At some point–even prior to the start of COVID-19–most online instructors have relied on the ‘Post Once, Reply Twice’ formula for their online discussions. It is unclear where this formula originated, but like the Pot Roast Principle, there is no real reason we need to be bound by it. Discussions remain a pain point for most online instructors, so what can be done? How do we make our online discussions something students want to engage in? What alternatives exist?
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Like many others out there, I’ve become a bit of a podcast obsessive. I know that we can’t really multitask, but when I’m able to go for a run and engage in some learning while I’m running, it almost feels like I’m able to get a two-for-one experience.
Last year, Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast introduced me to Dr. Andrew Huberman, whose Huberman Lab podcast introduced me to Dr. Alia Crum. After hearing Dr. Crum describe the different ways she approaches researching the physiological impacts of mindset shifts, I did a deep(er) dive into her work to better understand how she’s able to empirically capture the ways our bodies respond to our brains learning new information.
This post marks the return of the Instructional Design and Development Blog, known as the IDDblog, after a 29-month hibernation. If you’ve been our blog reader, you may still remember one of our last scheduled posts in March 2020, titled “Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All.” That very timely post guided administrators and instructors on the selection of remote teaching methodologies when the coronavirus forced schools to move courses online in a matter of days. After that, IDDblog remained mostly static because staff members of DePaul’s Center for Teaching and Learning had to give up blog-writing to respond to the intense needs for faculty and student support as almost all of DePaul’s course offerings switched to remote.
I’ve heard a saying that to say Covid changed our lives is an understatement, and I couldn’t agree more. This global pandemic has brought something bigger than our common understanding of change. It threw us into what Yuval Noal Harari called “a large-scale social experiment” – an experiment that no government, business, and educational board would agree to conduct in normal times. In his article, “The World After Coronavirus,” Harari called for reflections at the global level, but I think it is the change that took place at the individual level that seems to be even more striking and unretractable. From the perspective of teaching and learning, the privilege we’ve lost for in-person instruction, the opportunities we’ve gained to access courses through a few clicks, and the habits we might have formed during this lost-and-found period are all worth reflecting on. As a guinea pig of one, I thought this blog could be a place for me to conduct my own reflection, like Michel de Montaigne did as he drew meanings and reasonings by looking no further than the life of his own.
Kyle Grice and Margaret Bell
Our faculty learning community (FLC) generated some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable. Below are some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable; we give a brief orientation to the concepts, with links to additional resources, and potential next steps. Of course, this is only a selection of the extensive body of work, and there is more to be done. While there are a lot of ideas within this list, the most important thing is to simply begin. Within some of these ideas are comments from your colleagues at DePaul about their experiences with implementing the ideas. While our FLC focused on STEM, these concepts could be applied to any course at DePaul. Full names of all the participants in the FLC and their contact information are at the end of the document.
Meaningful and sustained change in education and academia can only come from acknowledging several key concepts: 1) Our society was built in a way that disproportionately privileges White / Male / Cis / Hetero / Able-bodied / Young / Neurotypical / Christian / High Socio-economic-status people in education, housing, employment, and health and well-being, at the implicit exclusion or explicit oppression of ‘others’. Therefore, equity, not just equality, is our responsibility in academia. 2) We all have implicit in-group biases developed from existing in our current society and, as instructors, are coming from places of power and privilege. 3) Everyone has equal and infinite potential to learn and grow, and emphasizing a growth mindset in interacting with students can be impactful. Continue reading
Mary Bridget Kustusch, Kyle Benjamin, and Grace Heath
When you are working on a problem and get stuck, how do you get “un-stuck”? Many of us have developed a myriad of tools, some explicit and some implicit, for helping us move past those sticky places in our work, but how did we develop these tools? How do we help our students develop these tools?
As a part of a larger collaboration, we are working to better understand the role of epistemological, or epistemic, framing in problem-solving in upper-division physics. Epistemic framing refers to how a task is perceived, particularly with regard to what knowledge and tools are necessary for completing the task. The particular theoretical framework that we are using considers framing along two dimensions: from conceptual to algorithmic and from math to physics. By putting these dimensions along two axes, we can map how an individual or group moves through this framing space (see Figure). For example, if one is discussing the properties of the physics quantities related to the problem at hand, they are framing this as more conceptual than algorithmic and more as physics than math. Thus, they would be somewhere in the upper right quadrant of this space.
