Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources

‘The only winning move is not to play’

stuxbury — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 15:47:38 +0000

‘The only winning move is not to play’ stuxbury Mon, 06/05/2023 - 11:47

Turnitin – the plagiarism-detecting software used by ��-Dearborn and thousands of other schools and universities worldwide – made a big announcement in February: it would soon integrate an AI-writing detector into its platform. The rationale for the add-on was clear. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative AI tools have taken off. Like the advent of the World Wide Web in 1990, this potentially society-altering technology was released into the world before regulators could formulate or coordinate responses. The implications for higher education were obvious. Reports of students using generators to write exam answers, or even entire essays, soon followed.

Still, when ��-Dearborn Director of Digital Education Christopher Casey saw Turnitin’s announcement, his first instinct was, “Whoa.” Like the technology it was designed to catch, the AI-detection software was being rolled out quickly and would inevitably have flaws. Indeed, the company’s own press release stated the software had a one percent error rate. The Office of the Provost estimates that ��-Dearborn faculty run 20,000 student writing samples through Turnitin each semester. This would mean up to 200 of these assignments could be incorrectly flagged for an academic infraction – and that was if the company’s projection was accurate.

What’s more, the “black box” nature of the detector means that the software does not explain how it arrives at its conclusions. For any student whose work was called out, it would be their word against the machine’s. “There's no hard evidence,” said Casey. “It’s just this mystery. If a student says, ‘No, I didn't do that,’ how do they refute that? It is just a student versus this detector.”

Director of Digital Education Christopher Casey

Casey’s colleagues in the Office of the Provost and the Hub for Teaching and Learning shared his concerns. So, when the add-on launched in April, ��-Dearborn joined several universities across the U.S. and internationally in requesting an opt-out. Turnitin did not grant every opt-out request, but it did ��-Dearborn’s – in part, Casey believes, because the university was proactive and persistent. The move garnered national media attention, with Associate Provost for Undergraduate Programs and Integrative Learning Mitchel Sollenberger quoted in a Washington Post article that made the issue clear right in its headline: “We tested a new ChatGPT-detector for teachers. It flagged an innocent student.”

This was not the first time ��-Dearborn made news for being out front in protecting students’ digital rights. As online exams proliferated during the pandemic, the university received attention for being one of the first to issue a policy prohibiting the use of remote proctoring software. That decision was based on a range of concerns, including unequal access to the necessary technologies, privacy issues and growing evidence that algorithm-based proctoring was discriminatory. For instance, it sometimes flagged eye and head movements as suspicious when they were not (this has particular implications for students with certain disabilities) and it could have trouble recognizing darker skin tones.

Ultimately, the Office of the Provost determined that online proctoring ran counter to the university’s student-focused mission. “It's like immediately going and creating this conflict between students and the university,” Casey said. “We're not starting from a place of being partners in learning. We're starting from a place of being adversaries and that's not the place we want to start from.” After the policy took effect, Casey and his colleagues at the Hub published a research paper sharing what they’d learned.

The university’s stances on AI detection and online proctoring were informed by growing concern nationally and internationally about the algorithmic tools designed to catch academic infractions. In 2020, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the leading organizations working to protect citizens’ digital rights, noted that most remote proctoring tools were “effectively indistinguishable from spyware, which is malware that is commonly used to track unsuspecting users’ actions on their devices and across the Internet.”

That same year, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal led an inquiry into three of the largest virtual testing companies after receiving reports of “alarming equity, accessibility and privacy issues faced by students using the platforms.” Last year, a federal judge ruled in favor of a student who sued Cleveland State University, alleging that a room scan taken as part of online proctoring was unconstitutional.

Casey said the Office of the Provost recognizes the extreme challenges faculty face in the current digital environment and that the Office of the Provost and the Hub are working swiftly to provide guidance and support. In February, the Hub released a Generative AI at ��-Dearborn guide outlining some of the benefits and concerns that ��-Dearborn identified early on. Currently, Casey is leading a ��-Dearborn task force on generative AI composed of faculty and staff representing all four colleges. The task force is meeting every other week and expects to release a report later this summer. Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Paul Watta represents ��-Dearborn on a tri-campus U-M task force on generative AI, which is also expected to release a report this summer. In addition, faculty and staff are welcome to join several cross-campus learning communities on this topic .

Casey acknowledges that, with the technology evolving so quickly, as soon as ��-Dearborn’s report is issued, it will be outdated. The key, he said, will be facing that reality. “Those generative AI services are here. They’re not going away,” he said. “We're beyond the point of blocking it. You're standing in front of a rising tide and you think you're going to stop the rising tide? You're not. So that's what our task force is really now grappling with.”

One strategy Casey anticipates the task force will recommend is redesigning assignments so that, for instance, students don’t just answer questions or respond to prompts but show how they arrived at their conclusions. The Hub has been supporting faculty with such redesigns since the start of the pandemic and the more hands-on, show-your-work approaches the Hub recommends are inherent in the university’s practice-based learning model.

It’s important to recognize that generative AI has great potential to be used as a learning tool, Casey stressed. For instance, in coding, it might take over basic functions and free up users for more complex tasks. (Read three campus experts’ thoughts on generative AI.)

Developing a thoughtful, coordinated response to higher ed’s new digital reality will be a process, Casey said. “It's not going to be an instantaneous change,” he explained. “Instead of doing these stop-gap, quick measures that really aren't super effective in the immediate term and definitely don't have a lot of benefit long term, we're looking to the future and saying, ‘What should this look like? And let’s just start moving there.’ We need to go toward the end game.”

“Much like the AI in the 1983 movie ‘Wargames’ figured out about global thermonuclear war, we continue to believe that when it comes to AI detection, the only winning move is not to play,” he added.

One thing Casey now knows for sure: the university’s concerns about Turnitin’s AI-detector were on point. Two weeks ago, the company issued an update on the software. Among the flaws the company has identified since the roll-out? Higher than estimated incidences of false positives in certain scenarios.

Article by Kristin Palm.

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College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

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Mon, 06/05/2023 - 15:44

��-Dearborn’s decision to opt out of a controversial AI-writing detector earlier this year was not the first time the university was a leader in protecting students’ digital rights.

Students often gather in the CASL Atrium to work on final projects and papers.

No, ChatGPT is not a disaster for higher education.

lblouin — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 14:36:11 +0000

No, ChatGPT is not a disaster for higher education. lblouin Mon, 03/20/2023 - 10:36

Predictions about the impact of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new chatbot that can respond to text-based prompts with humanlike responses on just about any topic, range from apocalyptic to optimistic. Among the dark and gloomy forecasts, you’ll find interesting reads about how the AI-based technology could kill white collar jobs, replace journalists and even try to break up your relationship. On the other hand, many are excited about the potential for this technology to revolutionize (or replace) search, make programmers more productive and help folks who are English language learners.

Inside the universe of higher ed, folks are also reckoning with the new technology’s pros and cons. Because ChatGPT is so good at generating coherent text, some fear cheating could go into overdrive. Indeed, there are already reports of students using it to generate text for entire essays, though proving that can be problematic. Meanwhile, curious faculty are already wondering whether embracing ChatGPT for educational purposes might be more realistic — and useful — than fighting it.

