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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:
- 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.
- 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.
- "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.
