The end of Fall Term 2020 draws nigh - in 16 days, come hell or high water, I will submit my grades, shake the dust from my sandals, and be done with the semester. It has been an excruciatingly busy term for everyone; many remark how they don’t remember having such a difficult term.

That doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been a profitable term. The pandemic has disrupted everyone’s lives, and instructors and students experience this disruption daily as they confront the complexities of online teaching and learning. The conditions are not ideal (but then, were they ever?), and the level of anxiety is higher than usual, and that is affecting performance.

It is nevertheless important to stress one point: good learning and good teaching is still happening despite these obstacles. Naysayers call this term a failure or a disaster - pandemic pedagogy doesn’t work and we need to return to the way the did things in the Before Times.

Do we, though? Do we really want to return to a time where we generally ignored pedagogy? Because that’s what we did in the Before Times. If nothing else, the Great Pivot has forced instructors to confront how they taught and students to confront how they learn.

I’ve been writing this series of blogposts for my graduate seminar on online teaching and learning, and this is the final instalment. Last week I gave my students a final reflective assignment in which I asked them to think about their “takeaways and stayaways,” the things they learned in the seminar that they would incorporate into their own teaching or would avoid like the plague. They’ve been confronting their notions of teaching and learning all term, as have I, and together we’ve been reexamining every aspect of how we teach. Here’s a brief summary of some of our important takeaways and stayaways:

• full-fledged, 100% synchronous courses do not do anyone any favours. If an instructor thinks they can lecture via Zoom as they normally would in a classroom and that students will respond as they normally would, they’re probably mistaken. Or actually, perhaps they’re correct: students’ minds will wander as they tire of the extra effort needed to remain engaged in the online video format.

• instructor presence is a necessity - students want it and need it. This doesn’t mean the instructor needs to be the centre of attention by cultivating an online teaching persona or dominating every discussion. What it entails is that the instructor facilitate learning experiences that benefit the students, that they demonstrate awareness of obstacles students might be facing (especially during the pandemic), and that they give students opportunities to feel connected to the course, to the instructor, and to other students. It’s a lot to ask of instructors, who not only need to be content experts, but group dynamic experts as well, and this in an online environment. It will not always go well.

• we need clarity and simplicity in our online courses. When all the courses are online, most people have trouble managing all the things. This may require a rethinking of a basic tenet of online pedagogy that to keep students engaged, you need to assign many smaller learning tasks.

• give students more authentic learning opportunities. Let them show what they can do in formats other than tests, term papers, and presentations.

• collaborate with students. Create tasks and assignments where you work with the students in some capacity. Think of the students as apprentices.

• build flexibility into courses. Do it on the housekeeping front in order to reduce your own need for managing extension requires, and also in order to help students manage the pressure the comes with high stakes learning. But we also need to do it on the format front and created blended and hybrid courses that create an engaging mixture of online and on-the-ground elements.

My final takeaway is a very personal one: teach a course about online teaching and learning. I’ve been teaching online for years, but I’ve never taught a course about it. I’ve learnt so much about what I’ve been doing all these years, and that has been enlightening. It has been a struggle to teach a grad seminar as all encompassing as this, but my students have been wonderfully patient with me as I’ve worked through what I thought about the topics at hand, and I’m grateful to them for that.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

As 21st-century educators, we are called upon to perform a variety of roles. This week’s posts are highlighting online tools that can help us with these tasks.

In the 21st-century educator model, one of the hats instructors wear is that of experimenter. This one has always left me wondering what exactly is meant by it. But lately I’ve come to a better understanding of it.

An educator today needs to be willing to try new things, to innovate, to take chances - in short, to experiment. It’s the only way to prevent education becoming stale from ossified tradition. Tradition itself isn’t bad, but tradition for tradition’s sake - often expressed as “that’s the way we’ve always done it” - will be the end of civilization. I’m not just being hyperbolic: when societies can’t adapt to new situations, they crumble and fall.

But experimenting with an app - putting it to use in a course - without having a clear purpose for that app is usually counterproductive. I know this from experience. Like a cat, I’ll jump at any shiny thing that comes along, so I have to guard against the urge to use something just because it’s new. So I try to curb my impulsive behaviour while still satisfying my experimentation tooth by using new apps myself for awhile in order to see if (a) I find them useful and (b) they might be useful to students in their learning.

One such app is Milanote. It describes itself as “an easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards.” A visual wiki, in other words, and it’s the visual aspect - an infinite bulletin board space where you can put almost anything - that I like quite a bit. It’s less linear than a good wiki like Notion, a little more flexible than Padlet, it can do more than a good kanban board like Meistertask, it can replicate a concept map like Mindmeister while still bringing in all the documents you might want, and it has fewer gadgety bells and whistles than Miro.

I started using it to plan and map out courses and presentations, and I liked how it helped me get all the things organized. And I realized it could help me meet two objectives I’m developing for the my students’ learning:

1. I want students to have a space where they can think/create, organize, learn, and present in a contiguous fashion, and Milanote enables this in a simplified manner.

2. I want students to do more learning in the open. I want to ease them away from handing in assignments to me, furtively, and instead developing the confidence to share their work with their peers. Milanote can manage this as well.

The other thing about Milanote is that it allows me to experiment. In that way it takes on a concept map function, and though it is not as visually smooth as a really good concept map app, it gives me the space to think things through. The app is aimed at the hip young “creatives” of today, and so it has that “creativity vibe” as the youths say. Which I have to admit I kind of like because it helps me to free up my thinking, to get out of certain ruts in order to explore new ideas. All I need now is a beard and a hipster hat.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

As 21st-century educators, we are called upon to perform a variety of roles. This week’s posts are highlighting online tools that can help us with these tasks.

Professional Collaboration - Twitter

Twitter is a cesspool. Except when it isn’t.

The excesses of tweeters are well known. They spread hate and extremist lies. They gang up on people they don’t like. They post way too many GIFs and memes.

Academic Twitter is often no better. The snark can sometimes be funny or even enlightening, but the narcissism, the selfies, the humblebragging and the bragging bragging, the self promotion and the image management, the posturing and the virtue signalling are over the top. Then there are the profs who call critics sacks of whatever or tell them to go and do something to themselves, or the profs - often the same ones as the name callers - who decry the level of discourse on Twitter without having enough self-awareness to realize that their yelling and name-calling are lowering that discourse.

Even so, Twitter is a real boon to educators. There are who wish to collaborate, especially during a pandemic that isolates us, and Twitter can provide the seeds for such connections. A lot of educators at every level are extremely generous with what they’ll share online, often through blogs like this one, and Twitter is one of the best ways to find out about these posts. You start getting to know those educators who view Twitter as a way of curating and amplifying the work of others, and by following them you can tap into whole networks of people thinking about the things you’re thinking about. This is especially useful if you are interested in developing a Personal Learning Network in order to foster your own professional development and learning.

