 Greetings. This is an unusual session of the Future Transform. We had to reschedule a guest, so at the last minute decided to improvise a session on the subject of how to best teach online. And so rather than having one guest anchor the discussion, we instead just basically let the conversation flow organically from within the Future Transform community. So what you'll see in this recording first is a really short intro before the program began. I put the topic to the community and asked what they'd like. And eventually some of them surfaced some really good topics, so we have that. And then a few minutes later, we begin. So this is just a quick intro to let you know that this Future Transform session is a little bit different. Love to hear what you think in the notes. Thanks. Bye-bye. So I'm asking people if they would like us to either have a session or to hold a session of free session about the topic itself, which is teaching well online. And the author, Ehrman, just gave us one start for the latter. And now we hoag from Southwestern University in Texas where it's a little bit warmer than it is here. Just she had an observation from a discussion. I was just wondering if you could share that. Now? Oh, please go ahead. Just see if it runs. I'm not used to being on stage. You're great. Great idea. Look at this. We had a diversity and belonging session yesterday for anybody that wanted to attend on campus. I was primarily aimed for the teaching space and for our students and for students of color or marginalized. And one of the things that stuck out to me that I had not thought about was the perception is or can be of students of color. Having a camera on can be perceived by them as being watched in a much more stronger context than a white students. And that struck me. And I asked for some information and follow up at the end. And it's a real thing, the person presenting it, presenting the session. She shared her own experiences of those type of feelings. And I just thought it was an interesting thing when the discussion about students need to have that type of, the students have that cameras on. We need to provide them flexibility. And I just thought of this as another thing to consider, particularly being flexible, whether they leave my honor off. So it was just an observation. And I just wanted to share that. Maybe it's not new, but I just want to, it struck me. Thank you so much. That's a great, great point. We're about one minute from starting the event itself. Can I, can I just put that in the list of things to talk about? It's your thing. Well, it's, it's your idea that you brought to us. Thank you very much. Okay, bye. Welcome to the stage. Friends, we'll start in about 30 seconds. Steve, can I keep you on for a minute? Sure. If you're just joining us. So folks like Andrew, Kim, Kate, Lorna, Liz, Tom, Eric, another Tom, Christina, Kenneth, Nessa, Gloria, Emma. We are right now just without our guests. Our guests had to cancel just a few minutes ago. So I was putting to the committee a choice. Should cancel today's session flat out or instead have a discussion about what our guest was going to address, which is teaching. And the past few minutes to Melanie Hogue and each put forth two ideas, two things to talk about how universities support online and what they can do about it. And is the people of color may feel surveyed experience. So I would love your thoughts. I'm going to have to introduce the program itself in the usual fashion. But if you would like to keep us going this next hour, speaking of teaching well online thoughts either in the text chat, put the raise hand button and I'll show you how to do that. David, thank you for appreciate that. That's a good question. Very good question. Well, here, let me, as people come in, let me do our normal introduction so people understand a bit more about the program and so forth. Hey, Brian. Hello, Tom. Yeah, since I was probably one of the early instigators and pushing Professor Laurel into this a little bit. We had some discussion about some of her ideas and how they impact what we're trying to do right now. I mean, I've been working on some stuff myself around adapting her ideas for the current circumstances, you know, the conversational frameworks in particular. And obviously we were doing some work with Arizona State on the tool sets and also connecting that up as well. So I'm happy to contribute there. Brilliant. That's a great idea. I have just put you down on the list. We will come back to you. Okay. Thank you, Tom. I will step off for a moment. Let's see what you offer right now, just to introduce people. Because it is the top of the hour and I would like to begin. And for those who have not been to the Future Transform before, or those who haven't been here for a while, let me introduce it and let me welcome you all. Again, my name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Future Transform creator. I'm its host. I'm its cat herder. And for the next hour, it looks like we're going to be exploring how we can teach well online, both in terms of what practices enabled that to happen, as well as how institutions can support them. About 15 minutes ago, I put to all of you the question, should we cancel today's session? Or should we have a discussion about how to teach well online? And enough people suggested versions of ladder. I think we can do that. So what I'd like to do is improvise, and we can always happy to improvise here in the Future Transform, and to talk about how to teach well online. And we have a few different folks who have raised key points about that. So just let me just stress, this is organic. This is free flowing. I've got a couple of ideas I'm going to put to you all. But