 Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see so many of you here today for a very, very important topic. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the host creator, chief catherter, organizer, and founder, and I'm here to guide you through a conversation about a particular type of teaching with technology for this fall called the High Flex. Now what I'd like to do is welcome our guest. I'm delighted to introduce Brian Vady, not just because he's another Brian, but also because he is known as the founder of the High Flex Method of Teaching, a way that combines face-to-face and online conversation. This is a topic of incredible importance for the fall and I'm really, really glad you could make it. Greetings, Professor Vady. Hi. Thanks for having me. Can you hear me? We can hear you just perfectly. Great. I love your background, which has stairs going up and down, which somehow symbolizes two different courses that can be combined in High Flex. But before we dive into that, let me just ask you, what are you going to be working on for the next year? What are the major topics and what are the major projects uppermost for you? Well, I have to say for the next few months, it's really focused on supporting faculty and institutions who are working on implementing these, especially in light of the unique characteristics that we'll have in fall and probably into the spring and maybe even beyond there for High Flex or for hybrid courses in particular and where a hybrid flexible can fit into that. I'm returning back to a full-time teaching work after being eight years as an administrator, so I'm actually preparing my own courses again, all online in fall and hopefully back in the classroom in a High Flex mode after that. So that's going to take a lot of my work. The aspect of this is, just in the world of High Flex work as well, it's really a shift and we're seeing a shift now clearly from one where it was a relatively low uptake in many schools and more faculty driven in many cases towards more of an institutional focus for many places. So that's going to change the nature of what's being done, the practices we develop and we share, as well as the research that's going to be done immediately but also the longer term impact of that kind of will have a lot bigger base to draw from and many more colleagues to be participating with. Many more colleagues indeed. Let me, friends, I'm just going to ask a couple of quick questions for our guest, but I would love to hear from you for your questions and comments and already we're seeing a few of them come in. So again, if you'd like to join us up here on stage and ask Professor Beatty questions, just click the raised hand button. If instead you'd like to just type in a question or comment, just go to the question mark button and type that in. Professor Beatty, and I have to say it's pretty eerie to have two men named Brian with beards on at the same time. But one question to ask is, when I try and define High Flex for people, I usually point them to your book or I say it's a combination of face to face and online learning at the same time. How am I doing for definition? You're the inventor of this concept. Can you give us a better sense of it? Yeah, first of all, I'd say that when I started thinking about this 15 years ago, I had to ask myself that question about, you know, isn't this being done already? Don't we already have some models at work where we have online or distance students in the same kinds of classes at the same time with face to face? And there are certainly examples of that. I came across some of myself in my dissertation research, but there was nowhere where I saw really this emphasis on flexibility for students and giving students this kind of immediate control over how they're going to participate, whether online or not, or in the classroom. Most of the situations I was aware of, they were remote for a reason. They were distant remote or they could never come to class. And so that's why we came up with a term called High Flex, Hybrid Flexible Course Design, because I thought, I can't just call it a hybrid course model because a hybrid can mean a lot of different things. You know, there are very many different models. And so I thought I wanted to focus on that. And so that's kind of where it came from. And so I was building on my experiences as a grad student, as a teacher from other places using mixed methods, using blended approaches and kind of trying to come up with a design aspect so that when we were thinking about creating this intentionally, we had kind of a map to follow. And so that's what we developed myself and my colleagues at San Francisco State. And many others have done over the years and actually made some, make their own unique modifications to it as well. So I know I only answered half the question or just started on my own. Can you get me back on track with that? Well, sure, sure. I guess I can do it with an example and tell me if I was doing this the right way. I teach part-time at Georgetown in its graduate program on learning design technology. And sometimes in our classes, we meet face-to-face, not right now, but in the past year or two, we've met face-to-face. But some of our students have been remote. And so we've wheeled in big screens or used projectors, so they'd be represented. And as the instructor, I would take great care to make sure they were included in the conversation that our audio was mic'd up so that they could see and hear everything very well. And I made sure to privilege them to ask them questions. And sometimes I was remote as well. And so it's a bunch of different gear, including owl mics and that kind of thing. Is that an example of HiFlex? Yeah, so thank you for helping me come back onto the question. So when I define it, essentially I tell them the way we've defined it and the way we have it in our policy, academic center policy, is that HiFlex course has a face-to-face path through it and an online path through it, and students have the freedom to choose which path they're following on a week-to-week or a session-by-session basis. And so we don't dictate which is if that's a synchronous online path or an asynchronous online path. Some of us teach with both paths available. Many faculty choose one or the other or use one for some things and use a different one for other kinds of things. And so they're taking some of the control necessarily away, or maybe just changing the options better based on the needs of the situation. And so that's what we've kind of come down to. We used to say more things about our policies to have another couple of sentences. It was a nice policy written by academics, so it had a lot of words. And when we revised it more recently, we just stripped it down to one sentence. There's an online path, there's a face-to-face path, and students get a chance to choose. Wow, that's clear. It's got to be clear or it gets really confused. Now, when I'm talking with institutions now who are thinking about this, especially in light of the fall, that's one of the things I tell them, you have to be really clear about what your guidelines are. If your faculty are doing all the course design and building their own courses, they kind of need to know where the guardrails are. If we're going to call it this, here's what we can do and here's what we're not going to try not to support. Many of them end up with the same kind of faculty choice as far as the options, as far as the online piece. Some of them are saying, well, our online version is going to look like this. We're going to have synchronous, or we're going to make sure we design for asynchronous, and then if you want to bring in synchronous, you know, that's maybe more left up to a faculty. You include faculty and support staff also having that right to choose. Support staff? What do you mean by that? Everything from librarians who participate to structural technologists to media support. Well, I think when you're making the decision about what kind of modes to support online, I think what I find is that it's primarily either a program decision. This is the way we're going to sell this to students or market