Professional and Student Collaboration - Microsoft Teams

I’ve been using Microsoft Teams all year to manage the research centre I direct, and both the administrative assistant and I have grown to really appreciate its usefulness. We basically do our work for the centre from within Teams, and we find it increases our collaboration and communication. So I decided to use Teams this fall to teach a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning.

There are some negatives to Teams. If you’re not familiar with it, it has a bit of a learning curve before you become comfortable with its structure of channels and tabs and other tabs. It’s like visiting a city for the first time and you’re kind of disoriented until one day you suddenly feel, ahh, now I know where I am. But that learning curve can annoy students (and others): they want to hit the ground running, and if they enter a space and can’t immediately find what they’re looking for, they get grumpy.

Teams also has some quirks: the wiki, which I used a lot in my course, has one of those hamburger patty menus that you don’t realize might be hiding all sorts of information that’s in the wiki; there are all sorts of places where you can “chat” with colleagues, and you become uncertain if what you’ve posted is reaching the intended audience; only a limited number of channels will automatically appear in the user’s account, which leads you as an instructor to wonder whether they’re getting a whole overview of the course and its materials.

But Teams also has some advantages:

• Teams is less didactic than an LMS - it’s about group collaboration and multi-directional communication, not information transfer from an instructor to students. I didn’t make full use of the collaborative possibilities, but Teams would work especially well in a course where there is a group project component because it gives you all the tools you need to work on documents together, chat asynchronously or synchronously, etc.;

• Teams eliminates the need for email exchanges with students; it can all be done with chat. If that doesn’t make you happy, Mr. Scrooge, nothing will;

• while Teams doesn’t have the same kind of discussion forum structure you’ll find in a typical LMS, it does allow you to have discussions that take place right with the content (but as noted above, these can be confusing and a bit unwieldy);

• with Teams, students are members, which gives them a lot of control - they can create their own channels and spaces to do the work they want to do.

You’ll hear people say “Teams is a disaster - just use Zoom!” The Teams video chat isn’t as good as Zoom’s - it has less flexibility and the recordings aren’t as good. But if you’re using Teams just for video calls, you’re missing the point. Zoom is a communication tool, Teams is a collaboration suite. It’s not as easy to use as Zoom because it provides so much more than Zoom.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

As 21st-century educators, we are called upon to perform a variety of roles. This week’s posts are highlighting online tools that can help us with these tasks.

If you google “curation,” many of your top hits will be about digital content curation. Your hits will be things like “13 content curation tools that every marketer needs” or “The three most effective content curation strategies” or “Improve your content curation: 23 tips from the experts.” If it’s a listicle, it’s always suspect in my book, but this is worse. The web marketing crowd has glommed onto a concept and sucked it dry of any inherent value: it’s all about clicks and getting eyeballs to stay on your webpage long enough to make a sale or increase the advertising value of your website. It’s all rather dispiriting. And as the New York Times put it in an article about the overuse of the word: “When everything is ‘curated,’ what does the word even mean?”

If there’s one good thing about curation’s “buzziness,” it’s that it has shaken the word a little bit loose from its museum and gallery connotations. When we curate at a gallery or a museum, we are preserving items we think have special value. Historical preservation can conjure up dusty, fusty rooms and exhibits. Web marketing’s use of curation has debased this notion of preservation: the whole point about creating content for the web is to always be adding to it, finding more of it, never standing still. While that might bring some energy to the idea of curation, it’s not really a step in the right direction.

When we use curation in an educational context, however, we can thread the needle and come out ahead. Instructors are natural curators: we find information that we want to pass on to students, in the hope that they will learn from it and be changed by it. We don’t want them to store it, and we don’t want them to consume it only to forget it. We want them to kind of split the difference and act on it.

Two apps can assist instructors and student curate information and work with it:

• there are lots of different link aggregators and collectors, but the one I use quite a bit is elink.io. It’s a commercial product that’s intended for the web marketing I’ve just been complaining about, but it can create very nice looking collections of links that can also be easily converted into newsletters. The collections embed well in other webpages, and the browser extension makes it easy to collect items.

• Hypothes.is is billed as collaborative annotation - it lets you annotate almost any kind of text on the web. You can set up groups (such as a course) so that members can read and comment on the same online document. I mention it here because curation as an educational tool shouldn’t be thought of as just collecting stuff - you have to do something with it. Analyzing and discussing it is the first step in that process, and Hypothes.is helps with that.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

As 21st-century educators, we are called upon to perform a variety of roles. This week’s posts are highlighting online tools that can help us with these tasks.

One of things instructors do is present information. Even if we have flipped our classroom - and in many ways online courses are the ultimate flipped classrooms - we are still called upon to inform, explain, elucidate, unpack, and enlighten. In the classroom the standard way of doing this up till about 15-20 years ago was to lecture with the help of a chalkboard and perhaps photographic slides or an overhead projector. Then along came computers and digital projectors and PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is now the standard way of presenting information, both in teaching and at conferences. Well made digital slide presentations can make anyone look smarter than they are, just as substandard ones can make anyone look less intelligent. But one thing they all do is drive the class or presentation in a linear fashion. PowerPoint only knows one direction, and this can turn presentations into trains that can’t be stopped.

It’s for this reason that I’ve come to like Padlet, an app that’s found some popularity with primary and secondary school teachers, but which can also be used in higher education. Many compare it to a bulletin board where you can pin information of almost any type - documents, images, video, audio, websites. And that’s what I like most about it. Whereas a PowerPoint presentation is a summary of information, a Padlet board can contain the actual information you’re talking about it. You can also present that information in a number of ways - as a linear narrative for sure, but also as a concept map, a kanban board, a timeline, or just a messy bulletin board.

The best thing about it for instructors is that you can use it to collect all the information you want to share with students on a particular topic, and then just teach from the Padlet. You don’t have to set up a presentation, you simply present the information you’ve collected or put together (though it’s flexible enough that, should you want it to be more presentation-like, it can handle that, too.) Any instructor who teaches with a slide deck has faced the inevitable question from students: can we get a copy of the slides? It’s an annoying request for most instructors. With Padlet, the question is moot; you give students access to the Padlet as a matter of course so that they read and study the documents and links you’re presenting and discussing.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

With the Great Pivot to online teaching, it became commonplace at advice sessions and webinars for facilitators to warn new online instructors not to let the technology overwhelm them or their students. “Take it slow,” went the advice, “adopt maybe one or two apps but not much more lest the tech get in the way of the teaching and learning.” Many instructors unfamiliar with online teaching came to the table with some trepidation that their lives would now be dominated by technology, and the instructional developers sought to put their minds at ease: online teaching was first and foremost about teaching and learning, and second about the online bits.

