 Well, we're at the top of the hour and now that I have my awesome New Zealand sweatshirt on let's begin Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends forum. I'm absolutely delighted to see so many of you here We have an important subject to go through and I'm really glad to have all of you here with us So we can go through it together. After I'm new to the forum Welcome. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator host and chief cat herder And for the next hour, I'll be guiding you through this conversation discussion and exploration Now today's session Is the last one in a two month long string of sessions the future trends forum over its history has explored many many subjects everything from the economic sustainability of higher education to open education to women in education And along the way, we've dealt with many stresses and pressures But nothing quite like the novel coronavirus pandemic And this has been hitting colleges and universities worldwide and really reshaping our institutions and the process of post-secondary education We've been devoting episode after episode session after session to it and Based on our conversations with all of you You've said that you'd like us to continue it, but you'd also like us to continue Reaching out to other topics as well, which we'll do starting next week I just want to remind you that uh, we are still in covid mode You can see here the screenshot is from about an hour ago Looking at the global red reach of the pandemic from the johns hopkins university site You can see our total infections officially are closing out of four million people And the death toll is past a quarter of a million people already biggest outbreaks are in the united states So we've been doing a lot of things long to help this. We've posted a bunch of resources online You've got tiny world comm slash covid edu to find links to a bunch of those and I continue to write about this Today we're going to host an open discussion. Think of it as a virtual town hall For us to all share and put our heads together thinking about the impact of covid 19 on higher education And as we go today, uh, we don't have a specific agenda That is we don't have a specific course of action that we'd like to follow We want to throw this open to you so that we can hear from you We'd like to hear your stories That is what you've been experiencing as Your campus as you as a professional where you as a person as well have experienced during this extraordinary time We'd like to hear what news stories have struck you or that you think we should be paying attention to What are the greatest challenges you've been facing and what are the successes? What tips strategies would you like to share? Now helping us in this course of action is a good friend and a good friend of the program and a splendid guest in the past Maria anderson Maria is a wonderful colleague and friend. I just want to just Say more good things about her than I can for almost anybody else Maria is a futurist. So, you know that makes her a dangerous person She's also a beautiful and fantastic math professor who's been teaching math to Math phobes and people who struggle with it for years and years On top of that, she's a founder of a company called course tune So she's a wonderful wonderful mix of people and she has a great sense of humor Maria, I'm so glad you can co-host with us today. Thank you for coming. Thanks, Brian. I'm happy to be here Well, tell us first of all, where are you coming from today? Where are you at your home base? I'm in salt lake Had a beautiful day off yesterday and went into the uenta mountains and did some hiking saw three people So there is some some spaced social distance, especially on weekdays the trails are much more crowded on the weekend Oh, I imagine I imagine And how are you doing? Uh doing okay, you know, it's it's been a really interesting few months for everybody. Um, I Uh, I already teach my classes with quite a bit of remote teaching So I teach as an adjunct for west minister college and I Education classes and math classes and I was teaching a teaching with technology class ironically and When I'm out of town for a conference or business meeting I teach them remotely and likewise If we're in town and the student can't make it to campus for some reason They just attend class remotely using zoom so we already had all that set up I already had all assignments set up to be submitted digitally You know and we were well used to having small group sessions remotely You know if somebody was coming in from away They would just you know be on a computer with a group that had a computer in front of them, right? So like it was interesting because as the whole world kind of Went into craziness about teaching remotely my students actually said to me in our first Remote truly remote session, which was just you know normal class for us Really? Yeah, this was the only class that I figured would be exactly the same as it was before all this happened and they were right We made Pretty much the only adjustment we made was that the test that I would have proctored in first and I proctored through zoom and that's it so um Yeah, that was So so that was interesting to watch because for me that's kind of always been I think there's so much you can learn from remote teaching that helps students all the time, right? And helps professors all the time to to keep a closer eye on what's going on. So I I'm glad to see everybody You know adapting to these things and learning some new things and learning some new tricks that are going to be so helpful for student success when we Get back to normal, which may at this point not be till like 2022 or something. I don't know um But then you know, I also run a company and so, you know, we had certainly had a bit of a tumultuous month With every school basically putting all payments on hold As they tried to figure out what was happening to them and Yeah, I mean, but we we have pretty smart fiscal policies So we had a cushion we could rely on and you know, we were able to apply for the government support and um You know, so we've just been trying to do our best even though our our Our company doesn't focus so much on faculty development We've just been putting out faculty development help and you know things that we can do to try to help our clients You know weather this storm and get to the other side of it and be ready to start thinking about ironically quality curriculum design, right? And uh, and we are kind of seeing that uptick again and people It's saying okay, we think we might need to focus on quality now Which is good, right? Which is great for everybody. Which is great for