In this episode, we chat with Jackie Davenport, an ATI Physical Therapy professional who is interested in improving their continuing education residency program for physical therapists. With students located in different regions, ATI is looking at different ways to engage learners both live and asynchronously. Our panel shares their insights on how to keep students engaged and how to prepare for teaching in complex multimodal settings.
See our full episode notes at https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/asynchronous-hyflex-and-live-oh-my/
By necessity, ATI Physical Therapy uses elements of online, in-person, synchronous, and asynchronous learning in its residency programs. Jackie Davenport, Clinical Development Program Lead and Residency Director for ATI Physical therapy, is interested in learning more about developing her network of clinical educators to be prepared to create and sustain engagement with their students. asynchronous and how it could fit into the continuing education courses that ATI offers. Host Matt Wittstein shares Jackie’s context with Jesse Stommel from University of Denver, Dale Munday from the University of Central Lancashire, and Eric Mulford a senior Nursing major at Elon University. Their conversation considers different teaching modalities, hard versus soft rules (or policies versus social contracts) in the classroom, and how technology can be leveraged to enrich connection in this setting.
This episode was hosted by Matt Wittstein, edited by Olivia Taylor and Matt Wittstein, and produced by Olivia Taylor in collaboration with the Elon University Center for Engaged Learning.
Limed: Teaching with a Twist
Season 3, Episode 5 – Asynchronous, HyFlex, and Live, Oh My!
Matt Wittstein (00:00:11):
You are listening to Limed: Teaching with a Twist, a podcast that plays with pedagogy. Hi everyone. Welcome back to Limed: Teaching with a Twist. If you haven't already, please consider rating, reviewing and sharing our show. That's the best way to help us get into more listeners' ears. Also, we're always interested in chatting with educators that have a unique idea or challenge for their learning context. If that sounds like you, please reach out to me, Matt Wittstein directly mwittstein@elon.edu. That's M-W-I-T-T-S-T-E-I-N@elon.edu. Or find more information at CenterForEngagedLearning.org/podcasts. I remember after trying some high flex pedagogy in 2020 as our institutions were struggling to adapt to a pandemic and thinking to myself, I can teach in person or online, but not both at the same time for Jackie Davenport clinical development program lead at a TI, physical therapy growth in their residency program has necessitated being creative and developing clinical specialists across the country. This month we learned from Eric Mulford, a retired firefighter and active paramedic, currently seeking a degree in nursing. Dale Monday, a senior education lecturer from the University of Central Lancaster and Jesse Stommel from the University of Denver and co-founder of Hybrid Pedagogy and the Digital Pedagogy Lab. The panel shares ideas of how to build community and especially how to connect in-person and remote learners through intentional course design. They remind us about the many things human learners want and need and provide great ideas for any teaching setting. I'm Matt Wittstein.
(00:01:57):
Hey Jackie. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you today about some asynchronous education.
Jackie Davenport (00:02:03):
Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited to have somebody help me figure out what we're struggling with and have been honestly trying to solve for probably four to five years now.
Matt Wittstein (00:02:12):
Awesome. So before we get there, can you share a little bit about yourself, the role that you're in and why asynchronous education is important to that role?
Jackie Davenport (00:02:20):
Yeah, so I'm Jackie Davenport. I work for a TI Physical Therapy, which is a large nationwide organization of outpatient physical therapy clinics with a couple other things like people that do health services and work in other sorts of industry. Just people might see it in an outpatient clinic environment with a big sign where you'd go if you had low back pain or neck pain and in other cases we're in high schools with athletic trainers and we're in companies helping to prevent injuries at work. I serve as the clinical program development lead, which is sort of just a fancy term to say that I help manage post-professional education at a TI. So one of my primary roles in dealing with post-professional education is running what is called a residency program for physical therapists who have already graduated with their degree. So I actually work a lot with people who are looking to become specialists in a certain area of physical therapy.
(00:03:10):
So we train all therapists as they're coming out of schools, and most programs are three year doctorate programs right now, but as they're coming out of school they're trained as a generalist so they could treat anything from someone who has an orthopedic injury to someone in aquatic care, to geriatric patient to women's health. So there's a bunch of different opportunities and avenues for PTs at a TI. We have an orthopedic and a sports residency program that really help to try to hone someone in to become a clinical specialist in each one of those areas. And so I manage that program. It's 13 months long. Residents come and they stay with us in certain regions of the country and they basically get immersed in a program that's really designed to develop them to clinically think, which is a version of critical thinking, but to critically think about the patients that they see and really develop some really powerful clinical reasoning skills to be able to handle complexity where they might not have been able to do that prior to just coming out of school.
Matt Wittstein (00:04:04):
So how did you get into this position? Did you do a residency yourself?
Jackie Davenport (00:04:08):
I did. So I did a residency about a year out from my education and I loved it. It was really helpful for me. It was an all in-person residency, so this was a time where we just kind of gathered together in groups and we had a few faculty members that were also in the same company that I was in and we went through every week learning about a different body part or a different region or a different diagnosis and just kind of had some mentorship and some didactic education that really helped to grow me as a clinician over time. I served as a mentor in that program, eventually became a faculty member and then have taken over leading both of those programs over here in the past two to three years.
Matt Wittstein (00:04:46):
I imagine in the last few years it may have changed just a little bit. Can you tell me about the challenges that you're facing today that you maybe weren't facing say four and a half years ago?
Jackie Davenport (00:04:55):
Yeah, so COVID is absolutely a part of four and a half years ago and some of the changes, but honestly we were having to deal with a little bit of this prior to Covid. When I went through our residency program, we were all in one location. As a TI has grown and has expanded across the country. It's really been kind of a mission of ours to not just keep residency education in the southeast in Greenville, South Carolina, but we wanted to be able to provide the opportunity to other clinicians across the country to be able to engage in our residency program also. So that made us have to kind of bend a little bit in the way that we were doing education. And I know when I say hybrid learning, people sort of get triggered to thinking it was covid related, but ours was really distance related more than anything.
(00:05:35):
So we had a program start in Birmingham, Alabama and we had to start to try to figure out how do we teach a group of people in Greenville with other people in Alabama on the call. And over the past couple of years we've decided to expand our program out even further. So in the 20 24, 25 year, we are expanding to seven different sites. And so not only are we going to be in different locations but also be in different time zones, which has added another challenge. And so I am currently living this problem of trying to figure out how to provide what I call equivalent education, maybe not equal education in every place, but equivalent education and opportunities for our residents who are in person with a faculty member and those who are virtually attending. And I kind of think about this from two perspectives, from the learners' perspective of the resident really thinking, hey, when they're in person that they're being heard and feel connected to the people that are virtual and vice versa. The people who are virtual feel connected to the learners that are in the room, but also from the faculty perspective of the challenges of having to look and see people physically in front of you, but also having to pay attention to people who are on a screen where you're not able to see as much of the small talk or the personal interaction or the body language that might come about.
Matt Wittstein (00:06:50):
I know I personally can really relate to that. It being difficult to teach to folks that are at home as well as folks that are in that classroom. And I will say a fault of my early covid teaching was that I was really teaching to the students that were physically in the classroom space probably because that was easier. Before we get to the problems you're facing today, I just want to know what was the first time that you ran this hybrid program? What was that like?
Jackie Davenport (00:07:14):
I think the first time, definitely not me running it, but the first time I taught in the hybrid program, I was teaching a concussion section, which happens to be my clinical specialty. I realized that I teach so much based on the way that people respond in front of me, so I will change the tone of my voice or I'll ask different questions or I'll pause or spend more time on a slide. And I realized I was only paying attention to the four people that were in the room and I had forgotten there were three other people on the call. And it was a challenge for me to start to think about, okay, wait a second. There's an issue here in the way that I'm teaching and in the way that they're engaging. And for me to have to try to figure that out, it was just a light bulb moment of us trying to realize, hey, we really can't be unfair to the people who are in person and ignore those who are on the call and just kind of do what's easier. I'm really kind of on a mission to do hard things when it comes to our residency and one of those is trying to find a way where we can win for everybody involved.