you all are a fantastic brain trust, an experience, a vision of criticism and a practice. And so we would love, love, love to hear from you. To begin with, I'm going to bring Steve Ehrman up on stage because he was the first one off the blocks. And he had a great, great question or observation or topic for us to examine. I think he has a story to share as well about that. And we'd love to hear from all of you. A few of you have also come up with more ideas, including the awesome Tom Hames, the awesome Helen Williams, and the equally awesome Melanie Hogue. And we're bringing you guys up. And as we go, we'll have more topics. Consider this an experiment that we're doing live, building the plane in midair. And to help us co-pilot and engineer it all, we bring Steve Ehrman up on stage. Thanks, Brian. The story that I wanted to tell has to do with the University of Central Florida. It's one of a number of institutions I've been doing research on over the last four or five years. And they're doing, as far as I can tell, a really first-rate job at trying to assure that their teaching online and their teaching in blended courses is exceptionally effective and that they have data to back that up. So what I wanted to talk about just for a moment is, historically, how did that come to be? And the story goes back about 20 years, at a time when the faculty in one school, the School of Education, offered a first online course to school educators around the state. And the person who designed the course, Steve Sorg, did a really good job of incorporating an awful lot of active and collaborative learning in this graduate course, treating the students as agents who would be doing things and learning to test their conjectures for themselves, trying out ideas from the class in their own schools and so on. Not long after, Joel Hartman, who was the then and the very long-time CIO of UCF, notified Sorg that there were just starting discussions around UCF about, so what are we going to do with this online thing? And Sorg and his colleagues made a presentation to the, especially to the deans and senior academic administrators that so impressed them that they thought, A, this is good, we should do this. We can offer a superior level of instruction and pull in students that we wouldn't otherwise be able to get. And furthermore, this is the way it should be going forward. You know, maybe it was a happy accident that Sorg started this way, but it's not going to be an accident going forward. We need to take steps to make sure that these courses are just as good in every way, at least as courses that someone might take on campus. And just sort of scaling this down to a couple points. One thing that they did taking advantage of something that's state allowed was to set a fee per credit for distance learners. Now, Net, if you're totally studying online, your fees are less than they are for campus. But if you're online, you have this one fee, which is for online students and they plow a lot of that money and it's a considerable amount of revenue back into supporting and improving good instruction. In fact, every faculty member who's about to teach an online course for the first time is the recipient of around $20,000 of help in training and instructional designers support. And they can go on using that instructional designer kind of support, you know, as long as they're at the institution. It's sort of like a lifetime consulting contract that they can call on. And since all of their faculty are campus faculty, they don't have a specialized Oh, I only teach online courses group. It means that some of these same good instructional practices are increasingly in use on campus. And I'll just conclude by saying that at this point 20 years later, because the volume of training has been so high, roughly two thirds of all UCF faculty have had this kind of training sometime in the last 20 years. Wow. Wow. Two thirds. Yeah. That's rich. Over to you, Brian. Well, would you consider this to be a great success story? And I do. I do. And I think it was another important thing I'd say about it is that they had aims for students learning well for getting access to students who might not otherwise have it and for remaining as affordable as possible. And all three of those goals then shaped what it was that they were doing and how they were doing it. The sense of institutional mission in this area, which was very strongly backed by the president of the institution and by the people in the various vice vice presidential level posts, including provost and, of course, CIO. You mentioned the role of the state. So the state either supported this or didn't refuse to support it. Yeah. What the state had done in this case was simply to say at some point, I don't remember when it was. I'm sure it wasn't as long ago as 20 years ago, but the state gave public institutions the right to charge a distance learning fee per credit. And it was that revenue source that UCF was taking advantage of. And by the way, as part of their drive to try to keep things as affordable as possible, the state gave a maximum to what that fee could be. And they're only charging, I think, half, maybe two thirds of that maximum. So they're leaving money on the table. Wow. Okay. So this is the opposite of Florida, man. This is actually something that's spectacularly good. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we've got the commitment to teaching online as parity to face the face about the fee structure, which then leads to extensive professional development support. Let me repeat your question from before, Steve. Does anybody else have a similar story at one of their institutions, either one where you're working with now or one that you've worked with in the past, where they've managed to structure online teaching that well? Here, again, you can type in the chat box. You can type in the questions. You can click the raised hand. If that's not enough, I'm just going to slap a little open mic here on the stage. So if you just want to crash on the stage of Steve and I, just press that button and you should pop on just as easy as can be. So I'll give people another minute to think about this. And if you're just joining us now, I'm looking at folks like Julie Abbey and Vivian. If you haven't heard before, we're just right now and Ruben. Hello, Ruben. We are right now this hour having an organic discussion about the topic of how to teach well. And let's see, we have Kirsten Holvin Woodruff has a point of view. Before I get to that, hello, Anne. Hello. Nice to meet you. I'm thrilled to hear about UCF. I think that they probably hit the nail on the head with faculty support and development as being the key to successful distance education programs. I teach at the University of Maine at Augusta, which is a distance organization. And they have a lot of support for faculty and it really makes all the difference. We can't expect faculty to innately understand how to teach online. And there are people who specialize in this and there should be enough of them available to help faculty. Well, that's great. How do they support this? I mean, I know the University of Maine system has had financial stresses for the past few years. How are they managing to afford it? That's a very good question. And I really don't know that. But I would like to find that out. And that I'm actually a doctoral student too right now. What are you doing? Distance education, higher education instructional design. So, yes, so I would like to find out some of these funding mechanisms that different universities are using to provide the personnel, because I think it's the personnel that really are important. And can I keep you on stage for a few minutes more? Sure. Thank you. And I just love that you and Steve are hundreds of thousands of miles apart. And you have similar background windows and perhaps even similar trees. I'm close to Ann in another way. Back in 1990, when I was with the Annenberg CPP project, we gave a grant to the University of Maine Augusta to start that system. Really? Yeah. And one of the things I learned from it was that people referred to it sometimes as the instructional television network, because at that time it was a two way video link with high schools where students around the state would congregate. But I thought that was really misleading because that was not the only technology that was involved. And the one that really impressed me in 1990 was that the students from around the state had seamless access to a unified library system, which included all the university libraries, the public library system, and Bowdoin and Bates, I think. So there was a single search interface, and no matter what it was you chose, it would be mailed to you to the high school or whatever where you were. So they really had, even though technically I imagine all the other campuses had the same access for them, the assumption would be the real libraries are the resources that we've got right here. So they have done a great job with student supports like that, academic distance library services. We also have virtual tutoring that we've been doing for students for about 10 years now. We have virtual tutors to work with our distance learners. And in addition to that old fashioned ITV, it's now sort of morphed into a high flex model where students can join from home from Zoom. So it has expanded. So thank you for helping us get started. You're welcome. You're welcome. It was an early illustration of the fact that's become more obvious since that there are ways in which online education can be superior to campus bound education. Having that sort of, the world is my library, which 30 years ago was not an easy way to think. That was one of the first things I saw in that direction. And a rural place, I mean, I see this as an issue of equity that, you know, if we want to allow people access to higher education, we have to bring higher education where they are. We can't expect people to, you know, working adults and parents, you know, to travel hours to get to a campus. They need to have access to it in their home. Well, this is definitely a major theme for our time. And Steve, let me keep you on stage for your reactions because we've gotten a few different, and I can ask you again then text if you like. We've had a few different, welcome back. Welcome back. We've had a couple of comments that I wanted to run past you. One came from, I believe it's Kirsten Colvin Woodruff, who says, at my university, we're given a five week online class that teaches us to teach an online class. Kirsten, thank you for sharing that. If you could tell us, where is this, which school is it? Let me put it to the two of you, first Anne and then Steve. Would that be a good way to skill up professors to be able to do this? What do you think, Anne? And might be frozen. If Anne is frozen, Steve, why don't you take a run at it? Yeah, I think it is. One aspect of the UCF training, it's about 80 hours of faculty work spread over. I'm not sure what long period of time. But with that much work being done by faculty, you can imagine they really can get into things deeply. And it's one of the reasons I believe that it's not just a matter of making online education comparable to what's always been there on campus, but to make the online and the revenue stream that's associated with online a lever to improve the quality of all teaching that's associated with that institution. So the rising tide is lifting both boats, campus and online. In the case of UCF, you had that built-in fee structure, which did that. So good, good. Thank you, Kirsten. And if you don't mind me masquerading your name, thank you for offering that. We had Rebecca Frazi. Rebecca, if you, I can beam you up on stage, if you'd like to. In fact, I'll just do that now just to see what we can hear from you. Rebecca. That would be great. Can you hear me okay? I can hear you, but I can't see you. You know, I feel terrible, but I cannot go on video right now. So I'm sorry. Well, your voice is fantastic. Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah, so I am a lecturer at San Diego State in the learning design and technology program, and I personally have taught online for over 15 years. And so for faculty development at San Diego State, when we had to pivot to online, one of the success factors was that the California State system decided early on that the fall would be fall of 2020 would be fully online. So then we scrambled the jets and created a pretty robust faculty development program that was a scaled down version of something we already had going on that's similar to what you all were talking about at UCF, which we called the Course Design Institute. And so normally, faculty were able to go through the Course Design Institute that happened over an entire semester, and they would have an instructional designer kind of coach them through redesigning their course to teach online. The scaled down version that we put together was a cohort model over the summer. We offered two, I believe it was four week sessions, three or four week sessions. We put over a thousand faculty through this faculty development experience over the summer. And some of the key aspects of it included a live synchronous Zoom session like this with all participants. And then we broke all the faculty into smaller pods like learning pods, and each pod would have a faculty peer mentor. So it was the peer mentor was somebody who had already been teaching online or who already had been through the more robust Course Design Institute. And that person served to sort of guide and coach and answer questions to that small pod of faculty and try to create some community among that that smaller group. And then there were self study modules in the Canvas learning management system because, oh, by the way, at the same time, we were migrating from Blackboard to Canvas. So it was, I would consider it sort of an action learning experience where the faculty were taking four required modules and then four electives so that they could take electives like in video quizzing or using Google Suite in your class and different things that might be more applicable to their needs. And then they went through those self study modules with the peer mentor. And, and then we also had drop in virtual, I guess it would be like a virtual help desk that's open, not 24 seven, but probably 8am to 7pm. And with the click of a button, you're in a zoom or like this experience with the instructional designers on staff. So the participants could at any moment, if they were struggling, drop in and immediately get assistance from those instructional designers. Oh, that's a serious institutional commitment. It was a serious commitment and the culture, the situation at San Diego State is also that the faculty at San Diego State are under union contract. So they got that it was required that they would get stipend or, you know, to participate in this program. So there was a huge monetary investment. I believe it was probably close to a million dollars and to pay the faculty for their hours going through the program. And then we also paid the faculty peer mentors and so forth. And we're actually going to read. So we had two cohorts go through in the summer and we're actually going to offer it again over the winter break because there were some faculty who weren't teaching in the fall of 2020, but now they're teaching in spring of 2021. So they, we didn't really have the capacity to have them go through in the summer so they're going to we're going to redo it this winter with a smaller group. That's, that's a fantastic story. This is San Diego State. Yes. And in fact, I think that this program will be showcased through EDUCAUSE as a sort of success case study. And I'm not sure how that's being shared, but you'll be able to learn more about it through EDUCAUSE. This is great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rebecca. Certainly. Thank you. Being in California, please stay safe from this pandemic. Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Rebecca. I'm friends, I'm tweeting out some notes about this and it looks like we're building up a pretty good outline about how best to support the campus. What I'd like to do now is to dive into a theoretical framework for this. I'd like to bring up two people on stage, both of whom have a lot of interest in Diana Lauren Lard's theories about how best to teach online. One of them is a colleague of hers, Zachary Speyer, who is a postdoctoral research associate. I want to say he's a university college London. Am I right, Zach? Yep. All right. All right. Welcome, sir. Welcome. Glad to see you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. Hang on one second, because I also want to bring up another huge fan of Lauren Lard's work. This is Tom Hames, coming to you from the Houston area of Texas, the United States. And he's a long-term friend and supporter of the program. Glad to see you, Tom. Hi. So... Go ahead. Well, I was going to say, both of you have written to me, including during this conversation, about how you wanted to expand on Diana Lauren Lard's ideas about