everybody. Yeah, especially students Well, then, you know, you've been on the program often enough both as a participant as a guest to know that I like to ask people what they're gonna be working on for the next year And uh, I think you just told me what you're gonna be working on for the next year Yeah, I think we're gonna um, we've been talking about The possibility of trying to get out some systems for uh helping people to Re-navigate the way they Um approach their face-to-face classes Certainly, I think I always think that having a solid backbone of curriculum design Makes it easier to teach everything and easier to pivot on a dime when you need to you if you know what's in your classes if you know How every learning objective is tied to Learning activities and assessment activities Makes it much easier to you know, pull up that design and say all right. Where do I need to make adjustments given what happened this week, right? um Without that kind of underlying backbone of knowing what's there and How do you currently design that curriculum? I I think it's more difficult and I think you know one of the things that higher ed has always been Particularly, I don't know whether the right phrase here is good at or bad at that um faculty who you know Fairly have no actual experience in education but go on to be teachers, right? Um, they uh They often you know teach on the fly right because they don't have curriculum background They don't have curriculum design experience instructional design experience And so when you teach in person you can get away with you know, like teaching on the fly I mean you can get away with it and that especially if you have a charismatic personality if you're the right Gender and ethnicity like your students will forgive most of the kind of crappy things you do in the classroom But when you're teaching online, you don't really have those same So same fallbacks As you do teaching on the fly in the classroom, you have to you You have to design experiences if you want to have students have aha moments You have to design that experience instead of hoping to see it in the classroom, right? and changing, you know As as the semester progresses so i'm hoping to see a lot more A lot more quality design and faculty development Not just around using technology but around actual design of learning and design of assessment I think this is an opportunity for all of higher ed to kind of have their Uh for lack of a better phrase there come to jesus moment on Hey, assessment can be more than tests. There's all sorts of variety of assessment We can use it really should depend on what the learning objective is and how deeply it needs to be learned in the world That we live in today with the information we have access to today There's a variety of ways that students can learn things They don't necessarily have to follow your prescribed path of learning to get there You probably shouldn't be failing them if they get there You know, I think there's just so much that can happen as a result of this. I know that People when they teach online for the first time like in a really well designed online class that they've built All of those aha moments that they themselves have come back to their face-to-face classes like Oh, I should be doing this in my face-to-face classes too. This is really awesome, right? So I think higher ed is like fairly criticized For you know, not moving very quickly, but I think we've all had a semester where everybody moved a lot quicker Then they thought was possible And maybe that's the only way we really could have kind of Given ourselves a fast boot into the future and it was painful and everybody's exhausted right now that I know in higher ed and everybody is like Ready to take a couple weeks off and that's about all they're going to get before they have to start planning for the next term I have so many questions So many things to ask you and this before I do that. Let me remind everybody here all 61 of you Hello That this is a place for you to ask your questions and to raise your thoughts. So again, just just scroll down to the raised hand button to join us on stage or just click the question mark if you like type in a question or comment My one to ask the there's so many things you said they're just brilliant. I just want to I just want to repeat You know, there's the possibility of all of us Striving hard to improve the quality of online education There's the fact that we are living in a kind of accelerant moment You know higher ed. It's just been shoved into the future very very hard and very very fast And that that may let us make up for some of the weaknesses and in our operations. Do you think we're going to see a mass hiring of instructional technologists and educational technologists and instructional designers over the summer Or do you think campuses are right now so shell shocked and so financially stressed that they're basically going to keep The staff they have and work them even harder Well, like everything else in higher ed. It depends I think one constraint here is that I don't think that Let's say higher ed decided to hire 3,000 new instructional designers tomorrow I'm not sure there are 3,000 new instructional designers higher, right? So I think that's one issue I think um people are discovering they have some budget left for this last academic year And um, I know that um several colleagues have seen just an uptick in the desire to have professional development for faculty right now Like let's get faculty now that we've weathered the initial panic of this Let's get some real professional development to faculty because that ultimately Is going to do a lot more good than hiring one more instructional designer, right? If all the faculty level up that helps everybody, right? So um things like professional development for um and and certainly Every school provided as much as they could Right as this crisis was happening, right? But that was panic mode professional development And now there's time for some more kind of thoughtful I'm planning ahead. What can I do to restructure my course like Uh, that isn't just the keep your head above water It's the you know, like hey, I'd like to be waist deep in this water instead, right? And so um, and I do think that there's Uh, you know some really good stuff that that can be provided for for faculty to help That has been around for a long time, right? But now there's like a true desire to Um to reach out and embrace that in a way that we didn't have before I do think Instructional designers are in high demand Um, and are going to continue to be in high demand. I think they're all working really long hours and school should really think about, you know