Thursday, July 9, 2020

It's still not about you: A learner-centered approach in an online course

Photo from Unsplash.com

At the end of spring semester, my dean asked us all what we thought we might need to teach our courses remotely in the fall. Our institution is moving all lectures to a distance learning format, which includes all of the courses I'm slated to teach. Thankfully, both of the courses I'm teaching in the fall are those I had to transition to distance learning in the spring. So, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I needed.

But I've done more thinking on this. Most of my department colleagues are sending shopping lists: a laptop stand, a tablet, a subscription to a program. Indeed, when my courses moved online, I was excited to need to use any of several excellent technology tools available for screen-casting and the like, some of which I'd used in face-to-face classes as a secondary tool. And although there were several excellent technology tools available, it seemed that most were marketed mostly toward delivering instruction.

At first, it made sense. We faculty, from my home-office perspective, were doing a heckuva lot of work to transition fully face-to-face classes to online classes. Of course there should be tools available to help us do so! But once my courses switched to distance learning, these tools to deliver instruction felt misaligned with what my course needed. 

As a bonafide GIN (thanks @geekypedagogy), I use regular feedback from my students to make adjustments throughout the course. The feedback after the first two weeks prompted a different kind of conversation. Instead of focusing on the material, my students were astounded by how much more energy and time they felt their classes needed. We talked almost every synchronous session about this being different--not better or worse, or easier or harder--work. We talked about how we perceive words on a screen versus on a physical page or a spoken phrase; about how the responsibilities shift in this kind of environment; about how to prioritize attention and energy. 

Most of all, we talked about how the level and nature of participation changes: showing up for class is more than a physical presence now. Some who were accustomed to sitting quietly in the back of the room were uncomfortable with speaking into the mic every session. Others shied away from the camera, and still others felt a heightened pressure from having to type or record responses quicker than they wanted or with less polish than they liked. I recognize that all of these are hidden-curriculum type discoveries that still relate to the communication skills in the course description; however, we know that experts see their fields relate almost infinitesimally, and novices see discrete boxes of information. And #MaslowsBeforeBlooms. 

It occurred to me that we (the higher ed collective) need tools for receiving that instruction, and that help create a solid learning experience from our students' perspectives. Yes, there is strong potential with, for example, collaboration tools, discussion tools, and tablet tools that allow for annotation. But these are still inherently very teacher-centered, content-oriented tools. In my courses, students tell me that initiating a team is rather foreign, beginning their own discussion board is somewhat awkward, and that most use their campus-issued laptop for schoolwork. 

Granted that most of us teaching courses specifically described as "communication" found the transition from on-ground to online learning (as opposed to teaching) easier because of their nature than those with applied labs or practicums. That's if these courses weren't already taught online. My students receive direct instruction and practice on how to form teams, communicate in collaborative projects, and conduct peer reviews, so I adjusted the load to account for the heavier learning on the structural side. However, again, the nature of my courses created a sort of happy coincidence.

An online environment is particularly suited for teaching courses of this kind, and I was able to overlap their 'student survival skill' concerns with the topics of the course. I recognize, though, that this overlap is very likely more difficult for courses in a different category. So many tools for content delivery and an environment so well suited to the content diverts us from the learner-centered approach for which so many of us strive.  

To my mind, there are three types of tools we need to further encourage a learner-centered online course:

  1. A portal through which students can seamlessly access the technology tools we bring in without needing to create an account or sign in. There is a vast universe of tools available, which is helpful for those of us looking for different activity ideas, and many are connected to our LMS. However, a variety of activities means I use a lot of technology tools but each one is used just a few times, which makes an LTI acceptance process hardly worth it. Students burn out quickly when they need to constantly learn a new tool, and they don't need a long-term commitment. I'll argue that students don't even really need to know the name of the tool--just the action they need to make with it. 
  2. Better tools for short, low-stakes, quick conversations in both asynchronous and synchronous situations. Students also burn out quickly on discussion boards; indeed, everything that we use for students to converse asynchronously requires some level of recording (writing a post, recording a video response), so it takes longer than we want, feels like it's high-stakes, and requires time on the front and back ends. Breakout rooms during synchronous meetings work well for these conversations; however, at least on my system, I still need to sort students into groups and set a time limit, which can tighten how open students feel about sharing, and the breakout room opens in a new window, which can lead to connectivity issues. Activities that use elbow partners and take 2-3 minutes give students a way to stay engaged without taxing their thinking energy.
  3. "Water cooler" spots for student-student and student-teacher (and students-teacher) interactions. Distance learning is really good at making the most of the time in front of the screen, but there's a lot lost when we cut out small talk. There are certainly opportunities to do this with Padlet or Flipgrid, but, as I say above, the formality we associate with anything that's recorded clashes with the casualness of small talk. Greetings in the hallway, jokes in the cafeteria, or stories on the way out to the parking lot all help build the social presence needed for students to trust us as people who care about their learning.
This is not to say that tools of these types don't exist, or exist yet. This is also not to say that my ignorance and minimal experience teaching online hasn't influenced this list. I've been absorbed by the theoretical frameworks and instructional design principles surrounding e-learning recently, but only recently. Perhaps, according to some other widely accepted guidelines that I'm unaware of today, tools of this kind aren't needed at all. 

