CLAS Acts June 2020

Monthly newsletter of the TT faculty of CLAS

Quick and Connected: Building Community, Purpose, and a New Intentionality in Online Courses

By Monica Johnstone, PhD

As we all contemplate the ways we may choose to, or be asked to, deliver our courses over the next term or more, I dove into my own online teaching certification and invited four CLAS faculty members to a RingCentral meeting to discuss their tips for teaching well online.  They quickly transcended tips and tricks.

As if to underline the practical complexities of online work, my camera decided to take a furlough day so I was represented by only a black box and my email username. Perhaps this was no great loss as I was typing madly throughout the discussion.

More successfully represented on my screen were four rock stars identified for me by FTLC:  Jeff Kelly Lowenstein (Multimedia Journalism, School of Communications), Rachel Anderson (English), Dave Leonard (Chemistry), and David Eick (French, Modern Languages and Literatures).

After the now customary “pandetiquette” to make sure we were all well and coping with isolation, each of the participants took a turn providing online teaching observations and challenges from their perspective.

Jeff led off by noting that he has signed up for (but not yet taken) his official course to gain his online teaching certification.  He was struck by the profound disruption of the abrupt transition to online delivery during the winter 2020 term, and yet how well students responded to it. 

“Most showed strength and resilience,” Jeff recalled.  “Their jobs, structure, internships went away.  There was a learning curve with Blackboard Ultra.  Students openly shared that online wasn’t their preferred learning format, that they valued the exchanges that go on in an actual classroom, but they got down to it anyway.”

Already halfway through the course, Jeff decided to back up to the very beginning and review with his students what their learning goals were and the actions they should take toward those goals. 

“I set up an online whiteboard on which they could write anonymously.  I asked them what sort of community they wanted to be, what they might want to add to their community in that moment.  I wanted to ground them in a feeling of togetherness.  If I teach online in the fall, I’ll be thinking about how to make that happen.  I tried to strike a balance between a group communal experience and individual time with students.  Both my relationship with students and theirs with each other are important.”

To achieve this balance of communal and individual attention, Jeff set up 5-10 minute huddles with students.  These proved particularly key for students who struggled. He was didactic about assignments and addressed how far along they should be toward completing them on particular days of the week.

“I also gave them a choice.  In journalism, sometimes the biggest story is what you go with," Jeff explained in acknowledgement that the big story of the term became the pandemic.  "I allowed switching of story ideas.  This gave them some control and some choice.”

Rachel got her online certification a number of years ago.

“Checking in with students is a core part of the pedagogy,” Rachel noted.  She likes to have a weekly “test” that involves questions such as, “what was your level of effort?”  She also asks students to let her know what is going on for them as individuals.  She uses small assignments that break down the larger processes, such as “write your abstract” or even “write your first sentence”.  These assignments are always due Sunday at midnight to help students keep track of deadlines.  Students assure her that they really like this predictability.  Rachel grades these small assignments rapidly to spot any issues that may be popping up

In winter 2020, Rachel was teaching Digital Studies, so the mandate to teach online fit the course subject matter.  She could productively ask the students to think about the intersection of education and the digital.  

Her concerns included that the load on GVSU systems would exceed their capacity, leading to crashes.  She was glad this didn’t happen, but decided to work asynchronously just in case.  Responsiveness was key.  Whether answering questions or grading, she tried to be quick.  Holding office hours far longer than she would on campus, usually 10 a.m.-2 p.m. daily, her students knew they could get a fast response during those hours which she dedicated to being in front of her computer.

Rachel asked her students what frustrated them.  Connectivity issues with Blackboard were among their vexations and some pointed to alternate communications platforms such as Discord[i] with which they were familiar using while gaming.  Rachel is looking into Dicord's viability for class and will also be investigating Slack[ii]. 

In general, Rachel approaches her online teaching by using principles of good web design.  She also likens it to good urban planning, “Have multiple pathways to things—accessible from multiple places.  For instance, links on the syllabus are also in the other files.  Wherever the need might come up.  This probably increases my Blackboard file size, but allows students to find things easily and lowers the number of emails asking where things are.”

Dave Leonard has not had much beyond his “emergency training” yet, but has benefitted from discussions in the Chemistry Department and some online preparations that have been years in the making.

“My department is calling all of our majors this summer to find out what did and didn’t work.   I heard from my students that they want some common meeting times and more availability beyond standard office hours. They need it.”

“I’ve been surprised,” Dave said, “about how resilient they are.  Most students took the switch to online in stride.  One student did disappear, and it took a coordinated departmental effort to get him back on track.  Communicating with other instructors is really important.”

“Communication and structure seemed to fall down when we’re asynchronous.  A number of students wanted a synchronous moment each week to all get together—it was community building.”

“In Chemistry we also found that key information had to be more than just posted somewhere.  It had to be built into assignments.  We had them confirm that they had read it.  We found it really helped to have them actually sign off on exam preparation on homework.”

