 Let me begin by saying welcome. Greetings to everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you all here today and I'm looking forward to hearing from you, especially in response to our terrific guest. Now what I'd like to do is thank our guest and welcome our guest. I'm absolutely delighted to be able to host Professor James Lang. He is Professor at Assumption College. You can see here from his title what he's up to. You can also look in the bottom of your screen. You should be able to see two links. I believe they're kind of yellowish color to two of his books. One of them on small teaching, one of them on small teaching online. This is where he is engaged in showing us how to improve our teaching and learning and especially how to improve right away even with small basic initial steps. So I'm absolutely delighted to bring him on here because this is a topic of a great deal of interest, especially as more and more campuses are looking to either have some kind of blended learning experience or a wholly online experience this fall. Professor Lang, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Hello, everyone. So glad you could make it. And I'll have to stop calling Professor Lang and call you Jim. Just this is, we were as formal or informal as we want to be. Jim, looking ahead for the next say, well, the next academic year for yourself. What are the big topics that you're gonna be wrestling with? What are the major ideas? I mean, is it mostly gonna be helping prepare assumption faculty for teaching, however they're gonna be teaching this fall, or what? So this is gonna get derailed right away because I'm on sabbatical to come here this coming year. Tiring. Yeah, so for the rest of my life, I'm gonna be grateful that this was my sabbatical year. I have been working with our interim director, Sarah Kavanaugh on preparing our faculty for the coming year, but I am gonna kind of slide away from that and work on my own writing projects as sabbatical is designed to do coming out in October. So I'm gonna be doing a decent amount of work preparing for that and then trying to get another book written before the end of the academic year. As I said before, you, my friend, are a writing machine. They have, most people don't get out two books in their lifetime, much less two books. Most of you have three others and now two more to come. That's fantastic. Well, I'm sure you're gonna be in demand as people try to figure out how to, not just adjust their teaching through a new environment, but how to teach well. Well, I have all kinds of questions to ask. And friends, I'm just gonna start off with one or two, but the forum is here for you. So the questions you have are the most important. Again, remember, if you wanna join us up here on stage with the video, just press the raised hand button. If you wanna type in a question, just type it in that question work box. My first question is, you've used this title, this phrase, small teaching. And I'm wondering if you could explain that for everybody, what does small teaching mean for you? The idea of small teaching kind of emerged after, I wrote a book that came out in 2013 on academic dishonesty called cheating lessons. And I got a lot of invitations to speak at colleges and universities as a result of that book because of course everyone has wants to address this issue in one way or the other. And as I gave those presentations, I kind of found that people were interested in the ideas and the theories and all that stuff, but people kind of perked up when I would get sort to the second half and I would start to mention some specific things that people could do in their classes. And I kind of started to just feel like that's oftentimes what people came to these events for was they were looking for practical concrete steps in terms of what they could do in the classroom tomorrow. And it was often coming in the middle of the semester too, like people would be inviting me to speak in October, right? And part of the recommendations I was making were sort of big course design kind of stuff. And the thing is when you get that recommendation in October, it's like, it's the middle of my semester. I'm not going to redesign my class. And by the time January rolls around, I'm going to forget that this guy was over here. What I tried to sort of start playing around with was introducing ideas that were like applicable tomorrow or that things that people could really put into practice. And I just noticed that people kind of perked up when they heard these suggestions and had a really positive reaction to them. So that and there, I mean, a couple of other things kind of went into the background of putting the book together, but ultimately I became interested in that question. Like, if you invite me to your campus in its March, how can I be helpful to the faculty by giving them ideas that they can implement right away? And then I've always had an interest in learning research and how people learn. I find that really fascinating. You know, I've never been out of school. And I went straight through to graduate school and into faculty life. And so I always have been interested when I read studies or like experiments about how do people learn things? So I kind of put those two things together to identify learning principles that used to guide small changes that faculty could make to their teaching and particularly ones that they could implement. Like I said, you know, read this section of the book. You can get this into practice tomorrow or next week. So that was how the original thing came about and just to finish up on the second thing. So then when I started giving, that book came out in 2016, I started giving presentations and getting invitations to speak about that book. And the first question that I always got was, how do I do this in my online classes? And at that time, I had never taught online. So I would have to just say, you know, you figure, you know, hear the principles, use the principles and, you know, see how you might be able to pilot them yourself. And occasionally I would make this joke. If anyone is a great online teacher and wants to write the small teaching sequel, let me know, I'll be happy to. While I was doing this in Arizona and