My greatest anxiety in synchronous online teaching a class of students is this feeling of being disconnected and not literally, but again socially, emotionally, epistemologically. I am facing my two-dimensional screen, telling myself that all is good and to stick to my plan—delivering content, directing activities, facilitating turns “to speak”—all the while wondering… Are you there? Can you ‘see’ me? Are you okay? Where are you? Are we okay? (Tarc, p. 121) This sentiment from Paul Tarc, an Associate Professor in Education at Western University, is echoed, over and over again, in the transcripts and survey answers from the research study that Viola Manakore and I are currently working through involving ACIFA partners. Here are just a few quotes I lifted from instructors we asked to relate their greatest challenge in moving to online instruction:
Last month, when our online engagement learning team began to meet as a small community of practice, I think this disconnect was our starting point. But after several meetings, we began to ask ourselves some different questions:
Engagement or Interactivity? As you might have guessed, after reading the first two installments on this topic (April 12 & 19), our faculty learning team concluded that, while engagement and interactivity may be linked, they are not synonymous. This is especially the case when we limit our notion of engagement to deeply connecting with the content and skill development in our coursework. Having students compete in online quizzing (Kahoot, Quizizz and the like), respond through the chat or status bar, use the online whiteboard, engage in virtual icebreakers, and indicate their opinions through polling software (Mentimeter, Polly, etc.) might break up tedious synchronous lessons, but these activities may or may not promote true engagement. For some of our students—who prefer independent, asynchronous learning—such work is just busy work, more of a distraction than a support. That is not to devalue these interactive activities. If such activities keep many students attending and alert, and give the instructors a sense that “the students are there”, effective instructors will find ways to integrate such interactivity into both the synchronous and asynchronous coursework. In fact, such activities can enhance a feeling of community and promote student to student connections. Quizzing apps help students to consolidate and remember concepts and terms and promote competition and even teaming (depending on the app being used). Having students regularly indicate their status in the chat (Let me know if you are with me… thumbs up or down?) or having them “flood the chat” (Type your answers into the chat but refrain from hitting enter until the instructor gives the signal!), can help turn the chat box from a nuisance into a powerful feedback and learning tool. Before class or gap time energizers (Scavenger hunts, people bingo, riddles, chair exercises, etc.) can provide some humour and wake up a sleepy cohort. And polling helps the instructor gain a sense of where students are at, and how they might adjust their presentations and activities based upon student readiness. In addition to some of the interactive activities suggested above (quizzing, chat, icebreakers, and polling) which provide immediate feedback, some more suggestions put forward by our engagement team to create energy and build community included:
Coping with the Disconnect But while all of the activities above might encourage more participation and even help improve attendance in synchronous classes, they may not help instructors overcome the unease of teaching to a computer screen and the bittersweet longing for things “as they were before Covid”. In a recent publication Paul Tarc, captures this sentiment quite eloquently: For me, as an educator in higher education with considerable autonomy of my curricular materials and teaching approaches, the greatest lack in the in the virtual classroom are the greatly diminished multi-sensory feedback loops. These feedback loops are crucial to the relational, and emotionally-laden, labour of educating. The capability to quickly read the body language, facial expressions, class dynamic and circulation of ideas and affects is greatly minimized in the virtual classroom; in turn, so is a spontaneity and capacity to engage and expand the intersections of teacher (identity, experience and knowledge), students (Identities, experiences and knowledge) and curriculum. (Tarc, p. 122) There’s something about teaching face to face that many educators find energizing and invigorating. Much like the professional hockey players that have been forced to compete without the roaring crowds and professional musicians who play without the appreciation and applause of their patrons, experienced classroom instructors are also missing such immediacy and intimacy. Imagine a stand-up comic doing their routine without the cues and clues of a live audience! How hard must that be! It is a bit like writing a blog never knowing if people are reading and appreciating it, or simply clicking on it and leaving... So, what can we do to cope with the kind of disconnect that many instructors (and students) are feeling in the wake of this year-long and continuing emergency remote online teaching? Here’s a few reminders that I keep telling myself:
Considering the needs of both students and instructors As we march forward to a post-Covid reality, there is considerable buzz around what we have learned and achieved as post secondaries in our rapid move to online learning. Institutions are looking at the past year as evidence that we are ready to move on from 19th and 20th models of learning. The 21st century learner wants more flexibility in how, when and where they learn – and we found ways to make that happen! And there are savings and opportunities to be had! Having many more students take their programming online, and having instructors teach from anywhere significantly cuts down on the physical requirements of a college or university and opens up student enrollment on an international scale. As a result, many institutions are committing to more asynchronous online, hybrid or Hyflex models of instruction; this is the way forward after Covid! And it may be so. However, before we rush off and sound the death knell for structured, scheduled, corporeal, in-class instruction, we also need to need to remember that not all of our students are comfortable with the requirements and trade-offs of learning online. At NorQuest, many of our students have struggled with their schooling, and they have come to our college for the community, routine, support, and structure that face to face learning offers. We must remember the needs of these students and build a blend of programming options that allows our students to succeed. In addition, we must also look to the needs of our instructional staff. Throughout this pandemic they have been asked to shift the way that they teach, and for some instructors the change came rather easily. But, just like our students, we are not all the same. For many instructors, it was a very steep learning curve. I know of many instructors who have felt isolated, helpless (tech and tools were challenging), and frustrated. Like Paul Tarc, they wondered if they were truly getting through and they were concerned for the learning (and even well-being) of their students. Some of these instructors have confessed to me that the past year has caused them to re-consider their work and worth as an educator, and to entertain the notion of a career change. They no longer have the zeal they used to have when preparing for their classes and sharing a community with their students. And this wrinkle around instructor engagement often gets lost, as we try to press our hot irons through issues related to student enrollment and engagement in our current teaching reality! Just how can we make sure that our instructors are also feeling engaged in their learning? Especially those instructors who hunger for the kind of interactions and “multi-sensory feedback loops” that previously gave them energy and connections. How do we continue to support these faculty in their professional growth? How can re-instill confidence and provide validation for their efforts? How do we build programs that allow these instructors to thrive alongside their students? These are questions program builders and instructional leaders cannot afford to ignore. And they are just a few of the questions that keep me up at night. I’ll end this blog with several questions for you. What has sustained and kept you engaged as you worked through the pandemic pressured teaching transitions this past year? And what will keep you engaged and energized as we transition to new ways of providing education and training to our students? Feel free to send in your responses or further questions through the reply feature below! Tarc, P. (2000). Education post-‘Covid-19’: Re-visioning the face-to-face classroom. Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE), 22(1), 121-124.
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In the first blog entry on this topic, I shared how the term “student engagement” is often used in very different contexts in and around post-secondary learning (active learning, curricula development, quality assurance, and institutional governance – to name a few). And even when we narrow down our focus to student learning and the connections made during this process, it seems as if it is easier to identify when engagement doesn’t happen, than to unpack what engagement actually is. This challenge gave rise to a set of three questions:
1. What is our definition of “student engagement”?In our NorQuest Online Engagement Learning Team (a small faculty community of practice), we are continuing to shape and refine our understanding of student engagement. In a chapter entitled: “The Meanings of Student Engagement: Implications for Policies and Practices”, Ashwin and McVitty share one definition that has promise: Within the community of academic practitioners, engagement by students is most commonly interpreted in relation to the psychology of individual learning: the degree at which students engage with their studies in terms of motivation, the depth of their intellectual perception or simply studiousness. Engaged students are viewed as taking ownership for their own learning, working together with staff on ensuring academic success and accepting the role of engaged and willing apprentice to an academic master (Velden 2013, p. 78). This definition makes me think of terms like: empowerment, inquiry, self-efficacy, perseverance, and personal accountability. As such it deals with the notion of engagement as something that may develop and grow as students partake in learning opportunities, and much of it will depend upon the students themselves. However, our learning team was looking more closely at engagement in direct response to specific learning activities, as a response to the lesson or course design of the instructors and the interactions and thinking that happens while such learning occurs. Another common definition of student engagement is “being in the zone” - to become so preoccupied with a task or challenge that time and other constraints fade to the background. I like this definition for its simplicity. This definition focuses on engagement from moment to moment, not over a semester or a year. I think it is every instructor’s hope that we can get our students so wrapped up in their activities that time seems to fly by. And it seems to me, that time flies by, not when students are simply trying to listen and remember, but when they are acting upon the content, skills and professional judgments that are the focus of their asynchronous or synchronous learning activities and assignments. However, if we accept this student engagement definition of “being in the zone”, we also have to ask, just how do we get our students to enter this zone? Experienced educators will tell us that it requires an artful mix of intriguing questions, humor, clear demonstrations, choice, opportunities to collaborate, challenge, feedback, personal connections, and a host of other classroom conditions and influences. Such artful teaching challenges our students to: ask questions, make inferences, compare and contrast, synthesize, role play, problem solve, build new frames of understanding for themselves and reflect (and many more - higher order - thinking skills). 2. How do we cultivate “in the zone” engagement?In an article published in 2011, Jim Parsons and Leah Taylor suggest that student engagement is directly related to how educators build learning experiences with sic different six different factors in mind:
While the work of Parsons and Taylor is perhaps a bit dated now, especially in light of how technology has transformed learning environments in the past couple of years, I still like this list. It points us away from the superficial (but often energy providing) things that we consider indicators of engagement; it is more than just eye-contact, body posture, question-asking and quick collaboration (in-class) or cameras, on clicks of the mouse and chat messages (online). Engagement is related to how a student connects to the learning outcomes, how they personalize learning, how they apply their gifts and abilities, and how we, as instructional designers, set up a context that allows them to do all of this. 3. Is there a difference between engagement in synchronous online environments compared to asynchronous work?In a word, no! And then again, yes! Engagement, as we’re coming to understand in our little learning team, is really more about thinking than it is about interactivity. Good questions, challenging tasks, and interesting readings and video recordings all contribute to student engagement – it matters not if these are situated through asynchronous or synchronous means. However, as Viola and I very quickly discovered when we started our research study on the rapid move to online instruction, asynchronous online instruction (which has a significant research base) is quite different from what most colleges, institutes and universities are now offering in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic. Tried and true asynchronous online instruction is dependent upon well-laid out course maps, where the activities, assignments and assessments are established well before the students take the course. Such courses attract students who welcome the flexibility offered and these students feel that they have the drive and self-discipline to engage in the learning and complete the work. While this learning can be enhanced by creating a community of inquiry (see CoI Framework AthabascaU), the success of individual students depends more upon the instructor’s selection and organization of the learning tasks than upon the instructor’s connection with the learners. What most of us are offering now is not that kind of online learning. Leading educators have said that our current Covid reality has pushed us into a “remote learning” model, where instructors are trying – to various levels of success - to emulate face-to-face learning in an online environment. Some have even gone so far as to call this “emergency remote teaching”, thereby conveying the notion that our efforts are reactive and responsive, rather than carefully mapped or based upon proven practices. (See excellent article at Educause: emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning ) We are learning as we go. And one year in, we are getting better at it. But many instructors are still struggling with striking the right balance and settling on practices that create interest, promote community/communication and provide enough support without frustrating or burning out the student or the teacher. So, using the frames and models that others have developed to describe engagement in online instruction to gauge and unpack what is happening now, has its limitations. We can apply some of the findings and principles from this scholarship in online learning to our new context, but we can only go so far. Most of our students at NorQuest, did not sign up for asynchronous online instruction and they certainly didn’t sign up emergency remote instruction. And while some students have thrived in this new, more flexible way of learning (they could more easily accommodate work responsibilities and could eliminate the commute), many more students lament the loss of the feeling that they are part of a classroom community with its shared pacing of learning activities, deadlines and camaraderie. And many of our instructors are missing this shared experience just as much as the students. In next week’s blog, part 3 of engagement, I hope to more closely explore the concepts of student engagement, interactivity, and student and instructor experience in our current Covid (remote learning) context and make some practical suggestions. References: Anderson, T. (2011). The theory and practice of online learning. (2nd Edition). Edmonton, AB: AU Press. Ashwin P., McVitty D. (2015) The Meanings of Student Engagement: Implications for Policies and Practices. In: Curaj A., Matei L., Pricopie R., Salmi J., Scott P. (eds) The European Higher Education Area. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20877-0_23 Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Taylor, L. & Parsons, J. (2011). Improving Student Engagement. Current Issues in Education, 14(1). Measuring student engagement? Quite a number of years ago, I was asked to champion a classroom walkthroughs program in a large school district. In this program school administrators would conduct “walkthroughs” as a way to assess how their school was implementing improvement goals. These administrators would get real data and a “feel” for how things were going in a quick and simple way. Principals and associate principals were to quickly pop into classrooms while teaching was taking place and, using a checklist with certain look-fors, make a five-minute assessment based on their observations of the lesson:
These and a number of other questions were all organized on a one-pager with checkboxes that administrators could quickly fill out. At the end of each day (or week) they would be expected to enter the data into an online database so they could combine all of their quick snapshots (crunch the numbers) and see “the big picture” for their school. A walkthrough mosaic, if you will. While I sympathized with the intent of the walkthroughs and was happy to get principals out of their offices and into the classrooms, I didn’t especially like the tool. It’s hard to reduce something as complex as a teaching environment into a series of “Yes I saw it!”, or “No I didn’t!” checklists. One question especially rankled me: Determine levels of class engagement:
The question was based upon a model for describing classroom engagement from the Phillip Schlechty (2002) which has five different levels of engagement: 1) Authentic Engagement, 2) Ritual Compliance, 3) Passive Compliance, 4) Retreatism, and 5) Rebellion. (for short summary of these levels check this document from Stockton University Center for Learning Design: levels) This question always bothered me. While the model professed to illustrate levels of “engagement”, there really was only one level where student were really engaged – the other levels just showed how disengaged they might be. The question elicited many questions from me. How do we know exactly what engagement looks like? Is it about eye-contact, question-asking, discussion, and busyness? Or could quiet students, who might be judged as day-dreamers, perhaps be more engaged than students who know how to “play the game”? Is a classroom of students quietly doodling as a teacher reads a story to them less engaged than those down the hall conducting a science experiment? Which group is merely compliant? I began to think about the types of engagement and considered a model of my own: 1) causing chaos, 2) confused or disconnected, 3) simple compliance, 4) making connections (personal or real world), 5) consolidating learning (building a frame for understanding), 6) challenging assumptions, and 7) creating new understandings or interpretations. Of course, most of this kind of engagement happens where we can’t observe it – inside the mind of the student. So, it wouldn’t work very well as a tool for quick observation (although it might work when reviewing student responses, written or recorded). After working with our district administrators for six months with what I thought was a flawed tool, I managed to convince the website builders to remake our walkthrough tool to expand the choices for observable engagement, and to better reflect our district improvement goals (for assessment, inquiry, and critical literacy). Then, only a year into the process, the district decided to drop the contract with the educational website designer, and walkthroughs - at least in our district - became a thing of the past. My fuss and bother about defining “student engagement” was put on hold. Student engagement as it is understood on college campuses After making the transition over ten years ago from k-12 education to post-secondary contexts, I quickly became re-acquainted with the term “student engagement”. I learned that the term “student engagement” is one that has taken on a lot of territory in and around the college scene in the past decade or so. As a result, the term itself has become rather “fuzzy”. On college and university campuses, student engagement is referred to when:
In our present post-secondary context, “student engagement” is something that is often used as a justification for many decisions made by learning institutions, but it is rarely defined and more often only fleetingly understood. More work is necessary in this field to clarify just what the students are to be engaged with and how, to help clear away the misconceptions and make decisions that most benefit our institutions, our students and our instructors. However, for the purposes of this series of blog entries, we will be focusing on only the first of those four notions of student engagement; engagement as it pertains to the kind of connection students make when involved in learning activities. Our immediate context at NorQuest At NorQuest, we currently have a faculty learning team considering how we might better engage our students in online activities, but even in this group of highly interested educators, we have had trouble pinning down what exactly we mean by student engagement. Just this past week we wrestled with a few critical questions:
Several of the instructors on the faculty learning team expressed frustration with their current online – Covid necessitated – teaching context. They lamented the loss of engagement from face-to-face contexts and the connection they always felt with their students. Now, because many students choose not to attend regularly (but might watch the recordings later), keep their cameras off, and only ask questions or use the chat box feature infrequently, these instructors feel like there is little to no engagement. And this feeling raised several more questions:
These six questions are going to become very important as we look to the future in teaching and learning at NorQuest. In next couple of blog entries, we’ll try to work though these questions with an eye to the college learning context. References: Schlechty, P.C. (2002) Working on the work: An action plan for teachers, principals, and superintendents. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Education Series. Ashwin P., McVitty D. (2015) The Meanings of Student Engagement: Implications for Policies and Practices. In: Curaj A., Matei L., Pricopie R., Salmi J., Scott P. (eds) The European Higher Education Area. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20877-0_23 |
AuthorJeff Kuntz Ph.D. ImagesExcept where indicated, images used in the blog posts are personal photos, images from NorQuest College or images from Pixabay. Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, videos and music. https://pixabay.com/ Archives
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