In crisis mode and in the hours that these folks are being asked to work What are you doing to help that? Are you providing? Yeah Something you know if it's not pay. Is it child care? Is it you know, like these these these folks are really taking the the brunt of this and to any school out there who has Is also in the midst of moving their LMS during this. I'm so sorry For their ERP system for their ERP system or like of all the semesters This was one to be doing that. Well, I just I said this before several weeks ago. Actually, um I just want to just give a shout out to the structural designers Academic technologists who have been working their brains out for the past few months and they get zero publicity for this John O'Brien at edu cause review just did a really really great tribute to them Because you're not going to see them talked about in in less location So that's one of the reasons I wanted to focus on that question But before Maria, I have other questions Folks have just shared theirs with me and I want to just put a couple of these up here for us to bounce around Robert McGuire asks the idea of campus-based courses improving after this experience interesting Can you say more? Will you expect novice online teachers to take back to their classrooms later by rubber? I assume but later you mean once face-to-face instruction Let me just give you a really simple example So a lot of instructors only use a learning management system to post their syllabus and put in final grades because that's all they're required to do But you can certainly use a learning management system as a drop box for assignments And you can have students turn in assignments that way Which means that a student like if you're on a traditional face-to-face You know offering with very little learning management system involved You expect students to show up physically in person and hand you their assignments, right? Which means that if a student misses class because of a doctor's appointment a sick kid Or you know what the bus was late whatever they can't physically hand you that assignment And if they can't make your office hours, they can't hand it to you there And if you weren't able to get to camp but if you are now used to accepting those assignments digitally A student can turn it in even if they were not able to get to campus, right? And so some of these like really simple things Bleeding backwards to a face-to-face class Give so much more equity to students who may have trickier schedules than others That that ability to or that ability for me to say yeah I will let you turn this assignment in late get it to me tomorrow. They can turn it online, right? And and so like teaching students like I teach my students how to use a scanning app on the phone, right? From day one they learn how to scan a handwritten assignment and submit it to me Right, which is often something you need to do in a math or science class like with a lot of graphs and diagrams And and so they know they can do that for anything like for any of their classes once you teach it to them Right as long as the teacher will accept a digital submission, right? And on top of that I think it comes down to this realization that When you teach online you start to realize that That in person kind of lecture time that you have Not it's not actually that like there's a lot of good done by doing this online instead because Actually, there was just an article in the New York Times. I read today from a student who was a New York, right? She said I am learning more in this remote teaching time than I learn in the classroom because in the classroom Students are disrupting the classroom all the time. It's distraction after distraction. We don't get through the same material I don't have time to ask questions. Even when I go to help sessions There's not enough, you know teachers to do the help and during that this time I can watch the video and I can stop it and rewind it and watch the parts I don't understand again and there's no distraction from the other students You know creating chaos in the classroom And so you start to have these realizations when you teach online for the first time like they Oh, like this is really helpful for students to be able to Rewind and rewatch and if I'm an English language learner I can read the captions and that's really helpful because now I can tie this very You know specific language to the discipline that I'm reading With the way you say it which I don't get in the classroom, right? and so teachers start to have these Aha moments of their own about what Good instructional design actually looks like and as soon as you have that realization that a video online Might actually be a better way to get that information than A professor teaching it over and over in the classroom that opens up the classroom for more active learning practices, right? So we see tons of this like bleed back From a professor truly learning how to teach online well and then taking it Back into the classroom and reworking everything they do in the classroom I say within about if an instructor truly goes through And learns how to teach a high quality online class I would say within two or three years. They're face-to-face classes look very different than they used to The fantastic response Maria. I'm just tweeting out the article if you haven't seen it. It's uh By a middle schooler named Veronique mince And it's tied why i'm learning more with distance learning than I do in school. Yeah and Just before I say more there was a quick comment that came I just wanted to share this This is from Kelly Walsh college of west gestures is observation We're all seeming to learn how to finally go paperless for the most part. I hope we can sustain that going forward Definitely definitely and we're learning how to deliver things without I mean students don't often have printers at home. So we're all having to make that adjustment to like Right, you know, no, they can't just come to campus and print something Uh, thank you. We do have to learn it at home In fact, uh, Kelly wanted to join us on stage Kelly. Uh, would you like to add to that? Sure? How you guys doing? Good nice to see you. Yeah, likewise and nice to uh to kind of virtually meet Maria Um, I guess I had to chime in when you were saying rewind rewatch and the use of a video Um, you know, brian knows I've been a big advocate of the flipped classroom for many years and um You were just really hitting some of those key words and it's so true for for The potential for instructors to begin to understand the power of short videos and what they can do And then you hit on the other key thing freeing up class time to use it in a more active learning