stage of the semester.

Rebecca: Well, I’m looking forward to another year of episodes with you, John.

John: I am, too. The podcast has always been one of the bright spots for me each week. It’s been so much fun talking to so many people doing such amazing work.

Rebecca: So let us close by cheerleading all of our listeners on, you can make it to the end of the semester, you can do it! And thank you so much for listening and supporting this work. And I hope that you continue to listen and that if you have suggestions for things that you want to hear about, please let us know.

John: Well, thank you for listening, and we’ll be back next week.

Rebecca: …right on schedule.

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

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

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215. Resilient Pedagogy

The global pandemic resulted in rapid and dramatic changes in instructional practices. These transitions were supported by many resources created and publicly shared by teaching centers and instructional designers. In this episode, Travis Thurston joins us to discuss a superb open access resource on resilient pedagogy that he and his colleagues created with contributions from many thought leaders in higher ed.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: The global pandemic resulted in rapid and dramatic changes in instructional practices. These transitions were supported by many resources created and publicly shared by teaching centers and instructional designers. In this episode, we discuss the creation of a superb open access resource on resilient pedagogy created by one teaching center with contributions from many thought leaders in higher ed.

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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 Travis Thurston. Travis is the Director of the Office of Empowering Teaching Excellence at Utah State University. He is also one of the creators of and editors of Resilient Pedagogy: Practical Teaching Strategies to Overcome Distance, Disruption, and Distraction. Jessamyn Neuhaus, the Interim Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at SUNY Plattsburgh, the author of Geeky Pedagogy, and a frequent guest on this podcast will be filling in as a guest host. Welcome, Travis.

Travis: Thank you so much for having me.

Jessamyn: Hi, Travis.

Travis: It’s great to be here, thank you.

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

Travis: I am not, but I am drinking a lovely orange citrus Mountain Dew Kickstart.

John: Very good.

Jessamyn: Do you need a little burst of energy, Travis? [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Like I always need a little burst of energy. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: I’m drinking some kind of wild orange tea, I just finished it. Really getting wild over here in Plattsburgh. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a Tea Forté black currant tea.

Jessamyn: Fancy.

Travis: Very nice.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss Resilient Pedagogy, an open-access anthology that’s designed to assist faculty in addressing the disruptions and challenges associated with a global pandemic and other forms of social stress. How did this project come about?

Travis: This really came about because right at the start of the pandemic here in the United States, this was March 2020, I got really sick after attending a regional Teaching for Learning Conference here in Utah… got home and went to my local clinic here, and it was before we even had COVID testing available in our area. And it ended up being about the same week that our university shut down operations and shifted to emergency remote teaching. And I ended up getting really sick, and I was out for over three weeks. And so I actually missed all of our transition to emergency remote teaching, which I know that actually seems like a good space to be [LAUGHTER] given what most of us experienced. But for me, as someone who has been an instructional designer and supports faculty regularly in their teaching, it was a moment for me where I felt like I wasn’t able to do my part. And so into that summer of 2020, as folks were discussing what we can do moving forward… Jessamyn and I are connected on Twitter, and there’s such a fantastic presence with folks on Twitter. I definitely lean on my community in Twitter. But I saw folks like Josh Eyler discussing this concept of resilient pedagogy, and it really resonated with me. We were in the process of teaching our faculty how to do blended learning for those who hadn’t. And so, as I was thinking about these terms and thinking about how we could support our faculty, we started talking with a few of the folks here at our university, specifically Chris González, who’s a faculty member, and Kacy Lundstrom, who is in our library here. And we decided to take on this project, this idea of putting together the book, as a way to share these strategies that can support faculty members, and ultimately can support our students.

John: A very timely project. [LAUGHTER] You more than made up for your absence right at the start of this. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Travis, how did you find the authors for this collection?

Travis: Yeah, great question. Speaking of Twitter, we put together a call for chapters, and we pushed that out on our social media channels. And we had dozens and dozens of fantastic chapter proposals. And so we went through a process of just blind reviewing all of the proposals that we received, and then selected the 15 that ended up publishing in the chapters. And so we landed with about five of those chapters coming from authors here at USU and 10 of those coming from folks external.

John: And you released this as an open-access text. We really appreciate the fact that you did. [LAUGHTER] Why did you choose the open-access format for it?

Travis: We decided to go the open-access route for a few reasons. One, it was a way for us to get these ideas out in a timely manner, of course. But really, it ties back to our purpose in putting it together in the first place, to try to share it with as many folks as we could. And we felt like an open-access volume would help us to achieve that.

Jessamyn: So the first section of this text deals with theory and foundations. What are some of the major principles of resilient course design?

Travis: That is a perfect question. And I think it’s actually quite pertinent because as we jumped into putting this book together, we challenged the authors not to just stick with one idea or one definition of resilient pedagogy. We kind of left it up to each of them to parse out what they thought resilient pedagogy meant. And so you’ll see in, like, chapter four, Rebecca Quintana and her colleagues there, they had been doing a MOOC on resilient pedagogy in the summer of 2020, taking a lot of these ideas of resilience from other fields, and then applying them to education and what we do with course design. So, in their chapter, they talk about these three principles of extensibility, flexibility, and redundancy, which we see in architecture or even in environmental fields, where we’re trying to support and sustain whatever it is we’re engaging with. So for me, when I start thinking about resilient design and resilient pedagogy, those three concepts definitely come to mind. How can we extend what we’re doing into different modalities that also ties into things like Universal Design for Learning, specifically with our students? How can we provide for multiple means of engagement or multiple means of expression within our courses? The idea of flexibility, I think, is something a lot of us have ran with the last 18 months or so in finding ways that we can not only be flexible with our course design, but also be flexible with each other. And what I mean by that is with our colleagues as we’re working on courses and with our students, as we’re thinking about the requirements that we have. And then I think a great one is this redundancy, which is not only helpful in general as a practice in the learning science of adding in redundancy. But as Jacob Fortman pointed out—he’s another author of that fourth chapter—he was teaching a course on virtual reality, which they typically have resources for within a brick-and-mortar face-to-face setting, and can provide support and troubleshooting. But when they started teaching that in a remote setting and they’re sending this equipment out, they can’t necessarily sit down and troubleshoot with every student. So they started developing additional support materials that can be used for students at a distance. So to answer your question, when I start thinking about resilient pedagogies, resilient design, those three concepts really stand out to me as a starting place for us.

Jessamyn: I always thought redundancy had negative connotations. But I must say, now, the more reminders I get, the more calendar shout outs I get to remember where I was supposed to be, when “Oh, what was I supposed to do here, there?” The more the better. So I definitely incorporate that into my teaching as well.

John: That example you mentioned about moving from a brick-and-mortar institution to online with classes, reminds me of a general issue that came up, in that it was fairly easy to ignore the inequities that our students face when they’re all on campus, when they all have access to computer labs, to the campus network, campus printing facilities, the library, and so forth. But when people moved online, the inequities that our students face in their day-to-day lives became much more visible to faculty. What are some lessons we should take forward from this period of remote teaching that we can use to help create a more equitable environment going forward?

Travis: There’s a couple of things that our institution ended up doing that I think, as we’ve been discussing it, are things we’re going to continue doing. Which when we talk through them seem like, “Well, why weren’t we doing this before?” Like, “Why weren’t we providing these things before?” And they’re things as simple as checking out laptops to students that don’t have technology. Our institution is the land-grant university here in Utah, so we have over 30 campuses across the state. So, for example, at some of our campuses that are in rural Utah, we actually had to set up Wi-Fi areas for students to be able to come and even access the internet to be able to be online doing their work. So there’s really simple things like that, in providing access to the technology, to the infrastructure, that is like a basic necessity to even be able to start doing this work. So from that standpoint, then when we even start thinking about how when students are maybe a little bit cautious to turn their camera on, to show their surroundings, or they keep their mic muted because they’re engaging in childcare while they’re trying to attend class. Or things like this that, like you said, John, are things that were easy to overlook when everyone was coming into the same space. But there are things that we should be thinking about and that we should be providing accommodations for our students and really adapting what we do to fit the needs of the students that we have.

Jessamyn: Switching away a little bit from the student-centered, I have a question. As the pandemic drags on, I’ve started to hear from faculty who are feeling overwhelmed and unable to do any new thing. The returns on their big pedagogical learning, the new things they’re doing are kind of small. And as a thought leader in education, Sherri Spelic, recently tweeted, “I’m tired of being resilient.” The word itself might be taking on some negative, toxic positivity. So how can we encourage faculty to do this to make their courses more resilient without placing a big, additional burden on them or resorting to rose-colored glasses?

Travis: I think I saw that tweet myself, and I may have retweeted it. [LAUGHTER] Because I think it really is pertinent right now for us to think about. There are so many demands on our time. And there are so many inequities and things that we could be trying to account for and trying to adjust for that, yes, we are tired of being resilient. So one of the things, as we were producing this book, I reached out to Jesse Stommel, who again is a fantastic person to follow on Twitter, because he had a tweet over the summer of 2020 with his list of words that he hopes he never hears again, one of which was resilient. [LAUGHTER] And so, I actually asked him if he would be willing to write the foreword for this book, to really play with that term and talk about those differences. And one of the points that I love that he makes in that forward, is that when we talk about resilience, it’s generally coming from a perspective of privilege. That we have the privilege to be resilient, which sometimes gets pushed onto our students, “Well, you know, if you just try harder.” But I think the same can be said with our faculty, and I think that’s why a lot of us have felt that the negative connotation to that term is because we feel like, “Well, you know, just keep doing what you’re doing and be resilient and you’ll get through this.” That was a long preface to my answer here. But for me, what we can do is just continue to make those small steps, make the small changes. For me, I try to emphasize this with the faculty that I support here at USU, that teaching excellence really is a journey. And so we’re just going to keep taking one step at a time as we keep moving forward. And sometimes, yeah, we’re gonna have to step off the trail and take a breather, and that is okay, that is okay. The other thing that I try to remind our folks here is that they don’t have to go at it alone. We have a robust community here—librarians, instructional designers, multimedia professionals, folks here in faculty development like myself—who really care deeply about teaching and learning. And I care deeply about our instructors and our students. And so, making sure that they are able to connect with those people that can lift them up and can support them when they are tired of being resilient.

John: During the period of emergency remote teaching many people were offering classes in this online synchronous manner, and some of that has continued into the following academic year. That differs quite a bit from what two of the authors on chapter three of this anthology, Noffs and Wilson, refer to as optimal online learning. Would you say that this transition and this form of emergency teaching gave some faculty and students a somewhat false sense of what constitutes online learning?

Travis: In a short answer, yes, I do. [LAUGHTER] And we’ve seen this in articles in The Chronicle or opinion pieces here and there, where folks are like, “Well, we tried online learning and it didn’t work.” And for someone who has studied instructional design, and specifically online course design, and has worked designing courses for years and years, what the majority of us were doing during that time was not what we would call “optimal online learning.” [LAUGHTER] And as my kids would remind me, research on this topic was going on back in the 1900s, as my kids would say, we had research on online learning back in the 90s. And a lot of that was, at first a lot of it incorporated synchronous engagement, where we were getting on some sort of technology and engaging with our students, probably with giant headsets. In fact, here in our building at Utah State where our office is located, we’re in the distance education building. And there’s this one particular hallway that has all these pictures of what distance learning looked like before. [LAUGHTER] And so there’s one picture down the hall that has the picture of some professors that they call the “Flying Professors” that would literally get on an airplane and fly to different campuses across the state to bring distance learning. There’s this other great picture of a professor putting this giant laser disc into a machine. [LAUGHTER] And then our very first real interesting innovation was that they had this trackpad that they could write on that would transmit the image to another location, all these interesting innovations. And so I look at things like that and then I look at what we were doing with emergency remote teaching during COVID, and I think exactly that. Like, we just had the wrong sense of what online learning is because there are mountains of research on what good online courses and what good online teaching looks like. And so, for me, and for us, the work is to continue to share those principles, not only as we are starting to shift back to face-to-face. But pre-pandemic, one thing I would always sit down with faculty members and say—when they’re coming to me and they’re going to be designing an online course for the first time, they’ve never taught online and they’re worried about it, they’re concerned about it—I would just tell them, “Good teaching is good teaching. And so it’s going to look different, it’s going to feel different in an online setting. But you have support, and there are strategies and there are ways to get to know your students that have been working for years, and we’re going to help you get there.” And I don’t want to be too critical of our approaches, because we literally were on the fly trying to change modalities. And typically, when we design a new online course, we spend months in development of that course, and training, not three days or a week. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Not three days, while your brain is about to explode trying to cope with a totally unprecedented situation.

Travis: Exactly. All the trauma of a worldwide pandemic, and social justice movements, and all the things going on in the world. Not to mention, I forgot to mention this earlier, but we have students who are food insecure or housing insecure. And so, yeah, of course these things are not going to take precedence, and shouldn’t, we’ve got to take care of each other. But yeah, there are definitely principles and things that we can do that are more effective than some of the emergency remote teaching that happened.

Jessamyn: Following up on that, can you give us some examples of some specific things, some steps that faculty can take, to design courses that are more equitable and more resilient to changing conditions?

Travis: One of my favorite suggestions comes from chapter one with Lindsay Masland. And she begins by giving this great self-determination theory approach to teaching and learning. And an aspect of that is that, as humans, we have this need for autonomy. And for this sense that we have some control and that we’re agents of our own learning. And so we can actually build those things into our courses. And so I would definitely start small with this, there are ways that you could build this into an entire course, but I would start small with an assignment. Look at one assignment and say, “Is this an assignment that I could allow for some choice?” And what I mean by that is: If this is traditionally a written assignment, does it need to be a written assignment? Or have we just always done it as a written assignment? Are there other ways that students could demonstrate their knowledge or understanding for this particular concept? So I would start small with something like that. We actually looked at this pre-COVID because we work closely with our Center for Student Analytics here at Utah State University. So I kind of look at it as a 360-degree type thing. We look at what’s working well for students, and then we think about… How can we enhance that by providing faculty development that helps folks to incorporate these things that are helping students more into their course? And then again, we kind of just cycle through and see what’s working. So one thing we found that was working really well for students was providing simple navigation in their Canvas course. We use the Canvas LMS, and for instructors who were using the tools we have to put in a syllabus to organize some topic or weekly modules, we actually found that, overall, students had an increase in persistence at the university when they were taking one of these courses. But more interestingly, we found that first-gen students who took those courses had almost a 3% bump in persistence when they were engaging in a course where an instructor had taken the time to organize the course well. So we know from the literature and research that when students’ cognitive load is reduced, like, they’re not trying to find where to go or what the assignment is, they can spend more of that effort, more of that brainpower, on the actual learning in the class. So yeah, there’s some small things we can do.

John: And that reminds me of the findings that Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan found in terms of the importance of providing students with more structure in reducing the achievement gaps for first-gen students. There’s quite a bit of research showing that that’s very helpful.

Travis: Absolutely.

John: Section two of the anthology focuses on reflection and practice. You’ve talked about some of the practices that could be helpful, but what are some other specific practices suggested by authors in this collection?

Travis: There’s too many to choose from, honestly. But some of my favorite ones… one comes from Jenae Cohn, who’s fantastic. I love her work outside of this book, but in this book it’s great too. [LAUGHTER] Specifically, she talks about the need for us to build digital literacy skills directly into our courses. So this isn’t a new concept, but I love the spin that she takes on it in saying that, “As more of these courses are using digital elements, we need to be teaching our students how to engage in effective ways with those resources, and building those skills and those supports directly into the course.” So, for example, we have this myth of the digital native, who they were just born to know exactly how to click on the right button in our course. Like, that’s just not a thing.

Jessamyn: No. [LAUGHTER] Have yet to meet one. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Exactly. So I love that she points out that there are very specific scaffolds, this kind of goes back to that structure thing, there are very specific scaffolds that we can build in, and things we can do to get to know the students in our courses and provide what they need to be successful in our class. So that’s a great one. Another one that I really like is Kevin Kelly and Rebecca Campbell, they talk about what they call “VHS,” which for someone in my age group resonates well. They talk about VHS as a virtual homework sprint. And again, this kind of builds off of what Jenae’s talking about, where you build in time to your course to help students work on projects, and to be productive in what they’re doing. So they frame this in a way that you actually can get together in a synchronous way. You provide some time and space to get to know each other, exchange what’s going on in your life, those types of things. And then you set out with a specific goal, like, “This is the thing that I want to accomplish in the next hour.” And then from there, you can break into small groups, you can break out individually. I kind of picture this… for me in Zoom, I can throw folks out into different breakout groups. And then as the instructor, I can jump around and see where they need help, where there’s some additional support that they could use. And then about halfway through that time period, we come back together, we say, “Great, what progress have you made? What barriers did you hit that you still need support?” And then you kind of go through that cycle again, similarly to what you might see in a work sprint in a tech company or something like that. You provide that scaffolding, that time and support. And really, it’s modeling how to be efficient in getting some of that work done, and how to feel, and giving students access to the help that they need.

Jessamyn: I love that example of how to use Zoom strategically and effectively. It could be very, very effective used that way, I think.

Travis: I know, because sometimes I get caught up in this, “Well, I need to push them into breakout groups for a discussion thing,” and… Well, why don’t we actually focus on some of the work that we need to do and give individualized feedback as we go? So I love the recommendation for that VHS.

John: Not Betamax, it has to be VHS. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Now we’re aging ourselves, John. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Help, I’m trapped in a Squadcast room with two very nerdy tech guys.

John: And that’s coming from the author of Geeky Pedagogy. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: I love it. Another one… again there’s so many… but my last one I’m going to point out comes from Miriam Moore, and she talks about this idea of getting out of the PPR box with online discussions… the prompt, post, reply box… that we get stuck in. This is something that we see quite often with online discussions. It’s not a new thing to the pandemic, this is common in general. And one of my favorite ways to picture this came from a 2016 article. It’s actually an idea paper by Shannon Riggs and Katie Linder, and they talked about it in terms of an architecture of engagement which I think is just so perfect. But they do this setting, like, picture yourself standing in front of this lecture hall—this small lecture hall, 30 students or something—and you’re teaching this face-to-face class and you want to have a discussion. You would not ask the question, and then go through one by one and have every single student respond to the exact same question. And then you would not, further, go through and want every single one of them to comment on something. I love the visual they created with that because it feels so ridiculous. [LAUGHTER]

Jessamyn: Oh, it’s so awkward. The awkwardness is making me nervous. [LAUGHTER]

Travis: Exactly. So that’s what Miriam’s talking about with this kind of getting away from that PPR box, thinking of ways to engage students in real discussion where they can co-create some of these things within the dialog. And so, I talk about this a little bit in the digital power-up strategy. I won’t go too deep into that, but it’s the idea that rather than using a specific question, that you give students different prompts as entry points into the discussion. And it allows them to make the post relevant to themselves, bringing in their own personal experiences, their different backgrounds, into the class. And my colleague, Dr. Mitchell Colver, he kind of describes this as if our online course is a box, a cardboard box if we picture it that way, when we invite students into that box, it should change the box. And so that’s really what we’re trying to do with our online discussions. We want them to be a space for dialogue, for co-construction of knowledge. And we want it to be a space where students can really work with each other and grow and learn along the way.

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

Travis: Yeah, I really love that question actually, so I’m glad you ask it on your podcasts. For us, what’s next with Resilient Pedagogy is really continuing the work. A lot of us were doing this work of teaching and learning before the pandemic, and really, it just continues. Again, one of the points that Jesse Stommel makes in his foreword of this book, is he calls out this line from Lindsay Masland in chapter one where she says, “Do we really need a thing such as resilient pedagogy?” And I love that Jesse says, “We probably don’t.” [LAUGHTER] Because what we actually need is just everyone to continue thinking about teaching in a reflexive way, trying to teach the students we have, and find ways that are going to help us to be successful as instructors and as students. And so for us, it’s just continuing to build those communities and those supports. And so for me, what I really hope comes out of this book that we were able to put together is that it continues to spark ideas, and continues to spark conversations about the things that we can do to continue to improve teaching and learning.

John: It’s a wonderful anthology. I really enjoyed reading it and I’ve shared it with our faculty on campus several times in the past and will continue to do so. Thank you.

Travis: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much.

Jessamyn: Thank you so much, I really enjoyed this conversation. Two of my favorite guys in faculty development.

Travis: Thanks Jessamyn.

John: It was great talking to both of you today.

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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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209. Military-Affiliated Students

One student population that is often overlooked in campus DEI initiatives is the population of military-affiliated students. In this episode Kenneth James Marfilius joins us to discuss ways to support and include this segment of our student population in the classroom and on our campuses.

Ken is the Director of the Falk College Office of Online and Distance Education and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Syracuse University. While on active duty, Ken served in the U.S. Air Force Biomedical Science Corps in multiple roles: as an active duty clinical social worker, mental health therapist, family advocacy officer in charge, and as manager of the alcohol and drug prevention and treatment program. He has taught courses on topics such as social work intervention, military culture, and social work practice, psychopathology, and others.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: One student population that is often overlooked in DEI initiatives are military-affiliated students. In this episode we discuss ways to support and include this segment of our student population in the classroom and on our campuses.

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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 Kenneth James Marfilius. Ken is the Director of the Falk College Office of Online and Distance Education and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Syracuse University. While on active duty, Ken served in the U.S. Air Force Biomedical Science Corps in multiple roles: as an active duty clinical social worker, mental health therapist, family advocacy officer in charge, and as manager of the alcohol and drug prevention and treatment program. He has taught courses on topics such as social work intervention, military culture, and social work practice, psychopathology, and others. Welcome, Ken.

Ken: Thank you, John.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…Ken are you drinking any tea?

Ken: I have a chai tea in this September fall day here in Syracuse, New York.

Rebecca: Sounds like a perfect flavor for the season.

John: And I am going off season with a spring cherry black tea.

Rebecca: Don’t wish the best seasons away, John. Fall is the best.

John: I really like this flavor.

Rebecca: I have an East Frisian tea, which is a black mix from my new favorite tea spot.

John: Could you start by telling us a little bit about your background in the U.S. Air Force?

Ken: Sure. So I received what’s called a Health Professional Scholarship Program direct commission during my graduate studies. And during my graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, I did some work with veterans, specifically working on the inpatient psychiatric unit, at the VA Medical Center. Upon graduating, about two weeks after graduation, I was shipped off to commissioned officer training in the Nashville Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. In post-training, I would go to my first duty station, and almost instantly begin seeing active duty service members. We served, almost 100% of the time, just folks in uniform at this particular installation. And within the mental health clinic, there’s three areas. So traditional mental health, seeing anywhere between six to eight clients a day, and again, in this situation, both uniform. And there’s the family advocacy program, and I served as director of that program for some time. And that’s really both prevention, but also treatment. And so you can look at it as sort of a stood up DCFS or CPS on the installation. So we would get referrals for child and adult maltreatment cases, and that would range from anything from physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, etc. And then there’s the ADAPT program, which is the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment program. I also served as director forf that program for some time. And similarly, we would get referrals. It could be a command-directed referral, it could be a self-referral, it could be a medical referral, etc. Anything from low-level treatment to inpatient treatment, we would get referrals from issues that might have occurred off the installation, ranging from public intoxication to DUI, etc. So that’s sort of the three arms specifically in Air Force mental health that I operated in, in addition to other roles. I transitioned out of the Air Force in 2016, moved back to the northeast and worked as director of the HUD-VASH program, which is the Housing Urban Development VA Supportive Housing, under the Healthcare for Homeless Veterans Program at the Syracuse VA Medical Center. And during that time I also designed, and still do teach, a course on military culture and mental health practice. That’s a bit about my background in the Air Force, the VA, and also now at the institution.

John: A few weeks ago, when the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, there was a lot of political discussions about this, where each party was blaming the other for how that came about. And one of our colleagues, who has a son at West Point, was concerned about how this might be addressed in classes since we do have many veterans in our classes. The concern was basically that the impact of those discussions might be hurtful to those people who had risked their lives serving in Afghanistan. What might be a good way of addressing these topics that would be sensitive to those people who have served?

