 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama-Spinoza and this is part two of the video on asynchronous online learning. Today on our agenda is we're going to look at the steps in creating asynchronous learning experiences and as we do this, I'd like you to think about your own classroom structures and how you do that little by little one by one and each step, how would you respond to each of these different questions that we're going to bring up today. So just as a quick reminder, we talked last week about asynchronous, the definition, cronus, being the Greek god of time, right? And so asynchronous means that we're looking at activities that are not necessarily in real time. So the learner gets to choose when they have these learning experiences, which means that they're either prerecorded or they're structured in a way where the person doesn't have to be in synchronous time with others to be able to do the activity. So I'm going to talk about a few steps and I want you to think to yourself in your own context, how would you respond to this, okay? So one of the main steps, one of these main goals that we have is to make sure that the design, the instructional design of our course is intuitive and user-friendly. So have we laid out the learning expectations in a way that a student understands, okay, this goes first, this goes second, this goes third? Is it intuitive or do they have to go searching and clicking on multiple things before they find the information? Do you have, for example, a calendar with requirements inside of your learning management system that you can easily share with the students so that they are all on the same page with you? Think about that and hopefully you give yourself like a check mark. Yeah, I've organized that. Second, have you set expectations and learning objectives that are really clear up front? And this means that maybe you need to be sharing the rubrics or building them with your students or that you need to have each of the course requirements or weekly requirements very clearly spelled out for the students so that they have easy access. Or it might also mean that you have a visible grade book to the students so they understand when things are due and how they are doing along the way and when they can stop and redo work or when they need to come for extra help, okay? So are the expectations and learning objectives clear? Now, this is good teaching so it doesn't have only to do with being online or only to do with asynchronous work, but it's really extra important when we're talking about asynchronous work. When we're talking about things that are done outside of the purview of the teacher, where the teacher doesn't have real control and seeing and checking to make sure things are being done. In order to do this, you can use different communication mechanisms. You can decide and agree with your class that we're always going to communicate by the learning platforms email, okay? That would be one way. Or I will always send important things through the announcements in our learning management system. Or we will check in with each other daily at 10 o'clock through WhatsApp. Or we're always using the class Facebook page. Or questions can always be sent through specific Google Doc, right? So something like that, but set up communication mechanisms that are very obvious to the students and that they are shared and they know how to access them easily so they know how to get help when they need it. We also recommend that within the course structure and especially within asynchronous assignments that you also embed or make links so that students can go to deeper and deeper levels of information. So for everything that's shared, for example, in this video, you'll see at the very, very bottom, I have a citation here. If you wanted to click on that, you'd see that some of this information comes from this other person's presentation. So basically allowing them to understand the sources of the information and where they can get further information on that same idea, okay? Another important step is to develop an environment where the learners trust each other and it's so much easier said than done, isn't it? But I want to impress upon you from a mind-brain health and education perspective that social contagion, making somebody feel a certain way can be even more powerful in an online environment than face to face. I know that sounds kind of crazy because you think, no, I need to go over and put my hand on their shoulder so that they feel supported. Well, the truth of the matter is there's a whole lot of other ways that we communicate through body language, through facial expressions, through tones of voices, by calling students by their names, for example. By welcoming them, for example, we start a Zoom class and we welcome them. They say, hey, Jamie, good to see you, how was that ball game yesterday? Or Mary, did you finish that assignment? You were so worried about just welcoming them in and calling them by name carries a whole lot of weight. And it makes people feel that they are part of a group, out of a community. And we'll talk a lot about when we do instructional design, we'll talk a little bit more about how we can leverage things like breakout rooms and Zoom, for example, to do much more small group work so that people get to know each other and trust each other more, so that they feel a part of a community of learners. We'd also like to recommend that you create an online learning forum that encourages collaboration. For example, let's create a space on the online learning platform where it's the students' only room, for example. They get to meet there any time that they'd like to. And that's not a space that I'm going to go into, but at least they feel that they have a space where they can go and collaborate if they'd like to. Or if we design asynchronous assignments, for example, discussion boards, where we prompt them to talk to each other and they have to collaborate towards an answer. Or we create that Google Drive, for example, and we give them a juicy