We’re all online instructors now, and will be for a while yet. The advice to take it slow with tech still stands, but as we become more comfortable with virtual teaching, we should not be too timid about testing the tech waters. There are applications and software out there that can be put to good and productive use in online courses. Few of them will be perfect: some will have steeper learning curves than others, some will cost money, some will promise much but deliver little. But those aren’t reasons for instructors not to look at what’s available, kick the tires, and see if there are apps that can facilitate a particular teaching or learning objective.

And there are tools to help you with the tools - metatools that can help instructors sort through the crazy proliferation of digital and networked applications that might be of use. Here are three helpful ones:

• Top Tools for Learning is an annual survey conducted by Jane Hart. It provides information on the top 200 tools for learning as identified by some 2600+ survey participants. In addition to the general list, there are also lists for the top 100 tools in personal learning, workplace learning, and education. This is a good place to start if you’re looking for ideas about what’s out there.

• To figure out how to evaluate what’s out there and whether it’s suitable for your purposes, Lauren Antsey and Gavan Watson have developed a rubric for evaluating e-learning tools. This essay explains their rationale and provides a link to the rubric. Not every aspect of the rubric might apply to your situation, but the questions and criteria will help you figure out what’s important to you with regard to bringing apps into a course, and can alert you to potential pitfalls or issues you may not have considered.

• eCampusOntario runs the wonderful Ontario Extend professional learning program for anyone who’s trying to improve their digital skills in teaching and learning. You can do it on your own, and it is designed to give you a broader context within which you can make out what kind of digital educator you wish to be.

For the rest of this week the posts in this series are going to be focused on specific applications that I have found to be either really useful in teaching, or which I think have a great potential for being so. I’m going to be contextualizing these choices using a framework originally developed by Simon Bates at UBC and adapted by eCampusOntario for their original Ontario Extend offering. The Anatomy of 21st-Century Educators serves as a kind of wake up call for higher education instructors: we’re not just teachers anymore — we wear a number of chapeaux in the service of our teaching, with technology assisting us along the way. This week’s posts will identify apps that support those roles.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

The subtitle above is from a CBC story about a recently released survey commissioned by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). 2,208 faculty members and librarians, and 502 students took the poll, but with over 500,000 students in Ontario’s universities, that’s not the most representative sample of student opinion. Still, there’s much to be learned from the information gathered. OCUFA’s press release highlighted that “62 per cent of students and 76 per cent of faculty and academic librarians believe that the adjustments universities made to move teaching online have had a negative impact on education quality.” The headline for the press release was blunt: “Pandemic has caused decline in educational quality.” Has it really?

One of the more interesting findings of the survey, and one that has been in seen in other surveys by institutions across the country, is that the online learning experience is leaving both instructors and students feeling disconnected. This aligns with the anecdotal evidence I’ve collected from colleagues and students in my own classes. Both have indicated that they don’t feel that they’re connecting with others as much; they feel isolated and miss the smaller yet valuable moments of chatting informally before class or socializing afterwards. These activities aren’t directly related to learning, but they have a big impact on how people feel about the overall experience.

Most of the survey’s results didn’t make it into the news reports or OCUFA’s press release. 29 per cent of faculty and librarians believe that the most important issue facing universities is “lack of funding/research/budget cuts/high tuition”; only 9 per cent thought it was “COVID-19/pandemic/impact on students” and only 6 per cent responded with “standards/quality of education/research.” This would indicate that faculty members feel that educational quality has declined, but that it’s a minor issue compared to funding cuts. That’s a bit of a mixed message.

In another section of the survey, students were asked “what are two or three changes that your university could make that you think would be effective in helping university students adjust to a post-pandemic world.” Reducing costs and tuitions fees came in first at 15%, followed by “reduce campus access/close it/more courses online” at 14 per cent. Yes, you read that correctly: students recommend more online courses, not fewer.

OCUFA interprets the overall results of the survey to mean that “without immediate action from universities and the Ontario government to address these concerns, it is likely that quality will degrade even further.” But there’s no evidence that education quality has degraded, only evidence of dissatisfaction - valid dissatisfaction - with the current modes of delivery necessitated by the pandemic.

I draw two conclusions from the survey. I start from the point of view that without online teaching and learning, there would be no higher education in Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic at all. The glass is half full. Dissatisfaction has left a bitter taste, but if we didn’t have that drink, we’d be dying of thirst. So maybe we should drink up.

My second conclusion is that we can improve the taste of that drink. The survey should not be taken to mean that online education is a failure, as some will inevitably conclude. If OCUFA wishes to use the survey to snipe at the government and university administrations, fine. But I think a more productive approach, one that would be of greater benefit to students and instructors, would be to think about what can be done to improve on the general unease that comes with online education.

One example was raised by my own students, and I think it has a lot of merit. Online courses tend to have a lot of smaller learning tasks; in the Before Times, this was considered one of the best ways to keep students involved and on track in online courses. But in the Before Times most students weren’t taking all of their courses online, and living through a year that has been trying if not downright painful. In such circumstances all these multiple and varied tasks seem to be overwhelming students, which contributes to the general sense of stress and alienation. We could rethink this approach and scale back on the number of learning tasks in our online courses.

That press release headline - “Pandemic has caused decline in educational quality” - was unhelpful and misleading. Satisfaction seems to be down and stress seems to be up, but we have the ability to adjust and improve.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

Co-creating or co-constructing knowledge with students as a pedagogical practice has been gaining attention of late, but it isn’t really all that new. Kant’s students took notes at his lectures and published those; natural scientists have worked with students in labs for years. But with the rise of interest in open educational resources and open educational practices generally, co-constructing course materials has made it easier for students to get into the game.

(A quick note on terminology: “co-constructing knowledge” is the term most often used by the open pedagogues; it implies that knowledge is contextual, a product of human activity and interaction. But I have a fondness for “co-creation.” It seems more special, somehow.)

As a collaborative learning exercise, co-constructing knowledge can include student-student cooperation, but it can also involve student-instructor collaboration on learning materials, and it’s this aspect that is becoming noticed on the pedagogical radar. Co-constructing knowledge can work in any discipline, but the creation of course content might be especially useful in the humanities and social sciences where there are fewer opportunities, especially at the undergraduate level, for instructors and students to work together on projects, and where authentic assignments may not be as common as in other disciplines.

