Learning from Students Who Use #EdTech

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In November, a group of five college students representing the California Community Colleges and California State University systems participated in a virtual panel at the annual Directors of Educational Technology in California Higher Education (DET/CHE) conference. Projected on a screen in front of hundreds of educators, students shared their candid reflections and experiences with technology in teaching and learning.

I had the honor of moderating the panel with support from J.P. Bayard, Director for System-Wide Learning Technologies and Program Services at the CSU Chancellor's Office. As always, listening to student experiences inspired me and reconnected me with the reasons I do what I do. As technology plays a more expansive role in teaching and learning, we must make efforts to center what we do around the real experiences of the humans at the other end of the screen. I also find myself reflecting on the courage it took these students to volunteer to participate and be candid about their experiences. And that is also something all of us can learn from.

I hope you listen to the 30-minute recording and let the students' messages inform your practices as you start the new term ahead. Leave us a comment below and share a takeaway -- we'd love to hear from you!

https://youtu.be/tjEf6SDtvqk
30-Minute Archive of a student panel from the 2018 DET/CHE Conference.

Quick Links

Don't have 30 minutes to listen? Here are the 5 questions the students were asked and a video quick link to their responses.

List of Panelists

View student bios here.

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Online Teaching and Course Design

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Online Teaching and Course Design

This post is the second of a series about principles in teaching and learning with contributions by Jim Julius and Michelle Pacansky-Brock

coinsLike Fred and Ginger, peanut butter and jelly, the Patriots and the Super Bowl, some things are so closely linked that they simply don’t make sense without the other. For online education, how we design our course and how we teach our course are the inseparable pair--two sides of the same coin.

The professional development program developed by @ONE has long focused on both sides of this coin. In 2011, we used the iNacol Standards for Quality Online Teaching as the criteria for our online teaching certificate, and in 2014, we customized these standards to develop the @ONE Standards for Quality Online Teaching. The @ONE Standards were the foundation for the design and teaching practices that underpinned the @ONE Certificate in Online Teaching, representing both sides of the coin in one essential set of standards.

In 2014, though, the Online Education Initiative developed the OEI Online Course Design Rubric. This rubric focused solely on foundational criteria for course design, and pushed the shared standards for designing quality courses well beyond the @ONE Standards. Over the course of two years, as the rubric was used by faculty across the state, it went through some major revisions, and sets a gold standard for course design quality. In essence, the OEI Rubric advanced the initial design criteria offered in the @ONE Standards.

This caused a bit of a rub when using the @ONE Standards. Participants moving through the @ONE courses sometimes struggled with determining which set of standards or criteria they should be privileging. Participants in our courses were not always able to see which document was driving course design decisions--the Rubric, or the Standards. Moreover, as technology changed, and as more data about student success in online learning became available, we realized that the teaching practices outlined in the @ONE Standards needed some careful revision to better reflect the mission of the California Community Colleges (CCCs), including an emphasis on student success and equity.

So, this fall, we drew upon the collective wisdom of experienced online teachers from across our system in a collaborative effort to articulate a set of teaching principles that reflect the specific needs of our students, staff, and faculty. Our first step was to remove the course design elements--now the purview of the OEI Course Design Rubric--and focus our attention on the other side of the coin, the practices and behaviors that support quality online teaching.

Working from the original set of standards and resources that helped us better understand the national dialog around great online teaching (including those outlined by Jim in his post on Monday), carefully examining data about our online students, and drawing on the knowledge and expertise of our peers across the system, we developed a set of principles for quality Online teaching tailored to the CCCs. The principles state that effective online teachers:

  1. Are present within their course;
  2. Apply equitable methods to promote student access and success while acknowledging institutional obstacles;
  3. Respond to student needs and use data for continuous course improvement;
  4. Teach and model ethical online interaction, while helping students develop digital literacy that will poise them for success;
  5. Recognize ongoing professional development is a central component of their success.

We would like to invite you to read the full text of the Principles for Quality Online Teaching, and hope the principles give you some ideas to mull over and discuss with peers. Most importantly, we invite you to participate in developing our communal understanding of these principles by joining us in a webinar, writing a blog post, or participating in a course.

We think the pairing of the new Principles for Quality Online Teaching with the OEI Course Design Rubric lays the foundation for your success and the success of our students, but the reality is, Ginger and Fred engaged in a lot of practice before they became Hollywood legends. The Principles provide the initial steps for the intricate dance of teaching and learning, but our continued conversation and engagement with one another is the music that breathes life into the dance.

Teaching--face-to-face and online--is hard work, and our students may need to surmount many walls along their path to success. The Principles remind us that the unique mission of the CCCs is not to separate the wheat from the chaff, but rather recognize the human potential in all of us.

 

Online Teaching Confession from a Convert

streetlampsI mentally stomped my feet when our counseling faculty recommended that, to better accommodate students, I offer my English 101 course, which is contextualized for first responders and administration of justice majors, online.  