it to students and maybe that's one of the reasons they're doing HyFlex. And so it's going to look like this. And in those cases, it maybe has a more firm structure and what that looks like. But in other cases, it seems to be the faculty. And then, of course, you have to have the support staff and the infrastructure to support either mode. I think most of our campuses, most of our institutions probably are very well equipped to support an asynchronous online learning mode. The synchronous online learning mode, especially before the spring, may have been a little more sketchy on some campuses. And now we've all kind of been, most of us at least have been forced into this immediately flipping on an online synchronous mode. And so we're seeing what our infrastructure can support well and maybe what it doesn't support so well. And now the complexity will be, well, if I bring this into the classroom, will my classroom environment support that? Given the changes in a whole class potentially, well, a small but whole class, most likely in the room, as opposed to just me speaking through my laptop here at my dining room table. Well, speaking of laptops and thank you for that excellent answer. I'm just delighted that we can take away the most precise definition of all time. That's really, really tight. We have a question that builds on this from Elizabeth Shala at Boston College. Let me just bring Dean Shala's comment up on stage here on the screen so you can all see it. And she asks, what difference is there among HiFlex, adaptable remote instruction and adaptable blended instruction? Well, that is a very good question. And I don't know what the definition would be for adaptable remote instruction or adaptable blended instruction might be. And so I can't really tell you what the differences are. I will admit the fact that we're using some terms now when we're discussing this with institutions around like a hybrid HiFlex mix, where you're not going to be hybrid HiFlex all the time. There may be some things where you cannot do online. So you're going to bring students onto campus or some other remote location perhaps. And so it would be a kind of a traditional more hybrid where the instructor is dictating the performance location or the participation location. And then at other times when it makes sense, it would be HiFlex. So it's sort of a modified hybrid or a modified HiFlex or a hybrid HiFlex, which gets really confusing. So I don't know what the other terms are, which is one of the challenges with our terminology, right? And why I try to keep a very simple definition of what HiFlex is to me. When I use the term, when I write about it, that's typically what I'm talking about. In my own teaching, I teach a different kind of course. I teach a professional development courses as well. And those I used to teach HiFlex with a face-to-face component. But after doing that for about a year, we kind of decided in the program, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to have a face-to-face component for this because of the nature of the audience we were serving. And so we created, we just basically did it online. But in the flexibility we have is between a synchronous participation or asynchronous participation, which I think many others teach. And so I don't really call that HiFlex. It's kind of like a modified online HiFlex. But I'm not going to go, I'm not going to add a couple of terms just to make it fit that role. But it is the principle of providing flexibility for students so they can better meet their scheduling needs, what works for them, their technology needs perhaps, I think is what really we're trying to follow. Thank you. I think that's a very honest answer. And Dean Shlala, if you'd like to follow up with more comments, then that would be a delight to hear from you. Friends, that's how text questions work. And let me just show another one right now. This is from our friend Mahabali at the American University in Cairo. And Mahan asks, does HiFlex work better with two instructors or large numbers of TAs? I assume the model means the online option can be any alternative to face-to-face, not necessarily live-streaming in-person lectures. That's a really good question. So when we talk about starting to teach this way, there are two things that the faculty really has to figure out early on. And that has to do with how you're going to do this. And a lot of times that's around the workload question but also the workflow question. And so one aspect is how do you build the online course so that you have an online option? So that's one aspect of this. But the other aspect which is really what I think you're asking for is how do you engage students over the course of the class, the term, et cetera, so that they're being facilitated and they're having interaction with the faculty member, with the other students perhaps, whoever is fulfilling that role. In larger classes, like many of us have right now, there may be TA support who can help with facilitating student engagement over the course like for a week by week or between sessions. But that's certainly a possibility. Not everybody who teaches a large online course or a large course in general has TA support. And so there may be other strategies like using group-based discussions as opposed to everybody in the same discussion, those kinds of things. Or coming up with other ways of supporting interaction that maybe don't rely clearly on the one-to-one between faculty and students for the baseline interaction. When I teach smaller classes, it's not so much of a problem because I can give one-to-one interaction and still manage workflow, the time I'm spending on it and the timing of the time, really the synchronicity there, much easier than if it was a very large class. So do two instructors teach it? I think if you use two instructors for a large lecture class on campus, that would be a natural, you would probably still use two instructors here. I don't think you need to have two instructors, although you do need skill sets in online engagement and interaction no matter, you know, depending upon what methods you're using. You've got to have some skills to do that, just like you need skills in the classroom to effectively engage students, especially students in a large class, effectively. So there are different skill sets and that's one of the biggest challenges effectively who have taught in the classroom for many, many years and have never taught online is trying to understand, well, what are those skill sets and how to take their excellence in the classroom and kind of transition that to excellence online as well. Very, very well, that's a great detailed answer. And Maaha, thank you again for that really great question. Now I'd like to bring in someone on video. I'd like to bring in our longtime friend and supporter from Houston, Texas, Tom Hames. Tom, I think we need to make sure your camera is on. I think it just went off. Tom, we'll bring it back. Let me know when your camera gets back on. We have more questions that are just coming in all over the place and one is from Randy Brooks at Texas A&M and Randy asks, in the high flex room involving teams, is it best to mix the teams such one member is live and the rest are connected from a remote location. Social distancing suggests limiting in-class interface. You know, Randy, that's a great question and this is the first time we've really kind of had to address this idea of limiting the face-to-face, face-to-face interaction in a classroom. What I would normally say and I still say this is that I try to, if I have online synchronous students and in-class students and I'm doing some sort of a student discussion breakout, assuming I can manage the classroom well, like, you know, kind of isolate the noise areas and things like that, I try to have the online students sharing in one of the groups in the class with the in-class students. As long as students have devices that they can use to interact in the online environment or maybe we have some tablets that are available that they could use, then we can do that. I've never had a classroom where I haven't had any students who can participate