distance learning. Let's speak right to what we're talking about. I'm wondering, Zach, because your name starts with Z, your custom to going last, I thought I would put you up first. I was going to suggest the same thing. I also heard the beard starting up, and I want some support there. The light reflecting from the top of the head that really does it for me. That's what gives me the cache. There you go. Welcome, Zach. Good day, colleagues. Yes, my name is Zachary Speyer. I am a post-doctoral researcher and the UCL Bartlett faculty of the Built Environment in the Global Center for Learning Environments. And Diana Lauren Lard is a colleague of mine from the Institute of Education where I did my doctoral work. And I actually am on the opposite side of the field from her that I study how the Built Environment and Education interface. And I'm constantly challenged to understand the convergences and divergences sort of surrounding facilities-based educational approaches and online teaching and learning. What I love about Diana's work and Professor Lard's work is she is very data-driven, but the data is not just a number of glutes in seats and a number of people who turned up and a number of people who logged in and a number of comments and sections. She's very much someone who tries, I think, to understand the social relationships that underpin the quality of the outcome for both students, their peers, and teachers, and their pupils. And I think what interests me the most about her work is her evaluation of the effort and energy that people who are doing and facilitating teaching and learning online are having to now invest to maintain a sort of expectation of what their students are actually going to be able to do, how to engage students. My sort of primary theoretical or conceptual lens is student engagement. So I'm primarily concerned about how staff and students engage each other and where they do that and why where they do that affects the formal, informal, like learning and living paradigm. And I think for me, Professor Laurelart is just kind of an icon in the sense that she is driving questions around how do you assess and evaluate students and faculties teaching learning and research in these different modalities that in many respects and in many sense reflect the human social activity that is education. But also, as I say, extend it beyond the traditional norms or the traditional paradigms we've been using and underpinning all of this work without necessarily throwing them up with the bathwater. Because what I find frankly happens a lot is it's an either or conversation a lot. It's either it's a parity or either it supplements or either it complements facilities-based education, which is my expertise. And I'm always wondering how people explore beyond that sort of dichotomist worker and I think more critically about the alternatives if you will, the lines of flight. Oh, yes, I saw Rosie in that cover. Very good. Thank you. Thank you, Zack. I hope you join in. So, yeah, that's actually a nice segue to what I've been working on for the last, for probably the last year around this. And that is, you know, one of the things that I like about Laurelard as you, as Zack just enunciated rather nicely is that she really strips this down to those relationships, those conversations that are happening between the students, among the students, between the student and the professor. And as I like to say, the most important conversation that she also puts in there is the conversations happening between the students' ears. And if we can, you know, the articles that I dropped into the chat are ones that I have used over the last year as I've started to try to build up from those conversations and to look at both physical spaces because I've done a lot of work with learning design as well, but also, you know, there are analogies in online spaces and how all of those, you know, stripping them down to, okay, what does this particular tool do in terms of those conversations? What kind of conversations does it promote? What kind of conversations does it get in the way of? And I've applied this to my own classes as well as a way of deconstructing all the little bits and pieces of those conversations that are happening within my classes and saying, is this tool appropriate for this or is this tool appropriate for that? And I've used this over the last year on a number of levels. One is a project that is a little bit more fallow than I'd like it at the moment because I'm juggling too many balls, but the teaching tool set triangle where I basically took the different types of instructional modes and tried to connect them up with both virtual and physical tools for realizing those. And I'm doing that through the shaping EDU project at Arizona State. But another part of this is as we've kind of been, it's been a little bit of a victim of the pandemic because I'm working on a book around that, which I'm literally finishing up today, I hope. It should be out in a few weeks about strategies for teaching in the pandemic based on deconstructing all of these tools and saying, okay, the digital world works different. So where can we get advantages from the digital world? Where do we get advantages from the physical world? This isn't about compromise. And I've become increasingly frustrated with this dichotomy between online and in-person. I think everything needs to be thought of as a hybrid and that those hybrids should not be in fixed in bounds, so to speak. And one of the things we like to do with hybrids is to say, okay, well, this is the way we can get twice as many classes into the same space. You meet half the time online, you meet half, no, okay. That's the wrong way to think about it