question. We say, okay, so you four are together, you four together, you four together. We need you to be in there and we need to see this collaborative response to that problem. So creating activities that fortify that collaborative effort is very important, especially online. And those last two points are connected to this third one here about encouraging group collaboration to provide peer-based support. So have we created this community of learners that feels confident enough to get feedback from each other so that they can help each other along so that they don't feel it's a competition for the grade? If you get a good grade, it's going to be bad for me. Know that we all feel that we're able to support one another in our learning endeavors, that we celebrate each other's attempts at learning, that we encourage trial and error and that they learn through all of that. Part of the way we do that is by modeling. So we have to sort of give examples of the ways that we would expect people to give feedback to each other either in written form or spoken and how we want people to treat people with respect within these synchronous environments. Now, asynchronously, it's a little bit more difficult. So for example, we have to be on top of it if a student responds in a discussion board in a way that's disrespectful of other students. We have to cut that off at the knees because we can't allow for that to deteriorate our learning environment, right? So we have to encourage group collaboration in the most positive of senses in order to create that community we're looking for. Some ways you can do this is storytelling. That's one of those things that I think you guys do best talk story, right? Tell each other about ideas, give examples of situations, draw parallels between literary figures and your own life examples. By sharing at that personal level, you're inviting those students into your own life and that's allowing them to understand ways that they can create more authentic connections to the information. And these days there's no end to the examples of authentic examples of perseverance and resiliency and things like that. If you wanted to call out certain value systems to go in parallel with some of the lessons that you're teaching about content, of sticking with it. And yes, this chemistry seems very hard, but you'll be able to figure it out or this math problem is complicated, but persevere, look, you've been through harder things. And most of them have been recently so they can pretty much empathize with that as well. Now having said that, always have to remember to keep this balanced, right? This is not just a show and education is not just performance. It's really gotta have meat in it. And that is one of the hardest things that we have to do right now as we go online is to maintain that level of curriculum coverage and going into each of these different domain areas of making sure they've got the right levels of math and language and art and science and physical education that they normally would have had in our face-to-face classroom environments. How do we do that asynchronously? So we have to keep that in mind. We have to have that balance of making sure we've got that playfulness embedded in our learning, but at the same time, we keep up that academic rigor that we're looking for. So some of these pre-planning activities we'd like you to think about before we talk about instructional design next week. Think about this. How will your learning goals be determined? Now, some of you may have decided by department that you have agreed upon certain standards or objectives for the semester and that's how you're gonna be shaping things, that's fine. Or maybe you've given full autonomy to each teacher to be able to decide those things. But before you begin to sit down and plan your class, make sure you've decided how you're gonna determine what does it mean to pass second grade? What does it mean to do the first semester of 11th grade successfully? So make sure that you've laid out very clearly for yourself in a backwards design kind of mentality. What is the objective and how are you gonna reach that? The second point has to do with emotion. How are we gonna keep students engaged? Now, this does not mean that we're always gonna use these high-tech tools all the time, although it could be really cool to use virtual reality or augmented reality glasses to do your biology homework. That could be amazing. But it doesn't have to be high-tech and expensive to be engaging. So part of engagement has to do with that emotional hook. And you can only do that if you know your students well. So by knowing the students well, you can get them engaged at a very authentic level. And this goes back to Hattie's work that basically passion is contagious. And it's probably one of a teacher's best secret weapons is that if they love what they're doing, students will love it too. But the opposite is true, right? This is social contagion. It's possible to drag a whole group down. So we have to really understand our power and to try to keep that high level of student engagement going throughout the semester. The third point we mentioned briefly before, but clarify how this community is going to be communicating while we are in an asynchronous environment. Will we be in touch synchronously once, twice, five times a week? Will we then, we turn in homework three times a week and through this particular portal? Will we have an email exchange? Will you pay attention to the announcements and make sure we respond? Will the discussion boards be replied to every week, every two days, every five days? Think about the communication practices and the way you wanna structure that and make sure that that's very, very clear to the students so they understand how we as a group are gonna be communicating with each other. Now, as we said before, you might wanna think about creating in your LMS. You might wanna create your own space for the students to actually meet. It might be harder for them to get online and find each other. It might not necessarily be