in a synchronous live session to essentially help me in the classroom as well as being there to kind of connect the remote students live. That can work really well. Now, if you don't have a setup that provides that or the technology in the classroom or maybe the audio quality of the classroom wouldn't support that, I also have had online synchronous students essentially form their own group and then the classroom students form their own groups. What I try to do then is make sure we have a consistent reporting out capability like we might all report out to a discussion forum or some other online site where everybody's report out as treated equally and then give them basically the attention time in the classroom to talk about that. But I do try to mix them up as much as I can because clearly we're trying to support, no matter what we're doing online and face-to-face, we're trying to support an integrated learning community. And if I've got synchronous students online and in the classroom, then I try to find as many ways as I can to integrate them. So it is one class as opposed to two separate classes that just have to be sharing the same LMS shell. Thank you. That's another really, really detailed answer. This has become a high-flex seminar at this point because of the high quality of all this information. So let's see. We have more people who are bringing in requests. Let me see if we can bring in Saichwa Shaw. Did I mangle your name completely? I'm sorry. I didn't ask the question. Oh, okay. No problem. No problem. We have Renee Liederman-Girard at the MCPHS University. We need your video on, Renee. That's okay. Just let me know what you can get back on. We have a stack of questions, and I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask. This is one from Tristan Johnson who asks a real clarifying question. What is the biggest student challenge with high-flex? And what is the biggest faculty challenge? Good questions. I think the biggest student challenge is similar to a student who's going to take an online course for the first time. It's figuring out how they learn effectively in the online environment. And oftentimes that comes down to time management. Of course, it's pretty clear most of us have gone through that ourselves as we've learned to learn and work online. But our students in particular, I think, are susceptible to poor performance starting out, especially if they're not able to manage their time well, or have never even had to do that. Because we're taking away that structure of, okay, you show up to class at 8.15, and you're done at 9.20, and then you come back two or three days later. Okay, that structure is, in many ways, unless it's a synchronous online, it's kind of gone for students. But then there's also all this work to do after the class, and that may be the same for your face-to-face students as well. So time management would be one thing. And then the second part is just using the technologies, having access to the appropriate technologies, the connection technologies on a regular basis, and a basis that fits the convenience or where they think it's convenient in their schedules to use them. So if I don't have good access to the bandwidth at home or a computer or a device at home, and if I have to go somewhere else to use that, coffee shop, whatever, library when they're open, that makes it less convenient. And that can work for me. I can work as an online student like that. And yet it's one of the challenges that students have to overcome. I guess a third part would be the whole idea of engaging online. One of the challenges with any kind of online instruction, especially with students doing it for the first time, and especially when they're in a class that they may not be so engaged with in general. It's a requirement I have to meet. It's not maybe in my major. Maybe it's a large class too. And I don't know this instructor. They're from a completely different part of campus. And maybe I don't know the other students. So those are all kind of things, those hurdles that they kind of have to get over to get the internal motivation to engage in that class. And so intentionally designing kind of community-building exercises that students kind of get them more interested in being part of this group can certainly be a good approach in those situations. But yeah, time management, the environment and technology, and then the whole idea of wanting to be engaged in the class as online students. Now, if they're choosing to be in class, pretty much those problems are much less and may not even be in existence. So it's really what I have to focus on is the shift from the face-to-face to the online. Most faculty who are starting to do Hyperlex are shifting that way, as well as most students. So it's part of a larger current then. Well, thank you. Again, an excellent question. Tom, we're still not getting your camera. Let me bring... There's two closely related questions. What? Brian, can you still hear us? I think you just blinked out. Still there? Yep. There you go. You just went black just for a second. Okay. We have two questions about students, and they're very closely related. So I'm going to bring them up one after the other. One is from our Bruno at my alma mater, the University of Michigan. And they ask, could this model allow for the same type of choice for instructors at schools when the campus is reopening this fall? Or is Hyflix Center on the instructor's presence in the face-to-face classroom? Yeah, that's a great question. We've had to address that a couple of times this spring as we're preparing different places, because that's a real thing this fall. Is there maybe the opportunity or times when a faculty member is not able or maybe has a choice not to be in the classroom? And so can you still do this kind of thing? And my answer is usually, well, if your students are still able to be in the classroom, then there's still a form of Hyflix as long as you can do the remote teaching effectively to that remote location. In the field, we have expertise developed over decades of work in the distance education world, before online especially, video teleconference and things like that. So there are certainly ways to teach effectively that way. But the question then would be on a campus decision, well, what does that mean? If the faculty's not in the classroom, can the students still be in the classroom? Is there have to be another faculty member there who's like just kind of managing the safety, security, privacy, other kinds of restrictions in the class? And it's more likely that there just wouldn't be a face-to-face session planned if the faculty's not able to teach there. Now, if the faculty's not able to be there on a regular basis, then you'd make that decision now probably. But let's say a faculty has to be out for two weeks. They're exposed in some way, and they have to be out for 14 days at least. Then what would you do? And I think on my campus, I believe we have to have someone who's officially representing the university when students are there for risk management concerns if nothing else, but then also to manage it. Could a TA do that? If someone who's being paid by the university, a graduate assistant or something like that could probably fill that role, as well as someone who can help facilitate. Similar to the way I would try to use an in-class student as helping to facilitate the synchronous online component if I'm doing kind of both sets live, that person could fill that role in the classroom is kind of essentially just trying to facilitate that remote location, remote from the instructor while the instructor is remotely kind of conducting the overall class. Well, thank you. Good question. And we have two other questions that actually follow up with the student side. So let's see. This is from our friend, Sarah Sangregorio, who asks, many of the local higher education institutions are talking about a version of High Flex. Could it be student choice, instructor choice? Well, student choice, the primary goal of High Flex. That's a great question. And I try to include that whenever I'm telling the High Flex story because our initial goal