Some years ago I wrote a post called The Traffic Helicopter Theory of Management, which was aimed at more normal times, yet where a variety of blockages would emerge on campus in IT, so an appropriate response was to find a way to "re-route traffic" in order that more or less ordinary function could be resumed. This was admittedly a tactical approach, so not as dignified as its more strategic alternative that takes a longer term view. Yet it was nonetheless necessary, because one blockage after another becomes extremely demoralizing and once demoralized it is hard to accomplish anything, near term or long term.
The situation is anything but normal now. Everyone is operating under a lot of stress for a a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fear of the evident health risk that they themselves face. At the U of I, where spring break is next week and face-to-face classes have been cancelled after that and will instead be taught online, the official announcement of this went out yesterday evening, there have been readying activities done at the administrative level and in support units, but whether instructors themselves are ready is anyone's guess. One might anticipate pushback from them along the following lines.
Luddites among the group are apt to claim the learning curve is too steep for them, especially within the tight time frame. Those who already have engaged in Web enhanced (in the current course), or blended or totally online instruction (in some other course) likely won't be opposed to moving online in an emergency situation as there is now. But they might still say there isn't enough time to get this done and they might be resentful that their spring break will have to be used to get up to speed for this purpose. In other words, there very well might be two strikes against us before this online instruction even begins. What things might be done to make all of this more do-able?
There are two general suggestions offered here. The first is that in terms of credibility with the instructors, other instructors within the same department typically have more credibility than do support providers. (This makes sense if how one does things online depends on the subject matter. Somebody in the discipline can tailor the approach for that.) If there are such instructors with substantial online teaching experience, it makes sense for one of them to assume a leadership role. On a provisional basis, the department Executive Officer could appoint such a person to an administrative position to coordinate the online efforts in the department. The usual caveats apply about incentivizing such an appointment - other obligations would need to be reduced, some cash reward might be needed to induce the person to play this role, etc. The person holding such a position would serve as mentor/friend with the instructors in the department who have to move their courses online. They might do this in part by being a conduit regarding effective practice from those instructors who are making good progress to others who are struggling. And they might serve as a broker with the support providers, so they have a point person in the department to interact with, rather than getting a flood of requests from each individual instructor.
The second suggestion is an old economics idea - division of labor. It is why in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the factory system more or less eliminated home production. In many cases today instruction can be likened to home production. Each instructor does their own thing. In a division of labor approach to an online version of the course, each instructor would do their bit only and what the instructors produced together would constitute the whole course, the production of which might be likened to the factory system. It might be that the whole course is cloned several times, so each instructor can have the online course reside within the learning management system used on their own campus. Or, possibly, there is a common host for all the instructors. Let's consider a few examples to illustrate how division of labor in online instruction might work.
Perhaps the easiest case to envision is a large class that has a lecture section and then discussion sections run by TAs. In the face-to-face version, each TA is a resource for the students in the TA's section(s). Students in other sections get no benefit from this particular TA. In the online version, the TAs become a common pool resource. Some online activity is needed to enable that. Some course restructuring might have to be done as well. Moving the lecture online is pretty straightforward and won't be considered here. We'll focus on the TA role, rather than the instructor role.
First, each TA should make a rather brief talking head video as a means of introduction to all the students in the course. (There are tips on this and other suggestions that follow in a previous blog post on getting a class online in a pinch.). These introductions need to be posted in a commons area on the class Website so students can find them easily. Next, if the weekly meeting between the instructor and the TAs is now conducted online, then after the first few minutes, where connection-to-the-the conferencing-system issues can be addressed and any confidential information can be shared, the rest of the meeting should be recorded with the recording posted on the class Website, so all students could have access to it. This would be a way where online is better than face-to-face. Students get to see how their teachers regard class issues and how the teachers aim to address those issues. Third, if the discussion sections typically included a presentation by the TA at the beginning, there then needs to be common presentations to be delivered online to all the students in the course. Each week one or two TAs would be assigned to make the online presentation for that week. It probably makes sense for the more experienced TAs to do this earlier and the less experienced TAs to do this later, but it should be the instructor that develops this schedule and gets the TAs to buy into it. Fourth, if another part of the discussion section is Q&A, that part must be handled differently when going online.
Imagine instead there are online office hours. If the flow of students to those office hours were uniform regardless of the time, then the staffing could be determined to meet that flow as could the method by which students would interact with the TA. In that previous blog post I was kind of down on using text chat in Zoom for an all class meeting, but it might be the right tool for office hours. Further, chats can be copied and pasted into posts on the course Website. So students who don't participate directly in the chat might be able to get their questions answered by reviewing the chats of other students. With pooled online office hours, the total number of hours available to students should greatly increase. Further, as it is well known that students are nocturnal, if (some of) the TAs are willing there could be office hours in the evening. That likely would be popular with the students.
If TAs wrote their own spot quizzes that were administered in their section(s), that would need to be replaced with common online quizzes. Let me leave off the issue of cheating till the next point and here only worry about logistics. Online homework done in the learning management system has been around for quite a while. Some instructors allow multiple attempts for homework and have a large time window from when it is made available to when it is due. For a quiz to be considered different from homework, normally one would think of a single attempt and a limited time of availability. I would opt for the former, but for the latter instead retain the large time window. The possible logistics issues (e.g., the student might lose their network connection while the quiz is being conducted) favor the longer time window. And that also lessens the stress on students, which under the circumstances would be a good thing.