Scenario, so uh, it's going to be really interesting coming out of this to see how How we embrace blended further and and the flip as well Yeah, I think what we're moving into is Uh, kind of a more dynamic way of designing our courses And just being you know, whether we call it flexible teaching remote I mean flexible is I think kind of what we're all heading into this wall Unless your campus has already made a decision that like you're fully online Just plan on it being flexible teaching like there's no real other option here Because even if you have to go to campus and teach your classes in person You will have students who are still in quarantine somewhere, right? And um, and that's not going to go away And it's just going to keep coming and going So you're going to be teaching students who are remote this fall Even if you're not remote this fall and you know, you may find that your own health Or somebody in your family needs to be quarantined and even if you're healthy You're in quarantine right and then you're teaching your class remotely So I think we're all going into the fall with this idea that that our design needs to be Really flexible and uh, accommodate all of these possibilities and It's completely doable. This I mean like I was saying at the beginning of this This was already the way I taught my classes like maximum flexibility for everybody for me and for the students like However, you can come to class. However, you can participate Whether it's you're there in person or you watch a video class afterwards Sure Like my job is to make sure that you learn what you're supposed to learn That's it Yeah, and you know to add to what you're saying, you know and put a fine point on it um We may be faced with How do we teach a class where some of the students do want to come in because they want to be You know, we're hearing that we're not hearing a ton of it, but certainly hearing some students saying listen I really don't like this. I want to be in front of my teacher Teach that class to that student and teach the remote students and To some extent do it synchronously synchronously because There's something to be said particularly for you know, the traditional day student wanting out those time slots Really interesting twist on that so I got a math for elementary teachers class this last school year uh, both semesters And um, it's a very hands-on class. We do a lot with manipulatives and group and partners and and things like that and so Uh, my students would when I was out of town and teaching remotely They would actually show up in the classroom One of them would pull up the zoom session on the instructor computer and project it to the wall And I would teach them with them all in person and me remote Yeah, and it was us. We did some similar last Came up incidentally. Yeah, and they had all the manipulatives and things they needed for the group activities And you know, they would pipe up if somebody was still oh, we need another minute one second We're still working on this, you know, and I could see kind of like the classroom You know, if one of them would point their computer at the classroom, then I could see that right There's a lot we can do with this like I think that a lot of schools and a lot of teachers are just starting to scratch the surface of possibilities But I think there's such great possibilities. I'm so excited to see where we are a year from now in education. I think if we can all try to be optimistic and remind ourselves that in education, we don't tend to do things unless there is a Uh, a high state what I call a high stakes deadline Like it will be super embarrassed because it doesn't happen. Then suddenly we write the paper We get the presentation done. We write the syllabus like Tends to happen for most of us at the last possible minute Everybody just learned technology because they had to Yeah, it's quite Really interesting for I just want to share a quick thought but then I I wanted to ask a question for both of you because you're you both be great at this um, the quick thought is that um Last year we had as guests the folks who studied the council of independent colleges Um, really interesting online education program Which was one where they were doing upper level humanities seminars team taught or taught across up to a dozen campuses in the us And one of the interesting side effects they found was the faculty who taught those classes Usually teaching online for the first time Found that when they went back to their face-to-face classes that had completely revitalized their face-to-face teaching That they found that in literary critical terms. It was de-familiarized They have things that they had assumed or now open questions And they started applying things either directly or directly the question I want to put to both of you Um, and then I want to get to the more of the questions because the question is piling up, which is great Is we're talking about optimism. We're talking about, you know positive things that could come from this How do we talk about that and at the same time? not sound Course or callous because we have so much suffering right now I mean at all levels emotional physical physical suffering All right, I mean, I've been hearing from some people who say we shouldn't talk about Optimism we shouldn't be talking about silver linings now. This is not the time to do that And I I disagree with it but I keep hearing that and I'm wondering what you two would say to that charge I'll let kelly go first. He has something he wants to say. Thank you, maria. Um, you know, I think I think it's necessary. I think we need to they belong together, right? These are very challenging situations And uh, people are suffering all across the spectrum. I mean Uh, we teach I teach in westchester of my colleges in new york just outside of the city Um, a third of our students have lost their jobs Uh, 10 of them have lost family members. I mean, it is they're devastated Um, and we need to accept that realize it and we need to look for opportunities to shore everybody up By accepting that reality not being afraid to hide behind it look for this to be, you know, I mean if If if improvements can't come out of challenges and change and challenging times like this then I I mean they they have to and it's human nature. Um, so just you know, just a few thoughts Thank you. I actually just looked at the definition of silver lining and it is a consoling or hopeful prospect I mean, there's nothing wrong with with looking for silver linings in crises I think it's very natural to look for silver linings in crises because otherwise You don't have anything hopeful to look towards, right? I think for faculty and