from our department was essentially to allow our online students to complete our program and to be in our courses to support enrollment and engagement with graduate program, declining enrollments you know, 2005 timeframe, pretty common. And so it was what we were trying to do is for me it was an alternative to trying to flip a program that's been face-to-face for 25 years into a fully online program by the start of the next term. So that wasn't going to work for us. And so I got department chair permission and a little bit of support to create a model that would allow online students to be part of our face-to-face classes, right? But the idea was not necessarily to give students the choice of flipping back and forth. That came as a relatively quick realization afterwards after we found that we could do this. We could do this well. And it would support fully online students in our classes. There are other things we found to be valuable as well. And the first one was to provide that flexibility to students in our region since we're serving a regional market. So they could be there and not based on their practices in the class. I mean, you know, like their life at things the work things going on, the family issues or travel or other kinds of things, they could still participate. We also found that then we were able to attract other students regionally or locally who couldn't be part of a face-to-face program because of the timing of the classes and their location and commuting and everything that now could be part of online students. Since they weren't remote students, they weren't like from a traditional distant kind of online market. They were from our local market. But they were kind of frozen out earlier because they couldn't be there in class. And so for them, they had that. And then they also then could take advantage of the flexibility. I had students tell us over time, even if they were always online, they really appreciated the fact that they could be there on campus and be part of an in-person discussion, you know, in the class if they wanted to be. Or I also had students who were in the class all the time. But they also told us, we really appreciate, I really appreciate the flexibility of being able to be online if I couldn't be here in person. I prefer the in-person. Right. I'd always choose that. But I was very happy to have a backup. That ties into a directly to another question from Rebecca Fresi, who has been on the program before, who runs the awesome FlexSpace. And she asks about choice and commitment. Do students have to committed some point to attend virtually or on campus? Or can they just decide not to show up on campus for given class? It seems hard to plan with no RSVP. Right. Okay. So connecting this back to the other question, if you keep this up on the screen, I'll get to it directly. Thank you for the question, Rebecca. Love FlexSpace, by the way. So in the fall, there'll be a lot of situations where students won't be given that choice. We won't, as an institution or as a teaching faculty member, be able to accept maybe new students into our rooms on a week to week or session by session basis. There may be some restrictions around who can be in the classroom. Maybe there's going to be a group of students who are allowed to be in the class and no new ones will be allowed to join it for essentially for social distancing or physical distancing kind of concerns. And so I think a lot of flexibility will be different in the fall than we would normally expect. And so that's obviously going to have an impact. Now, as far as the question from Rebecca is also a relevant question in normal times because there is a real chance that there will be an extreme imbalance in the way the students are participating in the section. And until you figure out what that is for this kind of students and this kind of course, maybe this period of time, that's a little challenging to plan for. If you've got smaller classes and especially the problem is really then as everybody shows up online and I have three students in class, that's a very different kind of course experience than my normal 20 to 25 people in a seminar. And so I have to be able to think ahead of that. And in some cases, in many cases in fact, faculty will ask their students what their intentions are. Without telling them we have to do it online and we have to do it face to face, they'll ask them what their intentions are and if they get a sense that most of the students will be online or most of the students will be in class and they can plan differentially. Now, if you have most of your students in class, which is my experience for the most part in relatively few online, especially relatively few in the asynchronous environment, the course will include discussion forums and those become very weak discussion opportunities. It's a very different kind of discussion when you've got three people who have a discussion requirement. And so I've shifted my approach to essentially move all my students into the online discussion forum even if they're in class because I wanted that to be a rich environment. So we'll use that in class as a tool to help us kind of capture some of our discussions as well as continuing it throughout the class and so I've been able to adapt to that. As far as at least worrying about the potentially weak weakness of an online interaction, I expect that there'll be a lot more of students, if there is choice at all, that they may have to reserve a seat for an upcoming session so that if all you are limited to is the number of seats, not necessarily who's in them, I would expect that there'll be a lot of places like I said earlier. Maybe these 15 students are allowed to be in class, everybody else in the section is kind of an online student but still you're going to need some flexibility because students who are even assigned a seat in class will have to have the freedom to be online if they're forced to or perhaps even if they kind of want to if it's available to them if the design supports it. So yeah, less flexibility which is why people will ask me can I call this high flex if we're not fully flexible, say well, given the situation I'd say yeah, give them as much flexibility as you can manage and if you're doing kind of the dual pass with the connections I say let's design it for high flex even if they don't have as much flexibility as we might initially have intended. We do have a note about that just to add I want to make sure we share this, not a question but a comment from Craig Hood at Loyola he says for the fall we can't really give students choice to attend face to face when we can only have 25 to 30% occupancy for our rooms. Yeah, I can respond to that too we've had large online courses or large classes, especially large lecture lecture classes which we usually use lecture capture for where we end up with about 15% of the students coming into the lecture on a live basis and everybody else is choosing to do it online asynchronously perhaps even watching a stream because that pedagogy was what I would call a relatively weak pedagogy but very common large lecture hall, lots of information shared and then you're off doing your homework and then doing quizzes and tests you don't need to be in class necessarily as much as most students perhaps to learn as well as if they were there we still would leave the lecture hall available for students but we had a section basically a combination of three sections, 1200 students and they were assigned to a lecture hall of about 180 seats and never had a problem with over capacity over filling that we didn't have them assigned up for being an online student or a face-to-face student and yet we knew real quickly after we started this this was even at the very beginning of the even predated high flex as a term it became pretty clear this is the pattern we were going to get and so we started just planning for that and it always worked out so just because you only have 15 to 25% occupancy depending upon the desires of the students and a lot of that the nature of the class the content you know where they are you might be able to still give them flexibility if flexibility