Flower Darby came up to me afterwards and said, I want to be the one that writes small teaching online. I like that kind of initiatives. I said, all right, you know, let's send me a sample of your writing and it was great. And so then she taught me a lot about how to apply some of these same principles to the online environment. I did an amazing job of putting it together in the book. So I just wrote about, you know, I wrote an introduction and I wrote the theory sections of each chapter, but she really brought her years and years of practical experience to bear on that book. Flower is amazing. We've had her as a guest and she's just brilliant. Yeah. Thank you. Well, speaking of brilliance, I asked her questions and they started coming thick and fast. So let me bring up one. This is from Dom Caristi at Ball State. Let's see if we can flash this text question up on the screen. Ironically, some students resist change. How have they responded to mid-semester changes? Yeah, that's a really good question. There was kind of a whole literature actually on, for example, on student resistance to active learning. We have to strike a balance here, right? I mean, the students come into the class and you've kind of presented them. Here's the way the class is gonna function. So I would not necessarily recommend sort of design changes or changes to the assessment structure in sort of midstream. Typically the kind of small changes I would recommend people are implementing are trying different things in the classroom, right? So like maybe trying a different way to host a discussion or a different way to a different kind of, like writing activities or stuff like that. Things that I would, ideally your classroom is a place where you're regularly kind of trying different things. And when you're together in a face-to-face environment or when you're having students do their activities online and online class, I'm always experimenting with different things that I hear about. So there I think the experimentation is gonna be a little bit easier for students to digest than sort of stopping halfway through and saying, you know, I'm gonna change the final project completely. I think there are some issues there because students plan, you know, need to be able to plan their lives and plan for, I know sometimes we'll see students who have got their calendars, like their paper calendars and it's like all their assignments mapped out and everything. So I think we have to be careful about those kinds of changes mid-semester. So ideally, you know, we're able to experiment midstream and respond to things that are going wrong or new things that we wanna try. But the bigger kind of design changes we probably need to wait for new classes to begin those. That's a great question, Dom. Thank you very much. And I hope you're enjoying Summer in Indiana. And thank you, Jim. That's a splendid, splendid answer. Again, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a text question. And here it should be an example of a video question. This is from Carl Huckarinen, who comes to us from not too far away from you. Hey, Carl. Hi, Jim. Hello. Hi. Jim and I talked a couple of years ago regarding a lifelong learning class that I was teaching on learning styles. And we've had to, we're also affiliated with the subject of university that we had to pivot this spring and now into the summer and fall, taking our classes for people, BD&H is about 73, bringing them all online. And this has raised not surprisingly some technical issues, but also adapting teaching styles to people, for people who've not experienced online education before in any substantive way. So my question to you, Jim, is when you are trying to pivot your online courses or when other faculty are trying to pivot their online courses to a more diverse community than where people may be familiar with the classroom experience, but now they have to work online, overcoming some technical challenges, overcoming some pedagogical challenges of how do I keep pace? How do I interact with my other colleagues, my other students in the class? And also particularly for our age group, the extra challenges of disabilities such as hearing disability, finding that online classes, particularly with people who have long mustaches and beards, makes it very difficult for people to do liberating. So that's a long wind up to say, how well do we, or what are some tips on adapting small teaching and online instruction in general to groups who have not generally experienced online instruction before? All right, thanks, Carl. So I, in my view, the kind of path we should take as we're, especially for those of us who are converting traditional face-to-face classes into online classes is the same. Even, no matter what audience we're facing, and you think about this in terms of universal design for learning, right? We should be designing for access to all learners, whether they're traditional age students or whether they're for further education. And in my view, and we have done some work trying to promote this perspective to faculty, and it's certainly not original to me, but to address the issue of the fact, people have technical problems or people have access problems or people all those kinds of stuff. And yet to also address the fact that people want, especially I think maybe seniors who are looking for community, right? And so who are looking for the opportunity to meet with the instructor, to have conversations with the instructor and their fellow peers. The approach that I think we should be taking to these classes is to start with an asynchronous foundation, right? So like the course content, as much as possible, we're providing that asynchronously and that's the readings, video lectures, whatever it might be, the stuff that we want students to get first exposure to, we're providing that to them asynchronously. And that helps address the access problem, right? Because if someone can't log in in a particular moment, they can get access to that stuff in their own time and in their own ways and we try to make it accessible to them as possible. But then we add that sort of on top of that, then we add the synchronous layer, right? Where we are then providing these additional opportunities for them to