Matt Wittstein (00:08:10):
I have the luxury of being able to make that choice of am I in person, am I hybrid, am I completely online? And typically I default to just one system is so much easier, but you're in a situation where you actually, there's a necessity to teach both in person and online. So let's sort of fast forward to today, what are the big problems that you're experiencing with this growing program?
Jackie Davenport (00:08:33):
I think one of the big things is how to engage our faculty in a different way of teaching than they have been teaching for the past 10 years. I think that's a big one, is trying to get them to understand how sometimes we might need to adjust our teaching style in order to captivate people who are virtual in addition to still maintaining the attention of people who are in person. So I know one of the things I'm struggling with is how to do that, how to train other people to be good at that. And then I think one of the other pieces is engaging the learner and understanding how we are trying to pull the different strings that we can to try to create as ideal learning environment as possible. So one of the things we tried earlier this year was I thought exactly like what you said, Hey, one of these environments is better than both, so let's not do any in person and let's make everybody, even if you could be physically present, let's stay at home and let's all be virtual instead.
(00:09:26):
And with a world and a residency program and especially a profession that's very hands-on, that did not go over well with some of the people who really wanted to be in-person and having kind of that hands-on learning experience, I think there are definitely times and places where we can leverage an all virtual content and construct, but when we have people who are wanting to practice the skill that we teach, it can be really helpful to have that kind of in-person moment, potentially have another in-person moment virtually as well. But trying to coordinate all of that is sort of where the big challenge comes into play.
Matt Wittstein (00:09:57):
I think you raise a great point that we may have made those decisions because it was easier for us, but that doesn't mean that it was necessarily better for the individual learners. So I hear some elements of wanting to train faculty for hybrid teaching, but other elements of how to engage the learner directly. So you're trying to figure out A, how to get the faculty to buy into this, but B, what to actually tell the faculty to get the students to be excited about that learning. Does that sound accurate to summarize your problem?
Jackie Davenport (00:10:28):
Yeah, that sounds very accurate. So we have kind of two lenses of we know that it's a problem, the longer we stare at it, then the more things we throw at it. It just turns out to be one of those things where we keep trying something new and we will win on one side and maybe not win as much on the other side. But I do think one of the biggest challenges is trying to help figure out how we train a faculty member. Here's another funny challenge who was never trained to teach in the first place. These are clinicians, these are people who take care of patients and help people feel better and move through life a little bit easier. These aren't people who are professionally trained educators. They have a passion for it. They care about the upcoming generation of PTs to do a great job to care for the people that they're going to see on their schedules. And so some of them have teaching experience, which is great, but a lot of them don't have formal education in that either. And so it's kind of blending all of that together to try to think about how do I support them and help them grow in that role and in that environment to make it successful both for them and for the learner.
Matt Wittstein (00:11:28):
So how do you currently train your faculty? Are they getting trained virtually? Are they getting trained in person? What does that process look like?
Jackie Davenport (00:11:35):
That's a good question. So we have a couple of people who, let's say they're interested in teaching in our residency program, we usually start them off as kind of what we call junior faculty where they'll come alongside a senior faculty member, almost like an apprenticeship for teaching where they'll get to see, hey, this is what this person put together, these are the articles they found for this week, this is how they're updating the evidence. Another fun challenge, because PT always changes as stuff gets published over and over again, we have to make sure that content stays up to date and they come alongside a faculty member to kind of see how they do it and to kind of learn along the way. We usually give them a week's material or we give them an hour of the lecture to let them kind of get their feet wet and presenting and talking.
(00:12:13):
And then about once a quarter we do what we call faculty development trainings where we kind of go through some of it's teaching based, but another aspect of our residency is mentorship. We also have other opportunities where they're trying to learn different things like trust or social styles or some other business leadership mindset things. We're also trying to teach that also some of that blends into teaching, but it's not as strong of a here's a learning and development strategy for you to be able to work through. Here's some instructional design elements for the PowerPoint you're putting together. We don't go as much in depth in that A lot of it is more experience and kind of apprenticeship learning.
Matt Wittstein (00:12:47):
So are they physically on site with a current faculty that's running a residency program?
Jackie Davenport (00:12:53):
If we have a faculty member that is looking to come and sort of be a part of the program, if they're located in that same area, they are. But once again, this year we're going to a couple of different sites. So we have a site coordinator who will be in Chicago for example, and he will join on calls virtually to see how some of the faculty members who've been doing it for a little while to see how they teach, how they put together their information, how they prepare for a week's material, and then we'll slowly kind of ramp them up to being able to hopefully do that a little bit more in person in their location once we get them trained up a bit more.
Matt Wittstein (00:13:25):
So as you're working on creating materials for both training faculty, but also the materials that your student learners are experiencing, what's sort of the technology set up? What tools do you have access to? What are some of the limitations that you all have found?
Jackie Davenport (00:13:41):
We have access to pretty much the whole Microsoft world. So we use Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. We use SharePoint to share information with one another, so they all have access to a single site where we keep things like our research articles, our PowerPoint presentations, those kinds of things so everybody can access on all the same material. One of the things we've started to try and just haven't really explored too deeply are playing games virtually and in person. So we have done a couple of cahoots games where we have set up some quizzes and some games for them to be able to play. There've been a couple of times where I've tried to use teams polling or whiteboard features and options for them to engage virtually and in person. Also, we tried a camera system one time that was quite interesting where we were trying to cast the whole room to a virtual group so you could feel like you were, they're crazy expensive, the really good ones.
(00:14:33):
And so we have a cheaper version of one and it works okay, but it's still, if you're at home on a laptop screen, there's only so much that you can really see when it comes to the cameras if you're also trying to pay attention to a PowerPoint presentation at the same time. So that's really the content we want them to see. So yeah, I think from a technology standpoint that's mostly what we've tried to leverage is anything within teams and then a couple of creative things every once in a while. I once pulled up a shared Excel spreadsheet and made them all fill out an exercise progression for their name in each of the rows just to see if we could create something different from an engagement standpoint. I would say it kind of went okay, but they weren't used to it, so it was also made it a little bit of a challenge.
Matt Wittstein (00:15:10):
It seems like you've tried a lot of different things. What has been maybe the most successful thing that you've tried that you want to incorporate into future iterations?
Jackie Davenport (00:15:19):
I think the most successful thing is trying to do something interactive. It seems like there's an interactive piece that wins At the end of the day, if we can find some way to make people in the room and people virtually do something as they're learning, I feel like that's been the most successful. We've never tried to have them paired in person and virtually we've mostly ever done hey, in a team of virtual people or in a team of in-person people, but I do know that we have more success in engagement. You can see that they're learning things a little better when they have to do something around it. I think that's been the biggest win for us.
Matt Wittstein (00:15:53):
Can you tell me a little bit more about how you're sort of defining success and engagement? Are those specific measurables that you have? Is it examinations? How are you defining success and engagement?
Jackie Davenport (00:16:05):
One of the best parts about our residency is right now it's not a lot of people. So the residency program right now has 10 residents in it. Next year we'll have 24. So when it comes to knowing the people, they know me very well and they know the faculty very well, and so we get pretty immediate feedback of, Hey, how did that go? Did you like that feeling like, Hey, that was a little bit boring or I didn't really understand this piece, or I felt like it was better when we were all in person. So they're not afraid to tell me what they think, which is very helpful. But I think success is for them to feel like that there is something tangible to take away for them to have an impact on the patient that they see the following week. Our program is very, I use the word obsessed and not lightly obsessed with the idea of creating excellent clinical thinkers. So I want someone to leave the education that we're doing, being able to think well about a patient that they see and apply the thing that they now know that might be different or that might be new in a real life scenario that they are seeing a patient in the following week.