As far as what kind of course content can be co-constructed, examples abound:

• working with students on open access anthologies (of early American literature and Hispanic literature) seems to be popular;

• having students contribute to other open textbooks by contributing different kinds of content (e.g. a “student view” on the material);

• working with students to contribute to Wikipedia articles that can be used in the course;

• involving students in projects to adapt existing open textbooks or OERs for a course.

Having students contribute to the development of content for themselves and those who follow them in their courses makes good sense. It gives them some insight into the effort and thinking that goes into the design of learning materials, which in turn should give them a better understanding of how their learning is constructed. And it also gives them a taste of that old adage that if you want to learn something, you should teach it.

Instructors who do want to work with students in this fashion should take a couple of things into account. The first is that if students are going to be contributing to material that will be used in a teaching and learning situation, instructors need to do what they can to make sure that the students’ work is the best it can be. That means providing really careful editing if they’re contributing written material, or coaching students if they are contributing audio-visual material. This is more intensive work than marking and grading, and instructors need to be aware of this. Another consideration is how such work should be graded. Instructors should probably take an approach that treats this more like an internship rather than a normal assignment. This would mean, for example, providing the kind of feedback that might be given in a job performance review as opposed to the usual term paper comments or rubrics.

Given the special nature of the exercise, it’s likely that student expectations will need to be managed a little differently, too. It can be exciting to be part of a project that has authentic value; creating courseware is the ultimate in non-disposable assignments. At the same time, students may not be up to the task. That’s why instructors need to find the right kind of tasks that suit the students’ abilities and the stage of learning at which they find themselves.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

We should think of collaboration in online courses as a spectrum. On the one hand are the simplest collaboration activities, the ubiquitous discussion forums. At the other end would be collaborative projects that involve students working together for a sustained period of time to create something together, a product that is much more than just the sum total of discussion posts. Collaborative learning, according to the definition that I’m using here, requires that students have sustained interaction with each other for the purpose of creating something.

Collaborative learning can be annoying for students and instructors alike when it comes to organization and grading. Students worry about members of their group not pulling their weight. Instructors worry about students complaining about members of their group not pulling their weight, and to this end often develop elaborate rules and guidelines and even contracts that can suck the fun out of the whole enterprise. (There are a bajillion webpages out there providing all sorts of tips and rules for group work.)

Once you get these issues resolved, what kind of collaborative activities are worth pursuing? That surely depends on the context you and your learners find yourselves in. I think the best way to approach group work is to look at some examples and consider if they will work in your course, either as is or in some modified fashion. To that end, here are some examples that I think are particularly worth considering:

• Collaborative design exercise: in a design course, students are divided into groups of three. They each submit a prototype for a design exercise, then together they create a fourth prototype drawing on the three individual prototypes. This works well both online and on the ground, and can be modified for other kinds of courses.

• Collaborative note-taking: students in groups of varying sizes (even the whole course) can use Google Docs or Office 365 to collaborate on class notes (for a lecture or reading). The instructor can review, fill in gaps, ask questions, etc.

• Report writing works well in courses where students need professional development practice (e.g. a report on climate crisis mitigation actions a city can take would work well in an environment or urban planning course). Having the students use professional collaboration software such as Microsoft Teams can give them a real sense of how these processes work online.

• Group writing projects are similar to writing professional research reports, but are more general in nature and can be assigned in a greater variety of contexts. When they’re about course content they might appear to lack an authentic edge, but the many people end up in jobs and careers where they are often in group writing situations.

Almost any kind of iterative project that brings together individual effort (e.g. researching a particular aspect of a larger whole) with combined effort (putting it all together as a slide presentation or video or podcast or report) can be worthwhile. Students engage with each other in a meaningful manner as they focus on the task at hand. That’s good learning.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

This week in our graduate seminar on online teaching we’re discussing collaborative learning - the fancy way of saying group work. It can be an important tool in our efforts to engage students in online courses. I’ll talk about that in tomorrow’s post. Today I want to take a moment and get something off my chest.

There is nothing wrong with studying in a group of one, alone.

This summer during a webinar I was explaining how I teach online, and I was asked why I hadn’t included any ideas for group work. I replied that not every course needs to have a collaborative learning assignment, that most students would have enough courses with strong group work components. During and after the webinar I heard from a handful of instructors who thanked me for saying that. Every time they have attended pedagogy workshops, they have felt pressured to find ways to incorporate group activities, and many instructors find managing such activities difficult.

Students have expressed similar views. One student actually thanked me once for not having group work in my course. “Since high school all we’ve had is group work, group work, group work,” she told me. There was no joy in her voice when she said that.

When I was an undergraduate student in the early 1980s, I didn’t have a single course with a collaborative learning component. Even today, for better or worse, I tend to prefer working alone, although I do work with people all the time on committees and the like, and I do like that work. But I don’t find that kind of work easy, and maybe that’s an argument for group activities in courses; it takes practice to become comfortable working with others.

But when I reflect on my time as a student, some of my strongest and most pleasurable memories are of sitting in the library, studying, alone. I enjoyed going for breaks with people, but the time spent pondering verb tables or parsing sentences from 18th-century German plays or trying to figure out just what was going on in that story by Kafka has left the most indelible impression. I think I realized then what I most certainly realize now: it was a privilege to spend precious time just thinking things through.

And it was time well spent. I think it made me a keener, more perceptive reader, it taught me that the role that patience plays in gaining insight and perspective, and it gave me a sense of calm (that was quickly shattered when I realized I had to stop thinking and start writing that term paper). These are things I’d wish for anybody.

But if you were to read the work of pedagogy professionals, you’d think that no one studies just on their own, nor should they. It is all about learner-learner or learner-instructor interaction. Even when we talk about learner-content interaction, there is little mention of reading or studying quietly; rather, the emphasis is on learning activities and the like. Not that such activities are bad, of course not. But I think we have all experienced moments of learning that have take place apart from the hubbub of a course, when we sit alone and put our minds to the task at hand. It would do us good to remember that and promote an appreciation for it among our students as well.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

We were recently informed by university administrators that the students in our fully online semester might be suffering from remote learning overload. It was suggested that if we lightened up on the tasks and assignments as the term drew to a close, that would not be a bad thing. The anecdotal evidence I’ve seen indicates that students are feeling more stressed out this term than might normally have been the case, and I would say the same goes for instructors as well as for all university staff. Everyone is wondering where the term went, everyone is behind on this, that, and the other thing, everyone is tired and slightly grumpy. Which is okay; it has been a hard year.

The general wisdom with regard to online learning is that to engage the learner, and to keep that learner engaged, numerous low-stakes activities are key. But this thinking originated in the Before Times, when fewer students took online courses. When I think of students in my online courses, most of them were students attending classes on campus, but they had elected to take one or two online courses for any number of reasons, usually in order to free up time in their schedule for other things.