is kind of allowed if you can have students coming in and out flexibility all kinds of ways of thinking about flexibility here this is great you did touch on a question about student-student quizzes and so I wanted to take this opportunity to bring in a point from Mary Talbot and from southeast Missouri and she asks do you work to have parity of assessment in the modes a student participating in a face-to-face class doesn't have anything to show that they are there the online student must post to reform that's a that's a very good question and so but I think there's I think there's really two questions there and the one about parity and assessment is I think very important when I talk about assessment usually we're looking at kind of a high level of assessment how am I going to essentially give you a grade based on the work that you're able to do and so when we talk about this especially if you're used to just a face-to-face environment when you're designing your online course you have to think carefully about how you're going to do those assessments to the you know to the extent that you can do exactly the same activities that lead to accessible you know evidence of understanding that I can give a grade on I mean a lot of times that if that works well in the classroom it might work very well online which I'm usually doing papers and projects and reports and things like that and for those it really doesn't matter how they're presenting them or showing them everybody's going to do it the same you're in class you're putting your paper online and we're giving you feedback you might have peer reviews etc same thing for like a project kind of presentation where the real difference is for most is when you're doing tests high stakes testing what I try to get faculty to consider if they're not doing them in their LMS already because of tests that they're trying to do would be supported there and I think they almost always are to use the LMS for that no matter which students are whether they're in class or online so you can do online testing even if you want them in a proctored classroom environment if you're using a proctored classroom environment then you should probably be doing some sort of a proctored online environment as well because you want the test conditions to be as much as close as possible to be identical with that in mind because there are a lot of other things around a test impact how well students do and some of it say is someone watching me or do I have a time requirement is it always 8 o'clock in the morning or can I do this at 3 in the afternoon when I kind of feel like I'm better about this so I also will try to say well maybe you can shift everything to an online more of an asynchronous test environment so that it's equal and then maybe shift the character of the test a little bit so that it acknowledges kind of the new realities well students are probably going to have other resources to draw from if they're not in class and they don't maybe there's a time requirement maybe there's not a time requirement so maybe you can ask a little bit different kinds of questions to get to that without having to be super concerned about oh my gosh they might be using their notes or their textbook resources that's one of the design challenges that a lot of faculty maybe not realize right away but it's one of the things that they have to think carefully about if you're shifting from a high-stakes testing and quizzing kind of environment mediated by an LMS that's easy to evaluate and you're going to go towards more authentic assessment with projects and papers and things like that then there's a lot more work involved in giving feedback in those senses so you have to manage that into the whole workflow question as well same thing on the student side speaking of which first of all we had a couple of questions about exams and assessments and I think you just grabbed all of them so Georgie and everybody else who asked these questions if you have more to follow up please again follow up you also mentioned design and I wanted to share a question about this from Tom Tobin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Tom asked Hydeflex needs intentional design thinking and the concomitant resources at time to implement it how light can the design phase be or in the next two months as we prepare for fall term hey thanks for the question Tom that's a very good question I mean I think a lot of us if you're in if you come from an instructional design perspective you've maybe been trained that way there's some of us who are academics in this area so we're instructional designers in a way we think but we're also faculty members who are in the classroom all the time doing a lot of rapid prototypes I mean agile kinds of things that we wouldn't normally build into perhaps our formal instructional design process and so this is sometimes a challenge especially as I'm working with instructional design staff on campus who often times want a very prescriptive way of doing this very process oriented and where a lot of faculty come at it very differently it's much more experiential focused design well I'm going to try this doesn't work I'm going to shift a little bit and try something else which is often challenging for those conversations what I tell my perspective is that we should be designing as if we were going to be teaching a fully asynchronous online course we can design for a fully asynchronous online course we can we at least have the tools and the activities and things established that we can use in any of the other modes there's like different skill sets of facilitating asynchronous, online synchronous and in the classroom those are things that will have a part of the equation as well especially the engagement with students but if we can design the materials, the activities the assessment for fully online then I think we can use those resources across the board so the question becomes then would you expect your faculty to be able to design a fully online course over the next two months to teach it in the fall the question is also how high quality of a course is going to be accepted what's baseline the conversation around quality I'll show the QM rubrics, I'll show the QLT rubrics from Cal State and the Oscar rubrics from SUNY so that we know kind of where we'd like to head with this and yet the conversation is always well okay what's the most important thing let's think about content presentation what are you doing now can you do it well online boom done perhaps how can you add your voice into this do some simple introductory videos could that be part of whatever you're providing from classroom to online thing okay so how can you build in those ideas of there's teacher presence there's social presence, there's cognitive presence and kind of think through some of those things so that we're doing we're not doing perhaps a QM certifiable online course yet we are doing something that is good enough to get started good enough to get students achieving those learning outcomes with a plan for bringing in other components you know as we develop the capability to do so since most of the faculty are also faculty designers they all can end up building their own courses I think it's important to start with an achievable baseline expectation and then encouraging them to go a step beyond a step beyond a step beyond and this is where instructional design staff I think can be critical you know some campuses may build online courses for faculty already you know that's a different arrangement that we have on our campus but in that situation can the instructional design staff turn that on but if the faculty are doing it well what do you need just to get started on our campus we created kind of a jump start to online teaching a couple years ago in response to a localized emergency where we were going to we thought we might lose our campus ability to access the campus and so we said well what are the most important things you know there's probably six or seven real important things content right assessment and engagement and you get to get a starting point in every of those areas what are you know what's one