ChatGPT's potential benefits for students and faculty

To get some perspectives on ChatGPT, we talked with three ��-Dearborn experts who’ve been closely following and using the technology. Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Hafiz Malik, who’s an expert in artificial intelligence, says ChatGPT actually represents a major upgrade of a not-so-new idea. Chatbots, of course, especially for customer service, have been around for years — as have people’s frustrations with them. “Chatbots usually get pretty annoying because you quickly run up against the limited amount of knowledge they’re trained to have conversations about,” Malik says. “The difference with ChatGPT is that it’s been trained on a huge amount of text-based data. Basically a lot of what’s digital, it’s read, so it has knowledge of a vast array of topics and can give you answers that are maybe not always perfect, but are damn good.” For example, when Malik asked ChatGPT to explain the concept of flat-magnitude response, a topic he covers in one of his courses, the explanation was on par with what you’d find in a textbook. For this reason, Malik sees “tremendous” potential for students to use ChatGPT as a quick reference “conceptual dictionary,” especially for smaller, technical topics. That could save them time compared to internet searches or books, making learning more efficient.

Malik’s colleague Professor Paul Watta is already dipping his toe in the water with another touted use case for ChatGPT. For about a year, Watta has been using a related OpenAI product called GitHub Copilot, which gives users complete programming function suggestions based on just the first line of their coding inputs, similar to how predictive text works on your phone or word processing app. Because ChatGPT has digested GitHub’s massive coding library, it can function like Copilot, though with the advantage of natural language prompts. In fact, when Watta noticed some ChatGPT-generated code contained an error, he simply asked it to fix its mistake — which it promptly did. Impressed, Watta gave the senior-level students in his mobile devices course an assignment: Design a simple mobile app that interacts with a web-based API and see how much of the work you can get ChatGPT to do for you. “Some aspects of programming are just plain tedious and thankless work,” Watta says. “For example, when working with a web-based API, you’ll have to read the documentation to see how the data is organized, figure out how to formulate the proper HTTP request, and then parse the response to get the desired information — which is all you really cared about in the first place! So if ChatGPT can help with that, it’s going to free up programmers to work on the more interesting and advanced aspects of software development, like creating an effective user interface or building something that interacts with five different web APIs. It could make programmers a lot more productive.”

Watta notes that this is an assignment he can give his more advanced students because they’ve already learned to code. For more novice students, he says ChatGPT could be a little more problematic. For example, for the final project in one of his introductory programming courses, students use a fairly obscure coding platform called openFrameworks. “I doubt even most of the faculty in my department know what openFrameworks is,” Watta says. “But I asked ChatGPT and it knows what openFrameworks is. And, when prompted, it started spitting out code! For a beginning programming class, it is entirely possible that students could try to use this as a shortcut to generate code that they do not truly understand.”

Cheating and privacy concerns

Without question, cheating via ChatGPT is a big deal, and not just within the realm of coding. In fact, because ChatGPT is so good at creating coherent long-form or short-form text, disciplines that rely heavily on writing for assessments could face the biggest challenges. So far, ��-Dearborn faculty don’t seem to be panicking, says Autumm Caines, an instructional designer at the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources who’s been following the generative AI phenomenon for a couple years and is helping faculty concerned about ChatGPT. However, she says the cheating risks could change how we think about assessments. “For a long time, in higher education as a whole, we’ve allowed writing to be a proxy for learning. I assume I know what’s going on inside your head if you wrote it down in a paper,” Caines says. “But if now we’re entering the realm of generated text, we may have to think about multimodal assessments — so not just writing, but doing a project, or a video or audio interview, or an oral exam.” In fact, Caines notes that ��-Dearborn’s recent investment in practice-based learning puts it in a good position to weather the ChatGPT storm. When the nature of a course is to create and record an original podcast or design and build educational toys for kids, there’s only so much a chatbot can do for you.

Alongside cheating, privacy ranks among Caines’ other big concerns. Like any deep learning-based artificial intelligence, ChatGPT evolves by being exposed to more data, and every time you enter a new prompt, you’re feeding it. This has already caused issues for big technology companies, who’ve noticed bits of their proprietary code showing up in ChatGPT responses, presumably because employees were using it to help them write code. Caines says students — and professors asking their students to use ChatGPT for assignments — should be aware that “this thing is not your friend.” “Don’t ask it medical questions, don’t share anything too personal,” Caines says. “If you read the terms of service, OpenAI is very clear they’re going to use your queries to train the tool, that they are collecting personal data, and that they can sell your personal data to third parties. We simply don’t know what they’ll do with it, but there is always a huge profit incentive in selling your data.” Caines suggests instructors brief students on the privacy concerns if they’re going to assign work that uses ChatGPT. Setting up “burner” email accounts for use as login credentials can also give students and faculty an added layer of protection.

ChatGPT is still far from perfect

Whether one’s intentions are good or bad, it’s also important to remember ChatGPT is a work in progress. Its text outputs tend to be boilerplate. It’s not always accurate. Sometimes it repeats conspiracy theories or lies outright. Malik says ChatGPT may be trained on a huge pile of data, but it has no sense of what’s true, so you have to take what it writes with a grain of salt. Moreover, if students are looking to cheat, he says algorithm-generated content usually carries artifacts that make it somewhat straightforward to detect whether something was generated by a human through a natural process or an algorithm good at mimicking one. Indeed, tools used to detect ChatGPT-generated text have proliferated since the software’s release, and Malik, who’s an expert in detecting deepfakes, seems optimistic about using machines to fight machines. Caines notes, however, that at least some of the available tools can be easily fooled. Since it’s still early days, she cautions faculty against using these tools to render an absolute verdict on whether a student is cheating.

Even with these present shortcomings, Watta sees the arrival of ChatGPT as foreshadowing. In his own department, he could see a day where instructors like him aren't spending so much time teaching students how to write code, but how to read, interpret and fix code, leaving the more tedious work to the machines. “In fact, this is something we’ve been talking about at the university for quite a while,” Watta says. “Our former CECS dean, Tony England, and our current dean, Ghassan Kridli, have been saying that the future of education will involve students having these AI assist tutors. So we’ve expected this may be coming. Now, it’s just coming to pass.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Student Success

Technology

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Mon, 03/20/2023 - 14:35

Three ��-Dearborn experts talk about the much-hyped new AI tool, the potential for cheating and why ChatGPT could be a valuable resource for educators and students.

Credit: Rokas via Adobe Stock

When content isn’t king

lblouin — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 16:52:37 +0000

When content isn’t king lblouin Wed, 11/09/2022 - 11:52

Many ��-Dearborn faculty and administrators are currently engaged in an effort to transition 3-credit courses to 4 credits. The thinking behind the Four-Credit Transition Initiative is that if faculty are able to focus on two 4-credit courses per semester instead of three 3-credit courses, they’ll have more time and energy to work on other things they enjoy, like research, course development and new initiatives. The question of how to transition a course, however, isn't always straightforward, according to Instructional Designer Autumm Caines. “A lot of people think adding that extra credit hour means adding more content — like, you could just add a couple extra readings,” Caines says. “But from a design perspective, that’s certainly not the only option or probably the best one. You could actually keep the amount of content the same, but go deeper. In some cases, an instructor might think about reducing content.”