Matt Wittstein (00:17:03):
So from our conversation, I have this sense that you're kind of viewing faculty as one set of learners and your students as another set of learners. You sort of have two different challenges with those learners. One is how to engage those learners, but two is how to create community so that those learners are able to learn from and engage with each other in social aspects that we know improve learning of those. What is the most important thing that you might want our panel to focus in on?
Jackie Davenport (00:17:32):
I honestly think that our faculty of those two, because I do agree that there's definitely those two things, and I really think that if our faculty do a great job of creating an environment of community and really are intentional about the way that our residents, I think we win on the learner side of things, my preference is to kind of focus more on how we train somebody not trained in education to do something that even the most trained educators still struggle with being able to do, which is kind of create that community between somebody and also virtual.
Matt Wittstein (00:18:08):
Jackie, I'm really excited to bring this to our panel. I think they're going to have some interesting ideas to share with you.
Jackie Davenport (00:18:14):
I'm really excited to see it too. I like the idea of people who maybe don't live in our clinical world, being able to think about a problem that's not necessarily a clinical problem, but we've always tried to solve with a clinical mindset. So I like the idea of it kind of getting solved for more of an academic and educational mindset and a learning and development mindset. And it's always good to have somebody give you a different perspective on the problem you have.
Matt Wittstein (00:18:45):
Hi Dale. Hi Jesse. Hi Eric. I am very excited to have you on the show today. We recently chatted with Jackie Davenport about a residency program in physical therapy, and before we get to that conversation, I want you all to introduce yourselves in doing so. Let us know a little bit about yourselves, where you're coming from, coming from, what your teaching and learning context is, but I also want to hear a little bit about how you build community in a classroom or in a setting where maybe you are just being introduced to a new group of people.
Dale Munday (00:19:16):
Hi everyone. Yeah, so I am Dale Munday. I'm a senior education lecturer in the University of Central Lancashire, which is in England in the uk. My background in teaching and learning centers around further education and higher education in the uk, primarily teacher training and adult literacy and numeracy, and then later focusing on digital education and various contexts as well. So building a community, I think having specific goals that are wanting to be achieved is essential. So I think bringing that collective into focus via those goals would be by
Jesse Stommel (00:19:51):
I'm Jesse Stommel. I have been teaching for 24 years in higher education. I teach writing at the University of Denver, and then I also teach teachers, college teachers in particular. I think community is really about learning things about one another, and I think one of the biggest barriers that we have to learning things about one another is the hierarchies that are set up in a classroom. And whether this is a physical space or an online space, everything about the digital environment like a learning management system is telegraphing hierarchy to people. So whatever you can do from the very start to break down that hierarchy so that everybody's sort of on an even playing ground as much as possible while acknowledging the fact that we all come in different bodies and that we all come with different kinds of power in the classroom. The simplest thing for me is on the first day of class, I sit on the edge of the table, swing my legs, just breaking down that notion of the teacher's desk at the front and then the students all sort of all eyes on the teacher. And I think the other piece that is really important is learning things about one another.
Eric Mulford (00:20:50):
My name is Eric Mulford. I'm a retired firefighter paramedic for 21 years and I'm now a senior nursing student at Elon University. Starting a second career. One of the things for me on how I build community is being authentic and being vulnerable. I think it's important as an older student to be authentic with undergrads that I'm in class with and the professors that I base on a daily basis, I think being vulnerable as well, and they know your trials and tribulations. I think that's very important to building community because they know where you're coming from. They know if there's something on your mind and they can kind of work with you. And that's what we do as a community here in Elon is we work with each other and we're there for them during their trials and tribulations if somebody's going through something. So I think vulnerability and authenticity are two of the biggest things for me.
Matt Wittstein (00:21:34):
So today we're going to talk a little bit about how to build community in a hybrid educational setting, but also how to prepare teachers and students for engaging in that setting. So we recently talked with Jackie Davenport. She is the clinical program development lead for a TI physical therapy, which is a nationwide physical therapy company, and she is responsible for the residency program, which means these clinicians instead of being generalists, getting a specialty in maybe pediatric or aquatic or sports medicine, and that program is a 13 month program, but because it's nationwide, they have this sort of necessary piece to have in-person parts with a prefect who's sort of guiding them in the specialty itself, but also some online slash hybrid and some folks are in a physical classroom where they're actually learning sort of the content knowledge of that material. She talked a lot about how to actually prepare faculty to teach in a different way, and I'm going to throw this to Eric first. I'm going to say what are some examples of faculty that have used some really good strategies to engage students, especially knowing that you're doing some clinical rotations and engaging you with that sort of clinical practice that you're doing in addition to the in-class work?
Eric Mulford (00:22:53):
So some of the ways that some of the instructors talked about a little bit about Kahoot, I think Kahoot is a very limited program. I think it's a great program and it builds within a classroom. You're getting points for questions and you just can see who's really getting it or who's not really getting it. It gives the professor the way in which people are engaging. It gives them an idea too of who might be struggling with some questions, but who might be excelling in some questions. One of the programs that we had last semester was called, and I found that that program for teaching had a little bit more variety as far as word usage. So Cahoot is very limited to their words, so you can only have, I forget how many, but to say 50 words per question versus is pretty much unlimited. You're able to put bigger questions in there or more descriptive questions in there for me as far as on the for instruction, as far as the in-class goes, but online as well, I like online lectures.
(00:23:53):
And so in my experience, I've had online lectures that have gone to where the instructor will take the online lecture and upload it so we can actually watch the online lecture from previous semesters prior to the class and I can get a grasp of what's getting ready to happen. And then when we go into the classroom, I can actually ask the questions that I need to ask based on what they said during the lecture that I had. It also works well too for making the students engaged. I was able, the online lectures there, she was throwing some Easter eggs in there. So if you paid attention and you actually watched the online lectures, you got a couple extra things in there that weren't in just a regular notes section. So you have the advantage there and it preemptively gets the students to watch the lectures to get those Easter eggs out to be able to study better, to understand the material better and to ask those questions.
Matt Wittstein (00:24:42):
So Jesse and Dale, what are some strategies you've seen faculty use to really engage students in unique and great ways, especially in hybrid and online settings?
Jesse Stommel (00:24:51):
I think one of the things that works best for me is to think about how we build relationships in physical spaces when we're in a physical classroom or when we're in a work site or when we've started a new job. And often it's not the planned programming, but it's the liminal spaces in between planned programming. So when you're at a workshop and then there's a break and you're walking from the workshop to where you're going to get coffee, the conversations that happen during that break end up being the space where bonds are formed and the kind of relationships, the connections that then kind of carry throughout the face-to-face workshop. And I think too often when we're doing things either hybrid or when we're doing things online, we don't think about those liminal moments. For example, we'll run a Zoom workshop and we'll turn the Zoom workshop on and we'll immediately start lecturing or talking or having a conversation.
(00:25:43):
And then the second that it's over, we hit end on that zoom workshop, which then takes all of those 25 people who would've been able to have that liminal experience and throws a black screen in front of them. And so just the tiny choice of deciding to turn the zoom on 10 minutes before we start and turning it off only when everybody has left it, because it's not like you close the physical door on the face-to-face people before they've all left the room. It's not like we actually kick them out of the room. And yet so often that's what I see happen in a zoom room. You literally just say, okay, we're done, click. And then everybody who's virtual is staring at a black screen and it feels like a rug has gotten pulled out from under us. So making sure that we're having those moments of passing each other in the halls and allowing that to happen both in the online space, but also between the online folks and the face-to-face folks.