or two things I also tell I also include in the conversation the importance to use the things you have already available like in your learning and management system that's supported by your staff on campus it's already been vetted it's already been approved your students don't have to struggle to try to get into a new thing some online teachers use a lot of different tools and they use them very well but a lot of times they're taking on all the responsibility for the IT support you know the risk around security and privacy all those kinds of things and when we're getting started it's like stay in kind of stay on the reservation here in the sense of use the discussion boards in the LMS if you're going to do discussions use the other tools you have available there share the resources the way that are similar to what you're doing now kind of you know ease into this in some way even though it might be kind of a jolt that started that's a really really rich answer thank you I can see why your students really benefited from you because you're enormously informative we have a question from a near colleague of mine at Georgetown John Stites who asks institutional question is there any minimum institutional contribution or function that is required for high flex all right that's a good question you could kind of take that lots of different ways I think what I'm seeing let me answer that a couple of different from a different couple perspectives one of the round is the faculty inside of it what we're seeing this summer a lot of institutions providing faculty development workshops around online teaching or perhaps high flex teaching or any other name for that kind of approach which are often you know some sort of stipend so they provide some some recognition of the effort faculty are putting into even though they never come close to actually paying faculty for the time they're investing in teaching differently to the extent the institutions done a good job of communicating and finding agreement with the faculty as a large body of the importance of doing things differently that seems to go a lot better where there's a lot of disconnect between administration faculty and administration making decisions saying we shall do this in the fall without having that conversation with the faculty especially faculty governance around what we're going to do and how we're going to get there often times that becomes then something that it just becomes how can you make us do this we can't do this so it doesn't work very well so faculty support in that direction the institutions has to be able to support the pedagogies in the classroom and so if there's no way to adequately capture audio and video from a classroom then it's possible that you would not try to do synchronous live connections in the classroom and just focus more on the asynchronous online environment because if you can't do the audio well in a classroom that's going to make that a very poor experience for the students trying to connect synchronously and if you're relying on a recording of that as part of your asynchronous materials that's going to not work well either so I think that's an important thing to do you might find that in on your campus that you have some rooms ready to go for this other ones might need some substantial enhancement some maybe not so much in substantial enhancement we talked a little bit about well we mentioned flexbase.org before I think they're starting to capture some designs especially for fall in response and some of those are high flex courses kind of designed rooms as well so that's another good resource to look for those kind of so that kind of support a third part about this is clearly around communicating to students the institution has to have a common message to students so they know what the options are this is not a surprise but especially if you're going to roll out a new format for them that some of their courses might be in or maybe just being available for them what does that mean and so that idea of consistent communication to students and other stakeholders parent communities maybe funding organizations other kinds of things so that's another important thing than the institution I think has an important role to play in now in normal times probably in this time too how do students register for a course like this you know there's a potential that if they take a high flex course and they intend to do it as an online student they could potentially they could take another class that's offered at exactly the same time if they intended to do that in face to face and that was available for them so if that's the kind of flexibility that would be provided at least to meet the strategic goals for doing this then that would have to be something that's supported by you know your registration system either registrar all those other things some campuses have differential fees for online online sections compared to face to face sections are you going to manage that if it's a high flex course will you charge them online fees will you charge them face to face fees will that be part of your decision about whether you let them make choices hey you're going to sign up for this as an online student you can be part of it but you're going to pay the online fee and you're not allowed to be in the classroom or something like that so they can get kind of kind of complicated which is why it's important to have strategic conversations at multiple levels with all your constituents on campus administrators and faculty and support staff and other kinds of support staff who might be dealing with students in a new way you know tutoring online advising online library support online if you're not doing that already then you've got some real challenges to overcome before you can really do this well this is all the the minimum what a fantastic question and that answer you can take to each of your campuses right now has just the baseline before we go further we have let's see still can't get the camera wait we have the camera working at a conceptual level Tom Haymes from this area has a really really great question challenging one Tom so my question is this you know a lot of the early responses a number of early responses to the crisis that we're facing right now had to do with making some systemic adjustments such as I remember there were some suggestions of of institutions pushing the spring semester into the summer to give people more time to prepare someone suggested on one of Brian's programs months ago that you know school should be thinking about very short semesters so that if something is disruptive you're not losing large chunks of the semester time to shut down some things like that one of the things I've kind of noticed and looking through high flex is that it's very much in alignment with traditional institutional constraints of sections semesters X week semesters and things like that it doesn't really challenge or disrupt those things and as I've been working my way through some of these questions I keep running up against systemic constraints that I think are going to be a real problem if the unexpected and at this point I'm expecting the unexpected occurs in the fall and institutions are forced to as Brian put it in one of his excellent blog posts a number of months ago do what's called the toggle term you know where you unexpectedly are turning on and turning off the in-person switch my question to you about high flex is you know when you originally developed it did you know when you were thinking this through you know did you make compromises because of these kind of systemic constraints and are those still appropriate going forward in the fall where some of these constraints might be under significant challenge yeah well I would say definitely as I was designing this in my world which was very traditional higher education here public large public institution in the US yeah those constraints were naturally part of the way we designed to fit what I was when I'm trying to do was not to create something that's totally outside the system and kind of standing on its own and yet you know you could make good arguments about lots