engage with the material in real time with one another. So in my view, that's kind of the best of both worlds as we're thinking about how to build these classes now, especially for the fall semester for folks who are gonna be doing it. And to me, this is also kind of the way to have what Josh Eiler and others have called resilient pedagogy, right? If you build the class this way, it can persist no matter what happens, right? So like if you start with that asynchronous foundation, then you add the layers of synchronous conversation and community, the asynchronous foundation is gonna persist no matter what. That's available whether you're online or face-to-face. The synchronous opportunities can then happen whether they're mediated through screens or whether you're actually in the classroom or however that might end up being. So to me, that's the way to provide the best possible access to all learners. And you get to still try to give, try to prioritize what I think seniors and many of our students are looking for as well, which is the connection in the community with the other people that are in the class. So that's pretty basic recommendation, but I think that's the direction that we should be going at least until we get through this period where things could be disrupted so easily. Thank you, that was very helpful. Thank you, Carl. Thank you, that's a great question and good luck with that class. Thank you. Nice to see you, my friend. And by the way, Carl's question noted something that is important about our biography, which is that we are now Assumption University as of June. When you first contacted me, we were Assumption College. Now we are Assumption University. 2020 is a busy year. That's right. So congratulations at Assumption University. That's a big step. So friends, if you're new to the forum, that's a video question. You can see how easy that is to do. And we'll try this again with another question coming from Ray Miller at Appalachian State. Let's see if we can bring Ray up on stage. Hello, Professor Miller. Thank you. Good, thank you. It's really good to meet with you, James. I read your book, Small Teaching Online, and it was very helpful. This is my question. Oftentimes we teach classes that we already know. And other times we teach courses in which we really wanna learn something that we don't know. We step into that, into that mind field. For those of us who are teaching asynchronous courses online and are relatively new, how do we set up that course so that we can allow for growth and change for us as the instructor, as well as for the student? Meaning, it seems as though you have to know an awful lot more in setting up an online course in terms of making sure everything is set in place before it goes live. But if you're doing it for the first time, and if the course itself is relatively new in terms of the content, how can we set this up so that the students and you feel as though it's okay to grow and to change as the 15 weeks go on and not, oh gosh, he's changing things on. Oh gosh, he doesn't know what he's doing. Oh gosh, it's a mistake. Can you talk a little bit about that? Thank you. Sure, yeah, so I'll recommend a resource first. There's a book by Therese Houston called, I think it's called Teaching What We Don't Know. That title, exactly right. But it's worth looking at, even for this context that you're asking about, Therese Houston is the author's name, H-U-S-E-O-N. So that's working out just to think in general about this issue of teaching when we're not, we don't feel quite experts on the subject. Okay, so I'm gonna just throw out one suggestion. And this was something that I experimented with actually in my spring class, which converted halfway through. And it ended up working very well. So what we did was, I had asked the students, I had assigned for each week of the semester that the students were going to create a resource collection on the topic of that week. So the students worked in groups, for example, so this was a British Literature Survey class, British Literature from 1800-ish to the present. And so they were asked to do research and put together a collection of resources on a historical topic that was relevant for that week's literature. For example, the Irish Potato Famine when we were in the middle of the 19th century. And what they had to do was they had to put together a collection of resources that included a video overview. Like, and they were looking for source videos. They looked for an image or two that they could analyze. They had to find like basically sort of overly like encyclopedia-ish type entries. But it was just designed for, and then that material became part of the course content. In fact, there was a question about some of the resources on the final exam. So the students were kind of responsible, which was why it was kind of at that level of like basic introductory stuff. And what the students did was they annotated five of these resources. So each resource was the thing, like the image or the video, a one paragraph annotation explaining why it was important and what would it help us understand. I think you could, without having to do that specifically, what you might think about is, you're gonna be able to provide the structure, but then and get yourself into the first, five weeks or whatever it might be. But then in the latter half of the class, let students know, you're gonna be responsible for building up some of the content for this class. Now, I will say that this was a little bit of additional work for me because I had to meet with each group beforehand and I had to help curate the resources. In fact, I typically asked them to come up with seven to 10 and then I would help them win it down to five. So, but again, in some cases, these were things that I didn't know all that much about. Like I knew it was important in some of the literature referred to these events, but it was great. I learned a ton from it. And the best part was actually because the course ended up, well, we were doing it all along, we were doing it on the LMS. I have those resources now for the future. So like, if I wanna do it a little bit differently the next time, I've got like 12 weeks of curated resources that could be providing to students in the future. So I would suggest that you be transparent about this and say, I've left this sort of big strip of the course open for you to help me fill in and we're gonna sort of develop our expertise in these areas together. That would be the only really concrete suggestion that I have here. Great, that's very helpful. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you Ray for the great question. And Jim again, what a rich answer. If you in the chat box and on Twitter, people are just lighting up, pointing at Harvard University Press to get copies of that book on teaching what you don't know. Oh, good. And we have more questions that are just flooding in. So I'm gonna just give everyone a shot here. This is one from Lisa Sieverts at Harvard Extension. She says, in small teaching, you say the flip classroom does not automatically provide outstanding learning experiences. Could you say more about how do you use the flip classroom effectively? Yeah, I mean, I guess what I meant by that was, we can't just sort of expect that we're gonna adapt off some whole sale pedagogy and that things are gonna, that's gonna transform the learning of our students, right? You can teach a flip class as badly as you can teach a lecture class. In my view, I'm always a kind of, my father always said to me, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. And I kind of still believe that these days that the classroom experience, to put everything outside of the classroom experience like all the content, and then I just expect nothing but sort of meaningful discussion or problem solving or work in the classroom, that doesn't necessarily solve the problem or like automatically going to create a great class. And so that there are kind of things that I think we still need to be doing in a flip classroom, like providing students sort of reminders or overviews of like sort of a key content. Like a lot of humanities classes are basically taught as flipped classrooms. They always have been, right? Like a literature class, the students do the reading outside of the class and then when they come into class, we discuss it. So like that's been the tradition. Derek Bruff was the one that pointed this out to me of Vanderbilt Center for Teaching that humanities classes often have worked like this for a long time. So, and so those of us in the humanities know that can go just as badly as a lecture class with PowerPoints. So, in my view, I think the flip classroom just kind of has to continue to kind of look for the same basic learning principles that we're looking for in any kind of classroom experience. You wanna mix stuff, right? So the book that I have coming out in October is about attention and how we maintain, capture attention of students throughout a class period. And one of the things I really learned from that research was the importance of variety and change, right? So like our attention is renewed by variety and change. So if you're gonna have students come in and just, you know, I find it very difficult to get students to sit and sort of in a circle and discuss meaningful stuff for 75 minutes, right? We need to be doing some other stuff occasionally. So like instead of doing something like that, I'm more likely to have a mini lecture or 15 or 20 minutes, do a little sort of activity on paper where they're preparing for the discussion and then have the discussion and then like a finishing activity. And to me, that's kind of what we should be thinking about in terms of flip classroom is not so much like it's some, you know, complete opposite of a lecture class, I think we should just be looking at how do we have active engaged classrooms as they're getting sort of multiple streams of kind of learning experiences. Sometimes they're listening, sometimes they're seeing things, sometimes they're talking to one another, sometimes, you know, we're talking as a class. I would view that as being sort of more important than kind of going wholesale in on like some specific pedagogical approach, I guess. That's a very, very detailed answer. And that just shows, I think, the depth of the topic. Lisa, thank you very much for this question. People are also sharing the news about this next book. It's just called Distracted, isn't it? It's called Distracted, the original title that I wanted was Teaching Distracted Minds. And the idea there was that all of our minds are distracted. So how do we best sort of teach to a distracted mind and there was no sort of reference there that students are somehow different from more than 50 years ago or that we are, but as anyone who's published a book knows, or even an article of you, sometimes the publisher wants a different title that they think's going to get more people's attention. So anyways, I'm not going to apologize for it endlessly, but... Oh, it's great. It's great. The idea is that, you know, why students can't focus is for the same reason that all of us have trouble focusing because we have distractible brains and instead of what we should be doing is thinking not so much about how to wall out distractions, which are outside of us, but are also in here. Said, how do we, what captures people's attention? What sustains people's attention and how can we take those things and incorporate them into our teaching? That's well put. That sounds like a thesis statement from our book. That's my elevator pitch. I'm getting good at it. You have to be. Speaking of attention, we had two questions that came up about something that is getting all of our attention, which is the pandemic and Amy H at Adrian College. Hello, Amy. She asked, how do we balance the small teaching approach in the face of the major changes, whether known or unknown, needed due to the pandemic? Yeah, I mean, so that's, I mean, one way to think about this is again, like thinking about the sort of basic structure of the classes that people will be offering in the fall, right? If again, we kind of take that approach that I recommended earlier, where we're providing an asynchronous foundation and then kind of having these, but then we have that synchronous element as well, whether that's in the classroom like normal or online discussion, online Zoom classes or some combination of both, the same principles are still