Ken: Yeah, thank you John. Yeah, so you mentioned, sort of, politics and let’s stay away from that and focus more on wanting to express support and empathy for all of our military members and their families who have invested and sacrificed so much for and with our allies and our partners in Afghanistan. I would be remiss if I didn’t first acknowledge the Gold Star families. A Gold Star family is an immediate family member of a fallen service member who died while serving in a time of conflict. And unfortunately, we now have a new cohort of Gold Star families with the most recent attack at the airport in Kabul. So they’ve been at the forefront of my mind. And it’s very normal for family members, and also veterans, and those actively serving right now, to have a sense of sort of loss, grief, suffering, that can feel overwhelming. It’s also normal for them to be experiencing all different types of difficult and unexpected emotions. They range from shock to anger, even potential denial, guilt, or disbelief. With the current situation that has unfolded in Afghanistan now, it is in the living rooms of all Americans. For a long period there it has almost been the forgotten war, because it has gone on for so long. And I’ve heard from active duty and veteran populations, that there’s really this sort of feeling of the need to do something in this moment, rather than feeling helpless. And so, it’s important to note that these feelings about the current situation are normal reactions to abnormal and complex and ongoing situations. They don’t make veterans weak, but actually make them strong. So acknowledging that it’s acceptable to experience them. And paying attention to those feelings, while talking with fellow veterans, active members, family members, and friends, is actually a sign of strength. So what can we do as instructors, faculty members, or even staff members, working at institutions of higher education? When you’re in the classroom, there’s really no way to pinpoint or acknowledge who’s the veteran in the classroom, right? You might be able to sort of run a report on the back end, if you’re so inclined, or perhaps it’s self-reporting, it comes out during initial introductions. I still think it’s important to not just assume, and particularly not just assume that it’s going to be a man, right? Because there’s a significant increase in females raising their right hand and serving in our military, which is a phenomenal thing. And that ultimately increases the amount of female veterans who will also be attending our classes. Given the nature of the recent long-duration wars in Operation Enduring Freedom, OEF, and OIF, Operation Iraqi Freedom, we have folks who are going back to study in institutions of higher education across the country, who have either witnessed combat operations or know of someone who’s gone to combat operations. And so, to your initial question, it’s important for we, as instructors, as professors, as staff, to be aware of those situations. And so how do we do that? Well, there are services. I know here at Syracuse we have a wealth of services on our installation. We’re the number one private institution in the country for veterans, and there’s the Office of Veteran Success, there’s the Office of Veteran Military Affairs, there’s different types of certificate trainings, the Institute for Veteran Military Families. We also have what’s called an “Orange Door” program. So in different colleges and departments across the institution, you have an orange sticker, if you will, or door hanger, to let veterans know who may be passing by your office, that there’s an advocate there that can help talk to you. Again, it’s not an academic advisor, but it could be sort of a life situation, or career decision, or something that’s just going on culturally. So I think it’s important to have these advocates, in any way or fashion, at different institutions so veterans do feel welcome and accepted. Now, actually in the classroom… So we have to understand that there is a divide between military life and civilian life. And what does that mean? Well, in the military, it is hierarchical, it is paternalistic, at times, in nature, it is very structured, it is collectivist and not necessarily individualistic, it is mission-focused. So there’s a shift there. When we come back, and we transition from active duty to veteran life, it is potentially a sense of loss, or “What is my identity? How do I find my way?” Often, you know, if we’re speaking specifically about undergraduate study, you might have an individual who just got out of high school, an 18-year-old, with a veteran who might have been through combat operations and might be 27 years old. So I think we have to acknowledge that there are differences. They’re not necessarily peers in that sense, because there’s different life experiences. It’s very positive for both the 18-year-old and the 27-year-old to interact and discuss those different experiences and not to alienate. And so, that level of understanding, that level of training, that level of conversation… in faculty meetings, in staff meetings, needs to be occurring because veteran populations fall under the umbrella of diversity, and they represent this sense of diversity, and we must honor that. There’s some times I’ve heard anything from a veteran hijacking a conversation, if you will, sort of talking about their experiences, to veterans feeling as if they’re not quite sure how to enter the conversation from what they’ve witnessed or experienced. So you mentioned, at the top of the hour here, that you talked about this idea, that sort of politics and blaming this way or blaming that way, and then the veteran’s sitting back and like, “I wasn’t involved in that, I was out there to do the mission. I raised my right arm to sacrifice myself with my brothers- and sisters-in-arms, and my experience is fundamentally different.” Because the mission is not what’s being talked about at that time. So understanding that there is a range. You and I, Rebecca, can be at the same place at the same time and witness the same exact traumatic event. You may come out feeling okay. Yes, was it traumatic? For sure. I may come out feeling as if there’s an impact on functioning. That functioning could be occupational functioning, it could be in the classroom, it could be social functioning, familial functioning, that could potentially lead to something like post-traumatic stress, and what we call post-traumatic stress disorder in the DSM-5. And it’s important to not just conflate and/or categorize like, “Oh, you’ve been in combat operations or you’ve been in the military so what about PTSD?” Mental health, and we can get into this a bit more, but mental health is much broader than just talking about PTSD as it pertains to veterans.

Rebecca: A lot of things that I’m hearing you talk about, Ken, that are making me think about my own experience in the classroom, but just also the conversations I’ve had with colleagues, is that I was looking up statistics just to see, like, I wonder how many students in higher ed are military or veteran populations. And the number I was finding was somewhere between 5 and 6, depending on the report, and in graduate studies about 7%. But I also think that often, when we’re talking about our student populations, this is a population that doesn’t come up in conversation. It’s completely invisible, similar to students with disabilities. It’s a population that sits there and may not be visible, necessarily. It’s an identity that’s existing in our classes, that we almost don’t recognize is present. Can you talk about ways in our classrooms where we can honor an identity that maybe isn’t seen without pointing out a specific person?

Ken: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think it is sort of this overarching respect, human dignity. Understanding that we all come from different walks of life, whether it’s an individual that has a disability, or veterans alike who are both veterans with a disability, right? So there’s a couple of factors there.

Rebecca: Indeed.

Ken: But also to include cultural backgrounds, right? And race, and gender, all these are sort of present and need to be acknowledged. And so how I operate as a professor is, I’m not going to, first day of class, be like, “All right, all veterans in the classroom raise your hand!” or go through it like that. I’d say, “Let’s set some ground rules and expectations for a welcoming environment, and that, ultimately, I’m not here to tell you what to do. We’re here to interact with one another and learn from one another.” I tell them that I expect to learn as much from you as you do from me and maybe even more. So every class that I have every semester, I’m learning something new. And the way to do that and cultivate that is to provide that sort of sense of safety, regardless of subject. Provide that sense of safety so we allow these individuals to feel comfortable engaging in that process, both direct and indirect levels of communication. That one individual, like I mentioned, who might not talk too much in class, is potentially constantly observing, actively listening, taking in this information, and has sort of a byproduct of that entire process. I also want to talk about trauma. So, I’ll sort of go back and forth from talking about, in my specific research and teaching, it’s obviously military and veteran focused, but what we’re seeing is trauma affects children. There’s this notion of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, that’s in the research. And so if it’s affecting children, well, they’re basically children and then before you know it, they’re graduating from high school, and they’re 18 years old, and now they’re considered an adult. But those traumatic experiences don’t leave them. Just like with a veteran, those traumatic experiences don’t necessarily leave them. So, the effects of trauma on children are far more pervasive than often us adults can even imagine. What does that mean and why am I talking about that, how that can impact the classroom? So following a child’s exposure to a traumatic event, or a veteran’s exposure to a traumatic event, there are a range of symptoms that may occur. Anything from a sense of arousal, being on edge, or constantly being worried, or the sense of rumination. There’s negative mood and cognition, so blaming oneself, or diminished interest in pleasurable activities or even school. Avoiding, consciously trying to avoid some level of engagement, not thinking about that specific event. And even re-experiencing, that can play out in potential nightmares or constantly replaying it over in one’s mind. So the symptoms resulting from this trauma can directly impact the student veteran, or the student’s ability to learn in the classroom, because they may be distracted by this level of intrusive thought about that particular event, preventing them from really paying attention in class, studying, or doing well. We also know exposure to violence has an effect on IQ and one’s ability to ultimately read. So as a result, some students may avoid going to class altogether. And so I think it’s important to have this sense of…what is trauma, who it affects, and not just looking at trauma as PTSD.

John: And certainly there have been a lot of additional sources of trauma. Now trauma has always affected a large share of our students but I think the number of students who have been affected has gone up quite a bit with the pandemic. And it’s also become much more obvious to faculty who are more directly observing trauma that might have appeared to be hidden to them in the past. What can faculty do to address the trauma that has affected so many of our students for any reason?

Ken: Yeah that’s a great question, John. I always come from the idea that we can’t address something that we don’t know about. So I think the first step is to educate, and it’s really on us as individuals and ultimately as a collective, is taking this seriously, right? And so how do we educate? Well, there’s sort of this idea of formal education, going to seek it out, reading about it, researching about it, going to events, but it also is talking with our colleagues about it, and actually experiencing it. So first and foremost, what is trauma-informed care? It sort of now has become a buzzword and I don’t look at trauma-informed care just for a mental health provider. If you really want to effectively implement trauma-informed care, it needs to be the frontline staff, the administrative assistant that might be interacting with these students first, it needs to be additional staff, it needs to be the janitor or the custodial, it needs to be the professor in the classroom. So it has to be a collective effort, and really sort of a cultural shift within the entire organization. Trauma-informed programs and services are really based on that understanding of some of the vulnerabilities that I mentioned or triggers a trauma survivor may experience and how they may impact the way that the individual accepts and responds to services.

John: You mentioned how one symptom of trauma is disengagement and lack of feeling of connection with classes. What are some symptoms that faculty might observe that might provide a clue that there’s an issue there that needs to be addressed?

Ken: Sure. There could be disengagement, but there can also be a level of confusion, difficulty concentrating. Let’s say that you’re noticing that there’s a shift in behavior, whether it’s through a written assignment, or maybe that individual was engaged and is no longer engaged. And I think there’s a balance there too, right? Because you want to be careful, and this happens quite a bit, is not to just call that individual out in the classroom because that would only make the problem worse, alienating and isolating that individual. So what I like to do is potentially talk to the student after class, just do a general check-in or maybe it’s an email and say, “Can we hop on a Zoom? I noticed a shift in the behavior, I just want to know that you feel supported by me as the instructor.” And that lends to an additional conversation where, okay, I am supporting this individual, this individual understands that they’re being supported, but they may need another service. And so we can’t just sort of be the end-all-be-all, the nexus of our students’ lives, we have to be able to be knowledgeable of the resources at our disposal and leverage those resources. And if we’re talking about veterans, specifically, what type of resource? Are we talking about academic resources, we’re talking about counseling? We have, at Syracuse University, right across the street is the Department of Veteran Affairs. We have, like I mentioned, peer-to-peer programs, which are often very successful in having veterans talk… specifically with the most recent incident in Afghanistan, having that sort of peer dialogues about, “Hey, what are you feeling? Are you feeling this too?” And just have that sense of normality, to say, “Oh, I’m not going crazy,” if you will, “This is normal.” And then situations may resolve on their own, or there might be sort of a level of psychological distress, acute distress, that needs to be tended to. And so, if it needs to be elevated to potentially having to see a mental health expert or provider, making sure that we’re training to get them to the resources that they need.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve been experiencing this semester is certainly an observation of students who are actually more open to talking about mental health generally. And that, when students are experiencing some distress in that area, actually being a little bit open about it, which makes it easier to refer them to resources. But also sometimes it becomes an impairment in being able to learn in the classroom, and that some additional accommodations might need to be had. And so some of those students may never have thought about reaching out to an office like Accessibility Resources or a disability office for supports. But these are students who are now getting support because we had a conversation, and it’s something that they never, ever would have thought of doing on their own and maybe wouldn’t have done on their own. I just thought it was something that was a definite shift from what I’ve seen previously.

Ken: Yeah, this is such a great point. Again, you don’t know what you don’t know. So the asset is you, Rebecca, right, that you’re aware of these services. And I even talked to my students about this, who will be clinicians in the field of mental health providers is, we have to acknowledge that we’re not going to know at all, but we need to know where to connect them to. And so, with that being said, you hear a lot about the increase in younger individuals, and specifically students at the undergraduate and graduate level, seeking out these services. And I think we have to come from this notion that there is strength in seeking help, right, there is a purpose in caring for one another. Reaching out for social support ultimately protects all of us. It protects you, it protects your family, the ones who care about you, your communities. I say that a stronger veteran community is a stronger American society. Same goes for other students. I like to talk less about stigma, and more about the inherent strengths of the human condition. We all have them. We must continue to find them, use them to help one another. And the beauty of technology today is that this could be done via text message. It can be done over a phone call. It can be done in a virtual Zoom session. Again, there’s so many options at our disposal, and it’s a unique opportunity in our society to actually leverage them to benefit all of society. And so I want to look at the increase in individuals seeking services as not necessarily a negative, but actually a net positive, and I think this gets conflated in saying we have a mental health crisis. It’s like, well where the same individual is saying, “Now we actually have these services.” And so it moves from, in which we are, a very much a reactive society to a prevention-based society. And so if we can get folks into services sooner, then there’s better outcomes. We know this in research, there’s better outcomes across the lifespan.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve been doing this semester, and really probably has been promoted by the pandemic, but something I will definitely continue doing beyond the pandemic is actually just bringing up mental health as a thing that we should be concerned about as individuals. And students have responded really positively to just even having that on the agenda for a moment, just acknowledge that that’s a thing that we should be thinking about. So that’s really definitely, I think, shifted the conversations we’re having in class and the desire for community. So I’m feeling a lot of the things that you’re talking about as it being a real positive that people are being a little more willing to talk about these issues. One of the things that I struggle with sometimes is thinking about how sometimes we talk past each other when we have really different experiences. And one of those can be military and civilian talking past each other because they have such different life experiences often. I mentioned before we were recording that I had listened to season six of NPR’s Rough Translation podcast called Home/Front: Conversations Across the Civilian-Military Divide. And there’s a series of episodes that talk about how people see different circumstances differently or experience the same thing differently, as you were mentioning before, Ken. Can you talk about strategies that we can use in the classroom to help us not talk past each other, but help us explain and listen?

Ken: So I think I’m going to talk here, from my sort of veteran experience, but it has a lot to do with civilians, if you will, also. So I’ve seen firsthand that serving in the military, in and of itself, is often not the sole reason that a veteran may experience mental health challenges. Actually, sometimes, it’s quite the opposite. So it certainly can be, and often is, a contributing factor. However, what I’ve seen in my work as both an active duty mental health provider and my work in the VA, is that mental health challenges—that may be anything from trauma, or depression, anxiety, suicide—is a very complicated and complex topic, and it does not discriminate. So we do know that prior trauma is a significant risk factor for the development of PTSD and mental health disorders… complex trauma. What we see in the research again, ACEs. So, let’s break that down, what is that? So traumatic experiences that occurred during childhood and adolescence. We have evidence to support that does have an effect on one’s health across the entire lifespan. Multiple ACEs pose a significant risk for numerous health conditions: PTSD, substance use disorder, depression, suicidal ideation. Research points out individuals with military service have higher ACEs scores, but why? Well, individuals who experienced traumatic experiences during childhood may seek sanctuary in the military. This can be very positive. We should also be exploring the associations between childhood trauma and mental health problems, both in veteran populations and our overall student population, and how this impacts the rise in depression and PTSD. For prevention, we really need to hone in on these predisposing factors and have an awareness of the vulnerabilities. Because nearly half, nearly half of the suicides in recent wars have been from individuals who never deployed. You also need to be psychiatrically evaluated before you go on a deployment, so you’re looking at physical and mental fitnesses. So I believe that to really sustain improvement in the veteran health, we must first understand the critical need to sustain the improvement in the overall public health, because these veterans are civilians before they enter the military. And when they transition out, they’re often integrated right back into the communities that they came from before service… they’re part of the social fabric of our society. So with that being said, the military mirrors society, which makes this a societal issue, and a community-wide effort in response. And so we need to create awareness, to have these conversations that you’re talking about, Rebecca, about the complexities of experiencing mental health challenges, and its impact not just on the veteran but their loved ones, not just on the student but their loved ones. It’s imperative that we work together as a society and work together on sustaining the improvement in the overall public health. Because again, a strong nation leads to an even stronger military and veteran population, both physically but also mentally. You’ve heard me say now “community-level” a couple of times and so it’s like, what can we do at the community level? We need the right services in place, communities that have the means to allow these individuals to not just survive, but ultimately to really thrive. So if we attack this head on from a prevention standpoint, we need to be providing our children and adolescents with parent-support programs, job trainings, mentors, access to education, not just access to education, but actually access to quality education. Family-centered schools, including embedded mental health services, or embedded trauma-informed care conversations. And survival services like access to medical, dental, mental health care, safe stable affordable housing, access to food, and breaking down barriers. Because if they don’t have access to these basic survival services, how do you expect them to have a critical conversation with a trained mental health provider when they’re worrying about where their next meal may come from? And the single most important factor in developing resilience in children who become young adults, this can also be said for adults, is to have a stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult. And that needs to be done on the local, county, and national level, and across our institutions.

Rebecca: A lot of this seems like it needs to happen way before they get to us in higher ed.

Ken: Correct. Before they get to us in higher ed, and as they continue on their journey in higher ed.

Rebecca: Are there things that we can do in the meantime, while we’re helping to advocate for these things in higher ed? I’ve heard you talk about certain services, and of course we would want to advocate for those on our campuses. I know we have many of these things on our campus, for sure. But what about within this classroom space? Is there something we can do at a classroom level?

Ken: Sure, this question also comes up. It’s like, folks in the community often ask, like, “How can we help?” It’s like “oh, the magic eight ball…” this is what you can do. I don’t think there’s one single answer. I do think though, number one is through actively listening, expressing empathy, being willing to be part of what I call an integrated network of support, building folks up, not tearing them down. One mental health provider can be a huge help. However, they cannot be the nexus of one’s life, there must be linkages to support in place.,,,for veteran populations to replicate that camaraderie that they experienced in the military, which is a significant protective factor. Perhaps most notably, Rebecca, is expressing to these individuals that they’re not alone in this process that we call life. And it’s important to engage in the language, so they don’t feel othered, begin to isolate themselves, which only perpetuates the cycle and the risk involved with developing depression, or anxiety, or even post traumatic stress disorder.

John: Going back to Rebecca’s point about people talking past each other, and your earlier discussion of the diverse array of students we have in our classrooms with very different backgrounds. We’re having a reading group on inclusive teaching on our campus, and a major theme from that is encouraging faculty to treat diversity as an asset. Are there any ways that you use to encourage people to express their different identities and to bring that as an asset into the class discussions?

Ken: So a specific exercise and assignment that I try and do in all of my classes, you might be familiar with it, Rebecca and John, is there’s one sheet of paper, and it’s called an identity wheel. And you break it off, and you begin to critically evaluate and do some deep thought about: “Where do you come from? And why do you identify this way?” And how identities change over time, and that is a positive thing. And so I have to talk about one’s core belief system. Before the age of seven, we believe everything that we’re told. And so, often, like-minded people in our communities around the country gather together, that even goes for race. And so, in some ways, that’s close-minded, because you haven’t been exposed. And so, beginning there, at what point did you start to critically challenge yourself, that, “Hmm, what I was actually told, I’m not quite sure if that’s true, or that’s factual? Where did that start?” And then ultimately, “Why did it change? What were you exposed to? Was it a teacher? Was it a peer? Was it a sporting event? Did you go off to some type of camp?” Often the first time that this happens is when they leave their high school and go to college. They’re exposed to individuals of different cultural backgrounds, different religions. It’s like, “Oh, I never even met someone who was from that particular religion.” And so, I think the best way to continue to first, have an understanding of where it comes from, what is our core belief system. Being willing to challenge our core belief system. This is the diversity conversation on how we treat others, but it’s also how we treat ourselves and ultimately, the impact that it has on our mental health. So if we do not have a firm awareness of our core belief system, it really affects the way that we think. Ultimately, it affects the way that we behave, it has an ultimate effect on how we feel. So it’s always a really good starting point to say, “Okay, what do I identify with? How do I identify myself?” Someone says, “Hey Ken, introduce yourself.” Is it, “Hey I’m a veteran, I’m a professor…” Like, that’s a starting point, but I want to get a little bit deeper into that, and to the students, I say, “You don’t necessarily have to share that in the collective, but I have to get you thinking from that frame.” So, that will help you in your academic journey, that will help you in your interpersonal relationships, but it will also help you in your, sort of, professional and your career trajectory in life.

Rebecca: Yeah I love those wheels, a great way to open doors into many conversations and a great thing to do early on in the semester, for sure. We can provide a link to an example of that in the show notes.

John: That was one of the topics in Cornell’s inclusive teaching MOOC that we participated in a number of times and taken faculty through. And that is something that many of our faculty have introduced at the start of the class to help people recognize their identities and their perspectives, and to talk about the value that all these perspectives can bring to the discussion.

Ken: And consistently engaging in this process, talking about the education, it’s also sort of continuing self-exploration. How can I continue to engage in a dialogue with those around me, and not this sort of constant debate, right? The media is filled with debate and competition. We can get a lot further as humanity, not just here in the U.S., but across the world, if we can engage in dialogue about these differences, and how we can continue to sort of build each other up in sort of a united front.

John: Do you have any other suggestions for our listeners?

Ken: You asked the question earlier, “What can we do more of?” And another question that’s floated my way is, “Is there a need for more mental health services?” My answer to that is, I actually think that, in many ways we’ve become, in certain areas we’ve become, specifically in higher education, resource rich. So I think it’s this idea that it needs to be the right services in place. And to all the family members, caregivers, veterans, civilians, who are wondering what they can do, sometimes it’s very simple. It’s call the veteran, call the military member and ask how they’re doing, call the student and ask how they’re doing. Like I say in the veteran community, you never know that that call, it just saved someone’s life. Especially an individual who was going through, potentially, a traumatic situation or is alone by themselves for quite some time at their house and getting that phone call can really change some things around. So I think it’s we, as a collective, need to keep it very simple, and start there and have that dialogue, reach out and be supportive of one another, and then we can start to create those linkages.

Rebecca: Imagine that, just being a nice human being.

Ken: There you go.

John: Your earlier discussion of the need for support for veterans reminds me of a conversation we had a couple weeks ago, in a podcast that related to new federal regulations. Russ Poulin talked about a concern with the way in which the Department of Ed is treating veterans differentially, depending on whether they’re taking online or face-to-face classes. And that’s been a fairly significant issue in the last couple years during the pandemic, especially when more classes moved online, in that the housing allowance was available only for people who were taking at least one face-to-face class. And they could take the others online. But if they were taking all courses online, they were not eligible for the same housing allowance. And that seemed to be a little bit inequitable, especially during a pandemic, when many classes moved online, and some of the funding disappears for people from one semester to the next, depending on the modality of their courses that semester.

Ken: Yeah, this is a big question because it’s a systems issue and what that system is honoring, honoring residential instruction over online instruction. So this is one byproduct of that. Now if you want to look at, first off, COVID has accelerated the use of online, not just online education, but the way that we communicate. And we’ve found out, in some degree, it’s more effective and efficient. Also the quality, the traditional online, is very different from what online looks like today, in both the asynchronous sphere but also the synchronous sphere. And online education is an access issue, right? We’re talking about equality, we also talk about diversity. I see, now as director of online, that it’s a different student who is applying for the online course, a student who may have work experience, like veterans who have served in the military. They also have families, and so it’s very difficult for them to uproot their family, let’s say, from Texas, but they want a Syracuse University education, and financially and their kids are in school. Now we provide them with that opportunity to get the same sort of faculty expertise within the respective department. Also high-level tech and interaction through video conferencing like Zoom that we all use right now. And so when you sort of drill down to it’s like, okay, the quality of instruction is still there. We’re actually reaching a different type of student, not just veterans, but I also see more people of color who are applying for online education. And why is that? And so I think we have to continue to sort of unbundle what’s going on and not create a dichotomy between residential and online education. Obviously, for some professions and what you need to perform, that may look a little different. But overall, with technology, we’ve gotten really creative on how we can deliver this content. In some spaces, online is of higher quality potentially, because of all the tools that you can use at your disposal. So, I think from your question, the BAH, the Basic Allowance for Housing, for folks who are potentially in service, but folks who are using the GI Bill based on geographic location of what they get their BAH from. And we have to look at honoring online education as the same quality as going to get a residential education. It’s a social justice issue.

Rebecca: Indeed, and something we all need to advocate for.

John: One of the things I’ve noticed in my online classes, and I’ve been doing this for 20-some years now, is that a relatively large proportion of the students in my online classes are active duty personnel. I had one student who, during the Iraq War, apologized for not being able to participate because they were on radio silence. He was on a ship there, and he was not able to communicate because there was an attack that was about to take place. And many of these students were among the best students I’ve ever had, they were really focused, they were really disciplined. They always got their work done on time, and it was always really enjoyable having active duty service people in class because they set a great example for other students. And online education has opened up many more possibilities for people in the military to build a foundation that often continues after their service ends. Could you talk a little bit about that role?

Ken: I’ll backtrack a bit. So I served as an Air Force officer with individuals on the enlisted side who served with me, who did not have a college degree, who might have joined right out of high school where the traditional high school student goes off to college, right, at 17, 18 years old. And what I’ve found is, they are my right and left hand. And they’ve been doing, you know, mental health intake assessments, free screenings, briefing me on the particular case, whether it was an alcohol and drug case, or a family-advocacy case, or a military case where I would get the file and I met with him for 45 minutes prior. And done incredible work in prevention and outreach—whether it pertains to PTSD awareness, mental health, suicide—and then I realized that these folks have real-world, real-life experience. But when they get discharged, or when they transition out of the military, they don’t have a piece of paper to show for it. So they have to go back and then get a whole four-year degree. In addition, in some cases, 10, 15, 20 years of this military experience. And so what online education provides, is an opportunity for, if they’re in uniform, they can begin, potentially part time, taking courses at a reputable institution, because they’re qualified to do so, not alienating them from doing that. And so I’ll use Syracuse as an example. I’m down in Louisiana and I really want to attend and get a Syracuse University education. I can have the opportunity to take online courses while I’m in the military. So when that transition does occur, I’m not only prepared with my real-world experience, but I also have the system backing of what that degree provides for a particular profession. And that’s a significant asset for our military and veteran population and their family members, because their family members are also residing with them, whether it’s on the installation, or on post, or off post in that geographic location, which may even be overseas. So thank you for bringing that up, John. I think that we have to continue to have conversations about access to education, and what that truly means for our military veteran populations, but even our everyday civilians.

Rebecca: I can imagine, too, the ability to have that consistency. Being able to take classes from the same institution when you might be moving around, or changing location, could be really helpful, because that helps have something be consistent.

Ken: Absolutely. And they can start online part time at an institution. And I’ve seen this situation occur, and they can even go residential, if they so choose, on campus when they do transition out of the military. So it gives them a sort of foundation or a head start, so they’re not starting from the first day of college once they get out of the military.