of aspects of the way we do education in general but higher education in particular in the states that could might be a lot better outside of a different system but yet we're all kind of growing up from within the system so that's kind of a different conversation but really I think what you have one of the things that even the little thing about giving students control over whether they're in the classroom or not or doing it online for a lot of places that's a radical concept we have had instructor and institutional control over students participation probably as long as we've had kind of formal institutions like ours who are doing this and so that itself I think is a big reason why we had 10,000 faculty using high flex over the years there's been hundreds and lots of different places but I think that's part of the that has led to kind of slow growth because we always had the luxury of making those choices and so now if we're looking for ways that support this I think we'll see a lot of people who are using blended approaches like this or co-modal approaches if you will that don't give students flexibility in part because and I want to give students flexibility they might not be able to that's probably likely for fall but I think afterwards you still might find people who are going to be offering programs that don't have as much flexibility as I would like to see them give students because of the control aspect and that's a philosophical perspective that I think is still going to be difficult for many to think about think about doing yeah those are certainly part of the constraints so we have to work within our systems now even in the fall the problem is the good thing about high flex is you have the opportunity to be kind of agile in your response to situations this spring I was asking my students how are you going to be in class this week this is like early March we won't have a class meeting before I could get the responses the university sent the email saying in class all classes are canceled for a week we'll be in online university starting in a week from now so for me no problem we'll just use the online materials and we'll just run the course online we were already prepared for that it was more of a disruption I think for my students because even though the class was available for them online half of them were always coming to class they weren't in the mindset of being an online student and so they had to kind of readjust their perspectives on how they're going to learn in the class but we were able to kind of toggle into the fully online world and if we had the opportunity to come back to class on campus I would have asked my students if they intended to come to class and if so then we probably would have restarted in class but we could go on and off that way because we could be prepared for all the contingencies and that's one of the things that we've been talking about a lot is instructional continuity I mean we've all been dealing with that my experience has been on campuses that do business continuity planning that really it's really focused on the business side of running the university and I think less so on some campuses on the instructional continuity getting academic affairs leadership and faculty to think about that in kind of a business perspective okay if we can't be here on campus how do we keep doing business so those are also questions I mean I've been asked that over time when I was an administrator the president I remember we had a looming regional conflict you know transit strike or fires or things like that they said well can we just teach all our classes online and I always saw the academic technology technology group I said well technically we could we have the infrastructure to support that the question is whether the faculty will be able and willing to teach fully online since 95% of them teach all in the classroom and may have never taught an online course right yeah I mean one of the things I've been looking at in terms of you know my own responses as well as trying to help other people out is literally deconstructing what we're doing in the classroom you know from the perspective of this works better in an asynchronous mode anyway so just do it that way and what parts do we need to have this face-to-face communication or where those the best right and then taking those chunks and saying okay how do we you know structure the time of the class so that we're still there so this semester most of my classes is asynchronous it's online but I have twice weekly meetings with my students once broken down by groups and once as a review session where I'm just catching up and I'm you know helping them with their projects and all this sort of stuff technically that's hybrid I mean it's still got that synchronous element and I record those things so if you want to watch them after the fact you can but I've been very deliberate in deciding these things work where I need to be having a two-way conversation these things work the best here and these other things if I'm just giving them content I'll record it and put it online and watch that anytime I don't have to have an audience for that I mean socratic doesn't work if you're not there anyway right so anyway but yes that's that's the thing is that I'm I'm concerned that the we're not going to be as nimble as we need to be so but thanks for the answer great Tom thank you so much for the great question and thank you for for all of your questions and comments throughout and we have time for one last question because we're right at the end of our time and this is one that comes from our wonderful friends at Ithaca SNR in New York and this is a question about to kind of bound our issues here which is when wouldn't we use when would it not work out well good question and this is always something I try to include as part of my talks as well especially for those who are thinking about maybe doing this and most of that was clearly pre-COVID but I would also I would always say if you have no good reason to try to combine online students and face-to-face students in the same course sections if there's no strategic need even a strong perceived need from a major stakeholder that faculty, institution, students etc. then I wouldn't recommend this it is more difficult to get started and it takes a change in how the work you're doing and any time you're asking people to change there ought to be a very good reason why so if you don't have a good compelling why I would say stick with a single mode and pick whichever mode we did this because we didn't have the wealth to offer both modes at the same time we had money for one section we wanted to be able to serve both students so for us it started as really almost like a financial need in some ways and some campuses still make that decision based on financial considerations so that's what I'd say if it doesn't fit there now the other thing I'll say is some courses are not natural fit to the online environment if a course can't be taught well online then it can't probably be taught well in a pure high-flex format some sort of hybrid might work best I'm thinking classes lots of lab equipment or you know dangerous situations where you really need that face to face in person kind of thing to get the learning outcomes met but if you can meet the learning outcomes you agreed upon learning outcomes for the course for the session you know for the topic whatever you're trying to teach them online then a high-flex could be possible if you have a compelling need to make it work but you know got to start with a why like a lot of us have heard before it's very true thank you Christine for the excellent excellent question of course and thank you for the superb answer we have we're right at the edge of our session and we have covered a huge huge amount of ground which is just staggering and I wanted to bring up one more person if we can let me see if we have the questions if we can bring this up hi welcome this is Steve Gottlieb the founder and CEO of Shindig welcome Steve thank you so much Brian amazing talk to you Brian as well so I wanted to pick up on a couple themes and also as a question I'm