gonna be used to guide that, right? Like in the same kind of small principles that will help promote learning can be used to guide that. So for example, one of the things that we've learned about over many years now about providing video content to people is we wanna keep that, those video content relatively short, right? So if you look at video, there was a study done of over, I think it was something like 7 million video users, 7 million participants in four very large longstanding MOOCs. And the video looked, and the research looked at how long did people watch the videos, the video content? And if you look at the numbers, they kind of, it goes up, people for the most part watching the videos, I think up to nine minutes. And then from nine to 12 minutes, it just kind of falls off the cliff, right? So like, you know, if you have a 45 minutes of content that you wanna present to students, the small teaching change here is don't make a 45 minute video lecture. That's really hard for any of us to sit through. And I would include myself in that, right? So two good reasons to instead break that down into three or four shorter segments are, first of all, it's just better for our attention. When we're watching videos at home or whatever, there's still stuff going on. I can hear people walking around my house, there's a dog and a cat in here, you know, the doorbell could ring, the phone could buzz. So there's just a lot more distractions than there are available to me than there are in a classroom. But the other thing about it is, I'm taking a class and like, okay, 45 minute video lecture, I don't have time for that right now. So I'm just gonna keep putting it off till I can find that chunk of time, which, you know, isn't hard for us to find sometimes in our busy lives, but I can find time for 10 minutes. So it's gonna be easier for me to consume that content when it's broken down into those smaller bits. So I think the principles are the same and we can still use the principles to guide our creation of these classes. Especially if we kind of think about, there's these two parts to the class, right? There's the asynchronous provision of content, which in a way, I mean, that sounds like it's something new, but it's really not. Like I'm asynchronously providing content to my students when I'm having them read a novel outside of class, that you might think about just like that. And then there's the synchronous stuff that we're doing on camera or in person. And again, there are two, the kind of stuff that we know works. Like for example, having people write down a few thoughts before they speak. Well, in my class, they typically do that in a handwritten writing exercise or even a type writing exercise if they're using a laptop. They can certainly do that in the chat room, right? Like so these, I think things can translate if we just are able to kind of think, how does, what's the principle that I need for this particular environment? Asynchronous or synchronous and how can I make it work in those different contexts? Thank you. That's covered a lot of ground in just a couple of minutes there. The chat box has lit up with people making different observations. Rachel Barlow notes that podcasts are being very intimate and that they all feel like one person talking to you. Charles Finley gets a little more sarcastic and says, hashtag TikTok learning is our future. Alejandro Muzanaga, forgive me if I mispronounced your name Alejandro, says the sweet spot for video lectures is five minutes she's found. I mean, there's different studies on that, right? Like so, I'm referring to this one that I saw which had that kind of, I mean, it had a pretty substantial, but it was MOOC. So like that's a little bit different than a four credit class. The thing about TikTok, again, like I would just, I would ask people to kind of reflect upon their own experiences, right? Like, so I think this is worth thinking about actually for those of us who experienced the transition in the spring and for those of us who are frequently on Zoom meetings and webinars right now, are you locked in for one hour and not doing anything else for that time? Or do you find your attention wandering over to your phone or you're doing other things while this is happening? If you're experiencing that, you should expect that your students are going to experience it as well. So, you know, if you've been in department meeting on Zoom or whatever and you were doing other stuff like guilty, right? I mean, you should, you have to think about your students are going to have a similar experience. So for that reason, I would favor these kinds of shorter exposure items in the same way that I would favor shorter exposure to lecture content in the classroom. And, you know, lecturing for 15 or 20 minutes and then doing something versus lecturing for 75 minutes. Students, you know, minds are going to wander and the students minds have always wandered in those contexts. If a few sentences back, you mentioned drawing on our, reflecting on our personal work and we just had a relevant question that came up from New York on this from Sarah Sullivan at St. Bonaventure. And Sarah asks, how much honesty could I bring to the classroom about this year's challenges? Child care concerns about COVID, not a clear map for how best to teach in this environment? Yeah. So Sarah Kavanaugh does great work in this area. And so she, her book, The Spark of Learning, which came out a few years ago, looks at emotions in the college classroom. One of the things she actually looked at was self-disclosure. So how much self-disclosure by the, what does self-disclosure by the instructor do for student learning, student sort of perceptions of the class and the instructor? And consistent with something I said earlier, they, and my sort of general views on life, the, the research finding was, you know, a modest amount can be helpful in sort of giving sort of a humanized view of the instructor, creating more of that sense of community, but you can tip the balance too much in either direction, right? And it seemed to, I believe, I have to double-check this and maybe someone can confirm this as well. My other recollection about this research was that the more positive self-disclosure was