We are now in a very different situation. Students are faced with taking all of their courses online. At my institution, most undergrad courses can only have optional synchronous elements, so if those instructors have been paying attention to the advice of instructional developers on campus, they’ve been providing more asynchronous tasks and activities than would have been the case in their face-to-face teaching. This in turn means that the students have to manage a longer to do list. They aren’t getting as many in-class reminders about upcoming tasks and assignments, so they have to keep better track of that on their own. This might be contributing to the stress.

As online instructors, we might be assigning a lot of activities because we aren’t yet comfortable with not seeing the students in front of us in the classroom, learning. Of course there’s no reason to assume that students sitting in a class are learning, but we have the assurance of seeing them do what we’re asking of them at that moment (even if it is just to listen and take notes).

In my courses, I often take a Jackson Pollock approach to education: throw as much paint (content and activities) as I can at the canvas (students) and see how much sticks. There’s not much I can do about this term; the students have already been splattered with a lot of paint. But next term I’m going to see if I can create an engaging course with fewer tasks. It’s a literature course, and I want the students to take their time and think - really think - about what they’re reading. My impulse is to assign simple learning tasks that register and make note of that thinking, but perhaps the added burden of those activities only serves to make me feel better (I’m teaching! They’re learning!) while distracting students from the more important activity of reflection.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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In venting my frustration about grades and grading in a post yesterday, I concluded by stating there were alternatives. Those alternatives have loopy bits, but they also get us thinking about how grades have been warping higher education, and how we can do things to bring more balance and authenticity to grades. Welcome to ungrading.

If you do a Google search on ungrading, the Google algorithim/bot/eye of Sauron will first show you results for upgrading instead. So let me spare you the work of finding that information. It generally refers to a process whereby instructors don’t give out grades until they really have to, for example at the end of term, though a few instances have been recorded where instructors have managed to get away from grades entirely. Susan Blum, an anthropologist who write extensively on higher education, is a well-known advocate for ungrading. As she puts it: “People kept asking me what I would do to improve things [in higher education]. And I said that if I could make one change, I would get rid of grades.” She references another well-known anti-grader Alfie Kohn whose article “The Case Against Grades” makes the argument for deleting grades, or at least minimizing their importance.

But how? Both Blum and Jesse Stommel figure prominently in the call to ungrade. Some of the things that Stommel puts forward are over the top, such as the statement in his well-known essay “How To Ungrade” that he cares “less that my doctors are graded and more that they've read all the books of Virginia Woolf or Octavia Butler, because critical thinking is what will help them save my life when they encounter a situation they've never encountered before.” I don’t care that my doctors are graded either, but I do care that they’ve gone to medical school, attended classes, and learned the difference between a collarbone and a pancreas. Besides, reading Woolf’s or Butler’s fiction does not necessarily make you a better thinker any more than reading Gray’s Anatomy necessarily makes you a capable doctor.

Once you get beyond such provocations, there is real food for thought. Stommel’s approach is to have students write reflections during a course in which they outline and examine what they’ve learned in the hopes that they will develop their powers of metacognition. At the end of the term, if he’s required to provide a grade to the institution, he discusses this with his students and asks them to come up with their own grade, which he has the right to change but rarely does (and, in those cases when he does change it, he usually increases the grade for those students who are underestimating their abilities). He states: “I wish the conversation I had with students could focus purely on authentic assessment, process, and formative feedback. But I have found that asking students to give themselves a grade also makes the why and how of grades a valuable subject of the conversations we have—valuable because they will go on to be graded in other courses and thinking critically about how and why grading happens helps that become more productive for them.”

For her part, Blum makes heavy use of learning portfolios and giving students choice. She “decenters” grades by not putting a grade breakdown in her syllabi, and students can develop their own learning plan: “The idea is to have students figure out how a class fits with their own lives, course of study and interests.”

Other instructors are taking up the call to revise how grading works in their courses. Laura Killam, a nursing professor at Cambrian College, provides students choice as well. She also negotiates grades with students: their assignments get feedback but not grades, and she discusses their work with them at different points in the term before assigning a final grade in consultation with them that also takes into account some other assignments.

Ungrading is a word that provokes strong reactions. At first you think, that just won’t work, but then you realize it’s less about the actual action of ungrading and more about reexamining and reinventing the role of grading.

Ungrading’s strength lies not only in its ability to get students to reflect on their learning, but also in how it brings instructor and student into an open dialogue about the student’s learning. There simply isn’t enough of that in modern higher education. Big classes, super-busy profs, super-busy students - these all combine to thwart genuine discussion.

The emphasis on student choice and reflection in assessment is also one of ungrading’s weaknesses. The flexibility and the underlying expectation for greater one-on-one instructor-student interaction will seem daunting to instructors of large courses. There are arguments that instructors free up time for that interaction by spending less time marking assignments, which raises a second fear: that ungrading will not improve a student’s abilities or knowledge because, in the absence of rigorous assignments, learners just won’t be challenged enough.

These objections are valid, but they aren’t enough to push ungrading out of the picture. Especially not now, as the Great Pivot of 2020 morphs into Pandemic Pedagogy where so much higher education instruction is now online. We need to find ways to connect students with their studies and with their instructors in the online environment. Ungrading offers a very human and humane way of achieving that goal.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Students are motivated by grades. In a past life I worked as a mentor in student residences, and when students would talk to me about wanting to improve their grades, I told them about a simple trick: decide what grade you want in a course, then write it out in big numbers on the first page of your notebook or binder for that course. They would see it whenever they studied for that course and be reminded of their goal. At the end of the term students would happily report back that they had achieved that grade.

Students are discouraged by grades. In that same past life, I can’t recall how many times I saw students whose lower grades convinced them that they didn’t have much chance of success in life, or even that they would never achieve the necessary grades to pass a course or to get into grad school or stay in a program.

Student attitudes towards grades can seem inconsistent or counter-intuitive. Good students are often much more concerned about grades than they rationally need to be; maybe that’s why they’re good students. Some struggling students don’t seem concerned enough, perhaps because they’ve given up trying, which frustrates people trying to help them.

The research literature on grades as a factor in student motivation and success is enormous, but I don’t want to discuss that here. What I want to reflect on is how I view grades and grading now, after some 30+ years of teaching in higher education. I’ve come to some personal conclusions about grades, namely:

1. I don’t like how thinking about grades often dominates my time when I’m setting up a course. I can spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how much each assignment should be worth, and it messes up my whole design process. It annoys me how I let it divert me from designing the actual course.