instructional designers and academic staff who are so stressed right now It's good for them to see that something they're learning right now is going to be valuable in the future That it's not just this sunk lost time that they're pouring into You know this new method of teaching that doesn't have any useful effects post COVID, right? It does have a lot of useful effects post COVID You will be able to continue to use these strategies and for all the students who are going through You know job losses and family members who are sick and things like that Us being more flexible institutions at the end of this benefits all of them because let's say you sign up for fall classes And you start to work and then you finally get a new job and it conflicts with some of your classes Well, if I can offer you a recording of the classes you would be attending doesn't that help those students I mean, isn't that going to benefit all of them when things start to come back online? If they have to go home and take care of a sick family member Isn't the ability to be flexible going to help them? I mean, this is a huge huge outcome for higher ed The ability to stop pretending that education is all about the actual time somebody spends in a seat in a classroom And to reframe it around it being more around What are the students supposed to be learning and Did they learn it? I mean, I think I think we For silver linings in crisis and to not look for changes in policies that will help us the next time around Would be idiotic Thank you. Thank you. I knew I could count on both of you Also, I just want to give you this like uh I can't remember the right phrase, but you'll tell me once I said I think we've all been going through a reality show called academic survivor And with every like week that goes by like Yeah, there's new lockdown rules. There's new there's new technology problems like, you know, we had the week of Zoom conferences being bombed. That was like the reality episode of that week, right? Where we all figured out how to put passwords on meetings and how to not share our links publicly and You know and every week, you know, like if you if you make it through another week You're like on to the next episode. So I think we're all to the point now where we can be like Whoo We're close to or we're there, right? We survived academic survivor season one and this summer we go into academic survivor season two And then we're on to uh murder hornets Kelly, I just want to say it's nice to see you at home Um, you've you've been a frequent guest and a video participant and that's just I was thinking is that really Kelly? Because I didn't recognize you from your uh from your uh, your office. Thank you My music studio Looking good Okay, we have a whole stack of questions and I'm just going to start bringing these up And friends if you're new to the forum, you saw how easy it was to pull up Kelly and you see how easy it is to uh Flow questions. So let me just bring up a few of these and give you a chance Again maria to to grapple them and if everybody else to pounds too Tom hams a great friend of the program asks has have we finally ruled the artificial dichotomy between online and in-person classes? No, because I I think that there isn't an artificial dichotomy an online class is very different than an in-person class because of the design of The assessments and the design of the learning, right? I mean, we we can't imagine that these two things aren't actually different They should be designed differently. I think that what we're removing Is this barrier around? What is course but that there should actually be a design for courses, right? Uh, that we're starting to acknowledge that it is not actually the time in the seats That matters, but I don't want to pretend that an in-person course is the same as an online course They should be designed differently. They are To design an asynchronous experience where people Still experience some transformation around their education and still have aha moments in their education Is much harder to do than when you can like kind of move around a classroom and in real time Poke at students knowledge of things, right? And so I do think Yeah, so yes and no I guess Tom it's a really good question and maria that's that I'd love the way you unpeeled that That's that's really good. Let's hear it for design More questions. We have one from patrick cox at sage Who says In reporting on webinars using kovat during kovat. I've never heard anyone talk about online universities I know one seeing increased enrollment for fall 2020. No any trends in that sector of higher ed So I i'm not familiar with like trends at all schools. I have heard from one school That's quite large that they are expecting Increases in enrollments because they have a more flexible option for students I think we're going to see that the expensive online options take a hit Because everybody's a little worried about their economic circumstances, but I think um And I think that for those students who are Really wanted the traditional college experience We might see them stepping out for a year. They may have Unfortunately thought that what they got in their sudden online remote experience is what online education is And it's not really So I think the more traditional age students will pull out but those more traditional age students aren't the ones who typically do an online education experience so I think for expensive schools, they're going to see a drop It's just my gut feeling expensive schools are going to see a drop in enrollment less expensive schools The ones that have a pretty fair tuition rate community colleges with online programs four-year schools with state schools with online programs Uh confidence some of the competency-based institutions that have affordable degree programs those those I think might see a bump especially if you know Financial aid comes through grants come through the cares act stuff might help with some of that We have a couple of strategic questions along those lines, but first I just want to share quickly uh rosemary ren Thought the point is to the silver lining for learning dot org has a webinar discussion on this very topic on saturday So thank you rosemary. Um, I tweeted that out as well but on the strategic question, uh, peter shea at um, university albany asks this very challenging question We're seeing estimates that social distancing for classrooms results in a 60 to 70 percent reduction in seats Our others grappling with that I think that there are lots of schools grappling with this especially because if you're worried about lower enrollments And you start doing any thinking about what it takes to disinfect a