The last part in moving the course online, and it is a biggie, is what to do about high stakes testing, which many large classes favor as the real means of assessing student performance. Connected to that is proctoring to deter student cheating (keep your eyes on your own paper). High stakes testing in an online environment is its own issue. Under normal circumstances there are reasonable solutions, at some cost. Here, however, I'm going to take advantage of my being retired and in no official capacity in making the following recommendation. This is where you bite your lip and hold your nose. Then treat the midterm and possibly the final too as a longer quiz that offers more points for right answers. Of course, there are tools in the learning management system to deter cheating - randomizing the order of the answers to a question, randomizing the order in which questions are presented, and possibly other means to make it harder to cheat. But they are far from perfect and a determined group of students will figure out a way to work around them. Perhaps the campus will come up with a better solution. If that happens, of course go with it. However, don't insist on it. We're already into plan B, with classes being taught online. The key thing is to keep things do-able, or if you prefer, it is the lesser of two weevils.
Now I want to move to other situations, focusing on smaller classes, so there is only one instructor per class. To achieve division of labor here needs to have instructors who teach the same class, but at different universities. In this next example, suppose these instructors already know each other. Perhaps they went to grad school together, or they previously co-authored a paper, or became acquainted at a conference and then followed that up with online interactions afterwards. There will be some trust between the participants that is an important asset ahead of time. In this case they will jointly coordinate the division of labor and who does what. The production difference between this case and the previous one is possibly much greater reliance on recorded video chats between the participants. There may be no need for talking head video at all. And it might be that video chats that are in discussion mode might very well replace some of the presentation content that would be done if the classes had remained face to face. If I were participating in this I would try things and see if they have some success. If not, I would try something else. Based on my own teaching experience, students who are very grade oriented (the vast majority of the students I had) would prefer that presentation content serve as preparation for the assessments. But circumstances are clearly different now and there is an underlying question - why does what we are doing in the course matter under the circumstances? A real answer to that question might be better revealed through discussion than through presentation. And as I wrote in that earlier post, at the undergraduate level most students haven't seen faculty colleagues in discussion with one another. That novelty might help students to maintain interest in the content.
I want to talk specifically about online office hours in this setting. To achieve the gains from division of labor, there needs to be a common site for the online office hours. My suggestion is to rely totally on asynchronous communication - a student poses a question online. Later, one of the instructors answers that question so that all students in the combined classes can see it. Here is an example of what such a site might look like. I made this site about seven years ago, when doing an experiment about the online videos at my profarvan channel. In the example, students submit their questions via a Google Form. The form is embedded in a Blogger page, to make it looks as if it is part of the site. Posts on the main page of the site have student questions and my responses, along with tags on the subject matter. I have to copy the student questions from this Google Sheet, which has the submitted questions. Note that the student name is part of the Form, but it is optional. A first name or initials is sufficient. There is no intent to go around FERPA here. This is simply for trying to personalize the response in some way, so it seems like human conversation rather than some automated reply. What I'm suggesting is something like this, but with the different instructors each possible respondents. What isn't there in this example, but shouldn't be too difficult to manage, is that if one instructor responds to a student, the other instructors know not to respond in addition, unless the instructors have staked different positions in their online video chat, in which case the additional response furthers the conversation.
My last example is when the instructor of the course doesn't have friends or colleagues at other institutions who might serve as partners in such a division of labor effort. How are these partners then identified? I don't have a single good answer here. Instead, I will offer several different possibilities about how such affinity may be found between instructors who teach the same course at different universities. (1) The department head might be tasked with collaborating with department heads at peer institutions. Courses will be aligned as best as possible. Instructors teaching the same course will be given a list of the names and email address of peer instructors. Then it is up to them to leverage this information. (2). Something similar, but now the book publishers act to coordinate the instructors based on textbook adoptions. (3) Something similar, but now it is the LMS vendors who act to coordinate institutions with the same LMS, and then somebody (perhaps the department heads) acts to coordinate the instructors. (4) Instructors act independently but post their early video content to a common site, say YouTube. The YouTube aggregator lists similar videos in the sidebar (this is aimed at watchers of the video). The instructors use this to contact instructors they don't know who have produced similar content.
An issue with all of these is how long it takes for some real collaboration to take place. Can something productive happen before the semester concludes? I don't know. But I think it is worth trying under the assumption that something good will happen.
Let me wrap up. I think we should expect fracture here. There are too many possible sources of failure to expect otherwise. Given that, what counts as a win is important to consider. Minor fractures should be acceptable. Major fractures won't be. The planning that has happened to date, which has not involved the instructors, will have to confront that regarding instructors who are the weakest link in the chain, while at the same time the most critical. There are still things to be done beyond the current planning, as I've tried to articulate here. But I don't want to maintain that doing those things is sufficient to avoid fracture altogether. So as we worry about what we should do next, we need to also consider what's realistic to aspire toward. Managing expectations is as important as managing function.
No comments:
Post a Comment