Rebecca: After a really different amount of experience, right, like someone coming straight from high school into a college situation. That goes back to your earlier point about having a first-year student in a college setting being in really two different moments in their life.

Ken: Absolutely. And the experiences are different, but I’ll tell you the symptoms are the same. So when that 18-year-old goes off to college and leaves his or her home for the first time and goes into the dorm room, there’s anxiety involved. There might be some level of depressed mood or lack of concentration, adjustment-related issues, mixed features in some way. Same thing goes for that 18-year-old I saw in my office in uniform. There is anxiety that goes along. There’s depression, right, there’s adjustment-related, there’s phase-of-life circumstances, which is completely appropriate. It’s good that they’re coming to seek these services, to sort of work through them, for longer-term success in one’s life.

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

Ken: What’s next for me is that I have a book called Diary of a Disposable Soldier. I’m close to getting it published. And on a weekly basis, I would go over to the Syracuse VA Medical Center in the cafeteria and meet with a veteran who was disabled, unable to type for oneself but could ultimately speak. He had found a diary that he had when he served in combat operations in Vietnam. And so he had, after 50 years, had come to grips that he wanted to tell his story. And so I’ve helped him along with several other individuals, get this work completed. Unfortunately, he passed in December. And so it’s my mission, in the coming weeks and months, to get this published and get it out there for friends, for family, folks that he’s served with in Vietnam, and other individuals who are curious about one’s experience during the Vietnam War.

Rebecca: Sounds like a really important and powerful work we can all look forward to reading soon. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It was really great hearing your perspective and thinking through so many important issues related to veterans but also just to our wider community.

Ken: Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, John, so much. Wish you both a wonderful weekend.

John: Thank you for joining us.

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

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

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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206. U.S. Regulations for Online Classes

To be eligible for U.S. federal financial aid funding, colleges and universities offering distance learning programs must satisfy new federal regulations that went into effect in July 2020 and July 2021.  In this episode, Russell Poulin joins us to discuss how these requirements have changed and what these changes mean for faculty and institutions offering online classes.

Russ is the Executive Director of the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), and the Vice President for Technology Enhanced Education at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: To be eligible for U.S. federal financial aid funding, colleges and universities offering distance learning programs must satisfy new federal regulations that went into effect in July 2020 and July 2021. In this episode, we examine how these requirements have changed and what these changes mean for faculty and institutions offering online classes.

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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: Judie Littlejohn is joining us as a guest host for this episode. Judie is the instructional designer for Genesee Community College, and has been a guest on several of our past episodes.

Judie: And our guest today is Russ Poulin. Russ is the Executive Director of the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), and the Vice President for Technology Enhanced Education at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which, of course is WICHE. Welcome, Russ.

Russell: Oh, it’s so great to be here. Thanks for asking me.

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

Russell: Oh, yes, I’m drinking tea and I live in Longmont, Colorado, which is near Boulder and we have Celestial Seasonings here, and so, I’m drinking Earl Grey that has probiotics in it. That’s a new product for them.

Judie: So you have Earl Grey, but I’ve got Lady Grey black tea from Twinings.

Russell: Oh, very nice!

John: And I have pineapple ginger green tea from the Republic of Tea. We’ve invited you here to discuss the new federal regulations concerning regular and substantive interaction in distance-learning courses. These regulations went into effect in July 2021. We also would like to talk a little bit about the requirements for identity verification that went into effect a year earlier, but before we discuss this, could you tell us a little bit about WCET?

Russell: Oh, I’d love to, and thank you for asking. And so WCET is part of WICHE, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which is a regional higher education compact focused on the west, but back in 1989, they started WCET to focus on educational technologies, distance ed, online learning – which wasn’t a thing yet then – and, even from the start, we had other states that came in, and now we’ve grown and now we have, members through all 50 states and Canada and even Australia. And our members, are institutions and organizations and corporations interested in the use of distance ed.

Judie: How did WCET become the go-to source for information on regular and substantive interaction?

Russell: Well, we were hearing from members that there was some confusion about exactly what they were supposed to do with this, and that there wasn’t complete clear guidance from the US Department of Education and so Van Davis, who worked at Blackboard at that time, and now works for us here at WCET. And what we did was that we went through all of the guidance, there were some guidance that had been given, and also the findings against several institutions and then tried to put together what is it that they were looking for? What is it that is expected? And then we put together a blog post of our findings, and put that out there, and for like, four or five years, no matter what else we published, that ended up being the top blog post for the year because people were seeing that that was the only place where somebody had compiled this all together and knew what to do. And then in 2019, I was named to the Department of Education’s negotiated rulemaking subcommittee that worked on new rules, and there are people who actually get together and write these rules – you can imagine how exciting that is – and I was part of that and worked on it. And one of the issues that we worked on was this distance education issue and updating this regular and substantive interaction part of it and so you could say I was in the room where it happened! [LAUGHTER]

John: So basically, there was a gap out there that needed to be filled, and there was a lot of concern because of the sanctions that were placed against Western Governors University?

Russell: Yeah, it’d been unclear, and then also yeah, there was these findings against Western Governors University that their courses were all correspondence courses, and that they were expected to pay back – really, when you got to the end of it – it was a billion dollars which they didn’t have in their pockets at the time, and so it really caught the attention of a lot of people and this was a rule that was first written in 1992, had incomplete guidance. It was being administered in different ways and so it was time for a real update and more details about what is it exactly that they’re expecting? And so we worked on that, and we also were able to put in that there’s greater reliance in terms of the relationship between the accrediting agency and the institution, because there were times where it seemed like the auditors were sort of overruling that, and that doesn’t make sense because if you’re meeting what the accreditors want, why is this out of balance?

Judie: So what is needed, then, to differentiate a correspondence course from a credit-bearing online course?

Russell: So, it’s really good to go back and make that distinction and remind people that this is all about federal financial aid and what qualifies for federal financial aid. And they always want to get into, “Well… interaction, the academics, and the pedagogy of it.” Well, okay, put that aside [LAUGHTER] for the moment, we’re talking about, for federal purposes, what qualifies for federal aid and what does not? And the idea was that distance education is something that qualifies for full federal aid, whereas correspondence response education… that you might not get full aid for those courses or if you have enough correspondence students or enough correspondence courses… if over 50% of your students or courses are labeled as correspondence… then your institution is now ineligible for aid, and that’s what happened with Western Governors University. And so, it’s good to be clear, especially as we’re seeing more and more distance ed, hyflex, hybrid sorts of courses about what fits and what does not, and what activities work. We need to know what happens, so that we know that we’re in line, so that we keep our federal financial aid for students.

John: The technology for offering online courses has changed quite a bit since the initial regulations were developed. Under the current revisions, what is meant by interaction in that definition of regular and substantive interaction?

Russell: Yeah, that’s a good point that this rule was written in 1992, prior to online learning [LAUGHTER]. There’s been a lot of changes. But you really do need to parse out the parts of it, and so thanks for asking about the interaction part of it because back in the old definition, prior to July 1, that there’s this really odd thing that, the only thing that counted for interaction was something that was done by the instructor. So, providing a lecture, providing a video, providing an assessment or providing an assignment, any of those sorts of things. Those are the only things that counted, so our interaction here… “Yeah, you said something and I’m the instructor that didn’t count what you said” That’s weird. So, now, there are parts of it (freshly hidden in the regular part of the definition) that if you go down there, that you’ll see that there’s the expectation that you respond to students and student requests. So, at least we’ve made that move that the student being part of the interaction is now a part of what counts, and that’s the great move forward.

Judie: And what is expected for substantive interaction, like how do you define the substantive part?

Russell: So going back again to the old one, that it was all just about content, that if you’re teaching a history course, as one might, that you’re talking about what happened in a particular battle, or what happened in 1792, or those sorts of things, particular things about the course, and interactions about basketball or other extraneous things didn’t count. But under the new rule, we’ve gone to an activity-based notion of it, and I’m going to read these, so stay with me on this, and they’re very short. So one, one of the activities is providing direct instruction. Two, is assessing or providing feedback on coursework. Three is providing information or responding to questions about the content or competencies. Four is facilitating a group discussion. Five is other instructional activities, as approved by the accreditor, that’s a really wide open one. But for these that, if you have any type of online course, I sure hope that you’re assessing what the students are doing, I sure hope that you’re responding to them when they ask questions, and so, you’ve already got two of those right there. The one that’s really in question is the one about direct instruction, and…everyplace else they talk about synchronous or asynchronous, but I know through some things that we learned about the Department of Ed’s thinking of that, and we asked this question directly of them during a webinar about direct instruction. At that time, they said that it was only synchronous education, and sometimes people freak out when I say that, and we are asking for clarification on that in writing, but remember that it’s two of the five, so even if they define it as just synchronous instruction, you’re probably meeting at least three of those five already if you have any type of quality course.

John: One of the issues, I think, that you’re also seeking to resolve is whether synchronous online office hours would count. Has there been any feedback on that yet?

Russell: Yeah, it seemed to us quite clear about the office hours, that that is something that would count and it’s something that did not count in the past. And so, it’s an interesting change for that and one of the reasons that they did that was one of the groups I was representing was competency-based education, and so, we’re going to get into notion of regular here in a moment, you know, how do you define regular for something that, by definition, is irregular in terms of competency based? And it’s based upon student pacing over the faculty pacing, and so, there’s a nod to that in terms of if you have regular office hours and have that posted on the syllabus or somewhere that that would count. And we’ve had some pushback from our financial aid friends, because that’s new to them. They said, “Well, that’s never counted before.” And so again, this is something where we’ve asked the question of the department and hope to get that in writing yet again so that that’s reaffirmed and everybody’s under the same understanding for that one.

Judie: You started to talk about regular, so how do you define “regular” interaction?

Russell: So regular? Yeah, as I was alluding to, that was the hardest one to do, because remember, we’re writing these for, depending on how you count, four to six thousand institutions. Some have short courses, some have competency-based, you think of every variation that you have out there. So saying “meeting once a week,” or doing something once a week just didn’t work because it didn’t fit all those different ones, and once a week would not be enough in a five- or six-week course, that’d be too little. So, we tried a formula and that was a disaster. So anyway, so we have these words, and then there’s a lot more, again, back to the relationship with the accreditor on this and what works. So, these are a little bit vague, but you need to work with your accreditor and how they’re defining these. So there’s really two parts to this. The first is going to be predictable and scheduled, and so this is something where either you have it in your syllabus, and then you have the syllabus at the start and here’s when things are going to happen, and then with that, that you may actually have a two- or three-week break where an instructor is not putting things out or you don’t have interactions, because it makes academic sense that you have the people out doing a paper or group work for two to three weeks and doing that. So that once a week would actually not work there, right? Or the predictable part of it was that maybe it’s not exactly in the syllabus, but what you do is you say, “Every Wednesday, we’re gonna meet or have office hours, or we’ll do something at webinar times.” So something predictable. So, that’s the first part of it. The second part of it was about monitoring the students’ academic engagement. And that was something we really brought in with competency-based education in mind, where what you’re doing is that you are actively following the student and making sure that they’re not out there on their own, and that you’re making sure that the student’s not floating and that you’re seeing that, “Okay, do they need interaction? Do they need some intervention?” Or the second part of that is what I alluded to before, or that the student says, “Okay, I need help with this,” or “I’m ready to move on to the next part of my competencies.” So that’s the other part of it is the bringing that together in terms of monitoring the engagement, so something that’s predictable, scheduled, and then also, outside of that, that you’re actually monitoring and interacting with the student.

John: Are there any requirements concerning the extent to which there should be interactions with individual students as compared to interactions with the class as a whole?

Russell: Well, both of them count. So if you’re giving a lecture, or if you’re doing a group discussion and doing that, that that’s a group thing, and so that counts. And also, remember, the second part of the regular was that you are responding to student requests, and so that’s on an individual basis. And when there is a federal financial aid review, or ”audit” as it’s called, of your institution, what they’ll do is they’ll go and take a sample of classes, and that they’ll look to see what happened in that course? Were there group interactions? Were there individual interactions? That they’ll look to see what happened and then they’ll look to see, does it meet the regulations? And have you developed faculty? Have you let them know that these are the expectations of them? That they’re looking for those sorts of things, and did it actually have an effect in the courses?

Judie: So what would be some examples of regular and substantive interaction that we could build into a course?

Russell: Yeah, that’s a really good question. You’re an instructional designer, you plan the whole course out, right? And you’re going to get more points on the regular side for the predictable and scheduled if you have a syllabus, that… it doesn’t have to be detailed down to every last thing that you’re going to do… but at least you’re showing that what are the expectations along the way? That, when are you going to have assessments? That, if you’re – let’s say that for some courses – that you’ll send out a video with a different lesson every Monday or every Friday, what you’re doing is that you’re hitting the marks on the regular, another is that you are showing that you have some expectations, in terms of the feedback and the feedback loop. And sometimes institutions have this as a policy, sometimes they leave it to the faculty member. But the more classes that you have where you show that the faculty person… you don’t have to respond immediately… but they’re showing that they will respond in 72 hours, not counting a weekend… that they will respond to the students. And there’s that expectation that they will do that because I had a question from one, that they had a faculty member that they put the discussion out there at the start of semester and then graded it at the end of the semester [LAUGHTER]. And first of all, that’s terrible teaching practice, let’s start with that, nevermind the regulations, but that faculty person thought it was good. And the other is, that there’s this expectation that, as you go along that you’re working with the students. So those are some examples of things that you’d want to do there.

Judie: So just a couple of different things that I like to try here is, I really like to try to encourage faculty to give feedback prior to the next due date. That just makes sense, so that if a student is making an error, they’re not going to repeat the same error because they haven’t gotten their feedback yet. So I just think, pedagogically, it makes sense to give the feedback as soon as possible. But I also like to just have faculty create a communication plan when they’re developing their course. I think faculty plan in their heads, you know, “I’m going to send this announcement, I’ll do this feedback, I’ll do X, Y, and Z.” But when they sit down and really map it out in a communication plan for their course, I think that really helps get into that regular schedule. And whether it’s date driven, or day-of-the-week driven or at specific points throughout the course when students reach different milestones, I think that really helps them. My understanding is that those types of things would help people meet the regular and substantive interaction definition. What do you think of that?

Russell: I love both of those ideas, and actually that, really, if you work with the instructional designers, look at what works in terms of good pedagogy, that these are the things that you’re talking about is that having a plan ahead of time and being open with the students so that they know, and then getting back to the students in between assessments so they have the feedback in terms of, they know where they might be falling behind a little bit in some areas and so that they know, “Oh, I don’t quite get that concept. And then, I have a math background and that was so key in mathematics that, if you don’t get this one, you’re not going to do any better on the next test right? And that’s probably true in so many different fields as well. And so, I love both of those ideas in terms of doing things and where you’re informing the student, and then keeping them engaged and then constantly moving them forward.

Judie: It’s great to hear that kind of feedback from you, thanks! [LAUGHTER] I hear a lot from faculty now, especially during COVID, when many are teaching in Zoom. And so they’ll record a live lecture with their students and, assuming that FERPA rules are followed, and there’s no students caught in the video or audio, they want to just show that recording again in the next semester, and want to know if they’re meeting regular and substantive interaction that way. And I tell them that, when they’re giving their lecture, that is regular and substantive interaction when they’re engaged with their live students. But I say that once you make a recording, and put it in the course, it becomes course content, because it’s no longer a unique experience with those individuals talking about their understanding of the course content. And I see like a real fine line there and I wonder what you think of that? Or how that might be interpreted? What do you think of using old recordings versus always expecting some sort of fresh and unique interaction with the students?

Russell: Yeah, I think if that’s all that you did, I think that you’d have a hard time in terms of meeting the regular and substantive interaction, and this is the one where we get back to the direct instruction question on that one, and we did gather that question plus several others and pose them to the Department of Education, because we felt that even since they released the rule that we were hearing different things from them than from the accreditors. And so I’m a little hesitant to give you a yes, that works or not, under the new rules or not until we get a better answer from the Department. My feeling was that, under the old rules that I felt a little bit better about that that probably was problematic. It might still be, but I’m kind of curious to see what they say about the synchronous versus asynchronous going forward. I think that, if that’s all that you relied on, I think that that’d be problematic that you would need to have other sorts of interactions that might make that work.

Judie: Thanks.

John: But videos that were custom created for that week’s activities, or that provide feedback for the class would count, right?

Russell: Yeah, the ones that are custom created.

Judie: I encourage them to make like small targeted videos for clarification. Like, to address a specific topic that they know that students struggle with, as opposed to just making an hour video of you standing at the front of the classroom, talking to people that future students don’t even know.

Russell: Yeah, and I think if you just use the video over and over again, and I certainly saw this in some engineering courses where they’re using the same ones that, what happens is that you have to update your materials every once in a while, too [LAUGHTER].

Judie: Oh, sure

Russell: You need to be doing that. And so I remember witnessing a course where they were falling behind on some facts or raised a lot of questions about advances that had happened after the video had happened, or were quite clearly dated, because they were talking about things that were going on in space as a future thing, instead of a past thing. And so I think, if nothing else, that you’re going beyond whether you meet these rules or not, that you’re diminishing confidence of students in terms of the value of what they’re receiving.

Judie: Sure, that’s a good point.

Russell: One other issue that we didn’t touch on so far had to do with the definition of an instructor, and that was a difficult one for us. And that was another one that Western Governors University got hit on this one. It was a finding against them. And that it seemed like some of the definitions meant like an instructor, that there was one person that was in front, and that a lot of institutions have gone to team teaching or bundled instruction, or using GAs or TAs or there’s several people in the course and with the unbundled instruction that WGU did that they had one content expert providing the content of the course and another one doing the assessment and maybe somebody else doing some of the advising. So you broke it up and that they weren’t counting that even though it was approved by their accrediting agency. So that is one where we have worked on “instructor” and we’re very clear in this, that it is what is approved by the accrediting agency that that is what counts. T hat was sort of alluded to before, now it’s very clear. And so if you have a non-traditional sort of model for your instructors or faculties, you may want to talk to your accrediting agency about how they view that and get something in writing about that.

John: I think that is a pretty common issue where there’s often a master course developed by the content expert and then again, there are instructional teams that work on the whole course, but the division there can vary quite a bit. And I know there’s a lot of interest in institutions in trying to scale online education to make it more efficient, and this is an area that certainly needs to be addressed with the accrediting agencies.

Russell: Definitely, definitely, yeah.

Judie: So these rules that we’ve been talking about also addressed student identity verification. So is the student identity verification related to the regular and substantive interaction? Or is this another area that requires a more precise definition?

Russell: This is actually a whole other area that was in a different part of the regulations, and this is one that actually went into effect in July of 2020, and it’s part of what the accrediting rules are, and there’s a whole list of things that the accrediting agencies are supposed to be looking for when they’re doing your accrediting reviews. One of the things that they’re supposed to be doing is making sure that the institution has, really, policies and processes to make sure that the student who enrolls in the course is the same one who’s completing and submitting the assignments in there. So it really is about academic cheating, and that this is only in the distance-ed world that they have to do this. I have to tell you, in a subcommittee, we tried to expand it and got beat back. So, sorry we lost that fight for you. But it’s still in distance ed where the accreditors are expected to check for that to make sure. And then the big change that happened in that is that, previously, there were some, what were considered ‘“examples” in there. And one was that you had some sort of ID, some sort of login ID for that or that you did proctoring, and that those were meant as examples. And those were taken out, because all too often, what would happen is that an institution would say, “Well, we have an ID!” and they would do nothing else. And so that was clearly insufficient in terms of doing it, and so, they’re raising the bar. The intent is that you have a plan, and that you’re executing the plan, and that you’ve worked that out with your accreditor, and that when that financial aid review happens, that you will be able to demonstrate what you’re doing and if it’s effective. Another part of it, there’s a second section to it, that also talks about that if you have additional costs, and so, let’s say that you’re using a proctoring software, and that that costs so much per student, that you have to notify the student at time of registration, that there’s an extra cost for that. And this is something that a lot of institutions have fallen short on, because what they’ll do is that they’ll notify the student in the syllabus, and so the first day that the student starts they see the syllabus, and all of a sudden they have to pay more money. And the idea is that the student should be able to have a choice at the time they’re picking between which course that they might take or know that they’re going to have an additional cost for participating in that course. And that rule is out there, and it’s a good one, because you’re being clearer to the consumer about what’s going on.

John: So authentication with a password to a course management system is not sufficient, and some type of proctoring software is, but there’s a lot of concerns raised with proctoring. Are there any other ways to authenticate students that meet the requirements without moving to software proctoring solutions?

Russell: Yeah, and I think that over the last year that we’ve seen, the concerns about proctoring software have risen to the fore, and there’s some good ones and that they do some good things, and so you should not throw them all out. But yet, you should pay attention to the concerns about that. But there are ways that we have worked on this in terms of different ways that faculty can work in terms of their assessments. One of the things we talked about is face-to-face proctoring, As distance ed grows, though, that gets to be harder and harder to find enough proctoring sites and the ability to do that, but that is an option. Some of the other things that have been proposed have to do with how you do assessments, and that having more frequent assessments and doing things where it’s easier to take the course than it is to cheat. That if you do like one or two big assessments per term, that it’s a lot easier to get someone to do those for you or the big papers and all that, so that’s one. There’s others where getting people involved in terms of group coursework, or other sorts of authentic assessment type of things, where you get involved in different sorts of things, where you have to stay engaged more and more often through the course, and it’s harder to get somebody else to do that for you. There are people who will take the whole course for you… that’s a problem. But the more barriers that you can put up, and we really do love our instructional designers, but the more that we can do to help faculty with thinking about assessment strategies and effective assessment strategies, the better off that will be with all of this. Aso there are other areas like… oh shoot, I’m blanking on… ICAI, they have a lot of strategies as well out there, and for some reason, it’s early in the morning here and I’m blanking on their name, but there’s an institute for academic integrity that has a lot of good resources on this issue.

Judie: Yeah, I think it’s great to encourage all faculty to work with their instructional designers on authentic assessment.

Russell: Yes, yes, yes! That success will be more sure if you work with your instructional designer.

Judie: So, do you think that this authentication concern is only for assessments? Or is it for day-to-day coursework and interactions, too?

Russell: Yeah, it’s really about any type of quiz or paper or anything that you’re going to be evaluating the student on. That’s really what it’s looking at, because there’s the opportunity for cheating or something bad to happen there. So there are other things that you do in terms of papers, you know, with Turnitin or other sorts of activities that people do or trying to create papers that are more authentic or real: “Write something about your hometown or work on a project in your hometown where there’s not a lot of papers.” [LAUGHTER] So, you can do those sorts of things where it’s harder to plagiarize.

John: It’s really nice to hear that open pedagogy projects, videos that students create, where they’re actively engaged in it, group projects, and all those things can serve the same role without moving to the extreme of proctoring.

Russell: Yes.

John: It is good to note that any courses that require proctoring must list that up front so that students are aware of the cost. And the other issue with that is, as colleges enroll more first-gen students and more students from the lower income quintile, many students won’t have computers or networks that will necessarily support proctoring software. If students are working on their course through their smartphones, most proctoring solutions don’t work with smartphones. But it’s pretty easy for the student to take a video of themselves talking about something, so allowing faculty to have more options for authentication is something that allows for a more inclusive learning environment.

Russell: That was a huge lesson from the move to remote learning due to the pandemic, that you had so many students who did not plan to be in a remote course that uses online tools… that they were using, as you said, cell phones or different types of tablets that were not compatible with some of these proctoring software solutions, or that they didn’t have the adequate bandwidth for taking the test in that way with a full video… that that was a real problem, privacy issues with it. So there were all sorts of things that were problematic with that. And so, being upfront with the students is very good and we do often cite that there wasn’t a federal finding, but it was a student in Nevada, who was in a course and they were not notified that they were going to be using proctoring software. The student was pre-law, decided to flex his pre-law muscles, and got a whole bunch of students behind him and took it to the institution and ultimately went to the Board of Regents there, and all of those students had all of their fees repaid. It wasn’t a federal finding, but what was shown was that they were out of compliance with the federal rule, and the Board of Regents decided to remedy that.

Judie: So looking at regulations like this, we can see that online classes are held to a higher standard than face-to-face classes. Do you think similar requirements should also be implemented for face-to-face classes?

Russell: Well, I think what’s happening is that the vast majority of courses are now digital courses. And whether it is fully online, whether it’s hybrid, hyflex, blended, or just the old term that the OLC used to use of “web enhanced,” that you use the web a lot, even though that you meet face to face Monday-Wednesday-Friday, that we’re seeing all these digital tools going throughout. And what happened with the pandemic? It really took off, right? And so there’s even more of that is gonna happen. And some surveys that one of our organizations, Every Learner Everywhere did, that there was more interest and uptake from faculty in terms of, “Well, I’ve done this now I should do it again.” And so I think what’s happened is that we’re gonna see more and more use of digital technologies through, if not every course, the vast majority of courses. Well, the thing that happens is that these same sorts of problems are in all of these. And you and I know, keep this as our secret between us [LAUGHTER] but, all this stuff was happening even without technologies, right?

Judie: Right.

Russell: A lot of the cheating scandals in some of the service academies in the last few years had very little to do with technologies other than sharing some information. So we know that’s going on. So it’s gonna be interesting. This is one of the things that we’re looking at that I bet we’re going to see a lot of new guidance coming out of this Department of Education that recognizes that and may expand this out quite a bit more, because there are people in the department who have huge concerns about consumer protection issues and the use of online or digital learning regardless of where it’s used, and that they’re seeing that some of these rules need to be applied more broadly. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see that we get guidance that says exactly that coming out and that we have James Kvaal was just finally approved as the Undersecretary there. I think that that staff has been working on these sorts of things, and have been waiting for him to be approved. I would not be surprised that in the next three to six months that we don’t start seeing some new guidance coming out or answers to our questions. I don’t think they wanted to answer our questions until James Kvaal was in. And so I think that we’ll see clarifications and guidance about some of these things where we’ve had questions before, and how do they apply in a hyflex setting? How do they apply in a blended setting?