classroom Uh, you start realizing that your only option during a crisis like this might be to go online Because you can't afford what it would take to keep classrooms clean like the classroom. I teach it. Uh I think the trash gets emptied once a week and the classroom gets disinfected about once a semester honestly Now think about the fact that that classroom turns over every one to two hours with a complete new set of students Even if it's only 50 of the number of students Doesn't everything still need to be cleaned between students sitting at those desks Like you have to find all that cleaning equipment which is scarce right now You have to pay for the staff to do the cleaning. You might need more space between classes to do the cleaning Like i'm not sure it really makes a lot of sense to attempt to do more than have maybe a couple of scheduled meetings During the semester and if your students are coming from all over the country, that doesn't even make sense anymore right because That's just not realistic. So I think what schools are maybe having to to do is um really convince people that uh Their online offerings can be as high quality as their face-to-face offerings in the fall and that they're they're doing things to Get ready for that. You just anticipated peter's follow-up question. Okay, let's have it Uh So how do we bring a thousand plus courses online between now and august? And I you have to get your faculty trained Okay, so training the faculty Yeah, I don't see another way to do it You can't possibly hire enough instructional designers to get this done Your faculty have to be ready and I think you have to embrace some remote learning As a part of that some synchronous remote learning as a part of that There is no way to get all online courses designed and I don't think that your traditional students want that My students at Westminster Love having our in-person sessions. They are happy to be on video with each other They love being broken into small groups to talk to each other Like and they can't always all make those sessions sometimes they don't have good internet sometimes But they can watch them later, right? And so I think that bringing online those courses is making sure that the faculty have a good professional development Discipline specific if possible because teaching a Spanish course online Berks is teaching a Humanities course online versus teaching a physics course online How we would design those well is completely different because they really have a different Cadence and pace to those courses, right? So if you can get your faculty access to some High-quality professional development from an expert in that field about how to teach remotely how to teach online That's going to be the best thing you can do like i'm running some Saturday workshops right now for STEM folks And like we come together for a Saturday and we hold sessions like like it's a workshop Like you went somewhere and did a workshop, right? but we have breaks between the zoom sessions so nobody gets too burnt out and And we spend an intensive day like learning all of these different possible strategies With a four-week follow-up where once a week we meet and do a q&a about like what people are thinking what they're trying like You know what their new? Questions that have popped to the surface, right? And so that for STEM faculty Is is really what they need they need to talk to somebody who's done their subjects online to figure it out That's the fastest way you can get to scale here And so I think it's just like deciding how many different pockets you have that need to be trained. Is it like you know languages technical fields softer skill fields Performing fields, you know like and then find some professional about me you can get all your faculty into and just be kind of that the hardest thing I think is going to be getting faculty to To step up and do training But I think people are worried enough about being embarrassed by What happens in the fall that again? This is kind of that once in a lifetime opportunity where Everybody might show up They can't mandate it at least you can kind of put social pressure on it And get them what they need to be successful These are our faculty are smart people if you give if you can get them the resources They need to do a successful job and to really plan for A successful offering this fall with a variety of activities and It experiences I think that that you can be successful You've got to get them the training and you got to convince the students It will be different in the fall than it was this term It'll be different and better We have a good way. I assume it can only be different in a good way at this point There's the bar is set and the bar is not super high there's um One Kelly Morrison at AP us also raised I did outsourcing You know hiring a team like iDesign for example. Yeah But I so thank you Kelly. Um, so we may see more of that So this might be a good time for that kind of uh work to be done But I also think that if every school out there goes out and tries to hire a team That that capacity is going to go away pretty fast, too There's only so many instructional designers out there and so many People who have this expertise, you know tapping I would like to say that tapping local instructors at schools like tapping your own Experts to teach the rest of the department would be great But I almost wonder if you'd be better off finding a sister school and swapping experts And that's because there's this kind of like you can't be a prophet in your own land phenomenon Many of us experience which is that Your own department may not want to hear what you have to say But they're willing to listen to what somebody at a different school has to say Right so finding like a sister college where you can be like Can your expert on teaching business online talk to my business faculty and my expert on teaching business online We'll talk to your business faculty and everybody will feel like they got something new And like it's it's it's it's an even trade, right? Um So to consider something like that It really depends on the culture of your college and the culture of the department and only you know What those things are right, but there are some creative solutions. I think out there to do this Great that's great. I we have a whole bunch of questions about teaching with technology They're they're more tactical than strategic here And I I want to bring a few of these up and I don't think we can get to all There's so many of us do it again friends We'll have to do this again and and also I can blog the questions that we don't get to We have a question from john stites Who so he's preparing to teach this