Department 12 Podcast Guest Appearance
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welcome everyone to the department 12 podcast. I'm your host, Dr Ben Butina. Joining me today is Daniel Monday. How are you, Daniel? I am doing well, then by to join you. Alright. So, Daniel, you teach at the University of Hartford in the Masters Io psych program, and you teach training, program, design and evaluation. Right, Alright. And the reason that Daniels on the show today is to share some tips for digitizing the classroom, which I know is, ah, situation that a lot of you find yourself in. Uh, maybe you've been teaching for a long time on your moving to the digital classroom for the first time. Or maybe you're doing hybrid. Seems like every university has a slightly different plan for how they're doing this. But I know that Daniel is gonna have some useful advice. So let me start with kind of a weird question for you, Daniel, as somebody that is not only an instructor yourself, but someone that studies, you know, instructional design and program design. Do you think about the average instructor who's never taught online before? Let's just say they have, you know, average technical abilities, but they're mostly accustomed to teaching in person, and they need to move their material either fully online or into a high undo a hybrid format. How difficult of a transition is that? Let's just say, like on a 1 to 10 with one being, you know, tying your shoe and 10 being nuclear physics. Uh, well, I think we fall in the room of I o psychology, um, intimidating at first. But who once you get everything planned out and plotted out, it's a very efficient system. I'd give it a six. Um, it really comes down there in structural design. All right, so what advice would you start with? Uh, if someone's looking to make that transition, they're they're looking at a stack of, you know, cilla by and materials and slides and things that they're usedto presenting in that classroom. How did they get started? Sure. So the biggest thing to keep in mind is that you will be learning, and you're going to keep improving. More of the great things about going online is that everything's digitized and there's a lot of data to look at, so you could track changes and have way better metrics to see what's different. Um as far as getting started. Um, take a deep breath. Remain calm. There's usually a big workload, especially right now, pretty quick push. But the way I took it when I first started Waas just getting your basics down right to your syllabus. Make sure that's iron tight and make that a roadmap. Um, does anything need to change from the Silva's? Odds are, 80 90% of that will remain the same unless you have some other strong physical component. And then from there, a lot of what you'll be doing is building out some path or just some flexibility in the course. Odds are if you have to convert, uh, there's something else that's causing it to do. So so you want to make sure you write that into your syllabus and and be mindful of it. Students know what's going on, especially the graduate level, so it's best to bring them into that conversation and integrate it into your lessons can mhm. You know, you mentioned something very early on in your answer that caught my attention. I wanted to jump back to it. You talked about. There's more metrics. There's more track ability in the online classroom. Could you give me a couple of examples of some things that you might track in an online classroom that you wouldn't be able Thio track or or analyze in the live in person classroom? Oh yeah, One of the favorites is we use a service called Canvas for Learning Management System, and we also use ensemble, which is for recording and media preservation Eyes Part of that, I can see not only who's watched the video, but I just can see how many people have listened to a lecture, other video or audio. At one point they stopped off on doing a mobile desktop or sensitive combination that's super useful. I've gotten just a little peek into the world of those kinds of metrics for the podcast. And that's how I know generally how long to make the shows. Because I know in general when people tend to tune out, um, so that that's I could see that being really useful for teaching a class, Um, I wonder, like the ensemble you said, That's the tool that you use for creating. Is it like lectures? Presentations? How does that work exactly? It's both. So the way I approached the class is. It's what they call an online hybrid is synchronous or asynchronous, depend on students shorts, So every week it's a symbol. Of course I have a live online lecture, and that's one of the survey before the class begins to figure out what time works best for most people from there is usually Wednesday nights and you have been joined into the meeting live. There's a few different ways they can do that on the telephone. We use WebEx or previous they use, join me or all great programs, and from there they see a video, just a little thumbnail of me in the corner. And most of it's on the slides itself just lecturing through. Depending on how many are attending, we'll have some discussions to Okay. Have you found that the video thumbnail of yourself and I assume that's live? It's like a little talking head video of you. Have you found that that's important? Yes and no. Frankly, on the student's side, it's not important. Most nobody really cares to see me first lecture. I show a few pictures of myself and my cat just to show them that there is a face. Um But if you're new to recording, it definitely helps to see office and talkto one for example. Right now, since we're recording on audio, I'm looking at a little plushy cat. My partner has just so I'm talking to a face. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So it's almost more for the instructor than it is for the students. Um, you know, when you think about someone who's used to lecturing or presenting in front of a class and they have access to the full range of, you know, like body language and the social cues of making eye contact and, you know, facial expressions and reading the room in that kind of thing, what, if anything, can instructor do, uh, to replicate some of those tools in the online environment? Yeah, it depends on your context. I mentioned the plush. It helps to have some sort of face to look at. Um, if you have somebody who's very moon in your quarantine with having an audience, just sit around, you really helpful? Um, but end of the day, it really depends on what your classes focusing on. And what I like to give a device on is that you're going tohave mawr options for people and all the content and resource is here to provide are accessible to all students. But they're not for all students. And what I mean is that you, you know, a few years students who don't wanna have every little extra additional reading and some are just going to show for the tests on dat works out well for both of them, depending on what their study habits are. So keeping that in mind, you are gonna have some low attendance lectures, probably especially at first. And that's fine. You have to kind of disconnect that you are gonna have a bit longer turnaround time on the transfer of learning. Uh, now, the advantage here is that you can throw mawr methods and more resources than you wouldn't otherwise dio previously in your face to face, make sure you have to do everything in an hour or so when you're in the lecture hall. Now you can refer to resource is, um, have been in the fly, have hyperlinks in your lecture slides, have readings that emit more, maybe interactive or have activities in them. And we could also dio preference is record too short lectures throughout the week rather than have just one larger one. Mhm is there Ah, best practice, he suggest, for how long a lecture should be. I tried a benchmark it with how it would be face to face mind 70 course. So my lectures tend to be a bit longer, and that's knowing that students tend to skip around from them and I try to give them some very good audio cues or in lectures. Let me know what content is wet. So, for instance, I usually have a review of the last week's assignments them some feedback on their papers. They have turned in. We little bit beyond the reading and talk about the topics and then wrap up with the next assignments. So plenty people just skip to the end and figure out what's doing next week. But being very clear and evident about that, that's great because of the day you want science to get what they need. Andi can always go back to later. What what's the ratio in general of students who actually attend the live lecturers versus those who attend asynchronous, that one ranges a bit by semester. I'll be honest, the first time around was only about, uh, 5 to 1 on. Part of that was because a lot of students simply weren't used to it. I was one of the first ones to kind of do it in the program, and over time I noticed that students start to talk to each other, and then that's we have a lot more interest. Okay, quarantine things that Yeah. All of a sudden, this becomes a lot more popular delivery method. Now, you said 5 to 1. So you said in the beginning. I just want to clarify it. It's about five people attending quote unquote the recordings versus for every one person that's attending live. Was that right? Oh, sorry. I slipped that 1 to 5. Okay. And then, um, when you're lecturing or when you're presenting are are you facilitating a discussion with those who attend live? Or is it more of ah, talking heads, sage on the stage kind of situation. I dread over with water as much as I can. Um, it really depends on how many people in the lecture There have been a few, but it's only been one or two, so force them to be the spotlight, but there's a few different inflection points they plan in these Aaron slides. So even if they're listening later on, they look at some discussion questions and think, Well, what do I think? And I actually even tell them that pause the recording and just write down the thoughts just as part of the listing process. Um, what really comes into play, though, is I have a very experimental design for my course. I tend to change it around a bit every semester and explain what's changed. Just so they know that their input is, uh, goes into the instructional design elements of the content. But with that in mind, I try to get them. Thio not only share, you know the correct answers, but a lot more of their opinions, applications and going forward in the future. Have them have it mawr of civil debates. So I try to give them a position on argue for it how I started off open asking, is training more of an art or science great responses on both ends and going forward. The plan is to give them a bit more on assignment, saying, Here is your position. How would you defend that if that's what you had to dio debate skills just to see some more perspective. So what kind of feedback do you get from students when you deliver in this format so less about? You know, the actual conversation about the content and the engagement with the ideas, But the feedback on you know what their experiences like of attending, you know, either online or hybrid. Uh, it's gonna vary by student, but frankly, a lot of them are surprised. Um e hate to be so pessimistic, but the bar is a bit low. Eso, as you might be a bit nervous transitioning things here. There's plenty, of course, is that simply have nothing I can tell you right now. Even your first. Maybe a very nervous attempt would be much better than having nothing and having students confused. Secondly, there's some very old slides and recordings out there on that. Some professors used to use the embedded audio recording option in believe it's PowerPoint 2010. Mhm, as you can imagine, not the best recording, so really, as long as you can hear your voice clearly. Ah, lot of tools right now, whether it's uploading it to YouTube or using ensemble. We actually do auto transcriptions for you, and they're not perfect. But they're pretty good to fall along with, um and more than anything else, even if you don't feel it when you're recording, Having that similar voice every week really does help students and makes them feel connected so that want to maybe give them a call in semester. If they've fallen off anything. Just a few assignments. Um, they recognized the voice. They feel much more comfortable. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense that creates, ah, sense of unity across the course work. And it gives them sort of ah ah, home based or return to in a way that it wouldn't be if it were, you know, seven modules by seven different people or, you know, seven different formats, that kind of thing. People just sort of get used to your voice and your delivery style, and then it becomes kind of a queue for them to learn. I I wonder what if you could go back. You talked about experimenting with your course design, which I think is very cool, and you're constantly changing things up, trying out new things and trying to make things better. If you could go back and talk to yourself before the first time you did this, what's the one piece of advice you would give yourself? Now, relax. Just relax. It's gonna be OK. Great advice. Well, Daniel, I want to thank you very much for sharing this. I know it's gonna be helpful to a lot of people, and I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today. Pleasure to have you.