Judie: That’s good news.

John: And whether the rules are expanded or not, they’re just good practice… that regular and substantive interaction is good pedagogy.

RUSSEL: Yes! [LAUGHTER] Yeah, you really nailed it with that. And that was one of the things that surely the people that run the subcommittee and then the main committee were trying to look at: “What do we do that makes sense in terms of best serving the students?” And we have to remember at the end that these are consumer-protection practices that have to do that, there are also federal-financial-aid protections that aid is going to worthy activities, and so we need to remember that in all this.

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

Russell: Well, I kind of previewed thata bit, that I really do believe that we’re likely to see several more clarifications coming out, or maybe some surprises coming out in the next few months. And so I think it would be good for people to pay attention to what’s going on, and we certainly write about whatever comes out in our WCET Frontiers blogs. So, be watching for that. And on something completely different, that we’re getting together some folks to work on the issue about veterans and their housing allowance. And just quickly on that, that veterans who take all their courses online, get about half or a little bit more of the housing allowance of veterans who take just one course face to face… they could have it all online, but just one course face to face. And it really is antiquated thinking, and it’s something that we need to get fixed. Because, I could be the same student in one term, take all my courses online, and the next term take just one course face to face. I have the same housing cost, I have the same family [LAUGHTER] I still need to eat, but somehow my aid is less. And so we’re working on that one.

John: And you shared many resources with us that we’ll include in the show notes, so those will be available on the website. Well, thank you for joining us, this was really helpful, and I think it’s going to benefit a lot of institutions and a lot of faculty and instructional designers as they plan for future semesters.

Russell: Well, it was a great pleasure being here with you today, and having a little bit of tea in the morning is always good. And so thank you, Judie, thank you, John for inviting me and for having me here.

Judie: Yes, thank you. This was fun. Take care.

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

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

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192. Skim, Dive, Surface

Digital texts and materials have been increasingly used in college classes. In this episode Jenae Cohn joins us to explore some of the affordances of digital texts and discuss strategies for effectively engaging with digital material. Jenae is the Director of Academic Technology at California State University Sacramento and the author of Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading, which has been recently released by West Virginia University Press.

Shownotes

  • Cohn, J. (2021). Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading. West Virginia University Press.
  • Christina Haas (1997). Writing Technology: Studies In The Materiality Of Literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1996
  • Smale, M. A. (2020). “It’s a lot to take in.” Undergraduate Experiences with Assigned Reading. CUNY Academic Works. 1-10.
  • Smale, M. A., & Regalado, M. (2016). Digital technology as affordance and barrier in higher education. Springer.
  • Hypothesis
  • Perusall
  • Power Notes
  • Kalir, R., & Garcia, A. (2019). Annotation. MIT Press.

Transcript

John: Digital texts and materials have been increasingly used in college classes. In this episode we explore some of the affordances of digital texts and discuss strategies for effectively engaging with digital material.

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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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Rebecca: Our guest today is Jenae Cohn. She is the Director of Academic Technology at California State University Sacramento and the author of Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading, which has been recently released by West Virginia University Press as part of the superb series on teaching and learning, edited by James Lang. Welcome, Jenae.

Jenae: Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks for having me.

John: We’re glad to talk to you again.

Jenae: Such fun.

John: And we’re really glad to see your book out. When we last talked to you, you were finishing it up but we didn’t actually get to see it. So this time, we’ve had a chance to actually read it before talking to you.

Jenae: Oh, I’m so thrilled you’ve had a chance to read it. It’s so exciting to get to talk to people about it, finally.

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

Jenae: I am drinking tea today. I’ve got an English Breakfast tea.

Rebecca: I’ve got a Scottish afternoon tea. So, do you have something for the evening, John? [LAUGHTER]

John: No, I actually have English Breakfast tea from Tea Pigs, which is a new tea company for me. It was a gift.

Rebecca: That’s an unusual choice.

John: It’s very good, actually.

Jenae: I’m always up for new tea recommendations. I have a whole tea shelf. I was really born ready for this podcast. So I am wishing I had some Sleepy Time now to complete the full…

Rebecca: I know, right?

Jenae: …section of daytime to nighttime. That’s alright, it’s still morning here for me. So, I wasn’t quite ready for that yet. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I go straight for the afternoon, even in the morning. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Skim, Dive, Surface. Digital content has been really increasing in our college classes for some time. And there are some affordances of digital content that print content doesn’t have, like OER and some accessibility features, etc. Can you talk a little bit about some of the affordances of digital content?

Jenae: Sure, I’d be glad to. And I love that we’re starting from this place of affordances., ‘cause I think often enough in our teaching, we can make choices about what we use based on our prior experiences, or what we found comfortable. And I would love to see us having a measured conversation about what we get when we make these choices, to be really mindful about the kinds of choices that we make. So, to me, one of the greatest affordances of thinking about adopting digital text is their flexibility. Digital texts can be modified and they can be transformed on different kinds of devices and using different kinds of applications. So when you’re encountering a printed book, something that publishers and writers really love is that you can really control the experience. And sometimes there’s real pleasure in seeing that really controlled experience. But, for a student, for a teaching context, being able to modify the size or the shape of the text, to modify the spacing, to be able to cut and paste and remix things, that can really be of tremendous benefit on the learning side of things. Rebecca, you mentioned equity-based concerns around digital reading as well. And I think that’s, to me, the hugest motivation to doing this work. We know that, according to EDUCAUSE data that’s been collected for years, we know that mobile device usage in college classrooms is nearly ubiquitous at this point. Mobile devices are not a luxury device, they are the standard device that students use. And they’ll often choose to use a mobile phone for their learning more than a laptop, more than buying scores of heavy textbooks. So the more that we can make our learning experiences accessible on mobile, the easier it is for us to be able to reach students who, again, may not have access to more than one device or who may not have the budget to be buying all their books, who might be doing a lot of their learning on a bus on their way to campus, for example. When people start repopulating campuses, one thing I think we’ve learned in the Covid-19 pandemic is that mobile phones were often a more stable source of WiFi internet connection than home wireless access was. So we also knew that from a kind of a download access perspective too, mobile really provided a lot of touch points that made access to materials even easier. But I sometimes struggle to read on a mobile phone. That’s not how I learned to read. But there are some things that I read all the time on my mobile phone. So the more that we can think about, again, what’s possible in those spaces, the transportability, the adaptability, the flexibility, the more we can start to think inventively about how we’re distributing and thinking about access in those spaces.

John: You mentioned mobile devices as a platform for student reading. And that’s especially true for first-generation students and students from lower income households, who face some of the greater challenges in being successful and continuing their studies. So I think that adds to that equity component, And one of the reasons we’ve been pushing for this on our campus… and I think this is true everywhere… is that, in general, text in digital format is easier to distribute to students through the LMS so they have day one access, where if you have physical textbooks, generally students have to pay for them, and sometimes that’s a bit of a struggle for students in coming up with the funds to require textbooks. And certainly with OER, but with digital materials in general, you can have them there so that all students start from an equitable standpoint.

Jenae: Absolutely. It’s a great point that often our OERs are digitized, which makes them more affordable when we’re concerned with student budgets. Not all digital texts are affordable, but the other piece I’d like to mention here, that I think I always appreciate underscoring is that a lot of libraries have way more access to digital collections through the kinds of publication packages that they purchase. I think we forget about the amazing resources our librarians are thinking about. And so many of our librarians are educators who are being really thoughtful about what they’re procuring online, there’s also this real potential if we’re willing to accept that good, deep, close, mindful reading can happen on screen that we really get this world of new things that might be opened up to vis-a-vis collaborating with our librarians, and thinking about what kinds of types of texts or resources might be really well suited for the kinds of educational goals we might have.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that I discovered from doing some interviews with students about their experience learning during the pandemic, is that access to textbooks was actually a really big problem, because some of them depended on course reserves and things physically in the library. And then when they went home during remote learning, and then maybe even any online courses afterwards, they just had a lot less access, because, previously, they might have shared a physical book with other students even so that it was more affordable,

Jenae: Right, absolutely. I think libraries had to be really creative in giving students that access that maybe we took for granted, when we were thinking about the campus from a brick and mortar only perspective. And especially when it comes to books and reading, we kind of come by the attachment to the printed books quite honestly. Decades of survey research suggests that students and faculty alike prefer and find, or at least think that, they read more effectively by print. Librarians have researched this, literacy scholars have researched this, neuroscientists have researched this, and they’ve all basically found the same result. So I think there’s been a lot of behavior that has been driven around that data. And I don’t mean to suggest that we should ignore that data, I think there’s probably lots of people who do read more closely and more analytically when they have a paper book in front of them. I don’t think that data means that it’s impossible to read in a digital space effectively well, we really just have to be thinking about strategies that work for it and assignments that are aligned.

Rebecca: As a designer, I appreciate the physical artifact of a book. And I was really, really, actually very resistant to reading online, but wasn’t for pleasure, which is really weird, because I’m a digital designer. I design websites, I design apps, that’s the kind of design I do. And I was really resistant to that for all of those kinds of emotional reasons probably. And it wasn’t really until the last couple years that I started using a digital format for more scholarly work or research. I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner. I’m discovering all of the affordances that I should have known as a designer who designed things digitally, [LAUGHTER] it’s just you get into habits and you don’t think of these things. So can you talk a little bit about some of the reasons why students find reading digitally more challenging than in a print format?

Jenae: Sure, there are a number of things that come up when students read online. One of them is what rhetorician Christina Haas studied a long time ago, back in the early 90s, actually. So we’ve been thinking about digital reading for quite some time. But she found in some small scale studies of student reading behaviors online that students lost what she coined “text sense” this ability to sort of locate and recall information based on where they appeared spatially. So one real challenge is when you read online, and you’re moving from kind of the logic of a codex, a traditional printed or bound book, which sort of moves from left to right in a certain kind of way, is a linear narrative order. When you move from that to what is typically sort of a scroll when you read on a screen, that creates a different sense of spatial awareness of where you might find that information. So it can be harder to remember, for example, where a certain key point was made, where you don’t have the materiality of paper to dog ear a page, for example, to create a kind of tactile difference in where you find information. That can be a challenge. So you do have to come up with some new strategies for simple memory and comprehension recall. The other research in this space, again, especially from cognitive psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that in small time studies people of all ages, young and old, do tend to remember information better from print, again, especially if it’s short recall, because of that text sense, that ability to really quickly and nimbly place where information might be found in a book. Another challenge to reading on screen that students might have that they might have been used to in print are some strategies around annotation as well. I think that, in a lot of contexts, students have learned how to use a highlighter or a pen to underline or mark where important information is on a page. And it’s not always immediately obvious where you might do that annotation work online, unless you have learned about tools available for markup. So I’ve always been surprised when I’ve worked with students at all kinds of institutions… every place I’ve been in, there’s always this range of what students just know about how to markup or read digital documents. Some students know all about PDF editors and readers. Some students know about browser extensions or add ons that might allow them to annotate web pages. But many don’t. Many think that the only way that you can mark up a text is by printing it out. And this isn’t just students, faculty, professionals, people all over are still learning. I don’t know that, for whatever reason, there’s necessarily widespread awareness of what it really can look like to manipulate texts that are not designed to be manipulated,…again, especially documents like PDFs that are stable, that are designed not to be necessarily changed. So there is a certain amount of scaffolding that we would need to do with students to help them understand exactly how they can directly engage with or build upon that affordance, and as we discussed at the beginning of this conversation, to have that real flexibility to modify and engage with the text and make it their own.

John: And students at some point in their educational career had learned how to use highlighters, and they were given highlighters by their parents at some point. But as you said, they’ve never been taught how to mark up digital documents. One of the things you suggest is that that’s probably something that we should work with them on in our courses. Are there any suggestions of where that should occur? Or is that the conversation, perhaps, we should all have with our students when we’re giving them digital text?

Jenae: Right, I think there’s a couple things we’d want to engage with students on and not take for granted. And I would maybe even take one step back and just engage students in conversation about what it looks like for them when they read in academic context. To your point, John, I do think that many students have been equipped with some of the skills to do basic markup in print. But some didn’t even get that. Maura Smale, who’s a librarian and researcher herself,has a great article about reading, and she surveyed a bunch of students and the quote that still really stands out to me, she talked to one student who said “In college reading is your problem.” And that quote, really still just sticks out to me, because it just goes to show that, I think,as instructors in a college setting we can take for granted that students have learned this academic skill to be able to figure out what to do with the reading. And as instructors, I think we need to be challenged to think really critically about what we also want students to be doing with that reading. Do we want students to read for content uptake? Are we wanting them to learn key terms, critical definitions, concepts? Are we asking students to do what a lot of humanities faculty call close reading, which is trying to unpack language and see what we learn from language choices? Are we wanting students to read like writers, that is, are we wanting them to read to emulate certain conventions in the discipline or the field? So there’s a lot of reasons why we need students to read. Sometimes we don’t always articulate this. So I would say that one thing we could do with students is to make explicit what our intentions are for the reading task as well. And to also ask, “What have they done? What strategies have worked for them? What have they found useful?” Just as you might ask them to do the same when they’re starting a new writing project, we want to think about the genres of what they’re reading and how those genres might shape the kind of actions that they take. Then when you start thinking about media on top of that, then we can start to open up to what strategies, tools, or resources might make those ways of reading possible. So just as an example, if you’re wanting students to read closely, just read for language moves, to do a close reading, those kinds of markup and annotation tools might be extremely useful for, say, color coding a document for certain kinds of moves or patterns that they’re noticing in the language. But if you’re wanting students really to read in a more curatorial way, that is wanting students to read for research, pull out a bunch of main points, put them together, come up with their own argument or analysis, maybe that highlighting is still useful, but there might also be tools like citation managers, bookmarking tools, heck, even a really good word processor, using the sort of capacity of the word processor to copy and paste and bring things over to make a kind of collage of new ideas. These are other kinds of tools we can leverage as reading tools. But again, we’ll have to think about why those tools might be serving our purposes successfully. And it won’t always be obvious to students what those hacks are. Sometimes they’ll come up with new things and ways to do it, but until we make explicit the ways that we are inviting this reading work, it won’t be clear how to really adapt the media in any way.

Rebecca: And I think one thing that comes up in your book, too, is the idea that there’s a lot of tools to handle a lot of these different techniques, some only work on one platform, which might not be the most optimal choice. But sometimes that’s all you have, and that you need to find a suite of options that are available across different platforms and things like that, because we don’t want students who have to read, perhaps, on their phone to feel like they’re not included or that they don’t have access to things and that there are tools available but they may not be aware of them. I’m always surprised even for students not realizing that there’s an Acrobat reader for their phone and that they can have things read out loud to them with a pretty easy free tool.

Jenae: Yes, text-to-speech applications are so transformative for so many students, text-to-speech applications are the perfect example of “accommodations for some” are “accommodations for everyone.” As long as we, to your point Rebecca, make those options really visible, we can really empower students to figure out what works well for them, that we don’t need to get too rigid in our conception of what’s possible. I was worried that some readers would see all those tool options in the book and think, “Oh, that’s so overwhelming. I don’t want to have to learn how to use six different things, so I don’t know how to recommend to students a whole suite of things that I barely use any of them myself.” And so I do encourage readers or listeners who are feeling that way, or having that reaction, to just know that they’re not alone in doing this work. I would say there are resources on your campus that you can tap into to learn what some of the options are. A lot of institutions do have some really good local tools and solutions that go beyond the kind of private or free options that are more well known and well recognized. So I really tried to steer away in the book from naming particular tools where I could, that’s one really good way to date your book, and make it not very useful after a small sliver of time. But I do have an appendix with some contemporary options in case people really just want the list of tools. But I would encourage collaboration, not just with other colleagues in your department or your discipline, but again, I’m really pushing hard for libraries today. [LAUGHTER] Libraries are really great places to talk to about these tools, IT offices, teaching and learning centers. And I suspect that listeners to this podcast are already tapping into those resources. But it’s a good reminder that staff and faculty on campus can really partner on some of these initiatives. And these offices are there to do the research, to create the infrastructure that makes these different options available to everyone.

John: One of the things that economists have often noted is that when new technologies appear to do things that were done in a different way, in the past, people generally try to do the things in the same way. So when, for example, water power was replaced by internal combustion engines, and then later by electric power, and so forth, people initially were using the same basic systems where there was one central mechanism transmitting power to different locations in the building. And it took decades and in some cases, centuries, to fully exploit the new technology. I think the same thing happens when we have new ways of teaching. When people first started teaching online, they initially tried to replicate all the things they did in the classroom, whether they worked well in the classroom or not, they tried to come up with equivalents, and it took a while for us to come up with more effective ways of teaching asynchronously. I think maybe the same sort of thing is happening here. And that initially, the first thing people wanted to do were to be able to highlight and to be able to put bookmarks in digital text. But as you’ve suggested, there’s a lot more that you can do when text is in a digital format. What are some of the ways in which digital reading environments can transform the way in which we engage with content more effectively than occurred when it was in a fixed print format? You’ve mentioned a little bit about that. But I think there’s several other things you talk about in your book.

Jenae: Yeah, I have the most affection for the chapter where I cover 1000s of years [LAUGHTER] of media history, which was also the hardest and most painstaking chapter to write, because I was terrified that I would misrepresent all the complexity of book history. But in any case, we can get back to that at some other point.

John: Before we leave that, though, that was one of the things that really struck me, where you mentioned talking about how when people were first reading, they were reading aloud as the normal default mode of reading, because that’s how communications had taken place in the past. And there was concern that reading silently would result in learning less than by speaking the text aloud. And it struck me that that’s happened so many times with any new technology in education or ways of engaging with content.

Jenae: Yes, I think it’s really easy to forget that history. And to forget that books are a new technology. Books themselves, as a ubiquitous technology, are only a couple hundred years old. That’s so mind blowing. I could not stop geeking out over that [LAUGHTER] as I was working on this book, to realize that so many of the assumptions about reading and writing I have held so dear, are very contemporary assumptions that in… gosh, just like the 16th century, the 17th century, orality was really the primary means of distributing information, of comprehending information. Memory was the most valued component of being a literate individual… that is so different in the moment we’re in now where we want to sort of ossify ideas in a very linear form, which is really what a Codex, the printed book, privileges as a technology. There’s a very iterative relationship between media technologies and what we value in our thinking. And something that struck me in writing this book are the cyclical patterns in which our technologies and assumptions we make about our technologies change our assumptions and values about what good learning is, or what acceptable sociability is, or what acceptable learning behaviors look like. And so the same thing is happening in a digital moment where because reading on screen looks different than reading on print, it’s less linear, it’s less controlled, it is less bound… there’s a pun there… is less bound to a certain isolated knowledge space that the author kind of creates. Those things seem like they are less rigorous and less scholarly, when, again, those perceptions of what rigor is and what good reading is. It’s a social construct that’s bound up in the material conditions of how we learn.

John: But even going back further, the book itself was seen as something that would cause us to lose the memory skills that people had from trying to memorize things directly. People objected to books, they objected to reading silently. And we’re seeing exactly the same objections to digital reading. I thought that whole section of your book was fascinating. And I learned a lot from it.

Jenae: Oh, thank you, I’m so glad. [LAUGHTER] Again, it was the portion of the book that I feel like was definitely the last practical part of the book. But maybe as a humanist, in my own training, I really enjoyed that process of getting to tell a very, very, very slivered slice of that history, because really, there’s no way I could really capture centuries of scholarship. But I felt like we needed to have some context to recognize that what we’re struggling with is not new, I think it’s easy in narratives about technology to just focus on the novelty, to focus on what’s shiny and different. And as a technologist, I resist that too. That really, when we’re thinking about technology, I like to shift the conversation more into thinking about space, and about behavior, and about activity, and less about what’s the latest, greatest gadgetry for the sake of gadgetry? I realized I never answered your question. It got us started on this about what we could do differently with digital reading. So I’m happy to go there.

John: So what are some of the new ways of engaging with content provided by digital formats.

Jenae: So I think there’s a handful of things that are really, I’d say, uniquely possible in digital environments. And I’ll frame what I’m about to describe in terms of the digital reading framework that’s really at the heart of this book. And so there are five strategies for digital reading, that they’re broad strategies and, in many ways, the strategies that you could use for reading in any media, but I call them strategies for digital reading framework, because I think you can uniquely map some affordances in digital environments to the strategies. So for example, one thing that’s really unique about digital environments is how easy it is to curate… curation is the first part of my framework… how easy it is to curate lots of different pieces of information, and bring them together. You can, of course, do curatorial activities in print by, say, organizing index cards, or putting together a filing cabinet of articles and information. But online, you can curate even more of a detailed level. So, for example, there are activities I really like to do with students where we use things like tags, you know, metadata, that users generate to create clusters of information. So, if you invite students to tag, for example, a collection of articles they’re finding for research, they can start to see what key topics or terms might be shared across sources they might not have otherwise seen, if they were just trying to index that. You could put together broad buckets of information under those tags much more easily with citation management tools, for example, or you could go even a little bit more old fashioned and use bookmarking tools for this in your browser. You have bookmarking tools where you could create folders that are basically topical tags to sort things. You can even do it on a desktop if you want to do this offline, you could create folders that are organized by subject headers or tags to put things together and create collections of resources. That’s one thing I think is unique is its ability to bring a lot of information together. The other thing I think is really unique and exciting about working online is the second part of my framework, which is connection, which is this easy ability to link lots of different pieces of information together. Again, you could do this in print when you look at the references section of a printed out article or the works cited of a book. You can find them there, but when you’re online, it’s so much easier to generate and follow hyperlinks from one website to the next or to look at a citation trail and see who has cited whom and see how particular ideas are connected to each other, or even at the sentence level to see whether a reference to a particular person or place can be connected to encyclopedic information about that person or place to deepen your knowledge of things that are referred to in the text itself. Let’s say there’s also a description of an image or a graph, you could find the illustration of that and make that connection between the visual and the textual to create a more multimodal experience as well. Again, all possible in print, just easier and uniquely accessible to do when you’re doing this work digitally, I’ll say one more thing that I think is unique about working digitally. And I’m gonna veer a little off from the framework here, but we can return to that if you’d like, but that reading digitally can be even more nimbly social, and more easily shareable. With print, the best ways that we can share ideas are by talking about this, as we’re doing now. Of course, if you go to a used bookstore, you might find some good books that have written annotations of people of yore in them, which always feels like a wonderful discovery. But online, there are all kinds of tools where you can annotate together in real time. So this can be done in something as simple as a Microsoft Word document with Track Changes where you can share back and forth, a Google Doc, a lot of people use now as a really easy way to annotate in real time, and of course, there are specialized tools that make social annotation visible as well, Hypothesis is a very popular one, Perusall, is another popular one, Power Notes is another popular one. There’s a whole suite of things now that are really encouraging students and faculty to work together to make their thinking really visible and social in one text. And I think all those movements have such transformative potential to spark conversation, because reading really is about having a good conversation.

John: I’ve been using Hypothesis in a couple of my classes now for the last three years and students have just found it so incredibly engaging, and that they’re reading things so much more deeply and having conversations right in the text, which is so much more informed than when they were working on a discussion forum online talking about it, or even when we had class discussions about it. My students have generally responded extremely positively to that social annotation process.

Jenae: That’s wonderful. I’m glad to hear it. There’s good scaffolding that needs to make that happen. Your social annotations can turn into a discussion board quite easily. Without the framing, there’s a potential to highlight part of a text and have someone comment and someone else say “I agree.” But, the book actually offers some strategies. It sounds like you’re doing this brilliantly, John, if you’re getting really good results from your students. I’d be curious to hear how you’re framing it because that’s always, I think, the challenge. And in the book, I do talk about some things you could ask students to look for, simple prompts, not just highlighting moments that are important, but also inviting students to ask questions, or inviting students to look at which parts are sort of popular when you do look for things that are important or interesting. So there’s a lot of different ways you can frame that task.

Rebecca: I did that trick with my syllabi during the pandemic, to get students to make sure they’re looking at the syllabus and doing a careful reading of the syllabus and see if there was any policy questions and things and encourage questions about it. And we ended up having some really great conversations as a result of essentially annotating the digital version of the syllabus.

Jenae: Yes, that’s a great assignment. Remi Kalir has some great articles about annotating the syllabus. I don’t know if that was part of your inspiration. And Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia also just wrote a great book about annotation from MIT Press that I think is really… someone’s listening to this and thinking, “Oh, I want to learn more about annotation.” My book is one starting point there. But their book is a much deeper dive into just annotation as a learning practice.

John: We’ll include the citation for that in the show notes.

Rebecca: When we start talking about social annotation, one question that may arise for folks is privacy issues and ethical issues about sharing and making something that historically we might be thinking of as being a private experience more public. So can you talk a little bit about some of these ethical issues around digital reading?