2. Everyone - students, admissions officers, parents, instructors, student success coaches - focuses way, way too much on grades. I especially hate seeing what this does to students. You know how sometimes during term you get the sense that student attention is waning, that they’re kind of drifting away from a course as the term draws to a close and the stress begins to mount? Enter a wrong grade into the online gradebook, and then wait to see how long till the emails start coming from panicked students alerting you to the issue. They’re paying attention in the course, or at least to the course grades. And there is nothing so disheartening at the end of term, after you’ve turned in your grades, to get a message from a student asking you to raise their grade or else they won’t be able to get into grad/medical/law school. It’s especially disheartening when they’ve already received a good grade.

3. I get frustrated that students think grades are an accurate measure of their abilities, and as such the only measure of their performance. They’re useful in helping instructors identify where students are generally situated on the spectrum of ability and knowledge. But they are just one measure, and they are by no means that exact. And they can be misleading, too. I know a student who is very happy and proud that she got over 90% in a course last term. When I asked her why it made her so happy, she looked at me a bit quizzically and said, “Well, it shows I know a lot about the topic.” But what she doesn’t know is that all 40 students in that course got over 90% - the instructor regularly gives high grades to all students. Do all of them possess superior knowledge of that subject? Yeah, no. But that’s how grade inflation can warp perception and understanding.

4. I also get frustrated by how we as instructors and programs convince students that grades are an accurate measure of performance. That’s why the students in the examples above behave the way they do: we’ve socialized them into this thinking. We pump up the competitiveness to get into our universities so that students come to us already primed to focus on grades. We set up student success offices, and what is the general measure of success at university? Not knowledge, but grades. We create grade benchmarks for honours specializations and honours lists and scholarships. We encourage instructors to design their courses so that students get grades back earlier in the term so that they can be aware of their progress — a good idea, but the downside is that it causes students to focus even more on grades.

Can we get away from grades? Yes, we can, but it isn’t easy. More about that in the next post.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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In my post yesterday I mentioned how hard it is to teach languages. I quoted Victoria Russell and Kathryn Murphy-Judy who in their book Teaching Language Online make the case that some fields have it easier in the online context, and I’d like to quote them more fully on this point: “With many other disciplines, only reading and writing are necessary to learn the course content online. However, with language learning, listening and speaking are also critical components of the course that are necessary for students to build their proficiency in the target language; moreover, all four skills are also needed for students to develop their knowledge and understandings of cultural practices and products and the perspectives that underpin them” (p. 132).

Helping students learn all that is a tall order. What instructors are being charged with is nothing less than helping students acquire “communicative competence.” And that means learning a lot more than just saying hello. Communicative competence has a number of facets:

• grammatical competence — the ability to work with the rules and forms of the language;

• socio-linguistic competence — being able “to use the language in ways that are socially and culturally appropriate, and knowledge of the discourse structures of language, such as knowing how to form cohesive and coherent sentences or utterances in the target language” (p. 136);

• strategic competence — developing skills and strategies to compensate for gaps (e.g. using circumlocutions to express an idea when you don’t know the exact vocabulary required).

CLT, or the Communicative Language Teaching approach, attempts to operationalize communicative competence by emphasizing realistic situations (known as notions) where people employ appropriate language tools (known as functions) to communicate in those situations. To accomplish that is to move very far away from older approaches based on drills focusing on patterns or grammatical structures devoid of meaning. Russell and Murphy-Judy provide a set of guidelines to help instructors teach communicatively:

Now, if you’re a language instructor, the guidelines will be familiar to you, even if you don’t follow all of them. But if you’re not a language instructor, take a moment and ponder just how difficult it must be to set up and instruct courses that incorporate or strive to meet these guidelines.

Now, imagine doing that online.

Luckily, online education can actually be very supportive of a such an agenda. Technology and apps exist allowing students to bridge the gap of distance that has been forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic. Russell and Murphy-Judy supply numerous examples of how this can be done, and the guidelines themselves can help instructors make wise decisions incorporating technology into their instruction. The authors also make the point that “technologies are always changing and evolving. Therefore, it is not the tool or application that makes online communicative language teaching happen; rather, it is the instructor’s knowledge of online language pedagogy, which is knowledge of the pedagogy and technology for teaching language online” (p. 175). That’s a bit of a tortured mouthful, but what I think they’re trying to say is that even though online education can be heavily dependent on technology, it’s the pedagogy that will rule the day. And if you’re going to teach something as intricate as language, you need an approach like CLT that recognizes its complexity and helps students recognize it, too.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Teaching second or foreign languages is hard because learning a second language is hard. Whether you’re the instructor or the learner, you’re juggling a number of balls because language involves a variety of inputs and a number of skills. Language is one of the most intricate human inventions (if invention is the right word), and most people don’t realize this. It’s certainly not on the radar of most university administrators, who have never really understood the complexity of languages and the concomitant complexity of their instruction.

Teaching language online is even harder. As Victoria Russell and Kathryn Murphy-Judy put it in their book Teaching Language Online: “Teaching language is different than teaching other disciplines online because students must engage in speaking, reading, writing, and listening practice while learning rich cultural content that enables them to develop intercultural communicative competence.” Most people intuitively grasp this; it’s why many shy away from second language learning. Students grasp it as well, avoiding language courses because they worry that they will not do well and end up with a lower g.p.a.

For many language teachers, shifting their courses online during the Great Pivot of 2020 was a daunting task. Second language teaching actually has a tradition of using technology in new ways - think back to the language labs of yesteryear or the apps like Duolingo today, and you’ll understand what I mean. But the pivot was still tough for language instructors who viewed the classroom as the best place to expose students to authentic language interaction (short of shipping them off to a foreign country, which right now, as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, seems next to impossible).

On the University of Waterloo webpage developed to help guide language instructors through the pivot, there is recognition of the complexity of online language teaching: “Yes, the focus of the course must be inherently different (more written, individual work as opposed to oral, group work), but with careful planning and design, the language learning experience can be just as powerful.” This is true, but it takes a lot of careful planning and design.

In the next post in this series, I’ll discuss some of the design strategies that can help language instructors. This post is simply a quick blast to make one point clear: teaching second and foreign languages is some of the most complex teaching going.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Today I’m speaking at the OE Global 2020 Conference, so I’m devoting this post to the subject of my presentation.

The mantra of those devoted to open educational resources (OER) is the concept of the 5 Rs developed by David Wiley. It’s a very simple formula for identifying the permissions granted by creators of (learning) objects to users, namely the right to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the material. (Being a German studies prof, I get a big kick out of the fact that in Germany these are known as the 5 Vs - that is some impressive translating.) People who create OER can use the Creative Commons licensing system to automatically grant these permissions to others. It’s a brilliantly simple way to give others free and unfettered access to your creations that they not only can make use of as is, but adapt to their particular contexts and circumstances.