Dale Munday (00:26:33):
Something I've come across in previous roles, and I've used myself in a hybrid approach are some of the more basic tools that we might come across. I know it was mentioned that Jackie's used the Microsoft packages that most people have access to now, which are useful for this kind of developmental hybrid approaches. So things just like even the basic Word document, obviously it's evolved over the years now when you've got things where you can have collaborators within a word documents, and again, those are easy things to develop and usually small building blocks for teachers as well because they're used to a certain tool. It's kind of like just a different way of using these. And I've used Microsoft Word in a hybrid space where there's been physical students working on the document as with students who are online. And again, as Jesse said there within the, there's a zoom or the teams call, they're working on it, they're discussing it and they collaborating together.
(00:27:24):
So it's building hopefully a community as you have more than one student working on these things and not solely individual approaches. Likewise things like OneNote as well. So OneNote, you can predefine spaces per students. Kind of similar to what Eric was talking about in the use of the gamification. Eric, you mentioned about plotting little Easter, Easter eggs within content, and I've seen some gamification used within OneNote for an escape room. So you're using digital escape rooms and having a hybrid approach with physical students, online students, both collectively working together to solve these puzzles. And again, that can be a useful way of building that community as well. And talking about Jesse, with the liminal spaces, things do go off track as well, so it's not just always content focused. They will have those small discussions that will be things that pop up when you've got these difficult tasks that need to become, it's not just as always focused on the task at hand. There will be these other discussions and community builders and exercises that come into it as well.
Eric Mulford (00:28:22):
I absolutely agree with that. I think that the biggest thing too from the online classroom part, you can sit in there and you can engage based on the way that you're looking at a student to go hybrid and to be online. I mean you make a great point, like the escape rooms and the virtual projects and things like that really engage that learner to be involved. There's something at stake there. They want to work as collaborate as a group. They want to be able to build teamwork and get through the process the next process. And then that's the biggest thing is trying to make sure in a classroom, I can't speak from a professor standpoint, but I would think that it's easier to identify a student that's not engaged and not learning as well. If you ask them a question, they're having a struggle versus online, it would be very difficult to do that. And list you're working on a project together, you say, Hey, your piece of the puzzle is this. I think you'd make a great point with that, Dale,
Matt Wittstein (00:29:14):
For many of us in education and all levels of education, when Covid came around, we had to adapt and we had to go to online only for a little bit perhaps. I know personally I had to go to hybrid in the fall of 2020 and then I swore after that I would never go back to hybrid because I had so much trouble teaching both the person that's in the classroom and the person that is at home. So I want to maybe give you all a second, and Dale, I think you gave a great example of how you can leverage making them work together, the two sets of students, the ones at school, and the ones that are still at home. What are some of the other advantages of hybrid pedagogy?
Dale Munday (00:29:54):
Starting off with the troublesome area first is probably best approach because I think as you just mentioned there, when you reflect back on the pandemic and everyone was kind of forced into an approach, so it wasn't a choice to start off with, which I think had a detrimental effect on people's perception of hybrid learning. And it was like that with online learning to a degree as well, because a lot of places hadn't done online learning before and then they were forced into online lectures and online learning. It wasn't really online learning, it was more emergency remote. I think we started using, in the UK it was emergency remote learning because people saw that the quality wasn't at what was expected. It wasn't really what we were expecting to get when we said it was online learning. And I think the similar thing has happened with hybrid.
(00:30:36):
So everyone who did hybrid through the pandemic was really forced into it by either the institution or the scenario, the situation that we were involved in. Whereas if we take a step back and carefully plan hybrid learning, that would look completely different as to how we did in 20 20, 20 21. So I think when we're looking at how we can develop hybrid learning, it is from that kind of ground up learner design. So I think that's the key with it. There's ways and means that hybrid pedagogy is different from what we saw in the past. And I think if we look at it and how we can engage, just as you mentioned there about the two elements of both online students and physical students where we need to start the planning. And it's not as simple as just having something that you would deliver face to face and saying right now it's going to be done as well with online students because that's not the approach.
(00:31:25):
And on the flip side of that, it wouldn't be that online learning and how you've planned that session would work for physical face-to-face students as well. So there is a need to carefully design things that work in the spaces with the technologies available. And I think that's the key. And it comes back to the first question as well about what tools work. And sometimes it is the simple tools that work effectively and we don't need to overcomplicate it, we just need to make sure that there's that synergy between the two. And from experience and from some of the research I was doing, one of the key issues and kind of fault with it was that you would have students in the class working together and you'd have the online students working together. And that would be kind of like what Jesse talked about earlier on around there was really a hierarchy within the class during hybrid sessions because there was a lack of confidence really engaging both sets effectively. And I think the default was always to have, right, I've got students in class, so I'll let them work together, and I've got students online, so naturally they all work together. Whereas what we really need to design is that hybrid approach. So there is that synergy between the two, and we look at the tools that we can use to really connect the two during, as I've said, those tasks,
Jesse Stommel (00:32:28):
One of the things that I saw over the last four years is that in some ways the response to hybrid learning amidst Covid, especially in the United States, feels like it's short circuited hybrid teaching hybrid means almost something completely different today than it did six years ago prior to covid. And I think it's really because I noticed so many institutions adopting some model of what was called high flex learning. And ultimately high flex learning is a pretty obscure, not very well adopted approach to hybrid teaching, but it kind of became a buzzword and a whole bunch of institutions adopted it, even though a lot of the people teaching hybrid weren't doing anything like high flex learning. And basically the notion is that we'll somehow got to figure out a solution to piping in all of these online learners into a classroom. So why don't we put cameras in a classroom and then we will take a picture of the classroom and send it to all of the people who have to learn online.
(00:33:29):
But the problem with that is that the person learning online becomes a fly on the wall. And so what they're seeing is not human beings. They're seeing a room full of human beings. So it would be like saying, Hey, come to my online classroom, but I'm going to make you sit up in the top corner of the room sitting on the chair with a bird's eye view of the room not actually embedded inside of the room. And so it was really the worst possible idea. The solution was, well, how do we pipe in these online students into the classroom? But I think we were asking the wrong question. The question is not how do we just pipe in online students, but how do we also embed the students in the room with the students who are learning online? A really simple approach to that would be, Hey, why not?
(00:34:12):
Instead of putting all of the face-to-face students into a room and piping in the online students, why don't we send all the face-to-face students into little cubicles in the library and put them inside of a zoom room so that people can see their individual faces. And so I think that really what we need to do is kind of get back to this idea of not just how do we pipe in online students, but how do we also get the face-to-face students to be embedded in the online experience in a meaningful way? Otherwise what you have is, as Dale pointed out, you have a situation where all of the online students just become one little box and then all of the face-to-face students are having this really rich, engaged experience with one another in person, and they're barely looking at the online students. They forget that the online students even exist because the online students aren't made relevant to them. They're not actually engaging with them in any meaningful way.
Dale Munday (00:35:04):
You're right, the online students were often the easiest to forget as well. So from a teaching standpoint, you would always focus on what's present. And generally it was the students in the classroom and then even those online asking questions and trying to be engaged, they were kind of missed to a point because like I said, the focus just wasn't on those students and it was not intentional in any way, but it's just because that was the experience that those academics had. They were used to teaching face-to-face. They weren't used to teaching online, so they didn't know how to navigate the tools correctly. They weren't sure on how to engage them in those discussions whilst having, like you said, the facilitation in the room. So it was a definite challenge. And I think you're right that the terminology as well, I think in the UK it was similar.
