Month: March 2020

As the current crisis unfolds, I have been involved in many conversations with faculty and administrators about moving classes online. These conversations rapidly devolve into discussions of the relative merits of various tools. Often these discussions resemble office workers debating the relative merits of various plows. They are disconnected from the reality of what was already happening in peoples’ classrooms before social isolation took hold. When I start to ask questions about the intent of specific instructional activities such as lectures, assessment, or discussion is I am quickly shut down because “no one wants to talk about philosophy now.” However, now is precisely the time when we should be talking about philosophy because it is only when we strip the processes that occur in our learning environments bare that we can grasp at the correct tools for both us as teachers and, more importantly, for the learners that depend on us.

In a nutshell, good teachers listen as much as they talk. Diana Laurillard refers to these as “conversational spaces.”(Laurillard, Diana, 2003, 2007, 2009) Teachers right now need to find tools that enable them to listen and hear because this is what distance robs us of. If the tool is too top-down your students won’t be empowered to talk. If it is too technically difficult the means of hearing will break down. This is the single most important challenge facing us right now. A good conferencing tool that flattens both the technical and communications curves is the essential tool right now not because of what it is but because of what it does. Function should always trump form.

The part of instruction that we are changing the most is the physical interactions within the classroom. Therefore it is important to take an honest look at what goes on in a stereotypical classroom. Faculty talk at their students. Much of that is misheard or ignored. Better students take notes of information. Often that information is lacking in context, especially if they are simply copying from a whiteboard or PowerPoint slide. In some classes communication doesn’t go much further than that. Students may ask for some points of clarification (many don’t) and try to make sense out of the information coming at them but that’s about the extent of the conversation going on. This is fairly easy to replicate online. Just post notes or PowerPoints slides. Answer questions via email or chat and you’re pretty much done. Because of technical challenges and tool limitations there are a lot of online courses that never go much further than this essential modality.

Those faculty who think deeply about what’s going on in the classroom environment realize that this is far from sufficient. One step further would to engage in the Socratic method with extensive questioning and feedback about student attention and mental engagement within the class. Socratic method is much harder to replicate online because much of its essential feedback is dependent on live, synchronous interactions with students. Watching a video of a Socratic interchange would merely form a more confusing version of a straight lecture paradigm and, arguably, would be more confusing for those not present synchronously. Also, the element of body language and performance inherent in this method is inevitably muted, if not lost entirely, online. There are a number of tools available to facilitate this kind of instruction such as clickers and other electronic feedback mechanisms. None of them, however, overcome the kind of “social distancing” that limit the execution of this approach remotely. Also, it’s a lot easier to hide in the back of the online “classroom” and be “present” without being mentally present in the discussion.

Many tools in the learning management system are designed to facilitate these kinds of instruction. They imply a power structure where the instructor is at the front and the class should follow along as best as they can. Some tools may be useful for making that path easier but the basic communications modality is the same. The more you go down this path, the more complex the tools become. Communication should not be complex. It is a fragile flower, easily broken. Moving thousands of classes online in a time of stress for both instructor and student risks a lot of breakage.

Another approach would be to back off and consider how effective communication occurs between faculty and instructor. For one thing, I walk around the classroom instead of positioning myself in the front. This is basic technique for making sure even those students who are trying to hide will not be able to do as we engage in class discussion. Conversation cannot be replicated in a series of disconnected posts on a discussion board. It is a dynamic interchange which the instructor steers but does not always control. The controlling factor is the students’ capacity to absorb information flows in the classroom, not how much material I have to get through. Adjustments are made. Putting information online has the advantage of persistence but we completely lose the conversational aspect so critical for the learning process, particularly among students who lack the skills to teach themselves. Start here.

We are fortunate at this technological junction to have relatively sophisticated videoconferencing capabilities to complement whatever asynchronous capabilities we have developed online. Live conversations offer the only way to achieve immediate feedback and conversation. Set up properly, they can also bring the student to the fore. The best platforms are also technically easy to navigate because they were designed to be used by nontechnical business users on a regular basis. They also flatten interactions if they are designed for collaboration over presentation/lecture. In an environment where the vast majority of faculty and students have never operated in this way before, this is an obvious tool to grasp for. It most closely mirrors interactions on the classroom level. It requires minimal setup and adaptation from what is going on in the classroom and can work to flatten the distance between teacher and student when distance will be the biggest challenge to overcome. Focusing on other tools risks creating lots of noise in a confusing environment, not the best strategy for communication.