fall on site allegedly a class He's already talked twice online. Have you found any tools or strategies that are either on site or online? But not both So just one and not the other Um I think there are some that you do online that would be really boring to do on site You know take to have students go through and watch a video on site would seem a little weird, right? People do that People yeah, yeah Um I so I think like some of the digital's You know, like there's some really great digital tools where students read and answer formative questions as they read, right? That'd be a really weird thing to do on site. I think um Yeah, I don't know like I can do most things I would do on site online Like I don't know that I could think of something that Hmm, I still can't I was trying to think of something that I couldn't do online at this point and I'm not really coming up with anything Um All right, that's okay. We john that's Students practice giving presentations online with each other. I just put them in in a small group Small groups of size two and they take turns presenting to each other for practice like there you go It's actually easier than doing it in person because they don't all hear the other groups and get distracted by it So if you're all in the same room, yeah, I don't know I think it's pretty easy to do things online, but I've been doing it for a long time and so I think some of it's like You need people to get comfortable with that and you know, one of the things I do in saturday workshops is like Let people practice with things I feel comfortable with it. So they have an experience Where they're the student doing all this active stuff online and starting to feel comfortable with like, oh I know how this works. I know how this feels from the student side like I feel this yeah a related question from uh, ruben platedura who's been a great guest in the past We're going to bring him back About video um, and he he points out that Video is not new. We've been we've known about this work starting all the way back in the 1970s So question is how do we introduce all the faculty to this work? Is it more of that uh pure instruction that you're talking about having faculty teach each other and swapping instructional designers I think some of it honestly has to do with um Understanding a little bit more about how learning really happens, uh, which sometimes just happens from teaching online, right? um That learning happens when you engage with that video not just because you watched it So learning happens when you like try to do a problem set and you can't figure out a problem So what do you do you go watch the lesson on the problem to figure out what you don't know, right? It's very rarely. I'm going to sit down and watch videos and then I will go do the assignment right in the same way It's not I will sit down and read the textbook and then go take the uh Multiple choice quiz that I can take five times. No, they go take the multiple choice quiz first And if they don't know something they go back and look at this tiny section of the textbook, right? So I think um More and learning has always happened that way when people are sitting in classrooms To assume they've been paying attention to the professor this whole time like this the last 50 years It's kind of a farce, right? Are some of them paying attention? Yes Many of them don't have the attention span to to to pay attention for an entire class. They're daydreaming now They're on their phones or their computers, right? They're watching what the people next to them are doing in class like There's all sorts of ways. They're not paying attention in person and so Um I don't remember what the question was now, but About teaching um teaching faculty how to use video again, it's such a the technical part, you know, we you know, that's important But also that we we've been doing this. We've been thinking about this And there are a ton of fantastic video collections out there already, right? So Depending on the field and what you want to say there are plenty of fantastic options for You know pulling in content from somebody else and supplementing it with a little bit of your own for like what the discussion is actually about or what the um or bringing it into modern times or Are things like that like I would have loved to watch the the Feynman physics lectures when I took physics Like that would have been a really cool thing to do You know and the principle those basic principles of physics haven't changed much and you know To watch it from somebody who was truly a master at teaching it would have been fun We have a question that's kind of the mirror opposite of that and I wanted I want to flash this up This is from mark rush uh, Washington and lee um And he says the thread of class recording is being taken out of context means that impromptu aspects of the live class may disappear No more jokes for example I wonder about that. I mean So I think that there are um A couple things about this. So I don't think that we should take um Live classes and turn them into the permanent online archive for something I think that if you're going to make permanent online videos that you need to actually kind of design those plan them and Record them in a separate uh environment From a live class They just turn out a little bit better that way and you don't have to worry about privacy concerns with students answering questions or things like that But with the classes the classes that you record live There's a couple possibilities. I think you know sometimes the If I know that one student can't make a live session I just send the one student that link if it wasn't something that was like I'm actually teaching something in this session If I'm going to actually teach something in the session I'm probably going to record a video on it for a permanent online experience, right? if it's us discussing things quite honestly Like 50 of my class time is the students working in small groups I'm not saying anything that recording is gets kind of boring if you actually want to watch it and um, I think that maybe we should have already been thinking about If you wouldn't want somebody to see this in a video should you be saying it in class every student's got a cell phone Every student's got a video recorder on that cell phone Even if they're not holding it up, you don't know that they're not recording it at their desk So if it's something that you wouldn't want repeated to another faculty member a news show something like that then I don't know that you should be saying it in class or You should record it in a video that you designed so you can say it exactly the way you want to say it So that's no question