(00:35:48):
There was new terms coming out by the month based on what people's approach were going to be with regards to the pedagogy. And High Flix was something that was termed here. There was hybrid, there was all sorts. And I think trying to navigate those was difficult for staff as well, because as staff, obviously you want simplicity. You want something that's very, very rigid in its framework to say, right, this is what we're doing and this is the best way to do it. I know from personal experience and from my institution at the time, that didn't happen because there was a lot of confusion as to what was expected during this period and how we could best facilitate the students who couldn't make campus and those who were actually on campus without being able to get away from campus. So there was a big shift during that period, and I think that's something that has dissipated over the time from covid and people are starting to look at hybrid and HyperFlex differently now, but I think the infrastructure and the staff experience and confidence still win from that initial surge, to be honest. I think that's one thing that still needs addressing for any staff looking to do hybrid. It's not to go back to look at pre covid or during Covid as the benchmark to what that looks like. And I think you mentioned there, Jesse, that it was a bit of a car crash to look at times.
Eric Mulford (00:37:00):
Dale, I totally agree with you and Jesse, I totally agree with you as well on the bringing people into the classroom into the cubicles to try to have that face to face. I think one of the biggest challenges too, from my perspective as a student is we've piped in these people online before that are sick or have covid or what have you, and their screens are always off, and so their cameras are off. So you don't really see the person, you dunno if they're in the background wash the dishes or what they're doing. You don't know if they're engaging in the actual conversation. So one of the things that I think would be beneficial if you're having be in classroom, you're piping people in, you could have just like we have in a Zoom, we can have your picture up there, your camera's up there so the instructor knows that you're engaged in the conversation, but you could have a camera in the back of the classroom as if you were in the classroom looking at the back of the heads of all the different people within the classroom. But that gives you the virtual experience that, hey, I can see myself in that classroom. I know that I'm on camera so I can't be doing other things. It can't be distracted by things. And your teacher or the professor can also engage with the class and say, Hey, Eric, or whoever the case may be. Do you have any thoughts on this? I think engagement is super important in that, and I think just like we talked about previously is that face-to-face is really what's important in the engagement part.
Jesse Stommel (00:38:13):
That's fascinating, Eric. I think I've never really heard that point made quite so succinctly this notion that where we put the camera in the room and almost everybody's instinct seems exactly wrong. They put the camera in a position where no student would ever sit, and so suddenly the students are seeing a view that they would never see in a face-to-face classroom and they're seeing a view that none of the other students are seeing. And so there's this sense of dislocation right from the beginning. And we feel that we sense that. The other thing is I don't blame the students for turning off their camera. I've been in a faculty meeting where I was virtual and most of the people were face-to-face and sat there with my hand raised for 15 minutes and nobody even noticed that I existed. And so what am I going to do the next time that I'm in that place?
(00:38:59):
I'm going to turn my camera off. I don't want a camera pointed at me if nobody's paying any attention to me anyway. And so the notion of creating the conditions where someone wants to engage and wants to be involved means putting them in the room in a place that they would actually be and then engaging with them. And in some ways, I think what we have to do is we have to almost pay more attention to the virtual people because our instinct is to forget that they exist. We like the sound of people rustling papers, we like seeing people's pores. We like the immediacy of being next to someone and hearing them rustle. A lot of that stuff is gone for the virtual person. And so we're tuned to not hear them, to not see them. And so making sure we kind err on the side of privileging the virtual because we're already kind of dislocating them.
Dale Munday (00:39:44):
Yeah, I agree with both Erica and Jesse there on that, Rick and the importance of seeing one another within that space. And again, that does add to the building of community. And one thing I did, I delivered a hybrid session with staff around approaches to take once we do go into this lockdown, and one thing I made sure of was that everyone had the camera on, so that was those online and those in person in the session as well. So there was kind of the tiled approach with everyone was there, everyone was visible, everyone was present. And I think that helped the session run. And I was able to see, as you said there, Jesse, it's difficult sometimes facilitate the session where you've got online comments or hands up and your focus obviously forward. Whereas my focus on this one was kind of central because where you used, you have your presentation, I had the screen with everyone on there so everyone could see everyone.
(00:40:33):
Everyone was visible and all the interactions, whether it be hand up the chat or whatever it was, everyone could see because at one point I think I turned my back and I was talking to someone and someone told me from the present in the room or so-and-so's asked the question. So again, taking away that hierarchy of it's all on me, it really helped as well that they engaged in the facilitation of that session and they took ownership as well. And I think by doing things like that and breaking down, as you said in the opening, taking away the hierarchies is that everyone's involved in this hybrid approach and it does need that kind of collective experience to work. Otherwise you do have that kind of separation. Again,
Eric Mulford (00:41:10):
As far as the hand going up, I think that's an important aspect in the Zoom if you're being piped in on the front of the screen at the front of the classroom. So for me, when I sit in the back of the classroom, I can see the students around the classroom and they'll subtly put their hand up to ask the question, but they don't really want to ask the question, but they need the answer. And sometimes the instructor, the professor won't see that. And so for me, they'll just lecturing, lecturing, lecturing and I'll pop my hand up. I'm a big guy. I'm the only guy, so they pay attention. Yeah. Do you have a question? I'm like, I don't have a question, but my friend Lucy over here, she had a question about something. I dunno what it was. Okay, I'm sorry, Lucy, go ahead. So I think C on front screen on the Zoom say, oh, hey, Lucy or Eric or whoever, Dale, Jesse has a question, their hands been up for a minute. Can we pause just for a minute to see what they have to say? I think that's super important.
Dale Munday (00:42:00):
I've also seen things similar to that where you do have these times where students are reluctant to put the hand up or something like that. And within both online physical and hybrid approaches, there's tools again that can be used to have anonymous questioning throughout. And I've seen sessions where those have been on the front screen instead of the camera approaches. But again, those can be important because it takes away that barrier again that both people's comments and questions are valid. And I mean it doesn't have to be anonymous, but sometimes depending on the topic, some people prefer it. They don't want the kind of questions to be attributed to them. And I think that can be a useful one. I know people at my university use Vbox quite readily for things like that where you can have anonymous kind questions come up and people can like them if they want it to move up the chain, things like that. And small things can make a massive impact on that development of community and engaging the online and physical students in the experience.
Matt Wittstein (00:42:53):
So I don't want to turn this into a conversation about artificial intelligence, but I do actually hear some parallels with how we adapted to necessarily doing online and hybrid learning to how we are adapting to AI being very present in our teaching and learning spaces. And I think one of the things that I just want to echo is that right now our students are faculty. They want best practices, they want policies, they want to know what the rules are for using these things. And that's very much the same thing that I'm hearing you all say is giving students and faculty members policies about how to engage as teachers or learners in a hybrid setting and giving them some intentionality in the choices that they're making as educators in that setting. Where I want to go next is I think a lot of us at this stage have the full spectrum of experiences with online and hybrid and in-person meetings or teaching or learning settings. And so I want to think about how we can get new folks to reflect intentionally on their own experiences to sort of bring out the best of why they had a really good workshop that was hybrid or why they had a really bad workshop that was hybrid. And how might you encourage someone that's new to hybrid education to sort of reflect on that and actually pull those practices into what they'll be leading at some point.
Jesse Stommel (00:44:18):
The fascinating thing is I think that humans know how to interact with one another. We spend our whole lives doing it, so we know how to create conversation with someone we've just met. Some of us are better at it than others to some degree. I think just relying on the tools we already have, asking people questions, having conversations, being curious in one another, being interested in one another. And I want to push back really lightly and kindly on something that you said, Matt. And I don't think that you necessarily, I'm sort of, I'm using you as a straw man maybe, but you used the word policy and I want to push back a little bit on the word policy because there's two different ways that we can do this. We can say everyone has to have their camera on in the zoom room, that's our policy.
(00:44:58):
Or we can say something like, when we can see each other, we're able to connect better. So if you are a able to have your camera on, I ask that you do it. Those are two different things. One is leaning into policy, the other is leaning into what I would describe as a social contract. This is how we can better connect with one another. There might be certain people who aren't actually able to have their camera on, and especially when we're talking about non-traditional students. I've had students who are high school students who are taking college classes and they are in a rural area and they have a small home and they're having to sit on their childhood bed in order to pipe into the zoom room, and they might not feel comfortable turning on their zoom camera while sitting on their childhood bed. I've also had students who, again, non-traditional students who are having to take classes and pipe into a Zoom classroom session while they are driving.