Right now, everyone is floating in an atomized soup. Regular bearings are lost in the fog of uncertainty but are coupled with a desire to move forward beyond the immediate crisis. Finding our way back to the basics of what we’ve always tried to do in the classroom and matching the appropriate tools with the task is critical to the success of that effort. If anything, there are too many tools available to us in this environment. This can be overwhelming. Best to keep it simple, go and grab your favorite hammer or screwdriver, and see if it will do the job in front of you. Don’t worry about the rest. Above all, listen to your students. They need to hear your voice clearly now more than ever and you need to hear theirs in order to be understood. That much will never change.

You have just been through 8 hours of unremitting stress flying your bomber over Germany, being shot at, and just keeping your plane in the air. As you approach your airfield in Southern England, you pull the lever to lower your landing gear and listen for the satisfying chirp of rubber on the runway that indicates you are home. Instead, your senses are greeted with a rending crash as your bomber careens over the asphalt runway. Your belly gunner is probably dead and your plane is a wreck. The problem? The knob that lowers your flaps is right next to that which raises your landing gear. Instead of slowing your speed and increasing the lift of your wings the nearly identical knob has raised your landing gear. (https://bit.ly/2UdHpT5)

As Covid-19 shuts down in-person instruction across education, we are faced with a similar situation trying to land our classes in a time of crisis. We must take the time to grasp at the right levers and to design systems so that our students aren’t forced to suffer the consequences of our mistakes, which must surely come. Learning is antifragile. Many of the systems designed around it are not.

We often overlook how broadly design impacts our lives. As Don Norman points out, “All artificial things are designed.” (Norman, Don, The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, 2013, p. 4). It impacts every level of the teaching and learning experience. Design touches the layout of our classrooms, the digital tools we use, and the very nature of semesters, class sessions, and curriculum. All of these are being tested right now (except for maybe classroom design). In order to begin any design process, no matter how rushed, we must first understand the goals and constraints of what we are trying to do. For instance, the government has declared gatherings over 10 people inadvisable due to the pandemic. It is mid-semester. Go.

As we ask thousands of instructors and millions of students to go online with little or no preparation, we will see lots and lots of crash landings as all grasp for unfamiliar tools and struggle to survive in poorly designed systems struggling to adapt to rapidly shifting circumstances on the ground. There are many levels of intertwingled systems where poor design can fail us.

Image ©2011 Tom Haymes. Some rights reserved.

At the highest level we run up against is the systemic construct that we call the semester/credit-hour/contact hour class. These are designed realities. “Services, lectures, rules and procedures, and the organizational rules of businesses and governments do not have physical mechanisms, but their rules of operation have to be designed, sometimes informally, sometimes precisely recorded and specified.” (Norman, ibid) In other words, we have to ask ourselves fundamental design questions that underlie many of these kinds of realities. There is pressure to keep the larger system intact and, as a result, there are many systemic factors that prevent us from simply blowing the “traditional” academic structure up. Instead of addressing the systemic paradigm, the initial reaction is to lean on technology to simply move all “instruction online.” The systemic design paradigm hasn’t been challenged at this level at most institutions.

This decision has consequences in that it shifts the burden of design from the administrators to the faculty who now have to deal with a new set of constraints in the design of how they interact with their students. Keeping this at the institutional systemic level for a moment, a second option might have been to pause the semester and extend it into the summer. There are other cascading impacts from that kind of decision but it might have done a better job of preserving academic quality but at the risk of sacrificing enrollments and revenue. It is interesting to note that in England in the plague year of 1665, pausing instruction is precisely what Cambridge elected to do, admittedly under very different economic circumstances.

Putting the burden of adjustment on the instructor is in itself a design decision. It will reshape the parameters and constraints of those struggling with classroom organization in a radically reshaped world. On a classroom level, faculty must consider the systems of learning they are setting up for their students and how these might be disrupted by a shift of modality and related tools for learning. What used to occur as a casual conversation within the class or outside the class must now be intermediated by technology. This technology will inevitably introduce a barrier to communication. Physical meetings also impose barriers in that they involve putting people together in the same place at the same time but these are design challenges we implicitly manage.

All instruction is a form of conversation (Laurillard, Diana, 2003, 2007, 2009). First, as mentioned, there are direct conversations between the teacher and the student, among the students (peers), and between the student and the teacher. Then there are indirect conversations, usually taking the form of assessments. These can also be interactions between students and teachers as well as peers. They require rapid feedback to the learner. Finally, there is the preservation of active learning, which involves immediate, internal feedback to the student. In other words, a conversation that the learner has with his or herself.

Moving instruction online carries with it at least two dangers to these paths of communication, particularly in a time of social isolation. First of all, the isolation itself must be considered and acknowledged. Online learning, as it is usually designed, is often a solitary process. Impersonal bulletin boards are, in the words of Frank Zappa, “lonely person devices,” often with little or no incentive to participate unless compelled to do so by extrinsic motivators. As I once said to an instructor in the early days of Facebook as he was considering using it for his class, “no one wants to go to a cocktail party with their parents.” Don’t expect our students to rush to primitive communication devices like discussion boards.