Jenae: Yes, I’d be glad to. And in the third part of my book, I address this conversation in a lot more depth. So this will be sort of a thumbnail sketch of thinking about the real ethical dimensions, as you put it, to digital reading. So, when it comes to social annotation, in particular, we have to be, I think, really thoughtful in our framing about what we’re asking students to share. One thing I would suggest is, as instructors, if you’re going to ask students to use any kind of annotation-based software, (A) to make it really clear to students who will see it. So with most social annotation tools, you can control the privacy settings to make sure that certain annotations might only be visible to the class community. But as an instructor, there is, I think, a little bit of responsibility on you to do that research and to make sure you understand before you ask for mandates and tools, that you know, where students data is going, when they enter it into any kind of cloud-based platform or internet-based platform, in particular. I think this is where tools like Google Docs, especially, get into very dicey privacy-based territory, because Google, in particular, we know has a track record of… especially if you’re using an instance of Google Docs not managed by your institution… that data is owned… all of your written data is owned by Google and is used for optimizing their ad services. So I think before we just sort of uncritically adopt these tools, we have to think about the implications of what we’re doing and give students the option to opt out. Social annotation can be really powerful and really transformative. But there always needs to be ways for students to contribute if they don’t want to have their words online or they don’t want to use a platform. Even if it is private to the class, we still always need to let students make evidence of their work private, because ultimately their thinking is their intellectual property. But it’s also just we want to make sure students have the agency to decide where and how their thinking is made visible. So I would say the other thing we want to think about with digital leading too is where we’re asking the students to read. I think we can forget that every website we go to on the internet is tracked, whether that’s the browser based cookies, if we’re using a university proxy network, a VPN, the University knows [LAUGHTER] where we’re going on the internet. Again, that sounds a little scary, but it’s true. That’s just the reality of the connected world that we live in. It’s not necessarily dangerous, but it could be. There’s always sort of potential for data to be weaponized in ways that we need to be cognizant of. So I would just say that, for as many possibilities as there are, there are also risks that we need to assess and be mindful of. And I realize one reaction to this risk is let’s just go back to paper [LAUGHTER] and forget about it. Why put ourselves into the surveillance network that is the internet for our learning. But there are real risks to reading in print too. There’s less permanence. If I spilled my tea on this book, this book work is no longer accessible to me. It’s like paper’s actually a very fragile technology that way. There’s a reason that some people’s whole jobs are to be preservationists of print materials. So we have to kind of weigh the risks and affordances. And again, give our students choices where we can. So that might just mean, again, as an instructor, letting students for example, if they don’t want to annotate publicly, they could probably easily do the annotation in a Word document and send that to you privately to have it be an offline document, they can even expand their thoughts on a print book and take a picture. If they’re really insistent on doing that, that’s still a kind of digital reading, in a way, even if they’re using a print-based technology to do the optical work of scanning the words on a page, they can again, snip a picture, send it to you, and keep the digital infrastructure intact. And I think encouraging questions… If you as an instructor don’t know what the privacy policies are on the technologies you use, again, partnership with your IT office that looks into information security concerns all the time, your accessibility office that might also be thinking about the risks associated for students who might not always be able to use particular technologies, these are all things that can start to be thinking about when we design these activities and work in these spaces. It might not all happen at once, and that’s okay, too. I think it’s always good to experiment and think about what’s best for maintaining an active learning environment. But these are considerations that we don’t want to ignore, and it might just take our own continuous learning and our own continuous digital literacy development to really make sure we’re understanding just what we’re doing when we’re asking the students to work online.

John: You mentioned that that’s especially a concern with Google tools that are personal Google tools that you might ask students to use. But when you work with Google Apps for Education, there’s generally an agreement where the educational institution owns the data, which provides more privacy protection…

Jenae: Yes.

John: …and Google agrees not to use that in any commercial manner.

Jenae: Yes, that’s a great point. And so it’s certainly worth, if you don’t know, if your institution has a Google for Education license, this is just something to look into. Because to your point, John, the kinds of licenses your institution manages centrally may impact the ways in which student data is used. And yet another example of this… if your institution matches certain tools to protect logins behind Single Sign On authentication for your tool, so students have to log in with their university username and password, that also usually suggests a greater level of security than say a student has to create new accounts and logins to use the tool. Even more risky is if certain tools invite students to create an account with their Facebook username or other social media kinds of connections. If you’re looking to expand your students’ reading behaviors to some tools, it’s always worth just thinking about, “Okay, what are the access points my students will have to engage in to use this? To what extent is it disconnected from our university’s existing infrastructure? And what are the risks of moving further away from the infrastructure or using it?” And again, if you don’t know and you have questions, this is really what a lot of experts on campus are happy to talk to people about to understand those choices more clearly.

John: And even if there is a Google Apps for Education agreement, not all the apps that are provided may be subject to the terms of that. I know, in the SUNY system, there was a core set of apps that were negotiated. And then many other apps such as YouTube were not part of that agreement. So, use of that, or at least at SUNY, is not subject to the same set of protections as are the core apps of the educational platform, though, it is worth exploring, as you suggested.

Jenae: Yeah, I know, it’s kind of in the weeds. And sometimes it’s like, “Oh, gosh, all the legal and technical stuff is super complicated, it’s kind of frustrating.” But I think there’s also really, again, exciting potential to learn with your students. The world we live in now is a world where we both have access to so much more and once more things open up more risks just emerge. just kind of part of living in an interconnected world. And so I think that being curious is a really great habit of mind. And so sometimes I get down these conversations, I too can feel a little bit like, “Oh, it’s so annoying that we have to ask all these questions.” And yet I try to approach it from a perspective of curiosity. And that was part of my motivation for writing this book, too, was just being really curious about imagining what would happen if we really developed a clear understanding of what we get when we do our operations in digital spaces. What’s possible there, and how do we explore that in ways that are engaged and thoughtful and attuned to the material conditions of the world we’re in?

John: One of the nice things about your book is you include a set of activities that you can use in classes to help students engage more effectively with digital content. Could you share, perhaps, a couple of those?

Jenae: Sure, so this can kind of bring us back to our framework a bit. So maybe I’ll share a couple activities that we haven’t talked about yet. So a third component of the framework is “creativity.” And so these are activities that really inspire students to create new ideas based on what they’ve read. We know that reading is mentioned to inspire new thoughts and develop new ideas. So one activity that I think has a ton of potential is one that I call “visualize that” where we ask students to create some infographic or a map of what they’ve read and invite them to really take a step back. Again, doing this online isn’t possible in print. You could have someone draw an infographic. But there’s a lot of tools where students can easily create shapes, create maps, you could do this in your cyber tools, you could use this in explicitly designed mind mapping tools. And if you have students who can’t use these visual tools, or for whom visuals was not an especially effective way to learn, I found a good workaround is actually students create a spreadsheet, like an Excel spreadsheet, where they map connections between ideas to take a step back from the reading itself. So I think that’s one activity that is really exciting for reading digitally. Another one is in the contextualization section of the framework, which really invites to think about not just like how a text exists on its own, but why it exists, who wrote it, etc. So there’s one really simple activity that I call “the journalistic investigation,” gathering the who, what, where, when, why… which, again, you could do this in print, but what’s really nice about doing online is you could have students basically create a shared resource where they work together to gather: “Okay, what do we know about this author? Who are they? Where do they come from? Why do we care about them? Why did they write it? What are the contexts in which this book, or this article, or this piece of research exists?” …and to really inspire students to see text, not just kind of as a floating isolated thing that came from this author’s genius brain, [LAUGHTER] but that exists in a particular context. And that can really shape the way they understand that past.

Rebecca: Thanks for all those great ideas, Jenae, and really thinking through all of these different considerations of reading online and reading digitally. I know that everyone that picks up a copy of the book will find many nuggets within the pages that are far beyond what we talked about today. But we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Jenae: Yes. So one thing relevant to this book that’s next is that I will be at the Distance Teaching and Learning Conference hosted by the University of Wisconsin – Madison in August. I’m really honored to be one of the invited speakers of that conference where the theme is what’s next. And the topic for me is “what’s next is text.” So making the argument that as we think about futures of online learning, after a year of working remotely, that we really can take a step back to be thinking really critically about what we do with text in online spaces. I think a lot of folks got really into video and audio and the online moment, all of which is wonderful. And yet text is one of the most accessible, flexible, ways that we distribute content and engage with learning and learners if students don’t have access to high bandwidth, internet speeds using chat and using text-based tools really has tons of potential. So I’m thinking about expanding some of this work into, I would say, an even broader conversation about low-tech online learning is kind of where I’ve been really interested in going next with some of my work and thinking about how we kind of strip out the, I think, intimidating overhead of really high-tech gadgetry when we talk about teaching grant technology to remind ourselves that teaching with technology actually involves a lot of tools that are extremely low bandwidth, extremely easy to use, and can be really transformative and have a really high impact. So I don’t know what my next big project is, but I think I want it to have something to do with like low tech, high impact. I haven’t decided how yet. But immediate next is that conference. I hope to see some people there.

John: It’s great talking to you and we hope when you do come up with that next thing you want to address, that you’ll join us back on the podcast again.

Jenae: Oh, I hope so too. Thank you so much again for having me, always such a pleasure to speak with both of you, John and Rebecca. Thank you.

Rebecca: Thanks for your time, Jenae.

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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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191. Moving Forward

After a year of experimentation during the pandemic we can reflect on practices worth keeping. In this episode, Martha Bless joins us to examine what we’ve learned from this experience about building and maintaining a productive class community in multiple modalities. Martha is an Academic Director at the Association of College and University educators (ACUE). She has been working with us at SUNY Oswego to support our faculty in the ACUE program for the past two years. She’s a member of the Education Department at Albertus Magnus College and Southern Connecticut State University.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: After a year of experimentation during the pandemic we can reflect on practices worth keeping. In this episode, we examine what we’ve learned from this experience about building and maintaining a productive class community in multiple modalities.

We should note that this episode was recorded in late April when there was still a great deal more uncertainty about the success of the vaccination program. Today, we’re a bit more optimistic about the fall semester than we were at the time of this recording.

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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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Rebecca: Our guest today is Martha Bless. Martha is an Academic Director at the Association of College and University educators (ACUE). She has been working with us at SUNY Oswego to support our faculty in the ACUE program for the past two years. She’s a member of the Education Department at Albertus Magnus College and Southern Connecticut State University. Welcome, Martha.

Martha: Thanks, Rebecca. I’m so glad to be here. It’s like being with my friends again. I love it.

John: It’s good to talk to you.

Martha: Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca: It’s been a while.

Martha: I know. I know.

John: Our teas today are…

Rebecca: Martha. Are you drinking tea?

Martha: Yes. Special for this occasion, I poured myself some iced green tea because we’re experiencing beautiful weather here in Connecticut where I live.

Rebecca: Wonderful. I have Scottish afternoon tea. I’m back on a streak again.

John: And I have Lady Grey tea.

Rebecca: That’s an unusual choice for you, John. It’s caffeine in the afternoon.

Martha: Is that like Earl Grey? Only Lady Grey?

John: Yeah, they use something different. I actually like it better than Earl Grey.

Martha: Earl Grey is strong. Yeah, it’s got that strong herby flavor to it.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to follow up on an OpenStax blog post you wrote in January titled Revisiting Pandemic Teaching Advice. Now that we’ve survived the spring semester, and maybe are planning for the fall… maybe we’re in denial about the fall. But for many faculty, that might be back to in-person classes that are socially distanced and masked after multiple semesters of online teaching. So what are some things that are on your mind as you look back over the past year and into the fall?

Martha: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I’m already getting questions from faculty about this idea of a HyFlex classroom. you’ve heard this term before, where they might be in a face-to-face classroom, but it’s going to be socially distanced, they’’ll be wearing masks, they might have students who are also Zooming in at the same time that their students are face to face. So, that’s gonna pose them real challenges. My husband teaches in a K-12 world, and they’ve been dealing with that all year. So he has kids Zooming in, he has kids who are in the classroom. So it’s a real juggle, and I will say the first couple of weeks of that kind of a classroom can be super stressful. But a way to help with that is to try to have your students who are in class bring devices, whether it’s a tablet, or a laptop, so that, if you want to do small group instruction, for example, you could have the students who are Zooming in sit with the students in the classroom at a desk on the laptop, so that it feels like they’re there. And then I would just say it’s all the same strategies and practices that I’ve been talking with faculty about for the entire year, which is focusing on building that relationship, focusing on getting the stress out of the room first, so that people can focus on the teaching. And that includes you as the teacher. It’s okay in those kinds of situations to come in and say, “Okay, my tech isn’t working today. So let’s talk it through,” or whatever’s on your mind. But I think for HyFlex, again, if you were teaching online this past year, and now you’re going back to campus. In that situation, again, there’s going to be a big learning curve there.

John: What are the best ways of building community in a classroom, because as you noted in your blog post, that’s one of the most important lessons taken away, the importance of maintaining community.

Martha: One of the things that struck me when, in March of 2020, when we were all sort of thrust into this, like, learning curve, where we didn’t have a choice anymore, we had to learn how to teach online. I know I experienced, both as a faculty development professional and as a teacher myself, as a faculty, I get this barrage of emails from multiple companies, from my IT department, from my department chair, all my colleagues, etc. And every day, there would be some new, like, “Try this, here’s this training. Come to this session.” And for a lot of us, it was overwhelming. So what I found was, I tried to sort of filter through all of that barrage of what, in many cases, was very helpful information. Sometimes it was a lifeline, like, “How do I use Blackboard? I need help with that.” But when it came down to it, I think when the dust settled, it occurred to me that there were really two big takeaways with that abrupt shift, one of which was: one of the most important things about online teaching, whether it’s synchronous or asynchronous, is building community. That’s one of the challenges because obviously, you’re not right there with them. You don’t have facial expression, you don’t have gesture, you don’t have tone of voice. So that became really important for me to focus on as a teacher. And then the other thing that bubbled up for me and a lot of us was the workload, the sheer workload that, if you’re new to online teaching, it can be a real time suck. And I always say this about online teaching and learning, The thing about online learning is it’s a great way to learn because you can do it in your PJs, you can do it whenever you want to. It’s always there. You can go to it when you have the time and when you schedule it, but that also is the thing that makes it, from a learning perspective, really easy to forget about, which is why we have often high dropout rates, high failure rates in online learning. From the teaching perspective, I think it’s that same thing. The great part about it is you can do it anytime, you can get to it when you have the time. But the flip side for teaching in an online class is the time management piece, because we often feel like we always need to be online, we always have to be there to answer the email right away. And that can be a huge pressure. Because again, it’s always there. You never know when to turn off, turn on. When am I teaching, when am I not teaching when I teach an online class? So for me, one of the biggest things was… well, a couple things really… at the beginning of the semester, in your syllabus, in your conversations with your students, to make sure that you clearly identify the parameters of communication in your online class. How soon should they expect an answer to an email? When are you available for meetings? When are you not available? About how long is it going to take you to give them their feedback, and so on. So I think, for students, if they know from the get go, here are the parameters, here’s what you can expect from me in terms of communication, then I know I can set that schedule and stick to it. Because it’s like a contract between me and my students. When I say to them,“No, I’m not going to email you back at three in the morning, I’m not going to email you at five in the morning, I’m going to email you between these hours and get back to you within 24 hours.” So I think that that’s a big thing for me in terms of time management that worked really well.

Rebecca: Circling back to the idea of building community, maybe we can take each modality one at a time, what are some strategies in asynchronous environments to get back community going?

Martha: In asynchronous environments, I think that’s one of the hardest because there’s no set time to be together. So I think a couple of things are really important. The first is to get in there and communicate with an announcement, before your students actually arrive, have it populated in your course so that when they open the course they see either an announcement or a video welcoming them to the class, something warm and inviting, not “Hi, here’s what to expect,” but “Hi, here’s who I am. Here’s what we’re going to be doing in this class. Here’s how it’s going to impact your life.” And, particularly in an online asynchronous class, I think video becomes really important. And I know that people are hesitant about being on camera, it can be a little tricky, it can be like, “Oh, that’s really me? That’s what I look like?” But I think we need to get over that and just sort of embrace the camera and make short videos that reveal your personality. And if you’re familiar with Michael Wesch, I know he’s wonderful. He has a great YouTube channel. And he has a wonderful little short video about how to make short videos, which is hilarious. And his point, and also others, James Lang, for example, who wrote Small Teaching, and Flower Darby, who wrote Small Teaching Online, they all refer to the use of video and not to be afraid of it. Because, in fact, research tells us that students actually prefer videos from their teachers that are not slick and highly produced. They prefer them that are more homey, that give them a sense of who you are as a person, maybe a little window into where you live and what your family was like or who your pets are. Those are often more well received than something that you might work on for hours and hours that’s really slick and prepared. So don’t be afraid to create these small little videos and post them frequently. Typically, what I do in an asynchronous class is I post at least two announcements a week and at least one video announcement a week. In the beginning of the semester, I typically do it at the beginning of the week. And then as the semester rolls on, they’ve submitted their first or second assignment, I usually do a short little video that says, “Hey, great assignment. Here’s what I noticed.” And I do a little recap about common themes and threads that I saw in the assignments. So video is a really important thing in an asynchronous class. In a synchronous class, when you’re meeting with students, I think encouraging them to go on camera… I know it’s been a real challenge for faculty. I’ve spoken to a lot of faculty who say, “My students just won’t go on camera, how can I get them to go on camera?” …and certainly we can’t make them. We can do as much as we can to encourage them, including having them use things like background screens, etc. If they’re a little bit shy about coming on and showing where they’re living or whatever it is, but encouraging them through incentives and through modeling it yourself and being on camera, I think, is really important in a synchronous class. And also using active learning techniques where you’re putting students in groups. I do a thing called a chatterfall often at the beginning of class where I have all of my students do a check in and I say, “Okay, type of word into the chat, how are you feeling today? Don’t submit it until I say ‘go.’” And then you say “go” and the chat explodes with all of these words from your students. So doing fun, active, things like that, I think is a way to build community in a synchronous class. Face to face…. obviously, in a HyFlex classroom, of course you’ll have your students in front of you and your students Zooming in. One of the simplest things that has the biggest impact, believe it or not, is learning and using students’ names. You would be amazed how much of an impact that has on students in a face-to-face classroom, in a synchronous classroom, and as am async when you’re replying to discussion forums, for example. “Hey, Rebecca, great job in this discussion, I love that you enjoyed the story.” Just using someone’s name communicates to them that you see them as a human being, that they’re included in this learning community and that you value them. So simple things like that, and be a good way to build community as well.

Rebecca: I know one of the things that faculty might be particularly stressed about, and obviously we have some faculty who have a little experience of this over the past couple semesters, is teaching in person when everybody’s masked. So you might be used to seeing facial expressions, even if you were teaching synchronously online, you might still have gotten to have that, right?

Martha: That’s true, yeah.

Rebecca: So what are some ways or things to be thinking about or planning for in person when people might be masked, but still generate community?

Martha: That’s a really great question. I wonder if doing things like “Hey, bring in a picture of you doing something and share it with the class, when you weren’t masked? What are some things you’d like to do” and share that. And I’ll share that on the screen: “Here’s me at the beach without my mask, here’s me with my family without my mask,” so that at least people can get a sense of the whole person. That’s really one of the only things I can think of.

John: One thing that I’ve done, it was primarily in asynchronous classes, but I’ve thought about doing this in synchronous classes too, is to have students create short flipgrid videos or voice thread and have them do short introductory videos, and then just share them. Now that may not scale very well in a large classroom, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that in a class of 400 students this fall. But that is a way of at least asking students to share something of themselves where at least they can see each other. One concern I have with incentives for turning on the camera is that many of our students are in crowded living quarters with multiple people in the room, there’s often a lot of noise and distraction, and sometimes they’re on limited bandwidth. And so the students who would find it easier to turn on the cameras are those who are living in nice living quarters with their own private space where they can work, where there’s no other people around. And so it’s essentially rewarding the students that are in a better environment, and it would disadvantage your students who are not able to do any of those things.

Martha: I agree. And when I say incentives, I mean things like not points or grades necessarily, but a nudge, or like, “let’s do some gamification, because everybody’s on camera today,” that kind of thing, more interactive conversation. Yeah, I wouldn’t use it as a carrot for a grade or extra credit points or anything like that. But certainly doing more fun activities, and saying, “Hey, if everybody’s on camera today, guess what? We’re gonna stop five minutes early, and I’m going to show you this really cute, award winning short graphic novel,” something that’s more the social oriented incentive, rather than a grade incentive, because, certainly, that wouldn’t be fair at all. I have students who come in on their iPhones. In one of my asynchronous classes, I have students literally all over the world. I have a student in China and one in St. Vincent. This was the best excuse email I ever got, by the way, as a teacher, I don’t know if you know, but St. Vincent in the Caribbean is just experiencing a volcanic eruption. He emailed me and said, “Dr. Bless, I’m so sorry. I’m not going to be able to hand in my paper. I’m being evacuated because of the volcano.” And I was like, “please just stay safe. It’s okay.” [LAUGHTER] But yeah, that was the best late excuse I think I’ve ever gotten as a teacher.

Rebecca: I’ve had two synchronous online classes this semester, and camera use is way down. But I’ve discovered that during certain activities, students will use their microphones quite a bit, and the chat a ton. And we’ve been using interactive whiteboards, like Miro, and students are super active in those environments. So although I can’t see a single face, I actually feel like I’ve gotten to know many of these students. Sometimes they’ll turn the camera on if we’re having a one-on-one conversation or something for a small amount of time. I even had a student turn on her camera the other day, she’s like, “I don’t want anyone else to see this, but I’ll let you see my crazy hair.” [LAUGHTER]

Martha: I love that.

Rebecca: But it’s been nice. I’ve had students presenting work, just speaking a little bit about what they’re doing. And then students are asking all kinds of great questions in the chat, providing good feedback, and it feels really engaged, maybe even more so than in person sometimes.

Martha: Yeah, it’s so funny that you say that, because, thinking about my synchronous class, and a lot of them don’t go on camera. But it’s amazing how much is conveyed just through your voice. Like, I know who they are when they speak, like, “Oh, yeah, so and so? Yep, absolutely. Thanks for you know…” And you’re right about the chat, they are more likely to use the chat than they are sometimes to speak. And I’m okay with that. That’s participation in my mind, as long as they’re sharing their thoughts via chat or voice. And it’s one of the things that I wrote about in the blog piece is to save time in terms of the grading load of any course, and that’s always a challenge for teachers. It’s always like, “I really want to give feedback. But oh, it takes so long to give so much feedback on papers.” So I found a tool when I was working on my dissertation. My doctoral work was about feedback in classrooms, and how to make that process more streamlined and better from both perspectives, for both the student and the teacher. And I came upon this tool, it’s called Kaizena, and it’s actually an add-on for Google Docs. Like a lot of these tools, there’s a free version and a paid version. But it’s not very expensive if you’re a teacher, and the students, of course, don’t have to pay. And what I’ve found is I use that tool, that allows me to drop an audio file or a mini lesson right into the student assignment. Then when they open it up, they hear me giving them comments. And I’ve been using this now for about a year and a half. And in every semester, about mid semester, I survey my students and I solicit feedback from them about various things, my teaching and Kaizena, specifically, and I ask them, “What are your thoughts on the audio feedback,” and far and away, most of them say, “Oh, I really like it, it’s more personal, I can hear the explanation that you give, that makes more sense.” And from my perspective, I can give them a lot more about what they can tweak in their assignment and how to do it than I ever could writing it on Word or in a margin on a real piece of paper. And the other thing that’s kind of funny about it. And sometimes when I give a video summary of “Let’s talk about this assignment and trends that I saw,” one of the last ones I created, I said to them, and it’s you know, towards the end of the semester, so I’ve given them a lot of notes already. And I said “In this paper on Kaizena, some of you may have heard my voice change a little bit and get a little irritated.” [LAUGHTER] And they laugh, and they’re like, “Oh, I know, I know, you’ve given me that note before, Dr. Glass. And I promise next time in the next paper, I won’t do it again,” or whatever, or “I’ll make it better.” But they always tell me in that mid-semester feedback that they really appreciate the voice component of it. And for me, it’s also a time saver. This is one of the other things that I found about the workload in online classes and how to derive that and it makes it more enjoyable. It takes some getting used to like I’m just talking to my computer, but my students really enjoy it. So for me, that’s become a really valuable tool.

John: And the tone of voice in terms of showing when you’re getting frustrated can also show when you’re not being quite as serious, when you’re being a little bit more flippant, which won’t show up in the same way when students are reading the comments, because we know that people in general are more likely to interpret things in a negative way.

Martha: It’s really true. And what I found is that, of course, on the flip side, I also give positive comments like, “Wow, that’s an amazing story. What a great sentence you’ve written here, terrific thesis.” And I can also give little personal anecdotes. One of their assignments is a little short memoir. And I can say, “Oh, yeah, I did that too,” or like relate to them in that way. So it’s a multi-purpose tool for me in both building community and in time saving, because they can hear that connection to me, to what they’ve written, which I think they really value.

Rebecca: I think that also happens too, when you’re trying to give encouraging feedback about improvement, but they just hear “Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” When it might be like, “Oh, you did this thing here. You could do it better by doing X,” which is really different.

Martha: Yeah. And the little mini lessons that I’m talking about… So, in Kaizena, what you do is, you set up your account, and I can create mini-lessons by pulling in content from the web. So like, “Here’s a little video on how to not use passive voice.” “Here’s a little video on APA format,” whatever it is, and I drop it right into the paper so that they can click on it and hear a little one-, two-minute tutorial. They’re very honest in their feedback, and some of them say, “Okay, I didn’t watch all the videos, but thank you for giving them to me.” But the ones who say “Yeah, those were really helpful.” I think it’s a valuable thing for them to hear not just “bad, bad, bad,” but “Okay, this is an edit, and here’s how to edit it. No big deal.”

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about accessibility related to audio feedback.