(00:45:54):
And I would prefer that they not have their camera on, just have your audio on. And so thinking about safety, and I mean that both physical safety in that case, but also things about how do we make people feel safe and comfortable and able to be vulnerable. I think we do it by asking things of one another, not necessarily by creating policies. So not necessarily we don't have coffee together for the first time and say, everyone is going to need to post once and reply twice during this coffee. We say, it's nice to meet you. How's it going today? And that kind of leaning into social contract I think helps guide that. And so asking yourself as a student, what's worked for me when I'm in a zoom room, usually it's not a restriction that I have to do X, Y, Z at x, y, z time. It's making genuine connections with one another and feeling like my voice is heard.
Dale Munday (00:46:45):
Just based on what Jesse had said there. I've been doing some research around blended learning approaches. And one of the things that came up very strongly was one, it was a participative development of the institutional policy. So it wasn't just a top down approach, but it was engagement with various stakeholders. And one of the terms that came out of the research was hard and soft rules. So the hard rules, like Jesse mentioned, there are things like they have to do. So if it was a case of saying, right, everyone who attends online has to have their camera on, that would be the hard rule. Whereas the softer rule would be the things that are more negotiable and the things that can be optional for things like Jesse said there around it, instead of saying everyone has to have it, it would be where appropriate, we suggest that you would put on the camera for participatory experience and things like that.
(00:47:33):
So this notion of the hard and soft rules or this participatory development of these approaches, I think can have a massive impact. And again, that's something that when we're designing things for hybrid experiences for students and staff, these are things that need to be taken into consideration. And the stakeholders vary. Like I said, that could be professional service staff. You've got academic staff got students, you've got external stakeholders that may have input. And obviously in the context of what we're discussing now, we're talking about physical therapists and things like that. There's a lot to take on board, but they all should have an input into how these approaches are taken because without them, it can be seen as an authoritarian approach where this is something we have to do. And usually there's a fight back from that as well. And they don't integrate well into various scenarios when we have that approach.
(00:48:19):
So multiple voices help with these approaches. And I think that is the same with hybrid. And again, it's the same with the AI example that you mentioned, and obviously it's happening across in the UK as well. There's a massive climate of, well, beer, I think it's probably one of the better words about the use of AI in higher education, whereas I'm kind of on the opposite. I'm kind of in used by its use in higher education and how it can be used in teaching and learning. So I'm integrating it into my courses and likewise, that's what I did with the hybrid approaches. I'm looking at where those approaches suit the curriculum and where they would add value to the experience of students. And again, I think that's key. It's what adds to the experience of students and not, we've seen this somewhere, we need to replicate this and copy this, or there's something coming down the road here. We really need to just put this in place now because that's what we do.
Jesse Stommel (00:49:06):
Yeah, I'm thinking about the, what is it we're trying to get, get engagement, whether it's engagement with each other or engagement with the assignments that we're giving. We're not trying to get the performance of engagement. Most of us have been in a classroom or we've been in a zoom room where we're kind of nodding our heads, making sure we're looking towards the camera, doing all these things with our body to make it look like we're engaged because we feel like there's a requirement that we must do that. Or we've also done that with assignments where we're given kind of an over elabor sort of authoritarian rubric that says, you must do this on this page or at this part of the document. And then we're essentially just kind of going through the motions approaching school like it's a worksheet. And I think the thing to ask ourselves as teachers, and I ask ourselves as students too, do we want to actually have our students engaging in thoughtful, vulnerable ways with the work that we're doing and the community that we're in, or do we want them performing those things so that we can check a box?
(00:50:05):
And I think that there's a whole different way of achieving one versus the other one we achieve by giving a bunch of policies and a bunch of overwrought rubrics, the other we achieve by leaning into, Hey, I see you and I'm really curious about how you would respond to this. A writing assignment where we ask a student, I really want to hear your voice. I want to know what you think about this thing. I'm less worried about whether you put the periods in all the right places, and I'm more worried about giving you space to actually work through your thinking on this particular subject.
Eric Mulford (00:50:36):
Trickling back just a little bit with Matt's statement of is it cheating, is it not cheating your statement of trying to actually get a learner to engage to get their actual thought process? I think AI is a tool for the student to have a launching point, especially this point in time where literally the internet is at your fingertips and you can look up anything. The problem with AI is there's a lot of things that you can get intelligence back on that aren't exactly a hundred percent factual, so you have to fact check it. But I think it's a good launching point. So if for an example, if I'm going to look up a subject in school on congestive heart failure or something like that, I got to do a big paper on, I can get some stuff like, Hey, what about congestive heart failure? Should I put that paper And it might give me a list of different things and then I can do actual research on those topics with sources cited to really get an actual involvement on the paper to get my actual thoughts. So I think there's a fine line there, but as far as AI goes, it's a more prevalent thing. And here at Elon University, there's professors and educators that are doing more classes based on AI because it's just flooding into our system more and more and more. So there's a fine line for that, but I think it's a good launching point.
Dale Munday (00:51:44):
One example I've got of where the authoritarian structured approach doesn't always work is during the start of covid, when my previous university created a policy on hybrid learning, so they went out there quickly got it out there. It was on some of the pages when I was doing some research into it, one of the questions was, how have you found using the guidance on hybrid learning, not one academic knew that existed. So again, engagement with these policies is crucial to a point. So if they don't even know they exist, how are they meant to use them to structure and frame what they're going to be doing and how do they effectively approach it? That's where the bottom up approach with these relevant stakeholders and engagement with these practices. And Matt, you started off with saying what can help? And I think things like case studies around effective use from other institutions, other academics and sharing good practice in that way can really facilitate an effective use of hybrid approaches. Likewise with AI as well, that's going to be the next thing where there's an effective sharing of AI practices both in higher education and obviously wider professions.
Jesse Stommel (00:52:48):
I think fear gets in our way when we're trying to build community. And so if we think about what's happening with AI and we think about sort of anxiety around cheating, most of the students I talk to are worried that they might get called out for cheating even when they don't think they're doing it. Most of the teachers that I talk to are worried that their students are going to cheat more often if X, Y, Z happens. And I think ultimately then we've got institutions, as Dale is pointing out, institutions, putting forth policies, and we're reading these policies and the policies are often very defensive. They're often set up to kind of say, if cheating happens X, Y, Z, and ultimately what would we do to break that down here? We're in a room full of people who've mostly just met each other. And Matt didn't come on at the beginning and say, okay, I just want to be clear.
(00:53:36):
There is a policy for this conversation that nobody can lie. He didn't say that although there was sort of a accepted presumption that we wouldn't lie. Now imagine if he did come on at the beginning and say, nobody can lie in this conversation. Imagine what that would do to all of our interactions with one another. And so what would we do to break that down? And I think this is what we do to break down what's happening at our institutions. I think the best thing for us to do if he said that is for us to then have a conversation about, well, why did he say that? What went into his saying that? What kind of assumptions and presumptions are in this room that led to that needing to be said at that moment? Are we going to lie? Who are we? What are our goals for being here?
(00:54:14):
Why are we here? What kind of relationship do we want to build with one another? So ultimately that's the conversation we need to have at our institutions among teachers and also between students and teachers, is to pull out those policies and not say this policy is the law, but to pull up that policy and say, why did this policy come into existence? What is ai? How is AI potentially a threat to what we're trying to do here? How is AI potentially something that we could use to support and help what we're doing here? Those kind of real honest, we're human beings. These things have an effect on us. Conversations I think are valuable.