So how does the idea of less content jibe with adding an extra credit hour? First, it helps to understand that when Caines talks about reducing content or increasing credit hours but keeping the amount of content the same, she’s not talking about making classes lighter-weight or less challenging. Rather, it’s about being conscious of the amount of material that students can realistically learn, given the time constraints of the course, and finding ways to use that time to produce learning outcomes that last. For example, let’s say an instructor has traditionally organized a 3-credit course around 12 core subjects. With an extra credit hour to play with, they could potentially cover 16 subjects. Or, Caines says, they could stick with 12 and add different kinds of learning activities that allow students more exploration in those essential areas. A unit that is usually covered by a textbook chapter and lecture could be developed further with an active assignment that asks students to apply what they’ve learned to a problem facing their own community, or engage in a group project, or write a personal reflection about how a key concept relates to something in their lives. Caines says the possibilities for these types of active learning assignments are basically unlimited.

The approach of going deeper with less material is gaining momentum in academia, in part, because emerging research suggests it enhances learning. Caines points to recent work from Bryan Dewsbury, an associate professor of biological sciences at Florida International University and current scholar in residence at ��-Dearborn, who’s an expert in inclusive teaching, a philosophy that emphasizes providing equal opportunities for students of all backgrounds to have successful learning experiences. In Dewsbury and his co-authors’ 2022 study, they followed students over two semesters of sequential introductory biology courses that used different instructional formats. During the first semester, three sections of the intro course used a traditional lecture format. A fourth mixed active learning and inclusive teaching with a reduction in content to make room for these more learning-centered pedagogies. In the second semester, students took either a lecture-based section or an active learning one. The result: Students who took the non-lecture sections both semesters had the highest grades in their 200-level biology courses the following year, with students from traditionally underrepresented identities showing some of the largest gains. Caines says outcomes like this suggest that active learning and inclusive teaching approaches help students hold on to the information and skills they’re learning because they’re able to spend more time with the content and experience it in different ways. It’s also a counterpoint to one of the most common arguments against active learning — namely, that it might be a good idea, but there simply isn’t time for it if students are going to get through all the material an instructor has deemed important. “But if students aren’t holding on to what they’ve learned beyond the course, that’s obviously not a great thing. What we’re seeing is more content doesn’t equal more learning,” Caines says.

Grace Helms-Kotre, a social work lecturer on both the Dearborn and Ann Arbor campuses, describes it as the difference between “making a point and driving a point home.” Over the past several years, she’s revised her Stress Management course multiple times, and each time it’s trended in the direction of less content. Initially, her course was organized around a traditional (thick) textbook, lots of assigned reading, quizzes and tests. But she noticed that the pace of the class and amount of material they were covering meant students were often just regurgitating the material on quizzes and tests rather than experiencing any kind of transformative learning. So she reduced the amount of required reading, shrunk the textbook, cut the number of core topics to just the essentials, and added some active assignments. For example, rather than assigning all the reading, sometimes she asks students to go find an article or video on the topic themselves and do a report back to her or the class. Often, she assigns a reflection piece that challenges students to engage with the material in a personal way. Helms-Kotre says the new approach has paid all kinds of dividends, including in richer class discussions and students reporting positive changes in their daily lives. Now, the most common feedback she gets about her course is that “it’s a class I’m really getting a lot out of.”

Incidentally, Caines finds student perceptions of active learning to be another interesting area of emerging research. She points to a Harvard study that found outcomes similar to Dewsbury’s recent research when it comes to learning outcomes. “But when students were asked how they felt they were doing, the students in the active learning and inclusive teaching sections felt like they weren’t doing as well, even though they were doing better. And the students in the lecture class felt like they were doing great, even though they weren’t doing as well.” Caines suspects this may have to do with the nature of active learning assignments. They’re usually less prescribed, less predictable, involve problem solving or innovating, and rarely reduce to right and wrong answers. As such, uncertainty and failure are par for the course. In some cases, trying and failing and trying again might lead to the deepest learning experience of all. But as we make our classes more active and inclusive, Caines says that’s a lesson we’ll have to help our students understand. “The way I explain it to students is that it’s sort of like going to the gym when you haven’t been working out for a while,” she says. “The sore muscles don’t feel good, but that’s an indication it’s working. So if you feel like you’re struggling with this stuff, that’s completely normal. It might even mean you’re on the right track.”

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Want to dive deeper into this topic? Check out Caines’ recent post on The Hub blog discussing why it’s important that we pay close attention to how much time students are spending on course-related tasks. Story by Lou Blouin.

Academic Excellence

Inclusion or Diversity

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Student Success

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

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Wed, 11/09/2022 - 16:51

To boost learning, faculty should cut material. Wait, what?

Graphic by Violet Dashi. Images by kegfire, Rawf8, gearstd via Adobe Stock

Three great lecture recording options for remote education rookies

rudmehta — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 17:26:28 +0000

Three great lecture recording options for remote education rookies rudmehta Tue, 07/19/2022 - 13:26

This article was originally published on July 27, 2020.

As ��-Dearborn prepares for a fall semester that’s heavy on remote learning, many faculty will soon be recording lectures for their first fully online courses. If you find yourself in this boat, don’t panic. Even with tight timelines imposed by the pandemic, ��-Dearborn’s digital learning experts say the challenge is totally manageable if you don’t try to do too much, too fast. Here are three straightforward approaches they say will deliver solid results, even if you’re a rookie.

Option A: Simple at-home recording

Tech you’ll need: Can be as simple as a laptop or phone; add an external camera and mic for better quality. Annotation devices can give your students a whiteboard-style experience.

For many faculty, recording a lecture at home will be the most straightforward choice and Instructional Designer Alfonso Sintjago says producing high-quality videos at home is totally doable. The built-in camera and mic on your smartphone or laptop can be adequate, but if you want to go the extra mile, the university is supplying faculty with external cameras and mics that will deliver better video and audio. Once on camera, experiment with the lighting. Sintjago says first make sure you have enough of it; if your image looks grainy, you probably need more light. Your light source should also be in front or slightly to one side of your face, rather than behind you. Using natural light from a window is great if you can record during the day. You’ll also want to make sure the camera position is at eye level or a little above, because shooting from below is typically unflattering. For faculty who write on the board a lot during their lectures, Sintjago says consider adding an annotation device, which is basically a tablet that you can write on with a stylus. Whatever you’re scribbling down can either be displayed as its own screen, or superimposed overtop an existing screen, like a PowerPoint slide.

For software, Sintjago says both Kaltura Capture, which is integrated right into Canvas, or PowerPoint 365 work great for beginners. PowerPoint has an added advantage of recording a single video file for each slide, which makes it easier to correct something if you discover a mistake or decide to do a small retake. Importantly, both platforms automatically generate on-screen captions for accessibility. They’re typically 80 percent accurate, and correcting transcription mistakes is as easy as editing a text file.

One last tip: The casual, personal vibe of an at-home lecture can totally be an asset. “I saw a great example from someone in Minnesota where you could see her dog and fireplace in the background. The whole scene was very cozy and you felt invited into her home,” Sintjago says. Another way to make the whole experience more personal for students: Record casual, short beginning- or end-of-week videos where you go over important reminders or respond to interesting discussion points from students.