“We have a lot of online homework that we have developed over the years.  Due to how technical it is and how much problem solving is involved, much of this stash is set up to be autograded homework.  To have five years’ worth of this material was really lucky,” Dave acknowledges.  Faculty in his unit share this bounty so everyone does not have to reinvent the wheel.

“Even at hours you aren’t there, the immediacy of the autograded homework really helps. I’m considering this in my preparations for fall courses.”

David Eick agreed with the others that a key question is how you maintain human community when that community is using media tools and platforms.  How do we reassure students and mitigate anxiety while needing some of that for yourself, too?

“This winter, I tried to get students to experience the class as pleasant diversion to the grimness out there,” David recalls.  He consulted students about the tools to use.  Like Jeff, he also wanted the students to have their own community, recommending to them, “You pick your own platforms to build your own community without me.”

“I learned that while synchronous is okay, the internet does go in and out.  You take a breath and repeat yourself.  In some ways Blackboard Collaborate can be clunky and Zoom was better.  I found that I needed to individualize my connections to students whether by video or phone.  I strongly encouraged weekly appointments, and we worked together via Google Docs.”

Still exploring more advantageous communication platforms, David was curious about Discord which Rachel had mentioned.  Rachel noted that it is used synchronously by gamers, but that it also stores messages.  In her Digital Studies class, she assigned students to produce an ethnography of one of their communities and found many students chose one of their Discord communities.

Rachel emphasized Dave Leonard’s point about autograding’s immediate feedback.  Many of her activities such as quizzes can be taken multiple times and are intended to be formative.  She noted that this makes academic integrity less of an issue.

Dave agreed that since he uses many question variants, it isn’t quick to develop quizzes that can be taken multiple times and that perhaps teaching online should make faculty reconsider their expectations of exam processes.  To develop ways of minimizing academic integrity issues may mean thinking about assessment differently.

David Eick noted that oral exams, a time-honored tradition in language study, could be of use to others.  Students could be asked to explain answers orally if the class size made that viable.

Jeff agreed, “It is a really important point.  Journalism tends to use culminating projects.  We talk with students about how their knowledge and facility with technology is an important asset.  They are uniquely well equipped to meet this challenge.  I remind them of how many times in face-to-face class I had to get them off their phones!  This is a historic moment for journalism.  It is a chance to document and leave something behind for their grandkids.  A tough, historic, disorienting time with longer implications."

Dave says this moment feels like a seismic shift.  He’s been thinking about the critiques of Alfie Kohn and what they may say to us during this moment about traditional approaches to assessment.

“How do I grade during this crisis when learning and connection seem more important?” Dave wonders.  His concern is echoed in the Chronicle of Higher Education as well as in the case against grading that Kohn makes or the critiques of Jesse Stommel.  He’s thinking about the effects of grading on anxiety, learning, minimal effort.  He wonders if we could aspire to teaching and learning more like our approach to graduate students.

Dave is experimenting this spring by consulting students about these tensions and foregrounding the learning objectives.  In Week Three of the spring term, the point in time of our discussion, he found students were working at least as hard. 

Jeff also found he was making pedagogical decisions in light of the pandemic.  “I reached out to 35 colleagues near and far who are teaching investigative journalism.  We ended up putting together an ad hoc group.  We created a very large database about how universities are responding (refunds, grading, C/NC, etc.) as a way to think collectively about how it was being done.  Our students did fact checking. They got to be on calls with Pulitzer Prize winners.  It expanded their focus.  One student did a piece on mental health responses by universities during the pandemic using international responses.  12% of universities were doing something, and she then checked their websites.  More said they were doing something, perhaps 60%.”

“Students liked connecting beyond our campus—it was exciting and gave them purpose.”

The pandemic may have forced us all to ponder our pedagogies, tools, assumptions about assessments and their relationship to learning.  Even as we flatten the curve, we may be flattening the  hierarchies of education as we think about ways undergraduate education could more closely resemble graduate education, and how our network of colleagues could become a network our students can share.

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[i] For the non-gamers, I will save you the trip to Wikipedia: “Discord is a proprietary freeware VoIP application and digital distribution platform designed for creating communities ranging from gamers to education and businesses. Discord specializes in text, image, video and audio communication between users in a chat channel.”

I was not familiar with it but my Laker son showed it to me.

[ii] The connotation of its name aside, Slack sees itself as “where work flows. It's where the people you need, the information you share, and the tools you use come together to get things done.”

FROM THE DEAN’S DESK

Frederick J. Antczak, Dean

I appreciate your leadership. It’s a horrible situation.  Everyone is frustrated, not just by the constraints but by the uncertainties. But make no mistake, this is a critical time in the history of the university, and it falls to us to keep it going. We will be judged by the nimbleness, creativity, and compassion of our response. You folks are doing a phenomenal job, and I include all the unit heads and members of the CLAS Office in that. The work you did this spring was already beyond what anybody could expect. So of course, the irony of history—and be clear, you are making institutional history—is that the events of the coming months may ask you to do it again. Your unit colleagues are relying on you, not only to make the unit’s best case, but to see the big picture and help them see their stake in it.   I know this office is going to be behind you completely.