Eric Mulford (00:54:48):
I agree with you with the policies and the verbiage that goes along with that. Jesse percent agree with that because it's okay, what happens if you use this? What happens if you break policy? There's going to be these consequences. You're going to go to an ethics board or you're going to go to student council or whatever the case may be. But at the same retrospect, if you type in, you take a book that you're using, you take three paragraphs out of it and you put it into an AI checker say, is this ai? It's going to detect at least 35% of that is ai when it's not ai. And that's the thing is there's not a definition specifically from a student's perspective of what is and what isn't. Ai, can you see that this doesn't sound right. It's crafted in words that the student doesn't typically use or the punctuation is really, really good and it looks crafted in a different way.
(00:55:36):
But as far as putting words together, people put words together all the time. And so one of the troubles that I had last semester is we had an issue with, there is some AI type conversation in our classroom. And so we had said, Hey, what's the difference between this right here of what we crafted up together as a team of five people, one of them being a 4-year-old person with a lot of education, and it shows that, oh, this report is 35% AI versus I took three paragraphs out of the book we're teaching from and we put it in AI and that shows up 35% ai. So what's the difference between the two? So there needs to be some, they'll set hard and soft lines of what that is that a conversation needs to be had sooner than later, especially right now where it's just ramping up every day. Again, I think it's a tool to use, it's a launching point to use, and as long as you're using it in the right format, it'll be detrimental to the students' overall development.
Jesse Stommel (00:56:31):
One thing I want to say is that I think that cheating is detrimental to your learning, but I also think tiptoeing around your learning because you're trying to avoid landmines in the midst of your educational process is also detrimental to your learning. And I don't think we say that enough that we want to create a situation where you're not cheating and you're motivated to do work that's authentic and meaningful to you, but we also want to create a situation where you aren't tiptoeing around a set of landmines and policies that you have to navigate.
Matt Wittstein (00:57:03):
I want to bring this back to hybrid education a little bit and maybe wrap up with this sort of question or thought of what is one thing that you would do to train somebody that is new to hybrid teaching? And maybe a converse way to think of that is what are some ideas that you might have for mentors of hybrid learners? And so Eric, I also want to point out that you can be a peer mentor. You don't have to be the person in the front of the room to be a mentor in that way.
Dale Munday (00:57:31):
When we're thinking of how to support and develop new staff who are new to this kind of a hybrid approach, for me it would be thinking about the scalability, thinking about where your starting point is that coming back to my experiences and my observations of staff who were thrown into the deep end really with hybrid learning, and they were just expected to teach exactly how they would've taught with the same number of students taught any completely new dynamic and a total paradigm shift to what they were used to. The pedagogy, totally. It didn't change, but it should is where I'm getting at. But I think if we're looking at the scale, starting small and starting simple would be the key for me because you don't want to overcomplicate things from the outset. And if you do, that would be a major worry. A lot more can go wrong when you planned to do more things. So I think taking it very, very simply from the outset, and I think some of the tools that everyone's mentioned earlier on in their discussions, that if you plan to use one or two key activities or tools or approaches within that session and look at how you can interact with online and face-to-face when planning,
Jesse Stommel (00:58:33):
Yeah, this is a version of what I think Dale is saying, that ultimately I think start with humans, not tools and ask ourselves what's super important for us as humans, making connection, eye contact, having experience using our imaginations, using our mouths, using our ears, using our fingers, using our eyes, and asking questions about the tools that we're using. How are the tools getting in our way? And I think having these conversations really sort of explicitly can be valuable. First time we're in a zoom room together, let's start by talking about how is the zoom room getting in our way and how is it helping us? Just to verbalize that, to put that out there, we're in a learning management system discussion forum. How is this helping conversation? How is it hindering conversation? And to some extent, you don't necessarily throughout the entirety of your career, have to have those conversations explicitly every time because I think to some degree they become implicit.
(00:59:23):
But to build that confidence like Dale is talking about asking the first time we're thrown into a hybrid situation, pausing and just saying what's working here and what's not working? And having the students have a conversation with the teacher to help kind of suss that out and to then use that to then improve the way that we engage with one another. So if we discover, Hey, this tool is actually making me not want to engage with people, it's making me not want to find out more things about people. Eric said something at the very beginning about a tool that limited the amount of words that could be used when my words are limited, X happens for me as a learner, but also sometimes we might say limiting my words in certain situations might lead to a different kind of conversation. For example, if you're in a discussion forum and each person is writing 250 words, those are little mini soliloquy, one after another.
(01:00:14):
It's hard to create sort of rapport or a rat tat back and forth inside of 250 words. So different things work for different reasons. 250 words allows you to get a full thought out. It's not really great for creating rapport, whereas something like limiting to 150 characters might be good for. We see that happen in chat rooms, for example. People write really short things in chat room, but the goal isn't to get a whole idea across. The goal is to kind of build rapport and bounce ideas off one another and talk about what's happening for us. And so I think making some of those conversations explicit. We're in the chat room in Zoom, how is the chat room helping us connect with one another? How is it different from what's happening in the main room of the Zoom? I think doing that builds rapport, also helps us keep things simple because I think we recognize very quickly that the more complicated tools we use, the more they start to get in the way of our basic human faculties.
Dale Munday (01:01:08):
One thing you mentioned there around keeping it simple, it comes back to the notion of the expectations we put on ourselves as well as teachers of in hybrid approach. And don't set the expectations too high. Again, just like you wouldn't when you're start out teaching, you don't set your expectations to be the world's best teacher. Straight away you're learning. And again, I think that's one key thing when getting to grips with hybrids teaching as well, hybrid learning as well from a student perspective that it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be playing sailing on your first time.
Eric Mulford (01:01:36):
I think I said at the beginning, for me as someone that's going to go teach hybrid lectures, so I had a cellular biology course here at Elon and the lectures were previously recorded through Covid times. So he's like, Hey, I'm going to load these up. That doesn't mean you're not coming to class because I have an attendance policy, but I want you to watch the lecture. It's going to be an hour and a half long, and you get to get the information out of it. You get to take notes and you get to pause it. They say a couple words like, okay on research that in the classroom itself, it's hard to tell the teacher or the professor to pause or hold on a second because it takes up time and they're rushing at end trying to get through all the material they're trying get during that period.
(01:02:16):
It gives opportunity a learner be able to go in and take notes and then come back into the classroom and say, Hey, I had a question about this. Or when they're talking, when they're going through their lecture that you've already watched, you can say, Hey, on the lecture online, you had said these things. I don't quite understand that. Can you explain that a little better? And you're already kind of prepared and you're in that learning engagement mode. That's happened twice now where I've had that and like I said earlier, the Easter egg thing where the student has the notes on an online course, I have all the notes for this microbiology course. I have all the notes there. However, if I watch the lectures for an hour and a half, I take an hour and a half out of my day, I'm going to get some extra little information within those notes that might be useful to me on a quiz or a test later on in that class. And I think it just allows the students to say, okay, I'm going to be engaged. I'm going to take the time. Because a lot of times online people are doing it out of convenience, and so they're just doing it just to get through the class. I just don't have a lot of time to do online course online, but it allows you to take the time out to sit down, to listen to the lecture and get the information you need to actually process this thought process for good learning.
Matt Wittstein (01:03:25):
Jesse, Dale, Eric, I really appreciate the conversation and even though we were focused on hybrid pedagogy, I'm most excited that a lot of the stuff we talked about is actually practical in a lot of different teaching settings. So I can't wait to share this with Jackie.
Eric Mulford (01:03:38):
It was nice to meet all of you. Great discussions soon. We'll see you guys again.
Dale Munday (01:03:42):
Thanks everyone. Great discussions.
Jesse Stommel (01:03:44):
Thanks. See you later.
Matt Wittstein (01:04:00):
Welcome back, Jackie.
Jackie Davenport (01:04:02):
Thank you. It's good to be here. I'm excited.