Once you become interested in OER, you become very interested in it; for some it’s almost like a cult (they don’t call it a movement for nothing). It’s understandable: many educators are upset with the price that universities, publishers, and others place on education, something they rightly view as a right and to which barriers must be lowered, not raised. OER can reduce student costs substantially while providing them with bespoke learning materials. OER creation and adoption attract very progressive educators who are pushing the limits of what education can do. They seek out new avenues to educate their students and are not afraid to innovate, try something new, and to be on the lookout for the next idea to come along.

But they also adhere to the 5 Rs with slavish devotion. Once you’ve defined something like OER using a straightforward formula like the 5 Rs, you’re bound to stick to that definition and even enforce it, use it as the yardstick to measure all educational materials. This then earns some materials the “NOT OER” label. Not necessarily the kiss of death for that material, but it can feel like shunning.

It’s important to remember that, as a creator of a work who’s using the Creative Commons licensing to make it available to others, you’re not giving up ownership of the original work, you’re simply specifying the terms under which it can be used. All six CC licenses require that you be acknowledged as the creator. Then you have to make some choices: if you let the user adapt your work, you can decide if they have to share it under the same conditions as you shared it, and whether that adaptation can be commercialized. If you let the user use your work but not adapt it, you still have to decide if they can commercialize it.

According to 5 R orthodoxy, if you don’t let the user adapt your work (you want to it to be preserved as is, whole and integral), you’re only meeting 3 of the 5 R conditions - revise and remix have been removed from the equation. As a result, your resource isn’t considered OER. Charts from David Wiley and Creative Commons aren’t too subtle about making that point:

These 5 R litmus tests can stigmatize perfectly good materials that might be quite useful in teaching and learning. There are numerous instances when an instructor might not want users to adapt or revise their materials. For example, if you’re providing an interpretation of a novel, you may wish to see your argument preserved in its entirety so that it isn’t misrepresented in some way. (Not that the user would intentionally do this, but it can happen easily enough.) Or maybe you’re working with students and including their contributions in the resource; it might be important to preserve their voice in that context. The inflexibility of the 5 Rs could prevent good material from being circulated more widely.

It’s true that the least restrictive of the CC licenses - CC BY, the license that requires attribution - is the easiest to use for OER. It’s also the preferred license of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which is a little bit surprising given the sensitive nature of intellectual property issues. It’s a sign of the desire for openness when it comes to the sharing of knowledge, but even the BOAI acknowledges in its original declaration that the integrity of one’s scholarship must be respected: “The only constraint on reproduction and distribution [of intellectual scholarship], and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

If you think of teaching as basically the transmission of received knowledge to students, you’re not going to be too bothered by this issue. But if you’re of the mindset that teaching is about creating knowledge and sharing it with students, or that it’s about co-creating knowledge with students and encouraging them to share it, this inflexibility can drive you to distraction because you realize that some open educators are more concerned about adhering to “the rules” than about giving people choice as to how they wish to share their creations. We all get stuck in certain ways of thinking, and that can be a shame when those ways become ossified. If any educational approach needs to remain nimble and responsive to new ways of perceiving just what education is and can be, it should be open education. We need to find ways of including materials that don’t meet each of the R criteria, but which meet enough of them to fulfill the spirit of open.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Yesterday I wrote about cheating in online course exams and tests. Plagiarism is also an issue, but the shift to online courses in 2020 doesn’t affect this form of academic malfeasance as much: regardless whether a course is online or on the ground, plagiarism can occur.

Plagiarism has become a much easier “crime of opportunity” since the rise of the internet some 20 years ago. Plagiarism detection software is used by many instructors to verify student originality, and the companies making this software have been keen in more recent years to align their tools with the academic integrity education initiatives at universities and colleges. These tools are sold not just for their detection abilities, but as part of a strategy to assist students in revising their work and understanding how to attribute and cite sources.

Much of the discourse surrounding plagiarism is extremely negative, understandably so given the breach of professional ethics that plagiarism entails. Exam cheating might only be a temptation for students, but plagiarism is a temptation for anyone in the educational system. iThenticate, which is promoted to editors, academics, and graduate students as a tool to prevent inadvertent copying of text from other sources, pulls no punches when it lists “6 Consequences of Plagiarism” on their website: destroyed student reputation; destroyed professional reputation; destroyed academic reputation; legal repercussions; monetary repercussions; plagiarized research.

The heightened anxiety and nervousness accompanying plagiarism in a professional context has carried over into the undergraduate educational context. As a result, many instructors approach plagiarism as a “thou shalt not” moment. Offices of academic integrity, libraries, and writing centres all offer suggestions on research skills that stress how to cite properly and how to paraphrase, all very useful but still based in a discourse of avoiding the consequences mentioned above.

This isn’t exactly a negative approach, but it’s not the most positive route to take, either. We shouldn’t be teaching students how to avoid plagiarism, we should be teaching them the value of recognizing those whose ideas have helped them formulate their own perspective. Even the emphasis on citation that one sees in anti-plagiarism education can lead to the situation where we miss the forest because of the trees: we can get so caught up in the mechanics of citation that we forget why we’re citing in the first place, which is simply to help readers find the sources of attribution.

Instructors can avoid this trap in how they design assignments. Getting away from standard term paper assignments by substituting targeted exercises where students are expected to find and attribute ideas would go a long way here. These are shorter assignments that don’t ask students to juggle a lot of balls. But they benefit students enormously by teaching them (1) how to collect ideas and (2) how to attribute those sources as they (3) construct their own arguments and takes on the course topics. Students develop the habit of attribution, and in so doing realize that they don’t need to plagiarize in order to still enjoy the benefits that come from using the work of others.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Look, cheating happens. People cheat on their taxes, on their partners, on their courses — both online and in class. It’s regrettable, but it’s to be expected because it's a fact of life. So do we need to spend so much time discussing it? Because we are discussing it a lot. With the Great Pedagogical Pivot of 2020, the news media couldn’t help but report on it in stories such as this one and also this one. Part of this media interest was and continues to be fuelled by other media stories on aggressive proctoring measures instituted by universities and professional accreditation bodies.

For years universities and colleges have been creating offices and programs for what they now call “academic integrity.” That term is a bit clunky, typical of higher education’s penchant for instituting new vocabulary for old ideas. (That being said, it does attempt to accentuate the positive, which is good. Besides, “Office of Cheating” might give students the wrong idea.) But higher education knows that its value proposition depends on being able to guarantee that its students have earned their degrees on their own and on their own merit.