because you can't teach half a class one way and half a class the other. You have to look at all of the different pieces and say, okay, how do I assemble this in such a way where I'm maximizing the affordances of online and then maximizing the affordances of the limited amount of in-person synchronous time that I have with my students, whether it's in this Zoom-like format, I'm sorry, I used to do Shindig-like format, video conferencing format, or whether it's a, whether we're sitting around a table in a room or a very large table in a room, socially distanced and so on. And by looking at my own classes, I mean, I figured out that I really only need about 20% in-person time or face-to-face synchronous time. If I'm very honest with how much time gets wasted in those classes with me repeating the same things over and over again, when I can record that as a video and put it in my class, and they can watch it over and over again. And I get it right every time as opposed to when I do this in class, I go for one class of this because I forget something and it's always a little different, right? So, I mean, those kinds of things and thinking very carefully about the task that we're trying to achieve, the ends that we're trying to achieve as teachers and students, and then putting those together, using her framework to build up from there and everything else kind of flows out from that idea of how do we strip it all away? And I think that often when we talk about online education and technology in education, we get too focused on technology and the tools and lose sight somewhat of the purpose. Just because something is cool doesn't mean it's good. And some things require marination. Some things require some time of use to where they're mature enough to use. So, that's another thing to bear in mind. Yep, go ahead, sorry. Okay, let me apologize for a second. The string of ideas is great because it comes out of your engagement with Lord God's work. If I could ask, if you could put a link to your chewing triangle in the chat, and I can meet that out so people can see it. I guess one question I would have for the two of you as Laura Lard allies is, how do you see her conversational framework applying to teaching online now in 2020? More so than ever is what I would say. Yeah, and if I could, Brian, sorry. I would just say, I think the conversational framework is now so important in part because I wish we would spend a bit of time making space for the importance of informal engagement with one another. And the fact that there's some almost constant motivation to find some co-creative, co-constructed space even in online settings. And the permission we must give ourselves as teachers to be learners all the time. And in doing so constantly then ergo extending that to our students is as critical as ever. I think when I hear about how we create these, we record these, we share these, we do this, and we want some consistency, and I totally appreciate consistency, but life is non-linear and often inconsistent. And part of, I think, what Diana Laura Lard's conversational approach gives me is the alternative view to say, look, I'm not going to be the same person all the time. I have multitudes, as one before me once said. And I'm not going to be secure. And there's going to be things that evolve. And there's going to be moments when I don't get it right and moments when it's not clear or it's incomplete. And I'm a human being. And I think what's really important about Lour Lard is the same thing that I derive from somebody like Ronald Barnett. Barnett's work is critical to giving sort of the permission to oneself that learning is an ongoing life course activity. What you do with it is your own. I mean, how you apply it, I think, is left to the individual agency. But I think for her, the sort of value of informal, the value of what some have called serendipity, the value of seeing learning as a co-created thing that requires sort of engagement on all sides to make the project work is actually super critical right now. Yeah, and I would second, real quick, I would second that one of the biggest deficits that we're dealing with this year with online learning is the fact that many of the online platforms are poorly suited to serendipitous informal learning. We do not have the couches in the hallways in our learning management systems. And that is something we desperately need. I've tried to build them into my own courses, but it's always kind of off. It's the couch off in the strange closet somewhere as opposed to front and center. And so that's absolutely, yeah. I mean, that's something that's a real deficit. The students, the agency involved in students getting together as opposed to tripping over each other is difficult to pull off online. And we need to really think hard about how we're going to work, how we design for that. That's a challenge to all those LMS people out there. Exactly. I just shared a link to Ronald Barnett's engage in chat and on Twitter as well. Abby Johnson notes that students at Antioch just requested this from our academic technology team. Okay. I want to clear the stage a bit. We have more opportunity for more people to join us, but let me thank the three of you for doing this, especially like the fact that Zach, you managed to pair your shirt color to Tom's little background. Go Bruins! Thanks, guys. Please go ahead, Steve, jump in. Yeah, just a final comment on the string that we were just in. I agree that when we're talking about online courses, we need to be thinking in a very fresh way about what it is that our learning spaces make easier or make more difficult. Alongside that, though, we've got students in many cases who've been through years of different