Related to this problem, and the second big issue, is the lack of informal learning in most Learning Management Systems. When I say, “informal” learning, I mean spaces that allow students to informally congregate with one another without the intervention of teachers. Peer conversations such as study groups can form in these spaces. More importantly, they may give isolated students (aka, people) the ability to socialize in a society practicing social distancing. Consider how this might be accomplished online. Does your videoconferencing tool give students the ability to form their own groups? Could this reach beyond the traditional course shell to encompass other sections or even other disciplines? Done correctly, this could encourage students to spend more of their online time with each other rather than random strangers in Snapchat.

In addition to space-time issues, technology itself can introduce unfamiliar barriers to student access for both the student and the teacher/designer. In a 2018 article, researchers at the University of Indiana concluded that technological barriers are not evenly distributed throughout our student bodies. In a study of Indiana students researchers discovered that “roughly 20% of respondents had difficulty maintaining access to technology (e.g., broken hardware, data limits, connectivity problems, etc.). Students of lower socio- economic status and students of color disproportionately experienced hardships, and reliance on poorly functioning laptops was associated with lower grade point averages.” And so we have another set of unexpected variables to our design challenge.

These factors are not revelations for faculty who have been working in the distance learning space for decades now. However, even they have been working with a largely self-selected group of students who meet certain technological requirements in most cases (although some depend on campus computing environments for their access so that will be an issue here as well). It is a lot to expect novice online instructors to rise to the level of technical and social design that better online instructors have achieved. To predicate your systemic design assumptions on that assumption is likely to break the system.

Instead, faculty must be directed toward tools that most closely resemble activities within a physical meeting, and which have the lowest possible barriers to entry. Videoconferencing is an obvious solution, but it carries with it at least one caveat: remember that some students may not have access to a computer with a camera or reliable broadband as the Indiana study seems to indicate. Also remember that that the study looked at students at a 4-year institution. Students at community colleges, at least in my anecdotal experience, are more likely to be concentrated within that lower 20% who have unreliable technological assets at their disposal, especially in poorer communities. Therefore, any videoconferencing platform used must have the option to call into the system using an ordinary phone that is not dependent on a data plan to operate. Students are also under a lot of stress right now. Connecting to their classes should not become one of them.

The challenge of informal learning is harder to overcome. Ideally, the videoconferencing systems offered to the students should allow them to form their own meetings as easily as instructor-led meetings. This functionality should be stressed to them. I don’t know how this will play out. On the one hand, less-prepared students, like the aforementioned community college students or younger students in K12, do not always understand the advantage of working with their peers to overcome their learning challenges and may resist congregating in the online space as a consequence, On the other hand, the level of isolation that is occurring right now might encourage students to spontaneously form groups. This will be an interesting social experiment.

Faculty also need to be mindful of what they are trying to do in other areas of the course, such as assessment. Many of the problems and concerns I’m seeing right now amongst the faculty have to do with trying to directly transfer what seems to work for them in a classroom into an online environment. Assessment design has, of course, come to the fore as faculty worry about compromising the integrity of tests online. The important thing to remember here is that tests are just one form of assessment and are also a designed reality that can be changed in a digital environment. Faculty need to take a moment to assess (pun intended) the outcomes they are trying to measure, not just in content but also in the skills necessary to process content, and ask themselves if they can achieve a higher-order outcome by shifting the nature of their assessment to a different level.

I require my students to produce a final portfolio that measures their ability to process and communicate information about government. I am less concerned about the comprehensiveness of their content mastery in my government class than I am in their ability to be able to find relevant information, analyze it, and use it to advocate for an issue that matters to them. This is also a design choice. As this website is their own creation and on their choice of platform, it also creates opportunities for active learning as we work together to improve what they are trying to say, how they are trying to say it, and how this is ultimately presented. It is a lasting artifact of their work in the class. It is also a form of assessment.

We are bending instruction. When things are bent, basic functions of their design come to the fore. Is what is being bent flexible or is it brittle? Can it be adapted into another form and how does that change its form or efficacy of purpose? By looking at it differently, can we see new opportunities for its use? While learning is a process, how we get there is fundamentally a function of design. This logic applies to the modalities we apply to the communication, assessment, and scope of learning in our classes. The good news is that we have a vast new range of digital tools that create design possibilities in and for our classes and this gives us many new tools to use as we navigate the difficult process of learning with our students. Understanding their basic functionalities and how they fit into the overall system of what we are trying to do is going to be key to adapting teaching and learning to our profoundly reshaped social world.