Matt Wittstein (01:04:04):
So thinking about hybrid learning, I spoke with Eric Mulford, a retired firefighter, current paramedic, and a student pursuing a second career in nursing. Dale Monday from the University of Central Lancaster, who's focused on teacher training and digital education. And Jesse Stommel, a teaching professor and educational developer from the University of Denver. If I could paraphrase their entire conversation, it would be to focus on the humans first as you explore new strategies to improve your hybrid residency program. We talked a bit about building community and the panel shared some ways to get students to be more present in courses and with each other. First, we have to start with getting to know each other and consistently talking to each other. This is sometimes more difficult and complicated when some students are digitally present and others are physically present. But Jesse pointed out that the deep connection points at conferences and in the workplace usually actually happen in the liminal spaces, the minutes before and after class and during breaks.
(01:05:01):
Online learning has somewhat killed those connection opportunities. So implementing time or activities that allow learners to have opportunities for small conversation is a really important practice. The simple example of in-person students working together and online students working together can be sort of flipped on its head if we're able to design activities that incentivize or even require students to work across platforms. Imagine a scavenger hunt where the online learners have a map for an escape room and the in-person students have to actually act out the tasks. They're required to work with each other in that setting and it actually makes them interact. We also talked a lot about policies and hierarchy, and again, how leaning into the human pieces is important. The idea came up that even the positioning of our cameras puts an online viewer of class in a position they would never be in the actual classroom and where they can't reasonably see or interact with other classmates.
(01:05:52):
Jesse suggested having conversations with students about how is this hybrid format supporting us? How does it change our learning? What are its limitations? Inviting stakeholders into that classroom, Dale mentioned, is a really good way to diversify new innovations and ensure more voices are present. Additionally, finding the balance between hard and soft rules that is rigid policies versus complete flexibility is something each faculty will need to navigate on their own to an extent regardless. Approaching policy through encouragement and humility instead of authoritatively supports learners. Instead of having a cameras on policy explaining to students why having cameras on is important to your pedagogy and asking them to have their cameras on if they're able demonstrates more cultural understanding and empathy. We wrapped up the conversation by sharing specific advice to prepare new faculty for hybrid learning and also mentoring students that are experiencing hybrid learning. Eric expressed using class time for questions and interaction and home time to let students slow down the learning process.
(01:06:48):
Jesse continued to remind us of the importance of focusing on what humans want in relationships, things like eye contact, connection and imagination. And finally, Dale wants us to give ourselves and your new faculty and the students a little bit of grace. This is a new experience and they can take it very slow and get better over time. Hybrid learning often doesn't scale especially well. So start with really small steps, especially as your context is changing with the growth of your company. So in your context, you're thinking about new faculty as learners and of course the students as the learners as well. Is there anything from our panel that resonates with those two different types of learners?
Jackie Davenport (01:07:25):
I think one of the first things that you said was very wise and honestly resonates with how we think as practitioners in a healthcare setting too, which is the idea of starting with a person and a human and the learners and the people. Just hearing that as a good reminder for us to just keep ourselves centered around sometimes it's not the topic that we're trying to get across as important as that is for us to pass board exams and be able to take care of people, but if we aren't first engaging on the person level to really understand what they need and how they need to learn, I can see how that is actually really critical. We think that same way about how we take care of patients. We want the patient to be first more than their diagnosis. We should want the learner to be first more than we care about that particular topic, and we'll win the topic if we win the person.
(01:08:10):
One of the other pieces that was really interesting is thinking about how we create some connection across the in-person versus the hybrid learners that we have. A lot of times we give case study presentations where we'll say, Hey, here's a patient case and here's some information about that case. Just to think about what would happen if we were to give the subjective information, the things patients say to one group of learners and the objective information to the other group of learners and have to have them collaborate to be able to get information from one another to create that kind of environment, I think would be very engaging, very interesting, and something we haven't tried or done before.
Matt Wittstein (01:08:47):
So I hear all of your responses seem to be focusing on your students as learners. What are the lessons that you're going to take in your faculty training aspect of your role?
Jackie Davenport (01:08:56):
I think one of the things that's encouraging for the faculty part is I really appreciated the end just thinking about grace and how this doesn't all have to be perfect right away, that we can take some time to be able to figure out what works well, not just for the learner, but for the faculty member, and that it's okay for us to just try some things, whether it's where we put the camera, whether it's how we engage somebody in the chat, how we have our faculty members communicate to different people, whether they're in person or whether they're hybrid. I think that grace piece is very important, I think is honestly really encouraging for our faculty members to hear that this is something that's challenging and if it's challenging for people who do it quite often and think about it quite often, of course it's going to be challenging for someone whose main goal is actually to take really good care of people and who as a secondary part of their role are able to engage in this faculty position. So I think from my faculty perspective, I just think it's encouraging to hear someone say, Hey, it's okay to give yourself a little bit of grace and for this to be something that takes some time for us to figure out and as we go along the way for us to think about our faculty's perspective on how it's going and the learner's perspective at the same time and trying to tweak things that make it good for either one of those groups as we go along.
Matt Wittstein (01:10:06):
And so they also talked about sort of bringing stakeholders into the process of making changes and stuff, and I'm curious how you might integrate your faculty learners and your student learners into that sort of feedback loop as you're updating your programs on a regular basis. How do you get the other stakeholders opinions?
Jackie Davenport (01:10:24):
Yeah, we actually ask our residents at the end of every section, which is about every three to four weeks, to give us feedback on the instructors that are providing the education for them. And I hadn't actually thought about adding in a question, but it should be pretty easy for us to say, how do you feel like you've been engaged in this process, whether virtually or in person just to get a little bit more specific feedback instead of keeping it open-ended. We haven't asked the faculty on a frequent basis. We kind of do this yearly annual review where we think about, Hey, how's it going? What do we need to change? But it's very possible that there needs to be some more frequent feedback from the faculty to say, Hey, at the end of your section, how did that go? What did you like? What was hard?
(01:11:04):
What do we need to think about doing for next year considering we are on this kind of yearly cycle? And then even the other thing I think, too is for our faculty to learn from each other. So if we had one group of people who did something and it worked really well for them, for us to find a way to communicate that to the other faculty members who are teaching in other sections that might not have seen how something went well or maybe didn't go well for a group of people that we were teaching in that topic.
Matt Wittstein (01:11:30):
Well, Jackie, I think that's all I have for you from our conversation. I want to thank you for your time and sharing that context, and I want to sincerely share that I hope that we're able to sort of collaborate across industry and higher education because I think there are lessons that we can learn from each other, especially in these contexts.
Jackie Davenport (01:11:47):
Yeah, thank you. I mean, I know I've been really excited. Even our faculty has been really excited. It's great to have another perspective. It's just fun to think about this in a different way because we are all trying to learn and teach at the same time, even if it's in a different setting or different context. But really our end goal is knowledge and for us growing as people in the process of this too. So I'm thankful for your time and thankful for the panel and just thankful overall
Matt Wittstein (01:12:18):
Limed Teaching with A Twist is produced in collaboration with the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University. For more information, including show notes and additional engaged learning resources, visit www.centerforengagedlearning.org. Limed Teaching with a Twist is a creation of Matt Wittstein, associate Professor of Exercise Science at Elon University. Episodes are developed and hosted by Matt Wittstein and Devani Ani, assistant Director of Learning Design and Support at Elon University. Olivia Taylor, a class of 2026. Music production and recording Arts major is our Summer 2024 intern and serves as a producer and editor for the show. Original music for the show was composed and recorded by Kai Mitchell and alumni of Elon University. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a few moments to subscribe, rate, review, and share our show. We aim to bring insightful and relevant content to educators each month. We would love to hear from you. If you're interested in being a guest on the show, do not hesitate to reach out. Our most updated contact information can be found on the Center for Engaged Learning website. Thanks for listening, and stay zesty.