kinds of faculty teaching them in similar ways, delivering content, and testing them in similar ways, and that that kind of culture is not actually what we need for universities to work better. And that things like learning how to conduct the conversation in your head, learning how to have a thoughtful, asynchronous discussion with other people are skills that are related to using e-portfolios to name one high-impact practice. So I think that the job of what kinds of habits of mind that students need to develop in a modern university needs to be a coordinated attack that it can't just be left to each individual faculty member saying, you know, what would be worth it just in terms of my course? So to choose a more concrete thing, let's imagine that a faculty member is saying, I want students to do projects in my course and ideally it would be great if they could do some video editing and building multimedia project online. But of course I can't do that because just my one little course is not going to provide the justification any way you look at it for students to go from zero to being good at that. But if there's a program you think by the time our students are in their last year we want them to be ready to do this or to think that way or to reflect this way, you can design the program to make it more and more likely that large numbers of students will be, in fact, ready to study and think in the ways that you need them to be by the time they're in their last semester. That's well said, Steve. That reminds me of part of Tom Hames's abjuration that we think about the end here and then the point where they can think about this. Thank you. Thank you. I want to bring up a question that came much earlier from the splendid Helen Williams and she asked us a question that I don't think we've touched on yet quite as much, although Steve, you just came up to it, which is how about strategies for supporting student group work and collaboration in an online environment? Which is a broad topic and I'm wondering if anyone wants to jump in on that right now. Steve, you can take first dibs if you like, but the question is how do you support student group work and collaboration in the online environment? If anyone wants to jump in on chat or if you want to join us on stage, just hit the join podium button or send us a note. We'd be glad to share that with everybody. In fact, if that's giving you all something to think about, if that's giving you something to chew on, let's see. People are thinking you can hear like smoke beginning to rise from people's ears. We have Anne. Welcome back, Anne. I think she may be having a bandwidth issue and you might want to just restart this page or kill some extra tabs. We have a note from Sally. Here, let me just put this up on stage so you all can see this. Sally Muriamu who says the university is being asked to prepare students to be digital professionals. Let's speak to the comments I'm going to speak. Thank you, Sally. Hello, Fred. Hi there. I've been a follower of yours and admire what you do. I appreciate what everybody's doing here today. At Little Defiance College in Little Defiance, Ohio, we made a shift to online. Our vice president for active affairs realized this summer that this fall could be very different. We didn't know exactly how to make it so we start off hybrid. We eventually had to go remote, but she wanted to require all our faculty, and I only am talking about 38 of us to be trained for online teaching, and I'm also the director of our Center for Effective Teaching, so I was able to design a course using Moodle, our platform, but I designed it intentionally so that the faculty who took it were online students learning about online teaching, and the beauty of it being a small school, they wrote all their responses and I was able to read them and give them feedback, and as I know my colleagues well enough, I had the minimalist who I could tell were begrudgingly typing away, and other people grabbed it and ran with it, but I was really impressed with the materials from Quality Matters because I had taken the Quality Matters courses, I was impressed with the AQ toolkit and using that, and then we had our own tutorials from our technology person about how to use Moodle, and I felt the, it took about three hours, but with the feedback I could give them was asynchronous, that when we did have to go remote this semester for a couple weeks, people were prepared, but some people really got it, oh, you're making me be a student learning how to do this, because I had the course set up and they had to go through it and submit and I gave them feedback like I would a good professor trying to do it as soon as possible and I think a few of them grasped the idea of what I was trying to do, the kind of the meta work, and my father went well and also was good for me because I really got to know my colleagues much better that way, so thank you. That's great Fred, thank you, that's a great story. I'm impressed that little Defiance was able to do that and let me keep you up on stage just for a second. We have a question that came up from the splendid Maria Rankin-Brown, Dean of Pacific Union College, and she had a question which really might speak to you on this. Anyone have advice on how to best mitigate for students' expectations starting to be entertaining? Because the media they associate a screen with entertainment. I'm curious Fred, did that come up in your discussion or can you even throw the question of your colleagues' thoughts on that? Well, in terms of entertaining, you're absolutely right. What we taking from the quality matters rubric, I really emphasized how do you keep students engaged with you? How do you keep students