curious when you do online instruction which is your technology preferred technology to use well when asynchronously we use a Moodle learning management system on our campus and so most of the asynchronous things I do are within that and then when we're doing live online instruction we use a Zoom platform and we do that because it's provided by the university and really I think our system so so I just wanted to mention as part of kind of in response to what you said about contingency and anti flex wasn't even a possibility and to the comments that you made and I'm curious how you reflect on that we built Shindig in part to enable all the deep interactivity that a class provides from students having all the peer to peer interactivity to self assemble and confer with one another and collaborate all that peer to peer education that's so valuable in the classroom could occur and likewise all the different dynamics that a teacher would want from cold calling to throwing open a podium to circulating around a class and and meeting with teams that all those were enabled and so I was struck by some of what you said suggesting that online was inherently less than physical and whether you ever see a day that with technology like Shindig whether in fact online could be truly competitive with physical and wouldn't have to be looked at as somewhat lesser I know it is now but I like to think where we're going is that with things like this that the real value of tech for education namely to gut the cost of residential campus life and make it accessible at scale at a lower cost and compensate educators better and give better value to students by getting rid of the need for a lot of the physical plant that that's still a promise that we should all be leaning into you want I'm sorry if that's what you interpreted my saying I don't I didn't intend to say that the online environment is in any way less than the face-to-face environment inherently there is highly effective online instruction going on and has been for many many years asynchronously as well as synchronously less so less less timeline synchronously but there's some really good online instruction going on in a synchronous world and I don't think it necessarily is less I do think it's very different in in each of these different we have you know different characteristics of the technology provide for different kinds of interactions right and so to the extent we could leverage those well take advantage of the you know the resources that we have available like in the synchronous environment same thing asynchronously a different different affordances there the way those systems are designed you can still have highly effective online or instruction in those but so I don't mean to say that what I think is doing is really giving us another way to reach students and support their learning and my perspective is I want to try to give students as much choice as possible and give them makes least some ways to build competencies in these ways because you know sometimes you know the in-person for me as a student in this content is better for me than the synchronous online or the asynchronous online sometimes the other formats are are more are better for me and sometimes it's because I can't get to the other formats and so this is the only one I have and so by default it's kind of the best choice so I think that in general you know I think we're going to see a kind of the world we're going to is when we have more and more options rather than one particular option kind of taking over the taking over the educational space you know every time we have a relatively new technology come out we hear a lot about it and then the good ones find a place to play but the old ones that still worked don't go away look at all the books behind Brian there you know that the book technology not going away I see your stack of books behind you as well not going away right although we can do online resources ebooks etc and it can be richer and the whole works you know I think I think we have similar kinds of situations in that in that aspect Brian Steve hold on just a second I want to come back to you we have we're at past the end of the hour so I have to wrap things up but Brian I wanted to first say thank you so much for being a fantastic guest I mean you seem to be the expert for the fall 2020 education technology world I mean it's just a tremendous tremendous position for you to begin thank you for making all this time for us the question I had was how can we keep up with you what's the literally what's the best way to track you through Twitter or something else well right now I'm trying to rely on things that don't require my immediate one-to-one interaction as much as possible so the resources we have around the book and I freely send out lots of other kind of design materials that I'm using in workshops and things like that so initial contact by phone or not phone you know why did I say phone email and then we usually set up often I do a lot of zoom calls with people too so that's probably the best way because there are a lot of people doing this work there are a lot of people you know who could answer questions similar to the way I have I probably have the most experience at least talking about high flex to groups and so I think I get a lot of calls that way but on your own campuses and in your own systems you may have people who are also teaching effectively this way or supporting it so I think I think that the expertise is distributed right so that's why I think I don't need to be the focal point of that necessarily well you are a fantastic point and today we have hundreds of people I'd love to bring you back maybe this fall to see how things are how things are now right yeah we'd really really like that so thank you thank you again so much now I will come back so let me just say that we have a couple of pointers for the next few weeks I wanted to mention one is that we have our next few sessions will include as you can see the point about we have fall 2020 planning in great detail next week we have experts on demographics we'll have another one talking about improving teaching another at public universities another about how to do live events well which is obviously something that we're all really concerned about and interested in but we also keep talking about this we have our conversations proceeding on social media especially Twitter so if you'd like to keep this conversation going and Twitter has already been on fire for the past hour this is F-T-T-E and if you'd like to go back to our previous recordings just go to tinyworld.com slash FTF archive we have 210 recordings that's where the recording for today will be and Steve did you want to add anything about about Shindig before we go yes I just wanted to add that I think Shindig can if anyone is interested in using Shindig for their own institution or recommending it to its institution not just for its classroom applications where I think we offer more peer-to-peer learning and more interactivity but also for these critical kind of large scale participatory town halls whether it's freshman orientation or faculty meetings or meetings for overseas students or social events all the campus-wide events that really depend on people being able to self-aggregate into small conversation groupings and or take the stage and address a large audience whether it's the Dean giving an address or student groups we're going to offer to anyone who is a Future Trends Forum attendee an additional 10% discount on Shindig which is already at a 50% discount for all educational institutions during COVID so if anyone wants to take us up on that just mention that you're a Future Trends Forum attendee and write to me Steveitschindig.com Beautiful. Thank you very much Steve and thank you again for providing this technology that makes the forum work I have to wrap things up I have to say goodbye to everybody thank you all for being participants in a fantastic conversation really diving into the main main ways we can think about teaching and learning this fall thank you all please stay in touch stay safe and we'll see you online take care bye bye