Martha: Yeah, great question. I always put in my syllabus and also talk about or put a video on the first day that I use this tool. However, if that’s not going to work for you, for whatever reason, email me. And Kaizena also lets me put in text comments. So I have that as an option as well. And because it’s a Google Doc add-on, I have all the Google Doc tools as well for editing and reviewing. So this, give them that right from the beginning and say, “I’m using this tool, if that’s going to be an issue for you just email me privately, you don’t even need to tell me what the issue is just say ‘No, I’d prefer text.’ So I give them that option.”

Rebecca: It seems like it might be helpful to do one more check in after the first time of leaving feedback as well. Like now that you’ve had some of that voice feedback, does it still work for you?

Martha: Exactly. Yeah. And I do, if it’s a synchronous class, I’ll, after the first paper comes in, I’ll walk them through it and ask “Does anyone have any questions or comments?” And if it’s an async, I usually post an announcement and then hold the virtual office hour for anybody who wants to drop in and chat with me about what they heard or any concerns they have.

Rebecca: Time saving tips are really popular amongst faculty, do you have any others?

Martha: Yeah, Kaizena has saved me a lot of time in grading. Sticking to that schedule, I think, is really important. It’s something as simple as putting things in your calendar. So if it’s an asynchronous class, and you don’t have a scheduled time, I find it really important to give myself that schedule, and try to stick to it. Because if I put it in my calendar, and I give myself a reminder, I know I’m going to be disciplined and sit down and get my work done in that hour and a half that I’ve put in my calendar, and then on to something else. So, really simple time management strategies, I think, work the best. I think thinking about creating videos ahead of time, so much of online teaching is done ahead of time, so anything that you can do before the semester starts during break week. So if you know what your schedule is going to be, you know, you can record your little intro videos for all the sections or courses that you’re teaching so that you can just quickly upload those. Making your videos not so specific to a course so that you can recycle them as well is another time saver. So rather than saying welcome to English 130, or whatever the course is, just say, “Hey, welcome to the course, this is who I am.” And then you can use that video in whatever course you’re teaching. Sometimes you can do that with videos, sometimes not, because I obviously like to make it personal for the students and the feedback that they need. But sometimes you can recycle them and that saves a bit of time as well.

Rebecca: I think i n your article, you also mentioned using rubrics.

Martha: Yes, one of the things that’s really interesting to me is that before the pandemic, most of us who are teaching face-to-face all received a course shell in our LMS, whether it’s Blackboard or Canvas or whatever it is, but the data, the statistics on use of those shells was just terrible. Like I think it was maybe hovering around 30% of face-to-face instructors actually used their course shell. Now, I think one of the positives to come out of all of this is that we didn’t have a choice anymore, we kind of had to use our course shell. And one of the things that I learned very quickly was the rubric tool in the learning management system. And again, it’s one of those things that, it’s time upfront, but you get that investment of time back multiple fold. By using the rubric tool to either convert existing rubrics that you have for your assignments or create rubrics. I created a discussion rubric for my synchronous and asynchronous classes. I had existing rubrics for some of my assignments. So I took some of that and just created it in the LMS tool itself. So that now I can go in there and just click, click, click, quickly grade it. And I’ve given them the feedback in Kaizena. So all I need to do in my LMS gradebook is grade the rubric and it’s done. And the other thing about rubrics, particularly for discussions, is I tried to get not too complicated. Don’t overthink it. I think Flower Darby talks about this too, in her book, particularly with discussions. And I’ve gone to a kind of three-pronged rubric, which is “Yeah, you got it, almost… mmh, almost there, not quite… and that’s a do over… like 1-2-3. And if they get a that’s to do over, I actually allow them to do it over because often it happens early on in the semester where they don’t quite have the hang of it. I give them an opportunity to redo because my goal as an instructor is to actually get the students to do the assignment and do it well. Rather than just feel bad about getting a bad grade.

John: Another nice thing with rubrics is that if you share them with students in advance, you’re making transparent what the expectations are. And that makes it easier for students to meet those expectations, because students often, in the beginning of a course, are trying to judge what you expect from them. And we’re not always as clear with that as we should be. And the use of rubrics can make that very explicit and create more transparency in the assessment process, which makes it easier for students to meet those expectations.

Martha: Exactly. I think there’s a level of respect with that, that “Here, I’m telling you, I don’t want you to guess what the teacher wants. I want to spell it out clearly for you.” And I also want to spell it out, not in teacher lingo. I want to make sure that my rubrics are clear to students about even making assumptions, like “analyzes source material…” Well, do I really know that my students understand what analysis entails? And so I think it’s important, when we share the rubrics with the students to parse that language a little bit and say, “Okay, who knows what that really means? What does it mean to analyze a source?” and if they don’t know what it means, then provide that definition for them. But I try not to make it too, too jargony in my rubrics as well,

Rebecca: One of the things I quickly learned… well, maybe not so quickly, I should have learned it more quickly… is that students don’t necessarily know where the rubrics are in the LMS. And you got to kind of explicitly point that out. I think it was halfway through last semester. And I’m like, you need to look at the rubric. If you looked at the rubric, you could get full credit on this assignment. And the students are like “There’s a rubric.”” Like, “Yes, there’s been a rubric on every assignment all semester, and some of them are in the syllabus as well.” But I had to show them and they’re like, Oooooh,” but as someone who hadn’t taught online before, it wasn’t obvious to me that I needed to show them where that was.

Martha: Yeah, it’s another great idea for a short video, the first week of the semester, let’s do a walkthrough of our course, here’s where you find the rubrics and do it as a screencast. And I made that same mistake in the fall about three weeks in, I emailed this person, and they hadn’t turned something in and they were like, “Oh, where do you hand in the assignment again?” …that kind of thing. And I was like, “Oh, gosh, I assumed that people knew Blackboard.” But I really shouldn’t make that assumption. So making a short little, “here’s how to navigate our course” video, I think, is a good thing to do as well.

Rebecca: Yeah, with all those little details, I did the submission piece, like I didn’t forget that part…

Martha: Right.

Rebecca: …but, where the rubrics are, no, didn’t manage that

Martha: …not so much…

Rebecca: Like, here’s a checklist of all the [LAUGHTER] pieces of the class to go over.

Martha: Yeah, an important thing, when you make that video, if you make a short little, “here’s how to do Blackboard” video for your students make sure you’re in student view, because I’ve made that mistake, I’ve started out my video on like,” Oh, wait, I’m not in student view.” So I need to do it again.” [LAUGHTER] …a little thing to remember. And actually one of the new versions of Blackboard, I don’t use it, but my understanding is that they also have a voice comment capability in Blackboard, and so that’s also a great tool to use if you have it. I don’t have it in my version, but I know it’s out there.

Rebecca: One other quick thing to remind students about too, in one of those video walkthroughs, is that the app version is different than the website version, and not all the content that is available in the app version, including some of the accessibility features. So sometimes they’re like, “I can’t find this.” And then you find out it’s because they’re accessing it from their phone and so they default to an app. And they may need to be doing stuff on their phone, because that might be a primary portal to the internet for them. But the web version does work on their phones as well. And pointing out that they might need to switch to that view to get some of the content is maybe helpful.

Martha: Yeah, definitely. As I said, I have a couple of students who access the course on their phone.

John: We always end with the question. What’s next? …which is something we’re all concerned about right now.

Martha: Yeah, that’s a great question. So my “what’s next” is, and I’ve mentioned that I think there are some positives to come out of this, and that is that it really catapulted us even kicking and screaming some of us into the world of online teaching and learning. And now that we’ve sort of gotten comfortable with some of those practices, and with using an LMS, my “what’s next” is what’s gonna stick? Like, are the statistics for using our course shells in a face-to-face course going to go up? Are we going to utilize those grade books more often? Are we going to bring in some of our video and those kinds of communication skills moreso into our face-to-face classes? That’s what I wonder about, like, “how much of our new learning is gonna stick?”

Rebecca: And it seems particularly important if we might be masked and stuff in the fall that we do have that strong digital presence moving forward, at least as we transition back to what will become our new norma.

Martha: Absolutely. Yeah,

John: And I know on our campus, they’re talking about cutting back student print quotas to encourage more continued use of digital materials.

Martha: Wow, that’s really interesting. Yeah.

John: So the goal there is to encourage both faculty and students to take advantage of those features because it’s in everyone’s interest to do so.

Martha: That’s really interesting because, of course, when computers and printers and digital documents first arrived, everyone was like, “Oh, nobody’s gonna use paper anymore.” 20 years later, and we’re still using lots of paper. So that’ll be interesting to see if it has an impact on that. I hope it does.

Rebecca: Well, it’s always wonderful to talk to you, Martha, thanks for joining us.

Martha: This has been so fun. Thank you so much, Rebecca and John. It’s good seeing you.

John: Thank you. And we will include a link to Kaizena in the show notes.

Martha:Awesome. That’s great.

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

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

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190. Academic Integrity

The global pandemic resulted in a dramatic increase in online instruction. This was accompanied by an expansion of the use of online services that, in return for a fee, provide students with solutions to assignments and exams . In this episode, James M. Pitarresi joins us to discuss strategies that faculty can use to preserve academic integrity in their online courses.

James is a Vice Provost for Online and Innovative Education and the Executive Director of the Center for Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is also a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Binghamton.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: The global pandemic resulted in a dramatic increase in online instruction. This was accompanied by an expansion of the use
of online services that, in return for a fee, provide students with solutions to assignments and exams. In this episode, we examine strategies that faculty can use to preserve academic integrity in their online courses.

[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]

John: Our guest today is James M. Pitarresi. James is a Vice Provost for Online and Innovative Education and the Executive Director of the Center for Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is also a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Binghamton. Welcome, James.

James: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for bringing me on board.

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

James: I had my cup of tea. I drink Barry’s Irish tea with a little bit of sugar and milk, and I’ve already had it today.

John: And I am drinking Spring Cherry Green tea.

Rebecca: And I’ve got a near neighbor with my Scottish afternoon breakfast.

James: Oh, nice.

Rebecca: …to James, not to John. [LAUGHTER]

John: Yeah, I’m not sure where this one comes from. It’s a Republic of Tea tea.

James: Well, I have to try the Scottish Breakfast. I’ve had the English Breakfast tea.

Rebecca: This one’s a Scottish afternoon, and there’s a morning as well, but I actually prefer the afternoon. It’s a little smoother or something.

James: Ok, Yeah, I’ll look for it.

John: And for many episodes, English afternoon was the preferred which is a little bit harder to find. Well, it’s probably comparable to the Scottish afternoon in terms of ease of locating,

Rebecca: You got to know where to look, John, you got to know where to look.

John: Well, we actually have six packs of twenty in the office where they’ve been sitting since last February when they came in.

Rebecca: We have to hurry up and drink those up.

John: So the global pandemic, which began last March, caused many faculty to shift from face-to-face instruction to online instruction, many for the first time. And we’ve seen a tremendous shift of students from face-to-face to online instruction. And that seems to have been accompanied by a fairly dramatic expansion in the use of online services that facilitate academic dishonesty. And a few years ago, at least on our campus, much of that seemed to be taking place using Course Hero. In the last couple years, much of the expansion seems to have been from Chegg. I saw a statistic recently that between April and August of 2020, the number of student uploads or questions to Chegg approximately doubled, and I think that expansion has continued since then. Why are the sites so popular?

James: Yeah, John, great summary of the challenges we face right now. I’ve done a lot of interviewing with students. And actually I stumbled into this in, I think it was June of 2019, at the American Society of Engineering Education annual conference, I think it was in Tampa. And I was doing one of the keynote breakfast things that are sponsored, McGraw Hill was sponsoring it. And we were talking about the future of educational materials. And the session was well attended by both faculty and students. We had a great panel and I was emceeing it. And the conversation came up about Chegg. Now this is pre-pandemic, and the question came up about Chegg. Many of the faculty hadn’t heard of it. All the students had heard of it. And it was an incredible conversation and eye opener. And what came out of that hour and a half meeting was, for me anyways, “Well, why were students using these type of websites?” …and there are many out there, I think Chegg is probably the leading one right now. And it was fascinating, having the conversation with the students. Of course, fast forward to the pandemic, and this all exploded. But what I’ve discovered, in having both focus groups and individual conversations with students from across the country, is that there seems to be a sense that students don’t want to leave points on the table. So if homework is worth 20%, or 25%, or 50%, they’re going to get all of those points if they can, and most students work hard to try to figure it out. But if they’re stuck, they’re not going to leave those points on the table, they’re going to go someplace to get help. And in the past, that might have been the person living in the dorm down the hall, or maybe you went to tutoring or some other source to get help. But these online sites are a couple mouse clicks away. And so the barrier to entry is so low, that if you’re struggling with a demanding curriculum and other things going on, the temptation is so great. And so what I found, in talking to students using these websites, is one of two general flavors. One was the student that was, “I’m not going to leave points on the table,” and frankly, blurring the line between academic dishonesty and trying to actually learn, and that’s sad. And we’ll probably get into that in a little bit in this conversation. The other group of students were students that were really trying to use these sites to learn, they were stuck on something, they couldn’t get past it. They’d submit, they’d take a look or search around. And to a large extent, they really want to learn. The pandemic came, everybody shifted online, and they took a look around and said, “Well, wait a minute here, this person’s cheating. That person’s cheating. I’m the one not cheating, I’m going to get the low grade because I’m really trying to do well, I’m not a cheat.” I heard this over and over again, “I’m not a cheat, but I know everyone in the class is cheating, and I’m not going to be the one getting a B, when they’re getting an A.” And so it became this crazy dynamic of a mix of “I’m not going to leave points on the table,” and “I’ll be darned everyone else is cheating.” And the barrier to entry is so incredibly low that the students who would never cheat, it’s a mouse click away. Oh, there’s the answer. Yeah, I knew that, hand it in, Sorry, long answer, John, but that sort of summarizes my exposure to it.

John: I actually had a conversation with a student just a few weeks ago that mirrors that exact discussion. Her response when we talked about this is she should have had more faith in her own ability, but she was using it as a crutch because she wasn’t that confident, so she was using this in every one of her courses. And I was just the person who happened to catch her doing it.

Rebecca: Academic dishonesty has been an issue for a very long time. But the pandemic has definitely put a spotlight on, especially this kind of digital version of academic dishonesty, even though that same mouse click was there a year or two ago, and these platforms definitely had traffic, they seem to have increased during the pandemic. Can you talk a little bit about the role of the pandemic in this particular issue?

James: Rebecca, you’re absolutely right. Unfortunately, cheating has been going on for a long time. And, usually, the way most professors adjust to that is, let’s say the homework or something might only be worth 10,15, 20%. It’s not particularly high stakes. It’s designed to be formative anyways. It’s the exams. And so in the past, they were face to face. And while young people tend to be very innovative and brilliant in solutions to circumventing academic honesty, in general, it was very hard to do. The pandemic rolls in. And now, exams are online. So we’re in a situation where the barrier to entry to cheating on an exam when it was face to face was pretty gosh darn high. Now, it’s extremely low, because you’re at home, you’re sitting in your bedroom or whatever, at the kitchen table, you’re taking an online test. Many faculty, many universities don’t use a proctoring service, we can talk a little bit about those, they’re typically a cost added, usually to the student, if they become very expensive to do institutionally. And quite frankly, I have a lot of experience that those systems don’t work, they don’t deter cheating, it’s pretty easy to cheat while these systems are being used. And I’ve unfortunately been involved with faculty that I’ve talked to, from my institution and other institutions where cheating has occurred during the exam while it was being video monitored. So in the arms race of trying to prevent cheating in the online world, we as instructors have a tendency to be a step behind. But you’re right, Rebecca, the pandemic shifted us online, including the big assessments, the big summative assessments, the exams, and we struggled with how to do it. Frankly, it was a little bit of lack of imagination on our part, and maybe an unwillingness or not recognizing that this change was afoot. The faculty that I’ve talked to that have modified their exam processes, have had some success. And interestingly enough faculty who have had upfront discussions with their students about academic honesty, and integrity, and setting standards, and a North star for yourself in terms of what your behavior is, they’ve had success in deterring cheating and academic dishonesty. But yeah, the pandemic brought it on, and it was the shift to online, plain and simple.

John: One of the things I think many teaching centers have been advocating for years is to use more online quizzing that’s automated to take some of the pressure off professors, and also to give students lots of formative assessment, as you’ve suggested, much of which is often done as a low-stakes summative assessment too, where students have multiple attempts. And so many faculty have been routinely creating these large test banks and updating them, but they pretty much all appear online pretty quickly. And the benefits of that, in many classes, have effectively disappeared. What can faculty do, without creating thousands of questions every semester, to get around this issue, to give students the benefits of that low-stakes or no-stakes formative assessment, while still making sure that students are actually learning from and ar not just looking things up on one of the services?

Rebecca: John, are you just looking for personal advice?

James: Chances are, it’s out there, John, I’m sorry to say, but hopefully…

John: I actually have been checking and I have done a few things that make it more difficult. But I’ve also been writing hundreds of new questions every week this semester.

James: Yeah, John, that’s part of the challenge is not only is it a shift in thinking for instructors, but it’s a shift in workload. So one approach is you did the work upfront, you’re writing hundreds of new questions with subtle changes, perhaps. And so it makes it very difficult to keep up with all those. The backside is to have more open-ended problems, but then your grading, so your extra work is on the backend. Part of this is having the conversation with the students, an honest conversation about their learning, connecting what you’re doing in the class, what you’re doing with the subject material to the issues that they’re going to face, perhaps in other courses, perhaps in their life and their career choice… so just an adult conversation, this is why it’s important for you to learn that, and I’ve come up with these low-stakes tests, so you can see where you’re at. And yeah, you can cheat on it. If that’s going to be your approach, then I don’t agree with that, and I think it’s eventually going to get you in trouble. So one approach, John is, yeah, you just do it, you have that conversation, and you say, “Look, it’s like taking your temperature to see if you have a fever. Just go and check. You want to know, if you have a fever, you want to know if you really have this material. I think you got to combine that when you get away from the frequent formative testing… the mantra, frequent formative assessment… when you get away from that, and you’re kind of saying, “Okay, here’s the next level test. This is a summative assessment, I need to know where you’re at with it.” That’s where the challenge is at right now, because the test banks have all been widely distributed. And unless you’re a glutton for punishment, and can write hundreds of questions, it’s going to be a real challenge. We’ve had some luck with using Gradescope. John, Rebecca, have you guys used Gradescope?

John: I have not. I know some colleagues who have, although not on our campus that I’m aware of.

James: We’ve had some, I would say modest success with it. It’s a tool that I think works best in a face-to-face type of exam, but you can do it in an online format. It helps speed up the grading process, it leverages artificial intelligence. There are some technical issues and glitches and so forth. But folks in chemistry and math have been experimenting with it with very good results. And one of the things it does is it can reduce the grading time. And that’s been the big pushback from my colleagues is “I’ll make open-ended problems, but then their grading is so hard.” One thing I did, and again, mechanical engineering, so I’ve got an advantage in that I can ask design-type questions. And what I have done in the past… this is pre-pandemic… is I would assign each student in the class slightly different parameters for a design problem. And then I was able, using some software (I think I used Mathematica or MATLAB, I don’t remember), I was able to run all the different variables and come up with approximately what their solution should look like. And so I split the difference, there was a little bit of upfront work in setting it up and a little bit of extra grading. But here’s the thing, the students loved it. And not because it was a design problem… I would say they like design problems. Here’s the insight. They loved it because they could work together, but they all had their own set of parameters that they had to do on their own. So they were like, “Oh, this is great. We got together, four or five of us got together and talked through it and explained it to each other.” But then everyone had to sit down, and kind of run the numbers for themselves. And they all diverged to slightly different solutions. That was a big insight for me. It would be interesting. I mean, I don’t know how you’d expand that to other disciplines. It would be interesting to go back and try that some more and see if that sort of assessment would get around all this. Now that said, could someone post their specific parameters on Chegg and get the answer? Yeah, unfortunately, the answer might be yes, John.

John: And in fact, I did that with my first econometrics exam when we moved online. I created seven variants of each of seven questions for a class of about 30 students, and nearly all the questions ended up online within about an hour of the test. And the first appearance was within 15 minutes of the test opening. So yeah, they can and they get a custom solution that can then be used by others. And for most of them five or six of the variants ended up appearing online very quickly.

James: Yeah, I wish we had a solution. Because if the three of us had the solution to it, we’d be going up for the initial public offering and starting up our company. But yeah, part of it is student behavior, and helping them understand what’s at stake about their learning. Part of it is changing our behavior as instructors. And while I understand sites like Chegg have introduced, I think it;s called honor shields, and so forth, the colleagues that I’ve talked to said it’s not very effective, they haven’t been happy with it. So yeah, this is a very vexing problem. And one that I don’t see a clear solution to in the future, I will say there was a math professor with a small seminar type class, and he just had oral Zoom exams with each student. He just set up a time and asked them. And the same professor, in his larger class, told students, “I might randomly contact you to explain how you solve a problem on a test.” And I think the fear of that alone probably drove students to study. [LAUGHTER] But yeah, you hate to resort to techniques like that. But there it is.

Rebecca: Especially when the platform’s themselves, like Chegg, they’re well designed for the behavior they want to occur. They’re designed in a way that rewards people uploading content, and so it’s designed in a way to be kind of effective at getting students to upload content because they want content.

James: Yep, exactly.

John: That’s actually the Course Hero model where you get free subscriptions if you upload a certain amount of graded material. And then you get access to materials that other students post. With Chegg, there’s a monthly fee, which I know, because I have to pay it just to keep track of all the cheating that’s taking place in my classes, which is really troubling. But it does have a nice interface, which is fairly similar to the interface that Netflix and similar services use. “If you like this problem, you will also like this problem.” And, in general, you can trace your way through and find many other questions from any given assessment that you posted

Rebecca: …referrals and recommendations. It’s amazing.

James: This is the Amazon model. John, one of the things that I found was interesting in talking to students who use Chegg is it recommends another problem. A number of students said that they enjoyed that, because while they saw the solution and everything, they felt that they were getting more experience with different types of problems, and they like that. But what was really interesting is when I would interview students and talk about their use of Chegg, one of the things that kept coming up, over and over again, is they liked the way, with certain types of problems in Chegg, that there could be hints. There are a whole spectrum of solutions available there. But the ones that are sort of curated, they thought were done very well, every step was explained, there was no “Oh, and it can be shown” and “then completing the algebra you get”… they showed all the steps. And some problems have hints, and you can choose to uncover the hints. And many of the students said they loved that. It was in plain language, and it showed all the steps. And maybe we should take a lesson from that when we put together course materials and study guides for our students, maybe that would be more beneficial for the students, would help them work their way through it. But I thought that was an interesting insight, that those were key aspects. Here’s another aspect, there’s not a lot of video content on Chegg. Now part of it is because “I just need to copy the answer and hand this homework in,” [LAUGHTER] but the students said, “Yeah, they didn’t really care about the video content, they were happy to read through the sort of solution walkthroughs.” And that’s interesting, because that’s sort of the opposite of YouTube, where it’s all video. And so the different learning methods and styles and approaches I thought was interesting. I just wish they didn’t cheat. [LAUGHTER]]

Rebecca: I think taking a lesson from some of those design aspects is important too. A lot of the things that students complain about is the learning management system and what that looks like and feels like or, for example, the problem sets that you’re talking about and wanting it to be in plain language rather than in language that maybe seems too difficult, or it’s not the right level of challenge. All of those things are things that could help the student maybe not want to leave your course and go somewhere else if it was built in. But it all requires a lot of time and resources and materials. And many of us don’t have that available to us with workloads expanding and especially during the pandemic having to turn around things quickly to shift gears,

James: Rebecca, you’re right, the massive shift from face to face to online, the anxiety, especially in the early days over this pandemic, and I don’t think the anxiety has gone down at all. But all that and the extra workload of learning to transition online, and figuring all this out. That’s been a consistent challenge during this whole period, that crazy shift in workload. And it’s been a challenge for all of us. It’s been a challenge for the students, certainly the types of students we’re talking about, in general, are students who went to college, they went to a residential experience. And all of a sudden we told them, [LAUGHTER] “Well, no, you’re actually attending an online institution at this point.” And Rebecca and John, I did want to point out, there was another interesting insight. I was interviewing some students on our campus, and then when I interviewed students from other universities, I was able to find similar things. And here’s what a student said to me, and I won’t use names, but they said, “Oh, in Professor X’s class, we never use Chegg.” Well, why not? “We didn’t have to. Her lectures were great. She explained everything. The homework was tied in, it made sense. And she gave us all her old exams. And she said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna know this for the exam.’” We had her old exams, and we’re like, “Oh my gosh, she’s right. We need to know this for the exam.“ And there was good support and tutorial services. There was great support. This is a quote, one student said “Chegg, Chegg who?” …obviously being a joker about it. But I thought that was fascinating, that when the course is well designed, when the material is presented in a clear way that’s student centered, when the students clearly understand how they’re going to be assessed, they know there isn’t going to be the trick problem to separate the stratospheric A from everybody else, they were like, “Yeah, we don’t need Chegg. We have everything we need from the professor and the student support services.” And when I asked students from other universities, I said, “Well, tell me about a course that you didn’t use Chegg.” And pretty much, I’d say well over half of them had “Oh, yeah, in organic chemistry, in thermodynamics, yeah, I had a great professor.” So there’s something in there that we need to learn as instructors. But that said, another quote from the same students who did use Chegg in another class, when I said “It’s academic dishonesty, you can be expelled.” And he said, “80% of the class is using it, they gonna expel all of us?” That’s an interesting perspective from a student. So yeah, but talking to students and getting their views on this has been tremendously fascinating. And it’s really helped inform a lot of the advice I give my colleagues about how to make the best of this situation. But it’s a challenge.