This is also not to say that students should be excused from a more active role in their learning and return as they might in a face-to-face class--passively observing information pass by and silently doing the minimum needed to survive (in between engagement techniques, active learning strategies, and collaboration exercises). But for many of my students, the acts of signing up for a college class, taking out a notebook and pen, writing down notes, and putting energy into an assignment is an intimidating extension of a former student self. Going from hardly identifying as a student to full control of the learning is shocking and unfair. As many in the student success/learning center fields have taught us, students need to be taught how to learn, arguably more so in an online environment. The art of teaching includes conducting learner analyses to know what kinds of scaffolds to incorporate, when to include or remove them, and for whom. Especially as many students are forced to take courses like mine online when they would prefer face-to-face, tools such as these would be beneficial for building a social presence and focusing attention on learning the course material.

A learner-centered approach needs to follow into the online learning environment, and it is ultimately up to the course instructor to make choices that will promote this approach. Otherwise, students drown in a whirl of content--a high risk in an environment that depends so much on self-regulation and can easily become exponentially isolationist. But in an online course, students get thrown in the lead role, and we need to provide tools and incorporate skills that will not only help them embrace that role, but also facilitate lifelong learning habits.  

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Predatory Colleges Find Friends in Congress (nytimes.com)
Assigning value to a college program based on its value in the economy is problematic for me in three ways: 1) it narrows the value of college down to economic value when in reality that value is much more complex and influenced by several other factors, 2) it takes a lot of the consumer-ish responsibility students need to have to make choices about where to go to college and what program to enroll in, and 3) colleges have very little control over how the economy values a set of skills. 

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Articles for June 24, 2015

Adults, Computers and Problem Solving (OECD)
This report is especially interesting because it looked at how well adults accomplished "problem-solving tasks that require the use of computer applications, such as e-mail, spreadsheets, word-processing applications and websites..." Specifically, the report found that "...literacy proficiency and age have the strongest independent relationships to proficiency in problem solving in technology-rich environments..." (p. 54).  Of course, these skills apply to several career clusters, but the technical fields are especially susceptible to advances in technology and use a lot of specialized computer programs. Students who have trouble creating an e-mail or using Microsoft Word are not going to have an easy time working with image editing software, repair databases, or even just managing all the files that result from several drafts and separate pages typical of a technical field. This is not to mention those fields that need to create and/or repair technologies, like in a car, machine, or network, or the fact that many technical fields now conduct hiring processes electronically. 

Monday, June 22, 2015

Articles for June 22, 2015

Higher ed as a commodity? Colleges have only themselves to blame (washingtonpost.com)
This is a response to Hunter Rawling's post College is not a commodity, stop treating it like one (June 9), and it's pretty reflective of the other side of the balancing act colleges are facing. The hard reality is that colleges need tuition to operate, and not all would-be tuition-payers would be convinced by the message author Jeffrey Selingo feels higher education needs to promote. 

Selingo offers three reasons why the commoditization of higher education is its own fault: 

  1. For decades, higher education has promoted the personal economic value of higher education. 
  2. Students are not solely responsible for their success. The college does matter. 
  3. Colleges have turned the four-year degree into an assembly line of getting in and getting out as quickly as possible. 

Friday, June 19, 2015

Articles for June 19, 2015

The Watchdogs of College Education Rarely Bite (The Wall Street Journal)
The Journal uses plenty of data to talk about a dimension of the college graduation/loan default rate conversation that has seemed to have been left alone until now: accreditation. Although it lays blame without really laying blame, the article offers several statistics on how many colleges accreditors have closed, and what the graduation and loan default rates are at those colleges they haven't. 

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Articles for June 17, 2015

Defining Competency (insidehighered.com)
Some in higher ed who were hesitant at first to accept the concept of competency-based education (CBE) are now starting to warm up to the idea, myself included. My feeling is that a lot of the hesitancy was based on mistrust--particularly, the legislative bodies don't trust individual colleges, nor do colleges trust individual instructors. It's much easier to 'cover up' a trouble spot that might hold a student back inside the context of an 18-week course; CBE potentially exposes weaknesses--but also strengths--in students, instructors, curriculum maps and course content, and assessment methods. The major decision-makers in higher education seem to have been nervous about approving a structure that might make those potential soft spots public, and the effects thereafter. 

Monday, June 15, 2015

Articles for June 15, 2015

Lazy Rivers and Student Debt (insidehighered.com)
Although there are some political undertones--especially in the comments section--about the recent attention brought to this issue by Chris Christie and Elizabeth Warren, this article does offer some hard data about how much amenities like aquatic centers and climbing walls actually cost in relation to other causes for rising tuition costs. The argument is usually that large, expensive amenities like these attract students; the counter is that college affordability and repairs to academic facilities should be the priority. To me, though, this seems like the end of a long breadcrumb trail.