Option B: At-home recording with style points

Tech you’ll need: Laptop, external camera, wireless lavalier mic and green screen.

If you’re aiming for something with a little more polish, adopting Mercedes Miranda as your online learning guru can dramatically shorten the learning curve. The Business Economics and Finance lecturer has been teaching online since 2009, and her colleagues rave about her video lectures. Miranda says she does everything at home, and her setup is pretty simple: An external camera, wireless lavalier mic, and the Kaltura Capture software that’s integrated into Canvas. But she does have one secret ingredient: a $20 green screen she got at Walmart. This allows her to lecture onscreen with a slide in the background, kind of like a TV meteorologist showing off a weather map. She says studies have revealed that showing your face makes a lecture appear more personal to students, though too much of you can be distracting. She finds being onscreen to introduce the topic and then letting the PowerPoint slides and voiceover carry the load to be the right balance.

More than technology, Miranda’s secret to successful lectures lies in how she organizes them. “If you simply try to reproduce your classroom lecture on screen, you’ll end up with a one- or two-hour monologue, and that’s not very engaging,” Miranda says. Instead, she says dissect your lecture and break it down into no more than five main points. Then record a no longer than 10-minute lecture on each point. She even further segments those individual mini lectures with short quizzes, which appear periodically during the video. That helps add some interactivity and also checks for comprehension. The Video Quiz function is integrated right into Kaltura Capture and you can insert quizzes easily at any point after you record your lecture.

Two of Miranda’s next-level tips: First, have your mini lectures focus on core concepts, but avoid referring to specific examples, pages of a particular textbook, or things that could get out of date quickly. If you end up teaching online for multiple semesters, you can reuse your core concept videos and simply update your examples as needed. Second, leave yourself enough time to produce your lectures. Miranda says it typically takes her two eight-hour days to finish one. And you never want to start a course with fewer than two weeks worth of lectures in the bank.

Option C: On-campus lecture capture

Tech you’ll need: None, but you can bring your own devices.

If your home situation makes recording challenging, or you just find using all this technology a little daunting, recording on-campus might be a better bet. The Professional Education Center (PEC) recently opened up its lecture capture classrooms to all faculty, and they’re equipped with high-quality cameras, microphones, document readers, annotation tools, the Canvas-integrated Mediasite Desktop Recorder software (which you can also use at home, by the way), and staff to guide you through the recording session. To make things even easier, much of the process is automated. Video Production Coordinator Joe Goraj told us the recording automatically begins at the start of your booked time and your videos get uploaded immediately after you finish. If you need some light editing at the beginning or end of a session, they can help with that too. Typically, the finished videos will be ready for your students the following day. In addition, they have portable equipment to shoot short supplemental videos if faculty want to do some show-and-tell from their labs. Check out this clip to see an example of what your finished video lecture will look like.

Two tips for beginners if you go this route: As much as possible, try to look directly into the camera. It may feel awkward at first, but from the student’s perspective, that amounts to looking them in the eye. In addition, if you’re used to pointing a lot during a lecture, say, at a whiteboard or projection screen, be aware that may not be in view of the camera. As an alternative, you can annotate your screen with a digital stylus or use your mouse pointer.

Bonus tip: Make a plan before you record and get help if you need it.

Whichever route faculty end up choosing for lecture recording, Sintjago says don’t get too hung up on the technology. What makes a lecture video “good” isn’t so much its production values but what you’re doing with your time on screen and how it fits into the rest of your course. If you need help figuring out an approach that works for you, Sintjago says to reach out to the instructional designers at The Hub. They can help you talk through what you want to do in the course and figure out what tools and techniques will get you there. The Hub is also hosting weekly course design tutorials in August to help faculty get ready for fall.

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Need help getting started? Reach out to The Hub. Or if you want to learn more about CECS’s on-campus lecture capture, send an email to ��D-CECSOnline@umich.edu. Ready to record? Complete this form to schedule a recording appointment on campus in the PEC.

Extended Learning & Outreach

Digital Education

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Mon, 07/27/2020 - 05:00

Recording lectures can be a daunting challenge for faculty who are new to online learning. Here are three solid approaches, vetted by our ��-Dearborn experts.

remotelearning_recording_final

Data ethics for the digital education age

lblouin — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 12:57:28 +0000

Data ethics for the digital education age lblouin Mon, 04/04/2022 - 08:57

The use of digital educational technologies has surged during the pandemic, bringing students and faculty a range of new options for learning. In so many ways, this is a great thing, and we’ve covered some examples of ��-Dearborn professors being inspired to use new techniques as a result of their remote teaching experiences. As more learning goes online, though, colleges and universities are also having to wrestle with some emerging privacy and data ethics issues, according to The Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources’ Autumm Caines.

Instructional designer Autumm Caines

The basic scope of the conversation about digital data ethics in higher education is more or less similar to how we think about privacy and data in our daily lives. As you know, many digital platforms, like social media or websites, track lots of data about our behavior, and that data is used by companies for various purposes. We’ve gotten pretty used to some of them, like how tracking allows businesses to show you products you might want based on your web searches. Sometimes, though, this kind of data mining can lead to real harm. For example, your data can be stolen, or it might unintentionally reveal something about you to another person that you’d prefer was private.

In a higher education environment, learning technologies are also collecting data about their users, who are primarily students. The kind of data can vary quite a bit by platform. A learning management system like Canvas, for example, has metrics that allow faculty to see which course pages a student viewed, track completed assignments and grades, and view students’ “last activity” and “total activity” in the course. But say a professor wants you to download an app or visit a website for a one-off assignment. The app or website might very well be collecting a broader set of data about your identity and behavior. And here lies one of the murky ethical issues, says Caines. In this case, the professor is more or less requiring the student to download third-party software. But it’s the student who has to check the box and agree to the terms of service, which likely requires sharing potentially sensitive data, and thus carries some risk. So the question is: Is compelling a student to share their data in this way ethical or fair?

Sometimes, Caines says, even seemingly more benign data sets, like Canvas metrics, can be used in harmful ways. The most high-profile example came last year, when Dartmouth College accused 17 medical students of cheating on their exams. The college claimed that Canvas metrics revealed students were accessing course pages containing information relevant to their exam while they were taking their tests. “The problem is Canvas metrics were never designed to be used for this kind of forensic investigation,” Caines says. “They’re simply not that precise, and Canvas even says their metrics can’t be reliably used in this way. If you leave a Canvas page open or have one open on another device ⁠— and sometimes even if it’s closed ⁠— the app might still be pinging the server trying to maintain its connection. So it can look like you’re active in the system, even if you’re not.” Eventually, Dartmouth came to this conclusion too and dropped its case and apologized to the students.

Other times, the risks of harm come from the now ubiquitous practice of selling data. Caines says the recent poster child case for this involves Naviance, a software platform used by 10 million high school students every year to research colleges and submit college applications. Not surprisingly, Naviance also collects a lot of student data, which it then, through its sister company, Intersect, uses to sell universities targeted recruitment and ad campaigns. (Both Naviance and Intersect are owned by the ed tech company PowerSchool, which is in turn owned by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners.) But a recent investigation by the Markup, a nonprofit big data watchdog organization, found this data is being used in ethically problematic ways. Using the ad and recruitment platform, college admissions offices can target students based on their location, grades, majors they’re interested in ⁠— and also their race. The Markup found multiple cases of universities deliberately targeting only white students.

