Humanizing Online Courses
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I discuss the complexity of compassionately teaching students (as opposed to content) in an online class. I argue that online education operates simultaneously in emotional, physical, and technological spaces, and that a breakdown in any one of these can make students feel isolated. I assert that, in addition to content expertise, online teachers also need the equivalent of help-desk skills, interpersonal skills, and customer-service skills to help manage the demands of the virtual environment.
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Humanizing Online Courses
- 1. HUMANIZING THE ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT CHRIS FRIEND SAINT LEO UNIVERSITY HYBRID PEDAGOGY / HYBRIDPOD
- 2. Answer the question in the chat box WHY DO YOU TEACH?
- 4. Created with Haiku DeckPhoto by Katie Tegtmeyer - Creative Commons Attribution License https://www.flickr.com/photos/44538772@N00
- 6. Photo by llauren - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License Created with Haiku Deck
- 7. HUMANIZING THE ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT CHRIS FRIEND SAINT LEO UNIVERSITY HYBRID PEDAGOGY / HYBRIDPOD
- 8. WARMTH VS. OUTCOMES “snuggle” by Caroline on Flickr; cb
- 9. BRAINSTORMING: BENEFITS OF F2F CLASS INTERACTIONS
- 11. ISOLATION IN ONLINE ED ACCESS (TECHNOLOGICAL SPACE) PRESENCE (PHYSICAL SPACE) COMPASSION (EMOTIONAL SPACE)
- 12. ISOLATION IN ONLINE ED ACCESS (TECHNOLOGICAL SPACE) PRESENCE (PHYSICAL SPACE) COMPASSION (EMOTIONAL SPACE)
- 13. ISOLATION IN ONLINE ED ACCESS (TECHNOLOGICAL SPACE) PRESENCE (PHYSICAL SPACE) COMPASSION (EMOTIONAL SPACE)
- 14. ISOLATION IN ONLINE ED ACCESS (TECHNOLOGICAL SPACE) PRESENCE (PHYSICAL SPACE) COMPASSION (EMOTIONAL SPACE)
- 15. ISOLATION IN ONLINE ED ACCESS (TECHNOLOGICAL SPACE) PRESENCE (PHYSICAL SPACE) COMPASSION (EMOTIONAL SPACE)
- 16. ACCESS (TECHNOLOGICAL SPACE) PRESENCE (PHYSICAL SPACE) COMPASSION (EMOTIONAL SPACE) ISOLATION IN ONLINE ED
- 17. REDUCE ISOLATION IN CLASSES ACCESS/TECHNICAL: REMOVE BARRIERS TO TOOLS/CONTENT ENSURE/FACILITATE ACCESS TO THINKING PRESENCE/PHYSICAL: BE PRESENT NATURALLY (DON’T OVER- COMMIT!) BE AVAILABLE (NO HIDE-AND-SEEK!) COMPASSION/EMOTIONAL: LISTEN RESPOND WITH KINDNESS
- 18. TEACHING WITH TECHNOLOGY “holding hands” by Kristina Alexanderson on Flickr; cbnd
- 19. CRITICALLY EVALUATING DIGITAL TOOLS What are their politics of the company & its CEO? What functions does the tool reportedly perform? What does it actually do? What personal data is required to use the tool (login, email address, birthdate, etc.), where is it housed, and who owns it? How does the tool constrain or reinforce our pedagogies?
- 20. EDUCATION IS NECESSARILY POLITICAL. LEARNING IS NECESSARILY HYBRID. “resistance” by Julien Sanine on Flickr; cbnd
- 21. FURTHER READING/LISTENING HYBRIDPOD, EP. 2: “COMPASSION” WITH MAHA BALI / مهابالي AND ASAO INOUE HYBRIDPOD, EP. 12: “ACCESS” WITH ROBIN DEROSA HTTP://DIGITALPEDAGOGYLAB.COM/HYBRIDPED
- 22. THANK YOU! (WHAT QUESTIONS DO YOU HAVE?)
Editor's Notes
- Brief self-intro. What I do at St. Leo, where I’ve taught, what HybridPed is all about, how HybridPod humanizes it even more
- Echo Bonnie: Video makes a class warmer, but it doesn't lead to learning outcomes. Teaching a pre-built/canned course? Outcomes are set; warmth is yours to bring. Anecdote: Discussion response videos (I respond to ubiquitous discussion-board posts via weekly summative videos, encouraging students to notice highlights in peers’ posts; every semester, students say I’m the only teacher they feel they know.) Call for contribution: How do you present yourself in an online class? (This question has two meanings. One, what steps do you take to become present? Or another, what characteristics do you show your students?) Share your thoughts via chat box; I’ll call on a few folks to elaborate via mic.