John: And I suspect the number of classes where it’s not being used has probably declined quite a bit, because once they’re paying that monthly fee, and now Chegg has a really nice mobile app, where you just take a picture of a problem on the screen, it uploads it, and the response comes back generally in 15 to 20 minutes, the marginal cost of engaging it in additional classes has become a lot lower for those students who might have considered it but didn’t think it was worthwhile before.

James: Yeah, the barrier to entry is now at ground level, other than the fee of $15, or whatever it is. It would be nice to engage with Chegg and other platforms. We need the students to learn this material. This is important. Let’s work together. I mean, the honor shield, okay, if it’s not working, why isn’t it working? Let’s figure out why it isn’t working on our end, working with students on academic honesty, and having a North star and having their own internal what’s right and what’s wrong, and helping young people build that set of skills and beliefs about themselves. You mentioned earlier that the young woman, she didn’t have the confidence in herself to be able to just do it. And part of it might be down the road, do departments and schools and universities and so forth, make a big fuss out of this? Is there legal action in the future? This is interesting. Where is this gonna go? I think the article in Forbes, which was very enlightening, they talked about the valuation of the company in the billions. And so if you take a very crass look at this, you got a multi billion dollar company based on cheating. That’s a hard swipe, and so forth. But let’s have a conversation.

John: And it’s basically all copyright infringement of textbook publishers’ content and faculty members’ content. So basically, they’re making millions, essentially from encouraging academic dishonesty and from infringing on everybody’s copyright. So it wouldn’t really be all that difficult, I would think, although copyright law with digital materials is a little bit tricky, because we do have the DMCA out there. And I know Chegg in particular, and I think Course Hero as well, is pretty good at responding to DMCA takedown requests, because I’ve sent dozens of them there just in the past semester, and quite a few over the last couple of years. And Chegg is actually also very good in providing faculty with information on the login ID that students use. Up until last year, in my experience at least, students were mostly using their actual college email address. Now they’ve tended to switch it a bit where they’ve created fake Gmail accounts, but they’re still logging in from the same IP address that they’re using when they submit their exams, which makes it really easy to do a look up between the exam and the person contributing the material. So there are ways of enforcing this. And if more faculty crack down on it, perhaps, it might deter a bit more of this activity. But there’s millions being made, as you said, and it might be nice if some of the publishers would work together to try to take back their ownership of the material they’ve paid to create.

James: I don’t know copyright law. But some of the problems I’ve looked at, where they were explained in more detail, whoever wrote that up, sort of wrote it up independent, they did not photocopy the instructors manual, the solution manual, they worked it out themselves. And truly I do not know what the copyright law is there.

John: The solutions, I think, would not be violations to copyright. But the photocopies of the problems and the test questions and so forth would be a violation of copyright.

James: That’s right, when we make up exams and so forth. But I mean, I’ve talked to faculty who had the exam, and had on the exam, “do not upload to Chegg,” [LAUGHTER] and it appeared, as you said, John, within 15, 20 minutes, and in those cases, it’s pretty easy to prosecute. Chegg will, as long as you go through the official academic honesty policy on campus, they’ll provide information, and that gets ugly really fast for the student. And here’s the other issue, John and Rebecca, I’ve pursued academic dishonesty cases, not involving Chegg, and it is work, it’s effort, it’s stress, and then you get the emails from the student: “You’re ruining my life” and all this kind of stuff. And It can be like, “Oh, boy, wouldn’t have been so much better if we had this conversation and you said, ‘Hey, Professor, I’m really struggling, can you give me some extra help or help me find a tutor.’” Here at Binghamton University, and I assume at many universities, students pay various comprehensive fees. tutoring is free, just go and sign up for tutoring, you’ve already paid a comprehensive fee that covers it. And I make that pitch to the first-year students all the time and say,” You’ve already paid for this, go and use it.” But yeah, I mean, think of the effort it takes for you to then go through all this work and crosswalk an IP address to this and that, I mean, that’s part of the equation we talked about, the time shift, you have to spend time on front creating assessments, on the back end grading it, and all through the process, pursuing it legally, a real challenge.

Rebecca: I think sometimes the argument, too, for students about being honest works a little better when it’s in their major, because there’s a slightly better sell of like a direct impact of “this skill set is really going to get you when you start that job and you can’t do the thing.” But we have to work on our arguments for the courses that might be in general education and things and help students recognize how those are valuable as well out in the workforce. Because I think sometimes that argument can be really compelling for students, but we have to be ready to help make it and help them want to be authentic in what they’re doing so that they can have success.

James: Absolutely. And you’re right. When I talked to students, certainly, for the courses outside of their major, they were much more willing to just survive the course, they really didn’t care. And, again, what lesson can we learn from that? Why are students feeling that way? Why are they saying that? Are those courses not connected? Or did we just not make the connection? We didn’t show them, “Oh, yes, that’s important, that gen ed is really much more important.” I’d argue, certainly in the STEM fields, as so many STEM degrees are being offered worldwide, as technology allows for so many of the things that used to require a person, now can be done by AI, that it’s our ability to work in teams, our ability to communicate, its ethics, and how do you tackle big challenging problems? I might be a mechanical engineer, I bring that background, other people bring other backgrounds and experiences. And that, what a great way to tie in general education courses to the bigger picture. Are we making that argument? Are we helping students make those connections? So, something to think about. I don’t have any answers, guys, so I’ll have to stay tuned to your podcast as you bring smarter people in to say, “Oh, well, when James said that, I have the solution.” [LAUGHTER]

John: Are there some other approaches that faculty could use in place of more traditional exams to eliminate some of the incentives and the possibility for this type of academic integrity concern?

James: Sure, there are, and they’re are more time consuming. So I’m going to be honest with myself, it’s a little easier to have 10 multiple choice questions in mechanical engineering on an exam, a little bit of a testbank, a little bit of taken from the homework, taken from my notes, super easy to grade. If you got 100 plus students, you can grade that pretty quick or you bubble source it. And I justify it, because the licensing exam is multiple choice. Well, it’s okay. It’s okay. I think we got to go back and say, “Well, maybe a judicious blend of some multiple choice questions.” Hey, you know what? The licensing exam is multiple choice. And sometimes you just got to get the right answer. With longer answer prompts that ask them to evaluate something, that’s the approach I use, and it weighs heavily on the back end. The grading is now something that you spend the weekend with a stack of papers,going through them. And you know, you guys know how that is, you can’t start grading a problem and stop halfway because you lose it in your head, right? You got the rubric in front of you. But still, you get a certain “Ok, I took a point off for that, yeah.” And so you got to sit and do that whole problem. And that’s for a lot of folks, I’ll just say, for me, that’s a shift in doing things as we shift to online. I hope that when we go back to face to face, and let’s hope it’s this fall, that we don’t forget some of these lessons, that we really should be designing better assessments that really challenge what the students know. My argument is, if you can google on it, and it’s three mouse clicks away, it’s probably not worthy of testing them on it. And the students are telling you that by saying I’m just gonna copy it. So I don’t have great solutions. I know some of the learning management systems, you can put problems in there, they’ll mix up the order, they’re timed, you can’t go back. But, the only problem I have with that is what is it we’re really testing? The time thing just puts a lot of anxiety and pressure on people and I’m not a good one under those conditions. And you know, John, I’m a “Oh shoot on problem two, wait a minute. Yeah, I did. Oh, I did that. I want to go back to problem two. I just remembered, cause in problem six, there was something similar.” You can’t do it. So yeah, there are things we do out there. But they’re not getting at the heart of what we want. And that is students to learn this material and for us to assess it in a fair and reasonable way, and help the students connect all this for whatever goals they have in their lives. What are you trying to do? Why are you in college? What’s your goal? Let’s connect what we’re doing to that goal. So Chegg’s not in front of that, that’s a deeply philosophical question for another podcast. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think combined with that, James, depending on your class size, open pedagogy or authentic assessments are also options, but it has to be the right kind of course, with the right kind of content, and the right kind of class size…

James: Yeah.

Rebecca: …for those things to all work in the mix.

James: Yeah, Rebecca, right now I’m teaching an innovation class with 10 students. [LAUGHTER] It is an absolute joy. It’s 10 motivated students, we’re using a platform called mural, which is an online collaborative platform. And so when the homework is due, I can actually go into Mural and see them doing the homework and they see each other’s homework. It’s like, yeah, we’re all going to collaborate on this. And so they can actually look and see what other people are putting in. And I mix it up, I randomize some stuff. So they have to do the reading and then they have to do parts. But, the students love it. And believe me, it’s almost like a bespoke education. This is like hand crafted somewhere between there and I used to teach some of the big sophomore engineering classes with 175 students, and I know some of your listeners who are teaching even bigger classes. That becomes almost industrial in scale. And the ability to give authentic assessments becomes very, very difficult. And until we get those AI engines up… and I’ll tell you what, when they get to the level of being able to do that. we’re all out of a job…. [LAUGHTER] or we better redefine what it is we do as educators.

Rebecca: I think what you’re pointing out, though, James, in some ways is that it tends to be those lower level classes that are bigger, those introductory classes. And so although they might get away with it, in those lower classes, they may not be thinking about the long-term game there.[LAUGHTER]

James: Yeah.

Rebecca: …because those are skills and things that they need in those upper-level classes, especially in their major, it’ll come back to get them in a way that if they don’t take an upper- level class in something else, they might not experience the same kind of consequences. But even reminding students of that, particular long-term consequences of their choices, could be useful.

James: That’s excellent. Rebecca. And as we talked earlier on, I mentioned some of the strategies that seems to work was faculty instructors talking about this, just having a very frank conversation. “Yeah, I know, all these platforms exist. Let’s talk about it. Here’s what I’m trying to do in this class.” Rebecca, I don’t think, in general, we do a great job at connecting the courses across the curriculum. And so I’m teaching my course and I do my thing. And then I hand the students off over the fence. “There you go, go take the next course,” unless we’re doing kind of self studies within our disciplines. “Hey, you know what, I teach this basic thing here at the sophomore level, and you don’t use it till last semester senior year, when does the student practice that thing?” And now we’re expecting them to pull that out of their hat and be experts at it? Why don’t we change things so that they’re constantly using it? And these are great conversations to have… a good hard look, a deep dive into how we build curriculum, helping students connect it, helping connect it to the progress they’re trying to make in their lives. Why are you studying mechanical engineering? What do you want to do with that? Let’s connect those dots through the program, so you can see where things are connected. But as long as the barrier to entry to online cheating is low, [LAUGHTER] but we got an uphill fight.

John: I have tried using some open pedagogy projects, including student-created podcasts and videos created by students, but it’s so much more work evaluating that, that it just doesn’t scale very well. I have been using them in my classes of up to 50 in my online class, but I have not yet committed to doing that in a class of 400, which I normally teach in person… last fall I taught synchronously online.

James: Wow. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And what are the recurrent themes here? Part of it is: let’s have conversations with students, let’s rethink formative and summative assessments, are there solutions at different scales that make sense? The real challenge, Rebecca, you’re absolutely right, is the big introductory sort of classes where we’ve become used to having sometimes hundreds, if not more, students in the class, these pools of multiple choice questions that make it, and I’m using the phrase industrial and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense at all, but it’s this ability to be able to expose students to a chemistry curriculum or mechanical engineering curriculum at scale in a very efficient way. [LAUGHTER] I mean, It’s kind of what STEM people do: how do we make this more efficient? And then a big change comes, a huge disruption, and we have to scramble. And so, I don’t see a way around the fact that this is going to be a lot of extra work. And if this were a long term shift, then absolutely, I think we’d be talking about how we restructure higher education in general and different departments and disciplines. I think because it’s short term, the concern I have is, we are going to forget all this, we’re going to wipe our hands of it and go back to face to face and go back to the old way, and not address some of the structural challenges that we’ve uncovered here: helping students understand why it’s important, and “oh, by the way, if the courses are disjointed, that’s on us, go fix that, put some effort into that, and have those conversations with the students.” That’s one of the things I always think about is what is it going to look like a year from now. And I’m concerned that we’re going to miss learning the lessons, we’re going to forget to apply these lessons, when we get back to our old ways, because we’re used to them. “I’ve got my research, my scholarship, my teaching, I’ve got it all balanced just right. I’ve been doing this for a long time, don’t make me change.” But we might have to in order to really help the students be successful. And one thing I always remember is this generation of students is going to be taking care of me when I’m old, so I want them to be good decision makers, [LAUGHTER] and have a good strong set of ethics and a moral compass. So they’re like, “oh, yeah, we have to look at society in a bigger sense.”

Rebecca: That keeps it in perspective, I think, James. [LAUGHTER]

James: Yeah, that’s right. It’s like, “Make sure I’m nice, because when I’m retired, these will be the wage earners. So I want to make sure that they keep the wheels of the economy turning and keep healthcare going and all the things we rely on, that we became painfully aware of during this pandemic, and how thin some of those threads were, how tenuous some of those systems were and are.” So really, it’s amazing how this pandemic has impacted absolutely every aspect of our lives. And we’re talking about some very specific things here. But there’s deep stuff going on here. And this is an opportunity for us to rethink how we move forward.

Rebecca: Especially because it’s easy to go back to what we had or to desire that, especially when we feel potentially burnt out with the workload and things of shifting, or just even having to have the difficult conversations with colleagues about really needing to do significant change when it’s really hard work that needs to be done.

James: Yeah.

Rebecca: So it’s easy to want to avoid it. [LAUGHTER]

James: Yeah, and I’m assuming this is a true statement. But, as a mechanical engineering professor, my training was watching my mechanical engineering professors, right? And their training was watching their professors. And so we teach the way we were taught unless we pause and take a look at the science and research and scholarship in teaching and learning, and then try to apply that. And yeah, Rebecca, you’re right, it’s work. And when you upset that balance, what’s going to happen here? And what does this mean for the future of how we do things? It would be great to not have these massive classes where you could interact with students more directly. I don’t know that that would solve the cheating problem. My students aren’t cheating in my class, there’s only 10 of them, I know them extremely well, they’re very motivated and interested, and they see where it’s connected. So how do you do that at scale and how do you do that across the curriculum?

John: On a more positive note, many faculty who had not been very involved in professional development, who had not reflected on their teaching, because they were just doing it the same way they always had, were suddenly forced to confront some new realities, and they’ve learned a lot during the past year. And I’m hoping that much of what people have learned will not be forgotten as we move past the pandemic.

James: Yeah, I agree. And I’ve been, as I’m sure you’ve seen, I’ve been just blown away by my colleagues, the huge shift, the willingness to just jump on board, to try new technology, to experiment with things and get feedback. Hey, I tried this and it really works great. And then we’ve been able to get that in the hands of other people. It was incredible to see and you’re absolutely right. So let’s pull these good pieces and bring them back. I can see myself now, even when we go face to face, just being more than happy if a student wants to Zoom with me for 15 minutes, and it’s in the evening, I could set up two evenings a week, set up an hour to do that. Like, before, I would have been: “When I get home, I’m toast. I just want to maybe catch up on my reading, catch up on my emails,” I could see that changing. And John and Rebecca, one of the things I have done, is for my entire staff, I have a weekly Zoom town hall where they can ask any questions, I give them updates. It’s fantastic. Folks really like it. And then I run a scholarship program and I just have… every two weeks, I set up a time chunk of time, vast majority of them show up, and we just chat, like, “How are things going?” And I didn’t do that. I mean, I certainly didn’t do it on Zoom before. And I might see individuals now and then, but it made me much more accessible. But in a way that was acceptable. It’s like, “Oh, I’m used to Zoom now, yeah, I don’t mind sitting in my attic studio at home and setting up a 45-minute Zoom and meeting with some students or some colleagues. So what a cool thing to be that accessible and be comfortable with it, within, obviously, within limits, and so forth. That’s a cool thing that I want to continue. A lesson we learned is that when we shifted to online, one thing became apparent right away, is there were a lot of students in socio-economic situations, they didn’t have a laptop, they didn’t have a camera, they didn’t have headphones, they didn’t have internet. And this pandemic has widened the gap to a very uncomfortable level. And so paying attention to that. And what we did at Binghamton is SUNYgave us laptops, we went out and bought a bunch of laptops, we bought mobile MiFi hotspots, 250 of them. You don’t even want to know what my monthly bill is for those… unlimited data. But we just did it. We just did it and sent it out. The other thing is we did a phone campaign just to reach out to students. And we recruited faculty and staff. And it was incredible, just to have a conversation with students. They were like, “Hey,” the overwhelming comment back was “Wow, like, thanks for contacting me.” “Yeah, I’m doing okay,” or “No, I’m not doing okay, I’ve got to take care of my younger brother and sister, my mom is working as a nurse, and it’s absolute chaos here.” So those are two things we learned in the pandemic that I hope we pay attention to, because there are students for with having all this fancy technology, that doesn’t exist. They’re in school, because there’s a computer lab and they don’t own this stuff, they don’t have it. And then the other is just reaching out to students, being a human, you know, “Hey, how’s it going?: …incredible, how powerful that is.

John: This has all become much more visible for faculty as a result of the pandemic. Those inequities were always there, but they were hidden. And now that faculty see that, it may also provide a richer appreciation of the inequities that students face as they were reaching the college level. And that’s something, as we move into the fall, that I think we’re going to see magnified because most students completed most of the last academic year remote, and some students were in well-funded school district with many resources, and all of the students and the faculty had good equipment. And in other schools, they did not have that sort of environment and much less learning occurred. So, we’re going to be faced with a student body that’s going to be experiencing greater inequities as they arrive on our campus in the fall. And I think that’s something that we all have to be prepared for.

James: John, you’re absolutely right, and well said. I think it’s always been there, and now there’s much more awareness. And I think that is something we cannot forget. And the second part of that is the students coming in… we’ve had some conversations with school districts, principals, high school principals, so forth, superintendents, and what we’re hearing is exactly what you said. It’s all over the map in terms of what that academic experience is. We know that the incoming first-year students had a pretty crazy year and a half, a lot of school districts had a “do no harm” policy. So John, if my average in your class was an 87, it didn’t matter. I couldn’t get worse than an 87. So am I motivated to work harder? Or am I going: “and thank you, I just got to take it easy.” And so I may not have learned all that material. So we have that. We have principals telling us that people have moved because of the pandemic, they had to move in with relatives. So the student isn’t showing up, they go to the house, they don’t even live there anymore. Like, where are they? So that’s a challenge. So if you think about the social aspects at home, you think about the emotional growth aspects, you think about the academic aspects, and then you add in standard test optional. The cohort of students coming in is potentially very different in a lot of ways. And we’re going to have to look at how we support them. It’s not a deficit model on their part. It’s a deficit model on our part, too, as instructors. So what are our deficits? And how do we change and modify to meet the students at a place where they can be successful? And I think that’s very important. But John, here’s the thing that was most sobering. One principal told us that it’s not just the seniors, it’s the juniors. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, so not only did the first-year’s propagate through the system, right behind them is the juniors who had a wacky…” and here’s what one principal said: “The biggest failure rate they’re seeing is in the high school sophomores.” This is a problem that isn’t going away. This is going to wash up onto the shores of higher education and if we’re not ready for it, we’re going to be in for a heck of a shock. And quite frankly, those students are going to be in for a shock. So we’ve got to figure out, what do we need to do as institutions of higher learning? And how can we best support students to be successful? No one goes to college to flunk out. They’re going because they’re trying to make progress. They’re trying to make progress in their life. Okay. How do we help them? Oh, yeah, deep and profound stuff, John and Rebecca, the effects of this are going to be with us for years to come.

Rebecca: …at least 13 years, I think, K-12. [LAUGHTER]

James: Oh yeah, right?

John: The preschoolers might have gotten past it by the time they arrive, but…

Rebecca: Yeah. A lot of preschools, I think, still maintained in person, but…

James: Yeah, so big challenges out there. I think we’re up for it. What I love about being in higher education is that we constantly question, we’re curious by nature, stubborn sometimes and have to see data in order to change our minds. But, these are all things we’re good at, and as long as we pay attention, don’t forget the lessons we’ve learned and recognize that the world has changed, and if we’re willing to figure out how we change, then I think this has a good ending. So I’m optimistic. But it’s going to be a lot of work. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Definitely, and some values, of changes of things like flexibility are things that we see as value, perhaps, in students now that we didn’t see before as important skill sets and things, and adaptability.

James: Yeah, and helping students persist, and all the qualities that helped drive us to moving forward in higher education, and so forth. How do we instill some of that curiosity and work ethic? All of us, each one of us, has a unique story of why we went to school and how we want to move forward with our lives. So how do we tap into that and help students be successful? That’s what gets me up in the morning and makes me excited about my job.

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

James: Good question. So I can tell you what’s next on my horizon. I’m in the STEM field, I’m doing some research and doing some digging. I’m concerned about traditionally underrepresented groups of students in STEM fields and their success and persistence. I am very fortunate to have an NSF grant that’s sponsoring some work in this area. And when I interview and talk to students, their perspective is very interesting. For example, I was talking with a young Hispanic woman, very smart, already has a job lined up, great, great student. And she said, “Yeah, they bring guest speakers in the class, and no one looks like me, all the guest speakers look like the professor,” …which is like me, an old white guy. So where are the young people? Where are people that, I know it sounds silly, but that look different, but more importantly, have different backgrounds and different experiences and different paths to success. And that’s such an easy thing to fix at all our institutions. We have alumni of diversity who are out there. So I’m concerned about our ability to attract and retain traditionally underrepresented students in STEM fields, because that’s the pipeline for faculty in STEM. So you want to attack the faculty problem in STEM, let’s fix this problem. And you can argue let’s fix K through 12, but I can impact where I’m at right now. And down the road that’s going to impact senior-level administration. So the more people who choose an academic career, the more diverse points of view we have, the more likely that they’ll persist in the career and move into leadership. So, that’s a big problem I’m working on. That’s what’s next for me is some research and scholarship in that area. Because I want the best and brightest students no matter what their background is, because they got to take care of me when I’m old. And I’m already getting pretty old.

Rebecca: I think that’s a perfect note to end on. [LAUGHTER] Thanks so much for that conversation. Really important things to be thinking about.

James: Yeah, good stuff. And thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it. Best wishes to you all. And let’s reconnect in the fall and see what lessons have we hung on to and how crazy is the fall. So, let’s circle back if you don’t mind, I’d love to catch up with you again.

John: That would be great. It’s always great talking to you. Thank you.

James: Great. Awesome. All right. Bye bye.

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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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188. Student-Ready Courses

College faculty sometimes complain that many of the first-year students who enter their courses are not “college ready.” In this episode, Natalie Hurley joins us to examine strategies that can be used to ease this transition and help ensure that our courses are “student ready.” Natalie is a New York State Master Teacher and a 2018 NNSTOY STEM Fellow who teaches high school mathematics in the Indian River Central School District in Watertown, NY.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: College faculty sometimes complain that many of the first-year students who enter their courses are not “college ready.” In this episode, we examine strategies that can be used to ease this transition and help ensure that our courses are “student ready.”

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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John: Our guest today is Natalie Hurley. Natalie is a New York State Master Teacher and a 2018 NNSTOY STEM Fellow who teaches high school mathematics in the Indian River Central School District in Watertown, NY. Natalie was also one of our students here at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Natalie,

Natalie: T hank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

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

Natalie: I am, I’m drinking a peach tea because it’s warming up outside and I want to feel that warmth.

Rebecca: That sounds right up John’s alley,

John: …and I am drinking a ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: I knew there’d be peach. It’s almost like you guys coordinated. I have Irish breakfast today.

John: No Scottish?

Rebecca: I am almost out of the Irish breakfast. And then we will move on to a different container.

John: Move down the Empire [LAUGHTER] and head back to your English breakfast and afternoon.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: Okay, we’ve invited you here to talk about the transition between high school and college. Could you first tell us a little bit about the courses that you teach?

Natalie: I teach high school math. And I have a pretty nice spectrum. I teach algebra I, calculus, and precalculus. I’m in my fifth year of teaching precalculus and calculus, and I have taught algebra I, eight years.

John: Excellent. What were your majors in college?

Natalie: So, I was a math major from the get go. And then I had this fantastic professor who helped me find my love of economics. His name is Professor John Kane, and he’s here with us too. [LAUGHTER] And then, once I started to find my love of economics, I picked up a minor in it. Unfortunately, it was too late in the game to pick up a double major, but the minor was great too.

John: And we did talk a little bit about you going on to grad school in economics. And I was a little disappointed that you didn’t, but then I thought you could do a lot of good in the school system. So, one of the things we want to talk to you about is the differences between your experiences in college and the way you teach your classes now. Could you talk a little bit about some of the differences between what you observed as an undergraduate student and the way in which you teach now in secondary school?

Natalie: Yes. So there are definitely a lot of differences. Although I tried to definitely keep that idea of college and career readiness, being wholesome in my classroom. I remember in college it was a lot of lecture style, a combination between very, very large classes of hundreds. And my math classes were usually pretty small, less than 20, generally. In my classroom, in a non pandemic year, I have somewhere between 15 and 20 students usually. Of course, now we’re doing cohorts. So I have a class as small as two and another class as large as 13… is my largest class… on Thursdays and Fridays. So I just remember, in college, a lot of lecture style: the teacher talks, you write notes, you can ask questions, but it’s very much like you raise your hand, if a teacher calls on you, you can ask a question. In my classroom, it’s more a conversation about math, whereas I’m leading them to discover the math, hopefully on their own, with a little bit of questioning from me to lead them there. There’s a lot of… in a non-pandemic year, think-pair-shares, or working in groups, or talking it out with their partner, or somebody that they sit near… things like that, that’s a little bit harder to do these days, especially when I only have a class of two in there sitting six feet away from each other or more.