intuitive to all of them to FaceTime each other or to use WhatsApp to talk to each other, but if they have the space within the class, you can also say all of these rooms will be open an hour before our regular meeting time if you guys wanna catch up with each other beforehand. That's a great way to fortify your community. Just make sure that those channels are really clear so they understand how communication is gonna occur within your class this semester. Fourth major point has to do with assessment. How are we going to assess learning? How am I gonna be able to document this? And you might be surprised. I hope you'll be inspired by the belief that you can actually evaluate, document, assess, give feedback even better in an online situation than you might do in a face-to-face environment. It's definitely better documented. For example, you can structure e-portfolios, you can use your LMS's analytics to see how many minutes each student spent on pages or whatever. There's a lot of additional information that we can have by going online, but the number one big thing about assessment is sharing that with the students. Do you have shared criteria? Have you talked about how you're developing those rubrics maybe even together? Where are the rubrics found? How will the students be able to know I have achieved? I have done what was asked of me. I have managed to reach this level of mastery in this particular content area. So have you shared assessment criteria with the students? Have you decided how you're gonna communicate that with the students? Have you thought about how you can structure that? Are you going to use, for example, e-portfolios for the entire semester and watch growth of the student over time? How will you do this? So think about this as sort of these pre-thinking activities before we actually do the instructional design because assessment is huge. And I like to do like a major shout out to the educational testing services these days. We're watching SATs, ACTs, we're watching a whole lot of downward trend and usage because these one-off couple-hour tests have come up kind of short in evaluating the worth of a student. And so we're looking at multiple ways of assessing over time and how do we do that? So do take advantage of this problem we have right now to think about maybe shifting the way that you've evaluated in the past. And finally, think about, you know, how are you gonna go about choosing the best tools, the activities and the methodologies that are gonna be applied to your classroom? Many of you are in love with one or two or three different apps, things that you've gotten comfortable with, that's terrific. We recently did an evaluation of more than 400 different ed tech tools and how teachers use them. And what's surprising is that most teachers use a lot of things based on recommendations from what their friends are using. And they prize that actually even more than just determining the objective. So one thing to really keep in mind as we pre-plan this idea is to think about how you can better meet your objective by using certain activities, tech tools, resources or different methodologies, okay? So always keep the objective in mind as you're coming to that decision, what am I gonna use? Many of you have been bombarded by commercial ventures these days that are filling your inboxes with, you know, trying to sell you new tools or things like that because I think that they're working right. You've gotten a list of recommendations of things that are usable. Don't feel obliged to use all of them. First think about your objective. How are you gonna assess it? Then think, now, what is the tool that best helps me do that, okay? So do that in the pre-planning and once you've got that settled we're ready to go into instructional design. The last point I want to just remind us all about we're looking at this goal that we have right now to move online to take advantage of asynchronous activities. We're looking at this kind of technically and a little bit dry and I just wanna remind you about the importance of the humanity in this entire process. Education is nothing but a people to people venture and we've used lots of mediums and lots of tools in the past. We've gone from, you know, pencils to computers to now doing wholly online classes. They're just tools. What's most important is you. It's your attitude. It's how you are nurturing those kids. It's your emotional connection to them. It's their belief that you believe in them and the way that you can convey your buy-in into their future is really gonna make a huge difference in whether or not they decide they're gonna also put in the effort to work in this very new environment. So building this sense of community, building this sense of trust that you already have had with the students you are now challenged of doing this in a different modality and that is hard. Nobody's gonna deny that but it is something you're able to do. Just understand your superpower. I think that most teachers don't realize how much leverage they have in influencing the emotional state of the students through their facial expressions, through the ways they interact with them, calling them by name, involving them and even just asking them, you know, how are you doing today? What do you need from me so that you can be successful in my class? Those are just some small things to remember to incorporate into this entire technical design because it's really what education boils down to is that humanity that we can convey to our students and we hope that sense of community will help them have the buy-in they need to do well. So once again, I'm gonna be asking you when we meet up, you know, are there three things that you learn for? Are there two things that you're curious about? Do you wanna know a little bit more about it? And one thing that you might change, most of all, I hope this video gives you that space for reflection so that you're ready to now pull your class together. And I look forward to doing that with you in the instructional design course next week. Take care.