what the context is it can't be misinterpreted You can point to the exact source if it comes into question, right? Like I think that's actually a safer way to go I've been meaning to do that for some of my some of the lectures I have to keep giving um Speaking of which we have a fan note here From cali morrison. She says, you know, there are all kinds of tools like, um course tune Good for you, I think Have you have you heard of this thing called course two? But we We are almost at the at the end of time. So we've got um, we have one, uh one last question Which is from the industry mckinnon at the university of wisconsin stout And she asks well lab activities like chemistry lab and fieldwork. How do we teach these online? Yeah, so I have a ton of ideas about this. Um, one of the things I think faculty can do so like I've taken every kind of lab biology chemistry physics engineering And uh, one of the things that's interesting about a lot of these labs is they're kind of cookbooks If they're not designed very well and that that's kind of our default in academia is I will hand you a lab to do You perform the lab and do the calculations. We call it a lab, right? But interestingly, I think students are asked often enough. Why do we do each step of this lab like What if I have several choices here? Which choice would be the right one to take at this step in the lab, right? We have to monitor and watch the labs instead, right? That's what we do with our time in lab is make sure nobody blows anything up and make sure everything is safe and Well, you could record A lab, right? You could record all the different individual steps of labs with a place to ask questions about why Steps are happening and what like why you could do them live You could do them in individual pieces with responses to the parts And then, you know, if you need them to analyze data You can just give every student a set of data that's their data for the end of the lab Right? It might be good data. It might be somewhat questionable data They should know what to do with it. Either way, right? Don't grade them on the quality of the data because you gave them the data Grade them on the quality of the analysis of the data, right? So there's really two things there. There's Why do we set up experiments the way we set them up? What is the scientific method? What is Uh, you know, how do we do that? I I fear we don't actually do enough of that in lab classes We focus so much on getting the good data and analyzing it. We kind of skip that initial part So again, like our silver lining is maybe this is the opportunity to finally address that Because we don't have to worry about the safety of 30 or 50 students in the lab setting We can actually focus on why we do things like And how we design experiments and what would happen in this experiment if you did this instead of this Because you don't have to worry that they're going to actually do it You just have to find out if they know what would happen if they changed the experiment at that moment, right? In a sense what you're asking for is you're asking for people to talk around the hands-on work And to explore the intellectual framework around it Yeah, and certainly every discipline has some specific tools where you can have somebody do that recipe based experiment But I actually think it's better if we focus on the scientific method of the the process And the can I do an analysis of the process and so much the time we grade them on the correct data I'm actually a little more concerned right now whether students can do a correct analysis saying You know what this data is no good. I would rerun the experiment Like right there. They never get that because they're so afraid their outcomes are going to be bad, right? But if bad outcomes happen in the real world, we should know what to do with them Well good outcomes happen When you folks ask fantastic questions and we have brilliant people like yourself when you're answering them We're we're just past the end of the hour. So we need to stop. I hate to say it, but Maria first of all Well, we're gonna haul you back. Don't worry. That's how we're like we've got tasers lined up to bring you back What um, uh, is the best way to keep up with you uh, business in this girl on twitter Yeah, I see business girl if you have any faculty who are interested in the stem workshops We're doing um, they're all you can sign up for them through all me education And if you're starting to think you want to do some like higher quality curriculum design work Um, we can handle some of the load of bringing in all your data and and you know helping you really move forward on that With course tune so if you haven't seen course tune Come come by the website and sign up for a demo and we'll show it to you and tell you how we can help you Be ahead of this for our schools who already were using course tune. I think they were a bit ahead of this crisis They knew a lot more about their curriculum than everybody else The course tune edge Maria, thank you so much. You're welcome much. We're gonna bring you back Um, but don't go away friends. I need to announce some stuff for the next couple of weeks And I I want to thank you all for the terrific barrage of questions I'm going to save these so that we can cling to Maria when she comes back um I just want to say that uh looking forward uh over the next few weeks We have a whole series of guests lined up And they're going to be talking about a wide range of subjects. Um, we have uh, sonia ardoin is going to be talking about student experience Uh, Jonathan Rothwell is going to be talking about inequality and professions We have james lang is going to be talking about small teaching online And we have a few more on top of that. So the next month is already being booked up Uh, if you have other topics or if you have other people that you'd like me to invite, please reach out to me Um, I'm always grateful grateful to hear that if you want to keep talking about these subjects Like how to teach with video how to teach online how to bring A thousand plus classes online to hurry we have all kinds of ways of talking about between forum sessions So you can tweet at us at the ftte use that hashtag or tweet at me, uh, bryan alexander We have groups on facebook groups on linkedin. We have a slack channel We'll be delighted to hear from you And in the meantime, if you'd like to go back and look at the 200 Uh recordings give me 201 tonight. Um, please just head to that URL. The archive is there waiting for you Um, and in the meantime, um, we look forward to seeing you next week I hope you're all well. I know you're all brilliant. Please stay safe. We'll talk to you soon Bye. Bye