Rebecca: Everything’s a think-pair-share. [LAUGHTER]

Natalie: Right. So yeah, and as I grow, and I become more seasoned, it becomes more student centered and less about me than it had been before. So I want to put the students in the center, whereas when I was there, it was very much the teachers up there telling you how to do it. And then this is how you do the calculus. And then this is how you do calc 2, this is how you do calc 3, and they just show you and you find your study groups, and then you work with each other after class as opposed to in class. So that seems to be some of the differences. I remember in college is a lot of rote memorization: know these words, be able to regurgitate this proof, things like that, where just now, in my classroom, and really the focus of high school math, and really all math through the Common Core standards, is that deep understanding, getting to the core and understanding vertically, what number sense and number theory is throughout all the grade levels.

Rebecca: It sounds like you’ve incorporated a lot of evidence-based practices into your own practice, which we encourage all of our faculty, even at the college level, to do as well. We hear a lot of faculty complaining about students not being “college ready.” And maybe that’s because there’s still a lot of lecture and memorization, and we want to keep changing that. What are some ways that we can become more “student ready” and bring students in?

Natalie: I think it’s very important that colleges understand what it’s like in the high school, how teachers are teaching, what they’re teaching. I’m in my ninth year, and the next year, we’ll start to move into the next gen math standards. And then that’s going to be the third set of standards. And I think it’s really important for college professors at all levels to be able to understand what did these standards look like for these kids? And how do I need to change what I’m teaching to adapt to that? I recently had a very informal discussion with the master teacher program and SUNY professors at SUNY Delhi about their math and science curriculum. And there was just a lot of surprises on both ends about what’s being taught, what isn’t being taught any more… emphasis on the calculator… standards now are being written so that there’s a lot of calculator use and students are losing a lot of their number sense, because you don’t need to know how to add and subtract, multiply and divide fractions when you get into high school, because you have a calculator that’s going to do it all, which turns into a lot of button pushing. But that’s definitely going to have a trickle down effect into… or trickle up effect, I guess… in college, when these students get there and they’re so used to being fully dependent on calculator and technology use… which is great if you’re a college that also promotes that. But some colleges may also still say, “Hey, we want to limit technology.”

John: Since you were in college, I think much of our teaching has changed. I know in my own department, most of us were doing a lot of lecturing when you were a student. And there’s been a pretty steady transition away from that. And that’s been true in many departments, including our math department.

Natalie: That’s great to hear.

John: But we still see a lot of lecture. And one of the things we’re hoping is that perhaps the experience of the transition to remote instruction has encouraged more people to try some new approaches to teaching and learning.

Natalie: We have definitely seen that in the high school, a lot of teachers who were behind the ball, as far as utilizing technology in their classrooms, it’s been forced to become great at it… literally overnight. So I guess if there’s a silver lining to all of this, that is definitely key right there. I think something that’s extremely important in high school is making connections to real world, making everything very real life, how am I ever going to use this in real life and making sure that that is evident in the student learning. And I don’t teach in a college, I haven’t been in a college in 10-15 years. But I think that if you wanted to be more student ready is also connecting all of your curricula to career readiness. Students want to know why am I taking this class if I’m going to be a librarian, or if I’m going to be a social worker. So just being able to bring those connections to them, could also help colleges be more student ready.

Rebecca: Just that relevance alone is more motivating to get students excited about topics. So finding ways to connect to students, no matter the level, high school or college, is a really great way to bring them in and bring them along.

John: One of the challenges I know in economics we face, is with students saying, “I’m just not very good at math,” or “I have trouble with graphs.” And I suspect maybe you might have seen a little bit of that, too. How do you address that issue of a fixed mindset concerning student’s ability to engage in mathematics?

Natalie: In my calculus and precalculus classes, and you’ll be even surprised to hear it that I do hear that there. But it’s extremely prevalent in algebra I, that idea of “My mom wasn’t good at math, so I’m not going to be good at math.” “I’ve always had math support, AIS,” or “I’ve been able to get through because I’ve always stayed after with the teacher.” I definitely still hear that, but the idea is to kind of break that mold by saying, “Hey, listen, this is a new year. This is a new teacher, this is a new curriculum, maybe this is going to be the one for you.” I find a lot of students struggle through geometry. So as soon as I bring up geometry, it’s like, “Oh, no, I don’t want to.” And I say, “Listen, let’s connect it to algebra, then. Do you feel more comfortable making the connections to algebra?” …or I don’t even know. I don’t know how to tell them that you can be better. Maybe you had a bad teacher, maybe you had a teacher who didn’t make things relevant for you, or just some bad experiences, but every year’s a new year. I’ve seen all sorts of success stories of students who truly find their niche late in high school math. So in my class, I’ve definitely adopted the idea of a growth mindset. And I’ve been studying on best practices to help do this. And part of that has been through standards-based grading. I’m kind of a beginner, a novice, of standards-based grading… more of a cafeteria, I’m choosing which aspects of it that I’d like to implement versus which ones don’t work for me, yet, as I learn and grow, which is definitely not the high school or college that I went to, to implement things like re-quizzes and retests. And it was hard for me to even start with this idea. Nobody else in my department was doing anything like this. And to be honest, as I was starting my career, I started my career right as common core was being implemented. So there was a ton of work in developing all the new curricula. I started in an eighth grade and moved all the way up and I’m like, “Wait, you want me to make two tests? four tests? two quizzes? three quizzes? four? And you want me to give them to these kids and grade them and change their grades and all of the clerical work. But now that I’m nine years in, I’m ready for it. And I find that the students have such a better… I guess they feel better about themselves when they go in to take a quiz when they know that there’s going to be redemption. One thing that I do is, if their test grade beats their quiz grade, I let the test grade replace the quiz grade in the gradebook. If you can show growth, by the time you get to the test… and that idea actually comes from college. If your grade on the final is better than your grade in the class, some professors will do something like that. Or if your grade is high enough, you don’t even need to take the final or I don’t know if anybody’s still doing things like that. But that kind of way, it takes the stress of testing and quizzing, and it takes it off of the grade and puts it more onto the learning. And, however, I do understand that that practice might not be making my students “college ready” if their college professors are not following that, which probably they are not. However, it’s something that I feel I need to do in order to focus on the learning that needs to happen.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we’ve been working really hard to do at the college level is to incorporate some of those practices as well, to encourage learning, and that it’s about test taking and the testing effect as a way of remembering and learning and practicing rather than some moment in time that somehow reflects all learning that has ever occurred, which is not really relevant or accurate.

John: And you would be happy to know that many people in our math department are doing mastery quizzing and mastery learning approaches where they allow students multiple attempts to demonstrate mastery.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think is somewhat problematic for the transition of students from high school to college is that we don’t have these kinds of conversations very often. They’re not in place unless we go out of our way to talk to local high school teachers about what’s going on in local schools and vice versa, where high school teachers are asking us what’s going on at the college level. Can you talk a little bit about how your Delhi experience evolved in ways that you could encourage others to have those same kinds of conversations?

Natalie: I believe it was somebody from SUNY Delhi reached out to the Executive Director of the New York State Master Teacher program, if you haven’t heard about it, it’s a STEM initiative to retain teachers in math and science. And it’s a four-year fellowship that you have to apply and interview and be selected to join. But, it ends up creating a very strong network of teachers statewide that are actually affiliated with SUNY, every region has a SUNY campus that they are affiliated with, Up here in the North Country, mine is Plattsburgh. And since our program has moved more to an online format, we were able to all participate with SUNY Delhi through this conversation. And I think that just leads to more ideas for the future or to somebody who has an in with some SUNY people. I think we all do professional development. I do it as a high school teacher, and you guys do it as professors. But then, where can we find the middle ground that can maybe mesh some professional development and share some best practices between our two groups?

Rebecca: Sounds like an excellent idea.

John: That is a practice that I think we should do more of. One of the issues that we have is that in general, high schools provide a lot of support for students. And often some of that support comes from parents who help encourage students to be successful in school, and then all of a sudden, people go away to college. And sometimes that doesn’t work quite as well, and we lose a lot of people. Do you have any suggestions on what perhaps colleges could do better to help retain more students?

Natalie: That’s a great question. And I think as we grow through the years, you’re noticing a lot more of, shall I say, helicopter parents or parents who are very, very involved in their children’s lives, and so much to the fact that they actually can become bulldozer parents and literally take roadblocks out of their children’s way so that they never experienced any kind of struggle. And that, of course, is not anything that me as a high school teacher, or you guys as college faculty can do, other than just encouraging parents to step back. Students should be very autonomous. I think that, if anything, we’re going to see out of this pandemic. Another I guess silver lining is the students are becoming more autonomous. They have to when their parents are working and they’re only going to school two days a week and they’re responsible for their own learning the other three days a week. They’re also learning skills, like do I care for online learning? So when I get to college, should I steer towards classes that are online or steer away from classes that are online. So these are definitely going to be skills. So you guys might want to look out for when you’re screening students or as advisors, “Hey, how did you do when you were fully remote? Were you able to get all of your work done? Did your mom have to come home and sit down with you and work with you? Or were you able to get up in the morning, eat your breakfast, and then get right started on your schoolwork?” I make a joke to my seniors about this time of year that if they are still being woken up by their parents, they are not ready for college. You will be home by Christmas if your mother is still waking you up to get you in the shower and get to school on time. Students are going to have a lot of free time when they get to college. Their lives are managed for 40 hours a week, an hour bus ride in and back, somebody tells them when it’s time to eat lunch, then they go right to sports practice and come back. They’re so busy when they’re in high school. And then when they get to college, and they have class that are for 15 hours a week, that’s a lot of extra time for these kids to have to manage. And then when they start to find out, “Oh, nobody’s gonna call my mom, if I don’t go to school?” That’s the kind of mentality that these kids are going to. And I ask my students often, “What do you think is going to be one of your biggest struggles?” or “What do you think is going to be a biggest struggle of your peers? …and it is time management. The students are used to doing a lot of their work in school, either in the class or given class time to start assignments, to do assignments, or they have a study hall where somebody says, “Okay, get your books out, get to work.” And now they’re just going to go to class, they’re going to learn for an hour, hour and a half, and then go back to their dorm and have to start studying on their own. And even that, just the idea of needing to study, a lot of students can very easily get through high school without studying, without ever learning how to study. They just are good students, they know how to sit and behave, they learn well, they do their assignments, and that’s enough. I was a victim of that. I was always above average just by doing exactly what is expected of me. And then when you get to the bigger pond and you become the smaller fish, that can cause a lot of struggle for students, that idea of time that’s not managed, that they need to learn how to manage on their own.

Rebecca: I think you’re highlighting a lot of great themes here. And we certainly experience as college faculty, but your students are right: time management is the number one struggle of our college students. [LAUGHTER] They already know that it’s a problem. We know that it’s a problem. High school teachers know it’s a problem. But we don’t actively necessarily all collaborate on finding solutions to that problem. We just expect overnight students are somehow magically going to have autonomy and know what to do with it. [LAUGHTER]

John: And that’s especially true for first-gen students who haven’t had family members talk to them about those challenges and those issues, and who don’t have that sort of support. And suddenly, they have all this free time. And they don’t have any tests until weeks away or months away. And they just had these big assignments due so they don’t have anything they have to do right away. But one of the things that we know makes that worse is online instruction. Because there’s a lot of research. I did some about 17 or 18 years ago that found that freshmen and sophomores just did dramatically worse with online courses. And we had a guest on our podcast several months ago now, who found the same thing in a much larger study… that juniors and seniors and older individuals, if they’ve been successful in making it to that stage of college, they tend to be relatively successful at managing their time effectively. So online instruction is much more challenging for freshmen. And one of the things that I know many faculty are concerned about is the fact that all of our students coming in next year will have spent at least a year in some sort of remote or online instruction. And the quality of that varies quite a bit across school districts. And I think that is going to be a challenge we’re going to need to address. Do you have any thoughts on how we can help students be better at this?

Natalie: You are definitely correct, there are going to be a lot of gaps to fill, based on how students have received instruction, in how much instruction, we were given guidance that perhaps we’d only get through 80% of our material. And as you know, at the end of the 2020 school year, some of the learning immediately stopped in mid March with the “do no harm” idea of you can’t do harm to any of their grades, whatever their grade is when they left is what their grade needs to be. So we saw students who had very high averages that said, “You know what, it’s good enough. So I know you can’t give me anything less than a 98. So I’m not doing anything for the rest of the year.” And that was a very real situation that’s not going to be reflected in a transcript that you receive as a college advisor or as a college applicant when these kids are applying to school. I’m hopeful that students could self assess where they’re at, that if a college is going to have a lot of remote opportunities, and they are good at online learning, absolutely, go there, that’s for you. And if not, then that might not be for you.

John: I think we can also refer back to an earlier podcast we did with Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, who talked about the importance of structure in all of our classes, that providing students with clear directions, with giving them more expectations, and a couple of other podcasts that we had with Betsy Barre, she discusses the importance of sharing information about the time that’s required for various tasks. So giving students more detailed instructions and giving them more guidance on how much time they should be expected to work on things, perhaps, may help.

Natalie: I completely agree, I remember the rule of thumb was a three-credit level class would have about nine hours, the total amount of work, including class time for that class. And I try to drill this into my students heads as a pre-calc and calc teacher that you’re going to be doing a lot of work outside of this class, which is not what they’re used to. They’re used to, “I’m going to go home, I’m going to do 15 minutes worth of homework, and it’s going to be graded based on effort. So I get a free 100 in the gradebook if I did it, and nobody’s gonna care if I did it correctly, I could do the whole thing wrong, I could copy from my friend, and there we go, I get the credit.” And that’s just not college readiness, or career readiness, for hopefully most careers. But I would love to see some kind of, even in high schools and then have it trickle right up to college, some kind of bridging from each course… ninth grade, these are our expectations, 10th grade, you get a little bit more strict restrictions, and then all of that being an idea of we’re bridging the gap from 12th grade to college. And as well as college professors and faculty looking back and saying, “Okay, this is where they’re at when they’re coming to us. And so we can pick it up from here.”

Rebecca: Yeah, that ramping is so important. And just acknowledging where students are at, and meeting them where they’re at, and not having some false expectation of where we wish they were, which is very different. And I think what John was talking about, like providing some time allotments and things, but just even providing students with a sample of what their outside of class time should just generally be looking like, maybe you are spending three hours outside of class studying or six hours outside of class studying. But what are those six hours look like? What does studying look like for this class? What are the kinds of exercises that would be really helpful. And faculty have a vision of what that should be, we just often don’t communicate it.

John: And often when faculty do, though, they communicate what worked for them, which is what had worked for their professors before them, which is not always what would work for a typical student.

Rebecca: What do you mean? Highlighting, John?

John: …and repeated rereading, and focusing on learning styles, but there’s a lot of things out there that faculty may encourage students to do that is not really always consistent with evidence. And going back to your point earlier, Natalie, about providing the relevance of things, one of the problems I think that faculty have is we got into these things, because we’re just really interested in the questions of the discipline. And the things that interest us now are based on having studied the discipline for a long time. And it’s a little harder, often, to connect with the types of things that would interest a student who’s just coming out of high school or is in a sophomore or junior position in college, because they don’t have that same network of concepts to make the topics that we find interesting as interesting to them. That’s something I think we definitely need to work on.

Rebecca: I know one thing that I always struggle with in the design classes that I teach is I’m constantly trying to get students to think about audiences other than themselves. But then when you start to put things in perspective, you realize they don’t really know much beyond themselves. They know maybe what an audience younger than them might experience or have expectations of, but they have a really hard time envisioning what a professional world might be like, because you just don’t have any experience in it. So we often come to the table with so many assumptions that we think that they have, and they just don’t have the life experience to match it.

John: We’ve talked a little bit about how instruction was affected during the pandemic, how did your classes transition?

Natalie: I saw this, the pandemic, as a way to be able to spread my wings and try and implement some different teaching strategies that I had thought about, but I wasn’t totally sure if I wanted to dive right in in one given year. And one of those ideas was the idea of a flipped classroom. I had never felt confident to be able to create a flipped classroom that I felt students would be responsible for. That being, watching the videos at home and then us just working on problems together in class. And to be honest, that’s pretty much what has happened. I have students who will have to watch videos on the two days, three days that they’re not here, and they have to, and I’ve figured out now how to assess that they’ve watched the videos, and to make sure that they are responsible for that learning. It’s not totally flipped. But I do have to provide instruction to these students three days of the week that they’re not around. And I did that in a couple of different ways for each one of my preps, because I didn’t want to get so solid in just one way was “the way,” and I wanted to try some things out. So for calculus, I teach calculus fully synchronous. My students who are at home Google meet live with the students that I have in class in front of me. We’re able to talk about problems as a bigger class instead of just the five who are in front of me. And that’s worked out quite well for us. Granted, class is at 10 o’clock, so it’s not too super early for these students. So, precalculus, I do kind of more HyFlex. They have the opportunity to come to the live session if they want to, or I do make videos for them to watch on their own. One thing that we had to keep in mind this year was that some of these students are responsible for younger siblings while parents are at work. So we needed to be a little bit more flexible in how we set up our classes. And when I had the conversation with my calculus students, they said, “Nope, we could totally do synchronous.” And if they needed me to make a video, I can make them a video. And then algebraI, I do completely asynchronous, the videos are already set up. There’s no live session. When they come in the next day, or whatever day follows watching the videos, I check and make sure that they watch their videos, give them a little bit of credit, just for doing what they were supposed to do. And, to be honest, I have become very, very graceful compared to how I ever was in the first seven and a half, eight years of teaching. My department very rarely ever accepts late work. Math is a sequential subject, you need to do the work today so that you know what’s going on tomorrow in class. This year, I’m just happy it’s getting done and getting done with integrity. So I’ve become so extremely graceful with students who are getting work done after due dates, right before the quarter ends. It’s not great, but they are also learning a very important lesson in “it’s a lot easier if I just do a little bit every day instead of trying to cram it all in at the end of the semester, or at the end of the quarter.” So, hopefully, that idea can trickle up to college as well. It’s not very easy to dig yourself out of a hole, especially in college.

John: You mentioned with your recordings that you were verifying that they actually watched the videos. How do you do that?

Natalie: With my algebra I, the videos obviously match their note packet, they have guided notes that matches very nicely. So the next day I just come in, check, they’re going to show me a front and back with all of the notes filled in. For precalculus, I feel like I shouldn’t have to check their notes, that they should be responsible enough for that level to actually watch the videos, I did get a sense that they weren’t watching the videos, mostly because I was bringing things up when they came to class, and I had a lot of blank stares looking at me. So I started using a program called Edpuzzle. They have to sign into it with their Google account. Lots of teachers in my school use this. And I was able to see who was actually watching. And it was funny, I had a student come to me and he goes, “I’m going to make a guess that 1/3 of the kids are actually watching the videos.” And as soon as I started counting up the number of students who actually watched the videos, it was about 1/3. So that gave a very stern talking to about what my expectations were in that they’re not going to have the best understanding and knowledge if they’re just practicing the homework assignments, that it needs to be the full package, coming to class in whatever shape or form that looks like, be it coming to the live session or watching the videos. But all of it needs to be done in order to be successful in precalculus.

John: Do you embed questions in the videos?

Natalie: I am just getting my feet wet with it. I just started using it. So no, I haven’t gotten that far. But I did hear that you can and you can do a little checkup and it will not let you get through unless you do the question. So is that something you guys have used?

John: I haven’t used EdPuzzle. But I have been using PlayPosit this year. And I embed questions in it and it is required as part of the grade in my econometrics class and in my introductory microeconomics class, and I’m probably incorporating it in more classes as I go forward. But students actually have responded really positively. They discovered that when they watch the videos, it’s really helpful, because when there was no grading involved or no questions, the level of use of the videos was dramatically lower. So this provides just a small incentive, it’s a trivial part of their grade, but it’s enough to induce them to watch them, though. I’ve been really pleased with it. One advantage of Edpuzzle though, is that It’s free, as far as I understand, whilel, I do have to pay for PlayPosit.

Natalie: Yep, it’s free. And we’re a Google school. So they are able to sign right in. And it was easy for me to use, I could see all the students, I could see how much of it they watched. So that was pretty cool.

Rebecca: That’s great. As I’m hearing you talk about how your teaching has transitioned, it largely matches how faculty at the college level have also had to transition. So in some ways, we may have been brought together unexpectedly. [LAUGHTER] So there’s a lot more college faculty also using a flipped classroom model, and using more class time to solve problems and work on the more complicated things. Because often the video lectures or that kind of part of the material is foundational. Some of it might be memorization things, it might be terms and things like this, and then you put it into action in the class, and you can have guidance and coaching. So what’s really interesting is that the pandemic may have brought these two experiences together, and that bridge might be more present than it has ever been before.

Natalie: Exactly, I used to think that there was no way for my students to learn, if I wasn’t the one who was telling them and showing them. If I wasn’t up at the front of the board, doing it with them, doing it for them, then they weren’t going to learn… there was no way they can learn this on their own, and boy, was I ever wrong. Even though I could do 10 problems with them up at the board, whereas they could do three working together in a small group or in a pair, it’s so much more valuable to listen to them have those conversations, and to hear them explain these things, in their own words, or what’s very powerful too, is when I hear my words come out of their mouth, as they’re explaining it to another student. So that’s totally cool to hear that. And I think that’s the direction of education. The prep work is more important than what the teacher role is in the classroom. So the role of the teacher plays planning and prepping for a lesson is so much more powerful than what the teacher is doing in the classroom at that time as far as leading instruction.

Rebecca: That design of experience is so powerful, just generally. I think one of the things that I know I have always struggled with using a flipped classroom model, but I’m definitely getting better, the more and more I do it, is really scaling back on how much can actually be done in class, when students are working through problems and they’re not having quite as much coaching. You’re really letting them struggle and fail and try again. That takes time. It’s not like something that can happen automatically. So we might be used to going through more examples, but less examples, but more depth can be really powerful. And your right, students explaining to other students is an amazing thing to see. But it also helps them articulate or realize where they don’t understand, which is something that you don’t necessarily recognize when someone’s explaining something to you. Because when someone explains it to you, of course it seems obvious, until you have to do it yourself.

Natalie: Absolutely.

John: One of the things I was thinking about is I have to create a video on log transformations in econometrics tonight, and that reminded me of all that.

Natalie: Do you want one of mine? I can grab it right off Edpuzzle. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Can you imagine that, though, like sharing back and forth between high school and college and sharing resources? We should do more of this.

Natalie: Oh, absolutely. Why are we always reinventing the wheel for ourselves, when there’s so much already out there?

John: When you first create a flipped classroom model, it’s a lot of work, creating those videos, maybe embedding some questions in them. And doing that is a tremendous amount of work upfront. But it’s taking this stuff that’s relatively easy for students to learn and shifting it outside of the classroom. So that when students are in class, they’re able to focus on the things they have the most trouble with. Because, as Rebecca said, you can provide a really good lecture on how to do something, but if students haven’t wrestled with it, they’re not going to learn it as well. I know for many years, I was doing an awful lot of lecturing, and I’ve cut back to very, very little now other than when I’m recording lectures, and I’m seeing students struggle with materials, but then when they are assessed on it, there’s much more balance in their performance. Because before there were always some students who would pick up on everything you did… people like you, Natalie, and people like those who are faculty. We were able to learn the stuff by listening to people tell us how to do it and figure it out on our own. But that doesn’t work well for a lot of students. And when they’re there explaining it to each other, they learn it much more deeply than they ever would by trying to do the more difficult parts on their own. Because in the traditional model, we’d give them the basics and show them how to do things. But the only time when they really got to apply that was either when they were working alone, doing homework, trying to struggle to solve some problems. or on a high-stakes exam. And those are times when perhaps they need the most support and the flipped classroom model can really address that really nicely.

Natalie: Yep, I absolutely agree.

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?” …which is a question I think everyone in education is wondering.

Natalie: I think what’s next is filling in the gaps. There is going to be a lot of gaps for a lot of years. And we keep saying I can’t wait till next year, I can’t wait till it’s back to normal. But pandemic aside, I don’t think it’s going to be normal for a long time, we’re going to have a lot of students who need a lot of support for a lot of years, and it’s going to affect me. And then it’s going to affect college faculty, as the students get up there, addressing where the gaps are, how can we fill them? How can we give these students the support that they need, even under just budgets that were being given that were cut in this past year or could be getting cut? We’re going to need a lot of support from each other, from our colleagues, from our administrators from the community… and I think a lot of understanding… these students are going to need understanding, we’re going to need understanding.

Rebecca: I really like the underscoring of this empathy towards one another, both between faculty and teachers, as well as between students and teachers. I think that’s a really nice note to end on. Thanks so much for sharing your insights, Natalie. I think many faculty will want to take the time and effort to reach out to some high school teachers and make some connections and start to figure out ways to bridge those gaps.

Natalie: Thank you so much for having me, this has been such a valuable experience. And I’m always grateful when anybody wants to listen to my opinion and share conversation with me.

John: Well, it’s great talking to you again, I very much enjoyed working with you when you were a student here, and it’s nice to see just how successful you’ve been. And I suppose I should mention that this came about because one of my current students had listened to the podcast, had shared it with people on Facebook, and then she said, “And you know, you really should invite one of my former teachers,” and so we invited you.

Natalie: That is so awesome. I feel very honored that that student thought that I had something great to share. And it’s been so great to be back in SUNY Oswego, among other Lakers, and of course, a professor who was a great mentor and led me down a path of success.

John: Thank you.

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

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

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