better. Like in other words, you don't want to self-disclose too much about like all of the sort of negative things you're experiencing or your, all of your fears and anxieties that maybe some of that can help humanize you, but too much of that seems to have a negative effect. And you probably think about this in the way that we have our social media context and we all know people that sort of are just consistently self-disclosing negatively on social media and like how sometimes like, okay, you know, I feel for you, but I don't want to read this all the time, right? Like, and I think there's probably something similar that happens in that classroom dynamic. So I guess my, my overall view would be, you know, you should not hesitate to, you know, have some self-disclosure to students that seems to be a good thing for humanizing you and creating community in the classroom, but you shouldn't overdo it and it shouldn't be just negative like that. You should also maybe if you're going to talk about the challenges we face, you might also talk about how you're addressing those challenges and some of the sort of positives that have come out of, or that are coming out of your experience with, you know, whatever it might be, right? Like, so, you know, see if you can find some of those positives to convey to the students as well because of course students need to hear, right? Like they're facing a lot of difficult challenges as well and we want to help sort of pull one another's up, to boost one another, you know, during this difficult time. So. Well, thank you. That's a, people are pouncing on this book, so. Now, didn't you, that's from West Virginia. Yeah, that's from the book series I added at West Virginia University Press. So I highly recommend, we have a bunch of great titles. West Virginia University Press, Teaching and Learning and Higher Education is the book series. Sounds fantastic. Thank you. And again, that was a great question. That was a great question. We have more questions coming in. We have another video question and this comes from a longtime friend and supporter of the program, Tom Hames. So let me bring Tom up on stage from Texas. Hello, Tom. Hi guys. So actually I had a question, but I was distracted so I forgot. No, it was easy. So. That's not going to be the first time I hear that joke. That was not going to be the last time. Do you want me to talk about my dogs? So no, my question is as follows. What I'm seeing a lot of right now, at least in my institution, I'm hearing the scuttle button in a larger world is that with everything going on, everything being so chaotic that there's this drive toward conformity, that you're trying to build all the classes so that they kind of look alike and the students don't have unusual learning experiences. And in my experience, that works against, first of all, innovation in the classroom, experimentation, precisely the kind of things you're talking about. What is your feeling on the balance between those two competing demands on class design? Yeah, that's a really good question. Because on the one hand, students who are dealing with all this disruption, it might be helpful for them to have some consistency. So I can see the rationale for that. I will say, though, on the other hand, I had students. So we advise faculty advisors at my institution. So I have a couple dozen advisees that I'm working with every year. And so we had to advise them after we had transitioned to online learning. And so I had Zoom meetings with all of them. And of course, just asked them how their classes were going. And I was kind of curious, as Director of the Teaching Center, what people were doing. So I would say, how many of your classes have switched basically to being an online asynchronous? How many are synchronous? And what I kind of found from that was that they actually appreciated having not everything be synchronous or asynchronous. They liked having a little bit of opportunity to do something different so that they weren't doing all their classes just online. Or they weren't doing some of them had all five professors were just continuing to meet exactly as they had just same time, same amount of times each week through Zoom, as if they were just continuing their face to face. And both those things posed challenges for the students. It was all asynchronous. They were having trouble organizing themselves, like in understanding how to meet their deadlines. If it was all synchronous, they were at home. And they were like things that might interfere with when they needed to be in their class times. So there are issues for both. And so I guess that might suggest to me that we shouldn't, on the one hand, maybe there's some basic parameters that are the same, but that we probably shouldn't mandate like things be all exactly, that we shouldn't push too far in the other direction because as I was saying earlier, change in variety helps renew our attention, helps keep our attention. If every class is doing the exact same thing and looking the exact same way, that's probably a sure way to get students less and less interested in the educational experiences they're having. So, I don't have any specific recommendations on that, but I guess that would be my impression is, we probably don't want to air too much on the side of conformity, even though I can see the value of having like some basic stuff. Like everyone's got to have, all of us major course documents online. Like I see the value of that kind of thing. Right. But in terms of like how the class is conducted, I guess I wouldn't want to see too much conformity that way. Good question. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I also, I like the blending we had of you, Jim, with all of your red and Tom with all of his blues. It was pretty. We have a few more questions that are here. I want to make sure that we get a chance to raise these. And one of them comes from Alejandra that I mentioned before. And she asks about a really precise question. How do you fold in synchronous opportunities into an already built asynchronous class? Okay. So one of the first things I did this, even though I'm not teaching this year, I had taught online, I had had to shift my class online in the spring. And so in order to help me learn better about what students were going to experience, I took an online class this summer. I took Spanish too. So, and it was a, it was an online, it was a six week intensive online class taught by one of my colleagues. What he did was, you know, he provided most of our content asynchronously, but he had discussion sessions in which he was available on Zoom for anyone that wanted to practice their oral Spanish. And so those were held two times a week and we would all be able to, and they, in this case, they were optional because the class was designed as a fully online class, but he wanted to offer these extra synchronous opportunities. So he just set up two times per week. There were typically, you know, maybe half the class would be in each session and he would just ask us questions and we would respond in Spanish. And so, you know, I think that's kind of what you want to think about. Like if, you know, students are, like in my case, if I were doing this the fall, I would probably do something like, students are gonna read the texts, they're gonna then respond in a discussion board post, and then we are gonna have an additional one hour synchronous discussion per week in which I'm gonna have read their discussion board posts and put questions back to them based on that. Ask them to summarize, you know, their ideas, other things, and just like the way we would have a traditional discussion in a literature class. So I think that's what you want to think about, like what's the active stuff that students would be normally doing in class? Solving problems or, you know, being in groups or like having that group discussion and thinking about how that's this sort of additional layer that's then added on top. That's like the structure on top of the foundation, right? That asynchronous foundation. So my Spanish course provided a pretty good example for me of what that could look like and how it could be effective. And it was very effective for me. I took advantage of it every week. That sounds great. And you could probably do a better job with Alejandro's name than I can now. Yeah. Thank you for a really, really good question. And I love the practicality of that question. And Jim, that's a good example of small teaching practice right there. Yeah, absolutely. We have a question from Michael Meeks that who goes back one step from Tom's question about innovation and consistency. He asks, as face-to-face students are forced to go online, a template lets students focus on content rather than learn to navigate disparate models where to find X or Y or Z. Yeah, that's a great point. And for that reason, I don't object to things like having a kind of syllabus template or having a kind of, where everybody can see the same information and know where to go easily. I think especially in this current situation, that's a pretty good idea. I think where I would want to be able to see the variety is in the assessments, we shouldn't all have to be using the same kinds of assessments in our synchronous sessions. We should be able to foster discussions or have students doing in there what they want. So I agree with you completely. Like having basic requirements for what goes in the LMS so that everyone can have access to it and know they're gonna be able to access these same documents or get the information they need or interact with the instructor in certain ways like having a, you know, a promissor about how questions are gonna get answered, how quick they'll be turned around, all that kind of stuff. I think that's fine. Like to me that doesn't stifle people's pedagogy of creativity at all. And limitations and conditions like that don't have to stifle creativity in the same way that you can be really creative on Twitter in part because you're forced into those 280 characters, right? So like that's sometimes gonna actually force you into more creative thinking. How do I work within this structure in a way to kind of, you know, accomplish what I want to that can actually create new and innovative thinking. Well, I'm classic. You're gonna think about the limitations of poetry formats and- Exactly, exactly. That stands up for, exactly, yeah. We have a question that comes up from a slightly different angle. This is the faculty development angle from Kathy Bitman at the Hillsboro. And Kathy asks, what do you say to faculty who feel their particular teaching style would not translate well to an online format? That is a hard question. That's one I probably don't have to think about a little bit. I mean, we certainly have had faculty on my own campus. I know who are not looking forward to teaching largely in these online and hybrid classes. They really value the face-to-face discussion, which I do too. That's how I've always taught with a lot of discussion and engagement. I mean, one thing I guess I would hope that faculty would be open-minded about was that you can let faculty know, look, this is a transitional period, right? Ideally, if you relish teaching in that face-to-face environment and sitting around a table and talking to each other like that, you're gonna be able to get back to that. But this is a time for you to learn some new tools that you might be able to incorporate into that class in the future. What my experience was, I had not used some of the tools in the LMS that had long been available to me, tried in the spring semester, and I'm gonna use them now. So like my face-to-face class is now gonna be supplemented by some tech tools that I had never experimented with before. So hopefully one can appeal to the fact that faculty like to, our learners who are open-minded and want to continue to improve in their teaching and that that's the way to look at this experience. It's a temporary phase, one would hope at least for, even if that temporary means a year or two, they'll get back to what they think they're good at and what they know they're good at, but maybe they'll be able to have expanded their repertoire of tools they can use in the classroom. That's a very, very well-thoughtful and supportive answer to that great question. Kathy, thank you very much for asking that. I've heard that question all the time, but I've got to ask, Jen, what were those LMS tools that you hadn't used