- Brainstorming: Think about the benefits of f2f class interactions. What advantages do you gain from working with students, as we say, “in person”? Type your responses in the chat box, and we’ll do our best to add them to the slide to discuss further. Discussion goal: Identify why f2f is often seen as better than online. Remind that online has its own advantages, but live discussion is not often one of them. Note irony of that, given this live session and its simple logistics compared with an equivalent f2f meeting of the same people. Caution: Avoid the conclusion that online needs to reproduce the f2f environment. If needed, prompt discussion of the benefits unique to online modes. (Anecdote: Working across time zones allows 24/7 progress—the project never sleeps.)
- How does the personal influence the curriculum? How does it influence your classroom and your engagement? Anecdote: DHSI+Pulse (I grew up in Orlando and visited Pulse years ago; I was in Vancouver the night of the attack and had to teach a class at DHSI the next day. Setting the personal aside was impossible for me.) How different are you as a learner if you don't get your morning coffee? You don’t teach them, but for K-12 students, maybe they got dumped by a significant other. A student in one of my classes had his apt flood with hurricane Matthew. Call for interaction: What personal influences have you noticed affecting presence for you or your students? Short anecdotes in chat; longer via mic; don’t feel compelled to disclose anything uncomfortable.
- And then when we bring in the technology… [Overview of model] Breakdowns in these levels can come across to students as: “I don’t care enough about you (or my course) to help you get access to it.” “I don’t care enough about you to show up wearing pants.” “I don’t care about how you feel.”
- Discuss how we provide (or don’t) access to our classes—space, tech, tools, costs
- How do we promote student presence in our classes? How do we show that we’re sharing space with them?
- How do we allow emotional space for our students? There’s a line between being compassionate and being a pushover. How does that get managed?
- This model shows three potential barriers to fully immersing themselves in our courses. They can be isolated or shut out at any of the layers. But there’s another point to make…
- The boundaries between these layers of isolation are hand-offs or transitions—additional trouble spots that need to be addressed at an institutional level. Know what resources are available to students so you can facilitate those hand-offs. (These are often institutionally managed.)
- Provide examples of each of the three major headings; explain the parentheticals for presence/physical. Call for interaction: What does this framework bring to mind? What simple solutions could you implement? How could a small change make a big difference for your students? Share ideas via chat.
- Keep your tools simple, or even allow students to decide what to use. What does your tool say about your pedagogy? What do the politics of your tools say about your content and/or pedagogy? Anecdote: SEO Readability in WordPress (The red/yellow/green status signals in an SEO plugin distracted my best writers from their craft, making them focus on pleasing an algorithm) What assumptions about access, ability, and prior knowledge do you make when you mention a tool by name, like “make a PowerPoint” or “open a Word doc” or even “Google this idea”? Can your class/assignment be tool-, site-, or app-agnostic? Call for interaction: Let’s start simple. What could you say/write in a class that shows you’re tool-, site-, or app-agnostic? For instance, “Open a new document to jot down ideas” instead of “Open a new Word document.” If it helps, imagine you’re instructing people who don’t use your platform. Use a Mac? Give instructions to PC users. Devoted to MS Office? Instruct someone who’s ethically opposed to it. Share a phrase in the chat box.
- “To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.” —bell hooks “Learning to be a critical consumer of Web info is not rocket science. It’s not even algebra. Becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of Web credibility testing is easier than learning the multiplication tables. The hard part, as always, is the exercise of flabby think-for-yourself muscles.” —Howard Rheingold Provide discussion of Turnitin & GoDaddy: Why I love to hate them. If not: Assign as tongue-in-cheek “homework”. Compare two similar tools, but rather than examining feature sets, compare their ethos. Why is the ethos of our tools important? How is education political?
- Teaching people means we’re developing the polis—our work is inherently political, and we need to acknowledge this when we design our classes, choose our tools, and interact with our students. Education is not politically neutral. Additionally, all learning done in the 21st century is inherently, unavoidably hybrid. We must recognize this, as well. We can’t teach people without their use of tools. We can’t employ tools without affecting people. Technology is not politically neutral. Hybrid Pedagogy’s latest Call for Papers (http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/politicizing-critical-digital-pedagogy) addresses this exact issue. We’ll be releasing a series of articles that explore what it looks like to be more explicitly aware of our politics while teaching.
- Regarding the three-level framework from before, two HybridPod episodes provide great relevant discussions: Ep. 2, “Compassion”, with Maha Bali and Asao Inoue; and Ep. 12, “Access”, with Robin DeRosa. Check them out, and stay tuned for a future episode about presence with Patti Poblette. Concluding thought before breaking for Q&A: This stuff is hard, and it’s complex. Enjoy the complexity; don’t ignore it. But more than anything else, find ways to *be there* for your students.