So what’s the best way for universities to navigate this increasingly complex data landscape? Caines says in some situations, the approaches can be relatively straightforward. If a professor is asking students to use an app for an assignment, they could also have an alternative assignment for those who were uncomfortable with the app’s terms of service. And students could also consider using alias email accounts for these kinds of activities, which offers some, though hardly foolproof, protection. For broader issues, like how an institution uses data to recruit students or enforce academic standards, Caines says we’ll likely need to have deep, ongoing conversations that include a wide range of constituencies at the university, so we can reduce the risks of harm to vulnerable groups. Right now, in fact, the three U-M campuses are considering what such a policy might look like. Moreover, Caines says, it always helps to be transparent with students and parents about what our practices are.

One other bit of wisdom from Caines: Remember that the fast-growing and increasingly profitable ed tech industry isn’t just targeting students, it’s targeting us as institutions. Colleges and universities are some of the biggest consumers of educational technology, and we can be savvy about what we choose to bring into our classrooms. For example, Caines says we’re not helping our students if we don’t introduce them to the latest tools and technologies that are relevant in the workforce, simply because they carry some risk. But we can also choose to pass on enticing, heavily advertised products that overpromise and underdeliver. For example, one trendy selling point nowadays is “engagement metrics,” where platforms attempt to score how engaged students are with learning via an amalgam of clicks, page views, and time spent on a page. The problem, Caines says, is those metrics paint a pretty superficial picture of student engagement, and aren’t all that useful to skilled instructors who are already tracking this via other more nuanced instructional practices. She says there’s also a general danger of becoming too reliant on data. “It can definitely become reductive. If we can only measure certain things, then we run the risk of only valuing those things, and that’s problematic for a bunch of different reasons. Ask anyone who’s been in education a long time and they’ll tell you there are many things that are extremely valuable that we simply can’t quantify.”

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Story by Lou Blouin. Want to learn more about data ethics in digital education? The Hub recently held a webinar featuring Bonnie Stewart, an expert in this area, and you can watch the Zoom recording on the Hub blog.

Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources

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Mon, 04/04/2022 - 12:57

The Hub’s Autumm Caines walks us through some important privacy and data ethics issues facing universities as more learning goes online.

Graphic by Violet Dashi

Adventures in labor-based grading

lblouin — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 16:02:51 +0000

Adventures in labor-based grading lblouin Mon, 09/27/2021 - 12:02

Are big make-or-break assignments and exams a good (or fair) way to assess students? It’s a popular topic in higher education right now, as research suggests traditional grading may have limits for evaluating student learning. High-stakes assessments and letter grades definitely aren’t in any danger of disappearing soon, but an increasing number of faculty are experimenting with alternatives. There are lots of interesting pedagogical strategies to explore, from giving students unlimited chances to redo assignments to doing away with letter grades altogether. However, we hadn’t heard of the idea of “labor-based grading” until we bumped into a post on The Hub blog written by Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric Mike MacDonald. He has been using this approach for a few semesters now as part of The Hub Affiliate program. In the spirit of the subject, we didn’t ask him to put a grade on how it’s going, but so far he’s liking what he’s seeing.

So what is labor-based grading? It’s a somewhat nuanced concept with philosophical roots in everything from 19th-century economic theory to modern social justice movements. (For a really deep dive on the subject, check out the work of Asao Inoue.) But the core idea is that instructors should value the actual work students put in over the course of a semester along with their performance. MacDonald was inspired to try it out for a number of reasons, but he says it makes a lot of sense for writing instruction, a discipline where the longstanding philosophy has been to value “the process more than the product.” For MacDonald, labor-based grading gives the instructor better tools to document and give credit for parts of this process that might otherwise remain “invisible.”

In his courses, labor-based grading takes a couple of different forms. One of the most straightforward is the “assignment bank,” where students are given a list of assignments they can complete over the course of the semester. Those assignments won’t be letter-graded themselves, but MacDonald gives students criteria for what constitutes a satisfactory completion of the assignment. If the student finishes more of the assignments, they earn more credit: “So if I have a bank of 13 assignments, and you complete eight, that might be worth a B. If you do nine, that’s a B+,” MacDonald says. In his class, students can also redo assignments as many times as it takes to get full credit.

Another application: In his introductory writing course, MacDonald uses a hybrid approach to take some of the anxiety out of essay writing, the class’s big stress inducer. He still assigns a letter grade to the final essays students turn in. But he breaks the process of getting there into a sequence of smaller component assignments that utilizes some longstanding practices in composition studies. The first exercise, for example, asks students to collect sources and identify quotes they want to use in their essays; the second is an interpretation assignment, where they translate what they think those quotes mean; the third involves organizing that content into themes, which helps form the structure of the essay; and so on. Notably, students get credit for completing each of these assignments, not just the final essay. Moreover, by doing the work in chunks, MacDonald says it removes much of the usual essay-writing anxiety. “So if they’ve done all the work, nobody should be putting together an essay at the last minute. Maybe they’re making final revisions or responding to feedback, but there should be no surprises the night before it’s due.”

So far, MacDonald has only run into a few minor challenges using labor-based grading. Since it’s a little different from traditional grading, students typically have a few questions about how it works, so he has to spend some extra time answering those early in the semester. And Canvas, ��-Dearborn’s learning management software, is built to calculate a student’s course grade based on an accumulation of points, so MacDonald says it can be less apparent to students how they’re doing in his course. Moreso, he’s counting the benefits of labor-based grading. One of his primary goals as an instructor is to simply get students to do as much writing as possible, and having more assignments that seem manageable means his students are doing a lot more writing. That’s good from a practice-makes-perfect standpoint, but he’s also interested in the effect it seems to have on confidence.

“The most vulnerable students often have issues of confidence, especially with writing, and even strong writers can lack confidence,” MacDonald says. “Writing is this thing we always judge and talk about as having such high stakes — like, if you make a grammar mistake on your resume, we assume an employer is going to throw it in the trash. So to have students at the end of the course say, ‘I’ve never done so much writing,’ is huge. For them to see this body of work — just the sheer quantity of it — I think helps build their confidence.”

Inspired by how well these techniques are working, MacDonald says he has hopes to soon teach a 400-level rhetoric course that only uses labor-based grading. The subject: Writing for Games. He’s a huge fan of board games and appreciates all the detailed planning work that goes into creating video games, board games, and even game reviews and analysis. In his view, the subject is a strong fit for labor-based grading because it would spare him the duty of “assessing whether your game is any good,” something he says he’s not qualified to do. But as a rhetorician and game user, he’s comfortable assessing the quality of student’s character creation documents, dialogue trees, or how they communicate their rules to the audience. In other words, what he really wants to see is that you’re putting in the work.

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Story by Lou Blouin. Interested in learning more about Associate Professor Mike MacDonald’s experiments with labor-based grading? His Hub blog post on the topic is a great read.

Academic Excellence

Opinion or Voices

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Language, Culture, and the Arts

Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources

Off

Mon, 09/27/2021 - 16:00

Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric Mike MacDonald gives us a tour of his recent experiments with reimagining letter grades.