before that you're going to try now? I mean, the basic one was the discussion board, to be honest with you, I had never used the discussion board before in my own teaching and I'd actually kind of read really mixed things about discussion boards that sometimes they're using this very pro forma way, students are just kind of checking the box and it was Flower Darby actually who convinced me, no, you can use discussion boards well. And there were two things about it that, I mean, the thing that I liked about it was the thing that lots of people have said, it made sure that everyone's voice got heard, right? So there were, you know, I think by the time we switched to remote learning, there were 10 discussion board posts, that was how many weeks that were left or maybe there was eight or something and I gave, everyone had to only do eight of them so they didn't have to do it every week, they could choose the ones they were interested in, but the thing that Flower told me to do, which I really, really loved was after each week, I would read all the discussion board posts and I picked three to five of them to highlight that I thought were really good and I made like a five minute video and said, in which I was kind of, you know, screensharing the discussion saying, look, you know, Kathy makes a really excellent point here. This one, this post, you know, is when I really want to everyone, make sure everyone looks at and then I kind of just went and did that every week. And I loved it because it was like a way for me to affirm the work of students kind of publicly. I tried to make sure that every student got their post affirmed at least once. So I had like a little box checking out for people's names when I mentioned one of their posts so that everyone got heard. But I also just found they were really thoughtful, students who would not normally contribute in class contributed really thoughtful and interesting to the discussion board. So that's what I'm going to do in the future with my preparation for discussion rather than having them write at the beginning of class. I'll probably still do some, do that occasionally, but I think I'm going to do, I'm going to keep the discussion boards as well. I recommend it. It's a powerful, powerful tool. We're almost at the end of our time, however, but we had a question from Joe Moore. So let me see if I can beam him up on stage. And let's see, Joe, do we have you in video? Yeah, it looks like it. Hello. Hey, really awesome forum, Brian, first time we're here. So thanks for letting me ask and James really insightful stuff. Thanks for sharing. I wanted to ask about group work. I try to incorporate group work into my civil and environmental engineering teaching at Carnegie Mellon where I'm at. And was curious to hear your thoughts on adapting group work to the online environment. Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would say about that is the only kind of comment or insight I would have is, I mean, I sort of think group work can continue. There are ways obviously to do groups and breakout sessions or to have their work finally. What I would like to kind of, another book that's coming out in the teaching and learning and higher education series that I edit is from Viji Sathi and Kelly Hogan about inclusiveness, inclusive teaching. And one of the things that they argue that I've been convinced about is the importance of giving students some help in terms of structuring the group. So like letting, finding roles to the group so that and kind of giving them a kind of starting, kind of launching them into the task in ways that will prevent, for example, some students getting silenced, some students not feeling comfortable contributing their ideas to the group. And this is not something I typically have done in the past, but they convinced me that this was something that I needed to start doing. So that, you know, there's clearly defined roles, even if you might not have to assign them, but even if you just create the roles and then the students are gonna segregate themselves into those roles, it helps facilitate that process. And what I've experienced being in some breakout rooms myself, just like in the past, you know, a few months or whatever is sometimes it is hard to like kind of get that conversation started and like move things along. So putting students into roles and making sure those roles are really clear and then I think can maybe help facilitate that process a little more than like when you're in class and it's like, you know, I put students in groups and I get them to work and if a student group's just sitting there, I just walk over to them and they say, okay, like, you know, I'm here talking here, why don't you get started? Right, like I can do that much more easily in the classroom than I can in this environment. And I think the role assignment can help do that work that I would normally be doing in class. Great. Well, that's a good answer, thank you Joe and I'm glad you're here, welcome, welcome. Friends, we are right at the end of time. We have just managed to hit the top of the hour. So I'm afraid that with all regret, I'm gonna have to let you all go. Jim, thank you so much for being a fantastic, fantastic guest. At how much you've communicated and with what calmness and wisdom you've managed to share this, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Oh, our pleasure. The quick question is, how can we keep up with you? No one can keep up with your writing speed, but how about, is Twitter the best way to find you? Yes, Lang Encore, L-A-N-G Encore. Great, well, we'll definitely keep an eye for that. And let me tell you, thank you again. Thank you for coming. All right, thank you. But friends, don't leave just yet, I just wanna quickly walk you through where we are. We have, coming up, we have for the next two months, a whole bunch of great topics, including academic women of color, revisiting high flex, work-life balance, how do webinars well, and more and more. So just if you'd like to learn more about that, just go to tinyorl.com slash form fall 2020. And in the meantime, thank you all so much for coming. Please stay in touch with us online and above all, stay safe. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.