engaged with the content? How do you keep students engaged with each other? And so I wouldn't necessarily call those multiple means of engagement as entertainment but it kept the course you kept thinking of different ways that you could using the UDL the Universal Design for Learning different ways to express the content. What are different ways they could engage with it? I think students found that more entertaining than you're going to show me a snazzy video. I think the AQ folks, particularly like Flower Darby was very good on saying when we get online we suddenly get very stiff we feel it's production or something. Just be yourself in the classroom, be yourself online. And I emphasize that too to my colleagues and I think that freed them up. Again, we can be entertaining in our videos. I actually had a colleague who would start some things off a little knock-knock joke because she sort of does that in class or just different things but what I learned is just as you are in the class be that online if that's entertaining enough that's fine. Thank you, Fred. Thank you, Fred, very much. That's great advice. Maria thanks you in the chat. That's just what we need to hear. Friends, we're almost at the end of the hour. Let me clear the decks a bit. Steve, thank you for being a great respondent and thank you for beginning our conversation. I want to bring up an old friend and dear colleague from Rollins College in Florida to speak to the particular angle that liberal arts colleges have to bring on teaching online. So let's see if we can beam Tom up. Hello, Tom. Hello, Brian. Oh, it's great to see you. Good to see you too. So I will quite be very quick here since we don't have much time but I do want to mention that Brian and I go back for a long time in teaching online. So I'm going to talk about a course online across two separate institutions in 1998. Three institutions. And then it's repeated that again in 2001. And I taught a course across two institutions with two courses between Rollins and a university in India in 2004. I'm not unfamiliar with this event and the point I want to bring up which I think is a less positive one that I'm used to hear from everyone else which is that liberal arts colleges may have a special difficulty in making this transition. I know that was certainly true in the years that I was teaching at Rollins. I retired in 2016 and I've talked to my colleagues since then the code experience of forcing most of them online has not always been very successful. And that has been proved both from the faculty but also from the student perspective of saying look in the case of Rollins we're paying 50 or 60 thousand dollars a year to go here and we didn't pay that kind of money to the students. And I'm wondering whether anyone has any success stories I guess in overcoming those kinds of issues in their institutions. That's a fantastic question Tom and I tell people about the classes we taught and they think that I'm describing science fiction or altering history but we've broken a lot of ground. Does anybody have any experience I'd like to share from that liberal arts experience where people have a difficult time trying to grapple with that. I'd recommend the work of Stephen Greenlaw at Mary Washington University he's an economist he's been doing a lot of great work with everything from open content to students co-creating classes Tom if anybody shares anything I will bring this up to you straight away thank you Tom and stay safe Friends we are at the last minute of our normally scheduled program and which is kind of shocking it means that we have barreled through a very very important idea without a guess but doing this organically ourselves and I think everybody involved in this conversation should feel really good about that we have a lot of ideas we've shared a great deal of content I want to point out that we have a lot of resources in the chat Vivian Forceman just shared one book for example just a minute ago we have some great questions so what I'd like to do with your permission is to scrape off and export the questions and put them in a blog post and I will attach to the blog post as well today's recording so that you can go and see what cover this will that work for all of you just let me know in the chat or by chatting to me and John Carlo oh thank you for sharing that it's good to see you very good to see you Vanessa Vale points out that we've been waiting for you are indeed alright well in that case let me thank you all for participating in an experiment that we all made together I'm really grateful to you for your creativity, your patience and for doing all this work together co-creating is sometimes the best way to proceed now next week we have no future transform session scheduled it's Thanksgiving in the United States and that's going to take us off and we can't compete with that so we're going to resume the week after that and we have a whole series of great programs you all have heard of them, you've all seen them I know so let me just mention a couple of details going ahead one of them is that we are going to be covering a whole series of topics for the next few months if you want to keep talking about these topics we have all these social media platforms that you can participate in if you'd like to go back into the more than 230 recordings just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and you can dig in and above all let me just ask you to all please stay safe in certain parts of the world COVID-19 is taking off and this is a very very dangerous time we value all of your lives and we want to make sure that you are safe and sound please stay in touch with us online and we'll see you next time take care friends, bye bye