Tips for hybrid staff meetings

lblouin — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 14:23:07 +0000

Tips for hybrid staff meetings lblouin Mon, 08/09/2021 - 10:23

A collage graphic representing hybrid meetings, featuring six people gathered at a conference table looking at a large monitor displaying four people teleconferencing in.

Of all the ways the pandemic may shape the future, its impact on the workplace may be the most immediate. Policy experts are already starting to think about whether the “remote work revolution” could even disrupt downtown revitalization efforts — or, conversely, breathe new life into suburbs. Our campus community will feel some impacts too, as many ��-Dearborn units begin a fall semester with a mix of folks working remotely and in-office. That new hybrid team format presents some potential challenges for meetings, particularly with regard to what technology and facilitation skills will be most useful. So to help you sort through the options, we called up Sarah Silverman, a Hub instructional designer with experience in the hybrid meeting format.

Hub instructional designer Sarah Silverman

Zoom is still a solid option

So let’s say you have three or four people in the office at the same time, and three or four folks working remotely. Your best option is to put all the in-person folks in your conference room and have everyone else call-in on Zoom, right? Silverman says not necessarily. While that format can totally work (more on how to pull that off below), it’s perfectly OK to still conduct staff meetings entirely on Zoom. When you’re deciding on a meeting format, Silverman says the question you should start with isn’t how to have a great hybrid meeting; it’s, what are you trying to accomplish? “Are you trying to prioritize the face-to-face connection of people in the room, or are you trying to prioritize the overall functioning of your team?” she says. “If you’re about half remote and half in-person, the best approach may be simply to continue meeting on Zoom, especially if that was working well for you before.” One advantage of this approach is that it sidesteps many of the common challenges of hybrid meetings, like figuring out additional technology or ensuring the remote staff feel like they’re on an equal footing. Having in-office staff Zoom in from their individual offices might initially seem weird, but probably only as strange as Zoom itself felt at first. Plus, Silverman says you can easily build in a little social time for the in-office members of your team before or after the meeting — if they’re not finding ways to get that already.

Tech options, from no-budget solutions to plug-and-play videoconferencing

If you’d like to try a hybrid format, you’re probably wondering if you need to invest in additional technology. For small- or medium-sized teams, Silverman says Zoom is still a great foundation to build your hybrid meeting on, and you don’t necessarily have to add any hardware to try it out. An easy base setup: Try positioning a laptop at the front of the room where your in-person folks are meeting, using it both for audio and to display everyone who is calling in remotely. If your laptop speakers aren’t loud enough, try adding an external speaker. Another good-to-know: Laptop cameras typically just capture what’s right in front of them. So to avoid very intimately huddling all around the laptop, you can add a wide-angle USB camera for about $100 if you want your remote folks to be able to see everyone who’s in the room. With that simple setup, everyone has the ability to see and hear each other, which Silverman says are the absolute base requirements for a hybrid meeting.

If you’re looking for a more dedicated in-room setup, Silverman says take a look at technologies like the Neatbar. This is basically an intelligent soundbar with a wide-angle camera that automatically tracks with the person who’s speaking, much like Zoom puts the spotlight on the person who has the floor. Plus, it integrates with Zoom and large video displays you may already have in your conference room, so it’s about as close to a plug-and-play professional setup as you’re going to find. At around $3,000, it’s probably a better fit for dedicated meeting room spaces that get lots of traffic. Of course, if you plan on purchasing technology, or have any questions, it's always a great idea to reach out to ITS.

Don’t forget the skills (and manners) you used for remote meetings

One of the first things you probably noticed about Zoom meetings is that they can get very messy if several people start talking at the same time. Hybrid meetings offer the same potential for a chaotic audio experience, so Silverman says people, particularly the ones meeting together in-person, will still have to use their Zoom manners. That includes things like making sure only one person is talking at a time, maintaining a constant volume, not assuming people can hear your side banter, and being prepared to mute when necessary.

The in-office folks meeting together also might find it useful to bring their laptops and login to Zoom with their audio and video turned off. This “in-room virtual meeting” format means everyone can still take advantage of features like the chat or live transcript. Similarly, Silverman says you might stick with a Google doc that everyone has access to for brainstorming and notetaking, rather than trying to train a camera on a physical whiteboard in the conference room.

Whichever options you choose, Silverman says it’s best to patiently give it a go, and know that there will likely be some wrinkles to iron out in your first few attempts. And if you find some version of a hybrid meeting is just not working for your team, Silverman says there’s no shame in falling back on Zoom.

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Sarah Silverman is an instructional designer with The Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources. If you’re a member of the media and would like to interview Silverman about this topic, give us a shout at ��Dearborn-News@umich.edu and we’ll put you in touch.

Coronavirus

Faculty and Staff

Technology

Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources

Off

Mon, 08/09/2021 - 14:19

The Hub’s Sarah Silverman talks about how to have productive team meetings if some of you are remote, and some are in the office.

How students felt about their year-plus of pandemic learning

lblouin — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 13:45:03 +0000

How students felt about their year-plus of pandemic learning lblouin Mon, 07/12/2021 - 09:45

A collage graphic representing online learning, featuring a male college professor teaching from "inside" a laptop screen surrounded by students in "bubbles.""

How will the pandemic reshape our lives — even after things go back to “normal”? It’s a question folks are asking in all kinds of contexts, from workplaces, to restaurants, to our social lives. There’s a ton of buzz in the higher education world too, particularly around which pandemic-spurred innovations might be worth keeping around. While that’s a topic that will take months to sort through, some recent student focus groups hosted by The Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources offer some substantive initial insight into what worked for students and what didn’t. The full report is definitely worth a read, but we’ve broken down some of the key takeaways below for an appetizer. Special thanks to Hub Instructional Designer Jessica Riviere and CECS Academic Advisor Roberto Novelli for taking us through the report. And they both wanted to give a shout out to Hub alum Alfonso Sintjago, who helped organize the student focus groups and has since moved on to a position with U-M’s Language Resource Center.

Hybridity is popular, and it could reshape student expectations

One of the overarching themes of the Hub’s report is that doing some things in-person or synchronously online and doing other activities asynchronously has its benefits. Novelli says short-form recorded lectures, for example, were generally a big hit with students (more on this below) “because it gave them this new ability to go back and review a concept if they didn’t get it the first time.” Conversely, group work was something that many students reported was tougher in a remote environment. “Looking forward, my hunch is these experiences will shift everyone’s tolerances a little,” says Riviere. “For example, students’ tolerances for being able to sit quietly in a classroom and listen to a lecture for 50 minutes with no break and no chance to repeat it may be diminished. And there may be a bigger appetite for using that in-person time to collaborate or get questions asked and answered, and much less tolerance for using class-time for transactional stuff that could easily be in Canvas.” In other words, students appear to be coming out of this pandemic learning experience with more sophisticated views of what activities work best in each format — and a desire for course designs that can capitalize on that.