When we try to replicate classroom experiences in an online environment, it’s easy to think of video conferencing as our go-to tool for all sorts of learning objectives—and for good reason. Most of us have participated in a video conference at work or had a video chat with friends or family at some point. We like the idea of being able to see and hear our students while interacting with them in real time just like we do when teaching face to face. But there are two key factors that make this approach problematic.
1. BandwidthHigh-bandwidth technologies work great for students who have newer computers, fast and reliable internet access at home, and unlimited data plans on their phones. For other students, courses that require frequent use of high-bandwidth technologies can limit their ability to fully participate in course activities. This can jeopardize their success in the course, create a sense of shame and anxiety, and leave them feeling like second-class citizens.
2. ImmediacyThe second factor, immediacy, refers to how quickly we expect our students to respond when interacting with us and with each other. Typically, we think of immediacy as a good thing. It’s baked into face-to-face learning, so it doesn’t feel like a limited resource. But one of the biggest advantages of online learning is that it can provide you and your students with more flexibility. When we require our students to be online at exactly the same time, we sacrifice one of the key benefits of online learning, and that can make an online course feel like more of a burden than it has to be. Continue reading
To many of my friends, I’m something of a Luddite. They all have newer phones than I do; these days, I’m usually about three models behind the curve. Heck, I didn’t even have a smart phone until almost 2014. I miss things that happen on LinkedIn and Instagram, because I don’t use them. And I’m more of a lurker than an actual poster on Facebook and Twitter. My wife often laughs at me, because I lose my phone in the house and have to use Find My iPhone at least three times a week. I do have a gaming console in the house…but it’s a PlayStation 2.
At work, I’m well known as a skeptic. I am often the one eliciting the eye rolls from my colleagues as I play devil’s advocate about a solution, or the one who might stick with a certain technology tool a little longer than others. When there is a problem to solve, I’m always looking for a free or low-cost option first. You might think that this sounds backward, in a technology-focused discipline where it is indeed my job to move forward and pursue new directions in instruction. So why would I hold back from the edge, and choose instead to look over it from a safe distance? It turns out that there are a number of advantages to treating design work with a healthy dose of skepticism. Continue reading
In her recent Computers and Composition article on teaching writing using Learning Management Systems (LMSs), Allison Hutchison unpacked the “wicked problem” faculty face when using an institutionally-required system. Hutchison’s literature review outlines how faculty in the field of rhetoric and composition have critiqued the technologies that mediate writing instruction; indeed, this type of scholarship has become increasingly prevalent, as digital platforms for composing seem to be ever increasing (and thus ever more frequently appearing in our classrooms).
I’ve attempted to apply Hutchison’s framework for identifying the problem, the needs, and the potential solutions (albeit in a much simpler format) to a particular strand of practice in the writing classroom: providing feedback on assignments. DePaul recently adopted two technologies that can be used for this purpose, and both contain affordances and limitations that instructors should consider when adopting. The descriptions below are perhaps more utilitarian and less of a critique, but given that this is a blog post, and not an academic article, that framing seemed more…well, useful. Continue reading
As the proud parent of a two-year-old Husky, I am well-versed in the many ways to train a dog.* One of the most common methods of training a dog is through the use of clickers. This method of training uses operant conditioning, pairing a treat with a sound, to reinforce a specific behavior. Amongst trainers, the common belief is that using a sound, instead of voice commands, ensures that the feedback received is consistent and non-judgmental. This all makes sense when training animals, but do these same methods work for teaching humans? A recent episode of the podcast Hidden Brain explored this topic further. Continue reading
During hands-on activities in the web-design classes I teach, I often ask, “What would Project Runway mentor (and national treasure) Tim Gunn do?” After all, if you’re going to take teaching tips from only one reality-TV star, it should be Tim Gunn. He was a faculty member at Parsons for a quarter century and chair of their fashion department for several years, making him one of the few reality-TV stars with a CV that would make any SoTL-loving academic swoon.
During his tenure on Project Runway, Tim’s primary role was to serve as the contestants’ mentor and sounding board. While Tim didn’t officially evaluate contestants as a judge, mentors on other competition shows often shift more fluidly between coaching and assessment roles, much like faculty do throughout the term. On RuPaul’s Drag Race, for example, RuPaul serves as a supportive, caring mentor during consultations in the workroom. Later, he’s more distant (figuratively and literally) and authoritative when leading the judges in final critiques and contestant eliminations. Continue reading