But I’m an English professor, I thought.  My bread and butter is helping students tease nuance out of text. My job is to steer them toward recognizing a strong critical interpretation while I watch for faces to blink on like a row of streetlamps, circling back to any that are still flickering. In my discipline, I sit with students, knee to knee, eye to eye, and ask them to “read that back to me,” so they can discover for themselves where their prose falters and, together, we can figure out how to improve it. None of this is online work. This is real human connection in the real human world.

After thinking through my discipline-based worries, it appeared I had epistemological ones as well! Isn’t face to face something that our younger students need more of anyway? Don’t they spend enough (way too much!) time on their devices already? And aren’t the socio-emotional skills that are derived from our courses the skills needed to navigating the real world? Such as the skills of problem-solving and working together that come from cooperative learning. Such as the ability to engage in respectful, challenging dialogue with others. Such as the skill of artfully and persuasively expressing their ideas to others.

Yes!

And no.

Making a Mindshift

I have been teaching for some time in the manner in which I settled on in graduate school pedagogy courses. My face-to-face classes mostly go very well. I thrill in the strides my students make, in the many recommendation letters I write, and in the students who keep in touch over the years, and who attribute some of their success to what they learned in my courses. Yet, in my resistance to online teaching, I was neglecting three crucial tenets of teaching: meet students where they are, use content and methodologies that are authentically relevant for students, and let data inform pedagogy.

After a little light research, I began to understand that the skills of critical analysis and expression are needed, perhaps in even more abundance, in the written world (a world whose presence has, perhaps most surprising to us English instructors who were told it was disappearing entirely, only increased). Students are communicating greater and greater portions of their lives through the written word. Between texting, emailing, and social media of all sorts, they are navigating much of the public sphere, the work sphere, and their intimate social spheres, through reading and writing. And I came to believe that students are not being challenged well enough around their virtual written presence.

So I decided to give this online thing a go.

Learning from Peers

Now, I am not afraid of serious effort. I love a good challenge. The phrase it’s going to be a lot of work is more likely to make my eyes light up than to scare me. But online teaching nearly did me in! As many of you know, online differs radically from face-to-face teaching. In order to make my courses meaningful and steer my students toward the outcomes that my face-to-face students achieve, I had to rethink everything.

I was lucky to have friends and colleagues in the DE world who could mentor me. I was able to look at archived examples of online courses that showcased the best and the worst of what can be done in the online format. I saw courses whose instructors who were clearly “phoning it in” and teaching the dreaded “correspondence course.” Those courses echo the most jaded beliefs about online teaching -- that online instructors simply “set it and forget it,” loading a course with multiple choice quizzes and pre-recorded lectures and letting a machine take over. But I also saw courses of great beauty – courses where I wondered how the instructor had time to sleep or eat, so hearty was the ongoing engagement, feedback, and “real-time” response targeted toward each student.

In viewing these outstanding courses, I saw possibilities for a shift in my own discipline-based pedagogical assumptions. What if, instead of looking students in the eye, and prizing their ability to verbally articulate their ideas, what if I were to meet students at their written words and, through a steady stream of “low-stakes” writing assignments, guide them toward thoughtful expression which carefully considers a variety of perspectives and evidence? What if I could go one step further and, through requirements, rubrics, and feedback on their feedback, teach them how to evaluate the written expression of others for these same traits?

Embracing the Differences Online Learning Provides

Thus began my conversion to becoming an online instructor in earnest. Through workshops, trainings, and trial and error, I learned that careful, creative, objective-oriented planning, and consistent communication and follow-through, can create a learning environment in which students can go as far, and perhaps further, than in a face-to-face environment.

In my online courses, students experience a near-daily stream of individualized, yet public, feedback on their writing, as well as private feedback on higher stakes writing assignments. I am able to guide students not only in their own writing assignments, but also in how to provide guidance to other students, who then use that to provide further guidance, which in turn has its own feedback loop, from me, and from peers. And if that sounds like the verbal equivalent of an M.C. Escher painting, I admit that managing the class does sometimes feel just like that. Yet, although class management is complex, the payoff is astounding. I have been seeing students make leaps in achieving clear, thoughtful analysis much earlier in my online classes than in my face-to-face classes. And I am seeing a pattern of stronger overall gains as well.

That discovery alone has been extraordinary. Additionally, I have learned how important online teaching is to student equity. Online courses are a way to level the playing field for students with disabilities, for students with work and family commitments that preclude commute time and campus involvement, and for students with intermittent or “on demand” jobs whose schedules are not consistent.

On the other hand, I am finding online teaching to be more time consuming than face-to-face teaching. While this is certainly a challenge, I’m also energized and motivated by my own feelings of discovery and exploration. Online teaching is newly charted territory and there is a lot to learn, with new data, new or improved technological tools, and pedagogical innovation happening all the time. It is clear to me that there are new discoveries yet to be made, and I am honored to be working with the DE mavericks at my institution, and at @ONE and the OEI.

It’s hard to believe how resistant I once was. These days, when I log into my online courses, I see a vibrancy of student connection and learning. It reminds me of a row of streetlamps coming on, virtually but brightly, one by one.