Recorded lectures were popular, discussion boards were a struggle

Recorded lectures and discussions boards were two of the most relied upon tools for faculty as they pivoted to remote class formats. But only one of these online learning staples got high marks from students. In general, students really liked recorded lectures, though Riviere and Novelli note students’ clear preference was for shorter lectures (in the 5-20 minute range), and for lectures that focused on material directly related to things they were going to be assessed on. (Riviere says it’s also important to note that some recent research shows students often feel like they’re learning the most from lectures compared to some other activities, but that’s not always an indicator of actual learning.) Interestingly, one thing students didn’t comment on was production values. “I thought this was significant because I know some of our faculty feel under a lot of pressure to create professional-looking videos, and at least in our focus groups, this was not the criteria that students were judging them on,” Riviere says. Instead, students seemed to care most about content and the instructor’s ability to connect. “We were all craving connection during this time, and frankly, it might have been harder to connect with a really polished-looking video.”

Headshots of Jessica Riviere and Roberto Novelli

Discussion boards, on the other hand, got a pretty consistent thumbs down. Novelli says many students felt like it was “busy work,” and reported “fatigue” with the format, especially when they had several classes using the same discussion board formula. “I think many students’ experience of the discussion boards was that they were going to pick through the thread, look for their opportunity to make a quick comment so they could check that box and move on,” Novelli says. “There was just no way they were going to read through everyone’s comments, especially if they had to do the same thing for three more classes.” Riviere doesn’t think that means we should junk discussion boards as an online learning tool, but it does warrant some rethinking of what exactly we’re trying to achieve. In an in-person class discussion, not everyone is going to speak up and we’d have no problem considering that a successful discussion, Riviere says. “But typically with a discussion board, we’re asking everyone to participate. So do we need to be creating more options for participation? And is some form of watching from the sidelines viable, similar to how some people in an in-person class are going to take in the information just through listening?”

So is this a transformative moment for higher ed?

It’s still early days, but there are some signs that our pandemic experiences could be spurring change in areas of our lives that once seemed pretty durable. (How remote work is changing our ideas of the office is a good example.) So is higher ed heading for a moment of fundamental transformation? Riviere’s take is “we’re about to find out.” But she has her eye on one less talked about aspect of the educational environment in particular: how our physical bodies factor into our learning experiences. She said our struggles to create functional spaces at home to learn or work showed just how much our physical environment matters, and many scholars are doing very interesting research into how taken-for-granted things like that 10-minute walk between classes, or physical interactions with peers in a language class, actually aid learning. This is especially relevant because it could help us sort through this fundamental question of which activities benefit from in-person interactions, and which can be handled remotely or asynchronously.

In the student support resources space, Novelli says he’s hopeful that we’re heading toward an era of more flexibility and informality. “I think it’s a great opportunity for us to meet students where they’re at,” Novelli says. “If it’s not possible for a student to physically come to campus between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., I think we should totally have remote options. And even in our office, I personally want it to be more welcoming. Enough of working behind a desk. Let’s work side by side, together, sharing experiences. Our offices should not be intimidating; they should be inviting.”

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Want more details about students’ experiences during the pandemic? Check out the Hub’s full report from its recent student focus groups.

Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources

Off

Mon, 07/12/2021 - 13:37

Recent student focus groups hosted by the Hub offer a candid look at what went well, what didn’t, and what ideas might have staying power post-pandemic.

Pro tips for synchronous teaching

lblouin — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 16:45:42 +0000

Pro tips for synchronous teaching lblouin Wed, 03/10/2021 - 11:45

A college student smiles at his laptop while engaging in a synchronous class session.

It will likely take many years for universities to unpack everything we’ve learned from the year-plus we’ll spend in a pandemic-altered instructional environment. One of the themes that will no doubt get a lot of attention is how we can get the most out of online learning. Pre-pandemic, asynchronous courses were by far the dominant format. But now a year in, students, faculty and instructional designers have been increasingly drawn to activities where people can be together virtually in real-time. At face value, that makes synchronous learning more like a face-to-face class. But as Hub Instructional Designer Sarah Silverman recently explained, getting the most out of Zoom class time often means embracing what’s different about the format. Our conversation with her has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

So Sarah, in the early days of the pandemic response, most classes went asynchronous, which again, meant real-time virtual class sessions weren’t generally part of the mix. Now there seems to be a lot of interest in making class time more synchronous. What’s shifted?

I think in the emergency remote Winter 2020 semester, there was a feeling that with all the hardships people were facing, it was not going to be realistic to have everyone convene at particular times for class sessions. At that time, it was also not guaranteed that people would have access to the technology they needed to do that. Now, though, I think what students are starting to feel is the connection with their instructors and their fellow students is supported by synchronous learning. This doesn’t mean that you need to be on Zoom three times a week for an hour to listen to a lecture. But I have heard a lot of people say they like the immediacy of being able to ask and answer questions in real-time, or hear what their instructor and fellow students think about a topic. Also, I think that while asynchronous does provide you this maximum level of flexibility, what we’re learning is that it may also require more cognitive bandwidth. First and foremost, students have to arrange and manage their own schedules. I mean, I’m a student in an asynchronous course right now, and I find many of these things challenging myself.

So on the synchronous side of things, how do you get it “right”? Because we’ve all sat through some pretty unengaging Zoom sessions.

I think the major challenge is a lot of instructors tend to think about a synchronous class session in ways that it’s going to mimic a classroom. Number one, they think they’ll be able to see all the students’ faces and therefore get facial feedback. But even if students were to keep their cameras on, which we’ve learned is mostly not their preference, it’s still not really the same as being face-to-face. Because of this, a lot of the work I’ve done with faculty involves thinking about what’s good about synchronous that doesn’t necessarily involve having the camera on. Number one, the chat feature is very useful for students, because you can ask a question and get immediate feedback. Second, it sidesteps one of the big drawbacks of the technology: It’s very difficult to know when it’s OK to speak and when someone is supposed to respond, so people end up talking over each other. In Zoom, you can also offer feedback via the Raising Hand function, or using emoji or the polling feature. These features also illustrate one of the overall thoughts I have about synchronous teaching, namely, that it’s alright to have more than one thing going on at the same time. It’s OK, for example, if the conversation in the chat is a little tangential to the lecture. These devices were not designed for us to be passive in front of the screen, and I think when we are passive, that’s one reason you see things like Zoom fatigue.

One other thing I’ll mention is that I’m very interested in issues that impact neuro-diverse students. One of the things I found is that a lot of students enjoy being with other people, but not necessarily speaking in class. So I’m a really big fan of synchronous learning activities that are actually quiet. Maybe you ask students to do an independent reflection, or write a paragraph that they then pass along to a partner for their comments. I think of it kind of like the experience of people meeting at a coffee shop to study. We’re not necessarily meeting up to talk, except maybe during breaks. But it’s helpful to be in the presence of people who are doing the same thing that you are.

That’s super interesting. Can we go back to the camera thing, though, because I feel like this is a really nuanced topic. Can you explain why we can’t just require everybody to have their cameras on?

Well, there are really a variety of issues. First, there is a very basic concern that current students at ��-Dearborn did not sign-up to learn exclusively remotely, and their home situations may not be set up for that. Many students are not even living in the same situation they were pre-pandemic, and people’s families and kids and whatever else is going on in their homes are not predictable at the moment. We believe that many of our students don’t even have a private space in which they can “go” to their synchronous classes.