With the massive shift to online teaching, it seems natural that people might wonder about the increased risk of cheating. What lies at the heart of the many media stories, and at the heart of the concern about online cheating, is that most people imagine university courses to be made up of lectures, essays, and exams. That’s likely what they experienced when they went to university, and that’s likely what they hear about from their own children when they come home from university for the holidays. They assume that with essays comes plagiarism, and with exams comes cheating, and they wouldn’t be wrong: those assignments are the sites for some of the most common academic integrity infractions.

With courses online, the anxiety has grown, especially around exams and the limited ability to exercise oversight of test takers. The solution for some programs has been to institute highly invasive digital proctoring systems. That kind of surveillance is accompanied by intricate regulations and rules. Have a look at the list of rules for this algebra midterm at Wilfrid Laurier University — it’s five pages long! Students have every right to complain about these invasions of their privacy and the unwarranted stress that is added to situations that are already stressful enough.

The thing of it is, cheating is nothing more than breaking rules. To reduce cheating, reduce the number of rules.

We can do this by redesigning the high-value assignments of courses to be less rule-laden. The simplest way to do this for exams is to make them open book. That requires different kinds of exams, to be sure, but it’s not that difficult to create open book exams or other kinds of assignments where there’s little or no need for surveillance. And this can be done in almost any field, including the STEM disciplines.

Or perhaps you’re worried about students using outside sources to get around having to do the work themselves? This plagues all sorts of disciplines, for example language instructors who see students flocking to Google Translate when homework is due. You can try to forbid the use of such technology — good luck with that — or you can turn the tables and make the technology part of the learning process. And if the concern is about students collaborating with each other, make collaboration a part of the exercise.

Will students be at a disadvantage if they aren’t required to regurgitate memorized material and information on a test? That could be possible in some fields, and tests of memory and recall may be necessary. In those instances, making an effort to shift to oral exams could be worthwhile, or even creating a blended written and oral examination. Whatever route is chosen, there are ways of creating more humane testing conditions that don’t rely on invasive automated data collection and multi-camera video proctoring. All of that extra stress only puts students at a disadvantage, and instructors won’t really gain a full understanding of their students’ knowledge under such conditions.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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Universal Design for Learning is often cited as a key framework for guiding the development of any course, online or on the ground. It emerged from Universal Design, a theory developed over the twentieth century that contends human spaces must be built so that they “can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of their age, size, ability or disability. An environment (or any building, product, or service in that environment) should be designed to meet the needs of all people who wish to use it.” Universal Design is governed by seven principles, the second of which is Flexibility in Use: “The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.”

Applying that principle to course design can cause some instructors to get a bit itchy. Talk of “individual preferences” can lead to concerns that designing for unique preferences may fly in the face of across-the-board fairness. But if we put the talk of preferences to one side and instead focus on providing students with choice, we can give all students greater agency in their learning.

What instructors have to be careful with, however, is creating situations where offering choice also results in a lot of extra housekeeping headaches for instructors. Take for example the “free ticket” device that many instructors use: they give students a certain number of free tickets which can be used to request extensions without needing to give a reason. This introduces flexibility that the student controls, but it also introduces an extra task for the instructor to monitor the use of the tickets and to approve the student’s request. A dual deadline policy - a regular deadline followed by a no-excuses-necessary extension - achieves the same goal as the free ticket system, but without adding to the instructor’s workload because the extensions are automatic and don’t have to be recorded.

Establishing guidelines like the dual deadline policy can also have benefits with regard to accessibility and accommodation requests. At the beginning of term I receive emails from our university’s AccessAbility office (yes, that’s really how they spell it) informing me that a student needs this or that accommodation. These accommodations are sometimes related to a physical disability (which are then usually handled by the AccessAbility team, for example when a student has vision or hearing impairments), but more often than not they are connected to learning or mental wellness issues. In the case of these situations, the request is most often for more time to do tests or term papers. But I’ve designed my courses to have no tests, and I use the dual deadline policy for assignments, and those two policies alone are able to meet the accommodation needs of almost all learners without requiring me to do any extra housekeeping or creating special access in the learning management system.

Introducing flexibility is especially helpful in these pandemic times as students adapt to the “busyness” of online learning. It can also help instructors manage their time.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

Post 42/60.

Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education

I teach a course with a scaffolded term project where students create their own learning unit. At the first check-in, students analyze one of my modules and discuss the content - its variety, usefulness for learning, its appropriateness for the students’ level, that sort of thing. Inevitably, at least one student who analyzes a module with not much video content will comment that, because they’re a visual learner, they think more video content would help.

When they write that, I give them a link to this Atlantic article by Olga Khazan. I do this because Khazan, citing research by Daniel Willingham, Polly Husmann, and others, explains that learning styles is a myth. We have learning preferences, just as we have preferences for clothes, colours, cuisine. But the idea that we are hardwired to learn better using certain channels (aural, visual, etc) just doesn’t stand up to any legitimate investigation.

It would be nice if students could start university without having been told that they have learning styles. (Khazan reports that “more than 90 percent of teachers in various countries believed” that learning styles were valid.) I often tell students that even if learning styles were a thing, they’d be smarter to learn how to adapt to types of learning other than their preferred method because they won’t always be given the option to learn things in their preferred format.

What’s also interesting is that students who do bring up learning styles tend to think they’re visual learners, and for that reason would like to have more video content. I think this actually has to do with the ability of video to immerse viewers more completely than may be the case with reading, though with the way everyone is distracted by their smartphones nowadays it’s hard to think of any delivery system that can withstand that kind of interference.

The other reason that I like having students read the Khazan article is to introduce them the VARK questionnaire. This inventory was developed by Neil Fleming in the 1960s to tell you “something about yourself that you may or may not know,” though its most common use is to help people understand what kind of learner they are (or think they are): Visual, Aural, Read/write or Kinesthetic. In the questionnaire you answer questions such as this:

I want to find out about a house or an apartment. Before visiting it I would want:

• a plan showing the rooms and a map of the area.

• to view a video of the property.

• a discussion with the owner.

• a printed description of the rooms and features.

The thing is, you can choose more than one answer. For this one, I chose all four, but even then it’s imprecise because it’s not clear why I want to find out something about the house. Is it because I want to buy it? Is it a house designed by a famous architect whose work I’m studying? Am I thinking of robbing the place? The reasons why I want to learn something will have an impact on how I learn about something. I’ve had students in my graduate seminar do the VARK and they had a similar reaction to me: context is key, not only to this survey, but to learning in general.

In the Khazan article, Husmann gives the following advice on how to study: “really focus on the material,” regardless what the material is. That’s what I tell all my students now.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

Post 41/60.

Recent posts from the GER615 seminar on online education