There’s also the general privacy issue, and what counts as a private versus a public space. We’re asking people to attend public classes from their private spaces, which presents a number of challenges. Some solutions are fairly straightforward; for example, I can use a virtual background if I don’t want to show my space. But there may be other personal, cultural, age or experience-related reasons why someone might not feel comfortable presenting themselves on camera in the same way they want to appear to, say, their family in their home. In addition, there is research that indicates that for some people, looking at yourself on camera or being aware that you’re being watched can trigger a trauma response.

So I don’t think it makes sense to require cameras to be on. But if instructors find it really challenging to not see people’s faces, one thing I’ve suggested is that they just communicate with their students that they personally find it really helpful. And then they can explain that they have a lot of options for how they can do this. They can use the virtual background. They can turn their camera on and off, depending on what the activity is. Or they could simply put a picture up. For a lot of instructors, a photo or a cartoon avatar is still a lot better than teaching to a bunch of black boxes. Personally, I’m sympathetic to faculty on this issue. I find it very difficult to have conversations that are deep and transformative if you don’t know who’s there. So I think it’s good to find ways to develop presence and identity in the online environment, even if that doesn't mean having cameras on.

So I know you’re really tuned into some of the interesting things people are doing in this synchronous format. Can you share some simple techniques that people could try?

There was a recent op-ed in The New York Times by Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen from USC, and he was explaining how instead of having large class discussions, each day he asks a panel of students to be the discussants. So there is a day on which you and three other students will have your cameras on, and the instructor will ask you questions and you’ll share your thoughts, but you won’t be in the “fish bowl” every day. I don’t know if that’s great for every student, but I like that this instructor is thinking creatively about how to use the medium in a way that brings students' voices in. Along these same lines, I do really like student presentations. I think it’s a good use of Zoom to let students take the reins of the space.

I also think the potential is huge for bringing in special guests. In academia, it’s a longstanding tradition to fly in an expert and get them a hotel room and they talk for an hour and then we take them out to lunch. That’s all been thrown out the window now. But what’s amazing is that you could actually have a prominent researcher from another city or country stop by your Zoom class for 15 minutes. Often all you have to do is ask and people are happy to do it.

And do you think any of these techniques we’re discovering through necessity will stick around even when we have an opportunity to go back to more traditional instruction?

Based on my conversations with faculty, there are very few people who say they won’t have any digital component to their classes going forward. The number one thing I’m hearing is that whether it’s online or in-person, they’re never going to use their synchronous time just to lecture and click through slides. They have really seen the benefit of, say, recording a 10-minute video on a topic, and then using their class time for other things. There’s just a much greater appreciation for our time together and what we can do with it.

I also think students have reorganized their priorities. In the beginning, a lot of students said they didn’t like learning online. And I think alongside that feeling, they’re now feeling that they don't want to just go back to sitting in a lecture hall either. There’s some other type of connection or collaboration that they want to get — and may start expecting — when they show up for class.

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Interview by Lou Blouin. If you’re a member of the media and would like to interview Instructional Designer Sarah Silverman about this topic, please drop us a line at ��Dearborn-News@umich.edu.

Online Learning

Opinion or Voices

Student Success

Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources

Off

Wed, 03/10/2021 - 16:44

A Hub expert explains how to embrace Zoom teaching as a medium unto itself.

Have better virtual staff meetings

lblouin — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 14:54:28 +0000

Have better virtual staff meetings lblouin Wed, 01/27/2021 - 09:54

A young man faceplants into his laptop.

Few aspects of office life inspire more grumbling than meetings. And the fact that they’re taking place almost exclusively online now hasn’t helped their reputation much. There are lots of things that make virtual meetings with your office team tricky to pull off, according to The Hub’s Autumm Caines, who’s been facilitating virtual meetings since 2015. But she says much of the “doom and gloom of Zoom” (to steal some clever verbiage from The Hub’s latest workshop) can be softened with a few simple tweaks to your team’s approach.

As you’ve no doubt experienced, one of the most significant ways virtual meetings differ from their in-person counterparts is that the former can get messy when two people attempt to talk at the same time.“In an in-person meeting, there are lots of occasions where people might talk in close timing to or, for short bursts, at the same time as one another. In a brainstorming environment, it can be really important and even fun, and your ear is pretty good at sorting through all the layers,” Caines says. “But it’s one of the quirks of the videoconference software that the camera shifts to whoever is the loudest, so if two people try to talk at the same time, even for a few seconds, it’s basically chaos.”

To leave room for this kind of layered communication but avoid the confusion, Caines says try leaning on the chat feature a little more in your meetings — especially large meetings. For example, facilitators can use chat to quickly take the pulse of the room, collect instant feedback on an idea, or deploy an icebreaker at the start of a meeting. Caines says this kind of chat activity typically works best in situations where the feedback can be dished up in a word to a few words, not sentences and paragraphs.

In fact, Caines says chat is generally a great tool for boosting participation. If a facilitator is a capable multitasker, or if the meeting has someone who can play the chat monitor role, you might try encouraging folks to chat out questions or comments during a presentation, with the facilitator briefly working in this feedback as it rolls in. And while you don’t want chat to take over your meeting, Caines says it can also be useful to create a little meeting “side banter,” which can be a visible way for folks to indicate they’re listening.

Instructional designer Autumm Caines

Another one of Caines tips: Think of hosting a meeting almost like you’re hosting a party — a setting where hospitality is crucial and also really multidimensional. For example, one of the most awkward parts of a party can be that liminal space where the first guests are arriving. It’s often the same for virtual meetings, but there are things you can do to make this time more interesting and comfortable. Caines says you can try assigning a designated greeter, who shows up early to acknowledge each person as they log in. You can also use the chat to answer a predetermined icebreaker question. “I also recently tried playing music for people, which I thought would be cool, but I actually got some feedback that the volume levels were different for different participants. So for some it was fine, but not for others,” Caines says. So don’t be afraid to experiment and see what works best with your group.

The party metaphor also works in another important way: Both meetings and parties take teamwork to pull off, and the larger the gathering, the more help you might need. At a party, you’re going to be less stressed if someone helps you clean, another person is assigned to food prep, and someone else is taking coats at the door. Sharing the labor of meeting facilitation can directly engage more people on your team and make sure no single person gets overwhelmed. So while someone is holding down MC duties, someone else could be monitoring chat, while another person takes notes.

If you’re up for trying out some more advanced techniques, Caines says using other collaborative tools during your meetings is a way to add an extra layer of participation. For example, a shared Google Doc that everybody has access to can be updated in real time for brainstorming sessions, though she notes if you have a big group, users working at the bottom of a doc might find it distracting to constantly have their text bumped down by those working at the top. However, using a slide deck in Google Slides solves this problem, because everyone gets their own slide. Caines loves this video tutorial of that technique that Hub Director Carla Vecchiola found and shared with their team. If you want to give it a try, here’s a customizable template.

Finally, Caines says don’t forget that the basic rules for good in-person meetings apply to virtual meetings. The biggest one, of course, is you should always have a clear purpose for getting together. Point being, if it can be handled in an email, make it an email.

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Want more ideas about how to get the most out of your synchronous time together? Check out Caines recent post on The Hub blog: “Avoid the Gloom and Doom of Zoom.”

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Wed, 01/27/2021 - 14:53

Zoom fatigue got you down? Experiment with these techniques for smoother, more productive, more interesting team meetings.