Faced with disruption, my students were flexible, adaptable, nimble

[I adapted this from my post on the site When Falls the Coliseum.]

Drexel was one of the universities to experience a protest this past academic year, as toward the end of our fast-paced spring '24 term and overall academic year, protesters camped in the center of campus for nearly a week.

The university went on lockdown when the encampment started on a Saturday night, gradually resuming normal operations during a five-day period. For two days, many classes were online, including mine.

In my class, studenting-wise, the kids did alright.

I know this pandemic "generation" has been through a lot, but collective worries that they have fallen to pieces and will not be able to cope or function in the "real world" (whatever that is) were certainly challenged by my students' quick and in most ways expert transition to a Zoom-based classroom.

The university was functioning hour-by-hour, so the entire Drexel community would only receive information about the next day's operations in the evening. We all had to be ready to shift gears.

I don't know if they were happy about it, but every student showed up for our synchronous online class on Tuesday, and they were on time and ready to go. All but one had cameras on, and they worked well both in the whole group class and the breakout rooms, interacting with me and their classmates.

We shared a few winky in-jokes about online learning, but in terms of the outcomes for that day's lessons, we stayed on track--I did my best, but it was largely thanks to their attention and efforts.

Few would likely choose to resume learning in a solely digital modality, but if need be, they showed they could pull it off.

These students are not withering little snowflakes, fluttering about, buffeted helplessly by forces they cannot/will not resist, melting when the temperature of their environment clicks up a notch. I think, as I did during much of the pandemic, that they're warriors. I keep finding that they adjust and adapt when called upon, and they showed that again last month.

Drexel acted with relative speed in opening its campus and beginning onsite instruction again. We finished the quarter. Graduations for both colleges and the university as a whole came and went.

I watched students walk in front of me across the stage at the College of Arts and Sciences graduation, and, you know, I felt not only proud that I had a chance to work with many of them but confident that they'll be the ones in charge some day.

Screens, attention, and mental health

I want my students to learn--of course!--but I mainly want them to be fulfilled and happy people. Writing is a path to those broader goals. I don't want fundamental aspects of my teaching to get in the way. I follow a teacherly version of the Hippocratic Oath. 

Lately, I've been thinking about how such general goals of student wellness might clash with online learning. Of course, as if this nearly 20-year-old blog weren't evidence enough, you should know that I am a firm advocate of the value of online learning, especially online writing (and literacy) instruction; simply, OWI gives students access to learning in ways they otherwise wouldn't. It extends the classroom in writing-rich ways. It's great.

But there are costs with any benefit, and one in particular resonated with me after I recently finished the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. This fascinating book looks at "why we seem to have lost our sense of focus, and how we can get it back" (p. 9). Using a mix of research and anecdote, Hari unspools a series of causes; unsurprisingly several of them connect with our life around screens (although he discusses other strong trends and causes too).

Consider that students who sign up for our online courses do not receive an accompanying app that keeps them focused when they are "in" class, particularly asynchronous class. We can't control behaviors such as students distractedly scrolling the web while "in class" nor do we have control over if our class work doesn't push them over daily, weekly, monthly screen time limits.

Should we be looking into this more, and, if so, how? How might we approach conversations about limiting screen time in environments fundamentally mediated by screens? After all, many screens  have inherent characteristics, as Maida Lynn Chen in The Conversation pointed out in discussing insomnia, depression, and screens: "... the light emitted from most handheld devices, even with a night filter, a blue light filter, or both, is enough to decrease levels of melatonin, the primary hormone that signals the onset of sleep."

Intriguing research and pedagogical avenues seem open here for teachers to explore and critique the structure of their very courses.

We want to learn more, as students' education could be intertwined with tools that may have deleterious effects on their attention spans and perhaps their overall mental health. This, I suppose, is akin to ergonomics studies showing the effects of sitting in a chair all day at work or school and seeking solutions.

For this brief post, I did a cursory review of some research. The pandemic opened opportunities to study this area, for instance, the metastudy, "A systematic review of screen-time literature to inform educational policy and practice during COVID-19" in The International Journal of Educational Research Open by Siamack Zahedi, Rhea Jaffer, and Anuj Iyer, which looked at 52 studies but found them "too small," "inconclusive," or "critically underrepresented" and suggested, "These facts, along with the undeniable benefits of online learning in the absence of brick-and-mortar schooling and the ominous forecasts of learning loss caused by prolonged school closure, inform our recommendations for a more moderate policy and practical stance on restrictions...." Another is an Education Next article "Should We Limit 'Screen Time' in School?" by Daniel Scoggin and Tom Vander Ark; here is a link to a forum connected to that article.

Looking briefly at the available literature, I'm thinking about next steps, and, as I type away on the web interface of my computer (on a Saturday), I'm wondering if we need to develop tools--what would that even mean!?--to help our online students stay focused.

Modality as strategy

While of course online schools have long used distance learning to reach large and perhaps otherwise untapped student populations, we might consider how modality could help strategically build academic programs on a more granular level in traditional institutions.

The almost complete pandemic-induced shift to online and hybrid classes has meant that programs have a broader modality range when offering courses, and modality can certainly be a more prominent factor in strategic approaches to program development.

All venues that cover higher ed are discussing the impending enrollment "cliff," a significant drop in traditionally aged students that is projected to start in about 2025 (1). But I think many have submitted to a hyper-focused hand-wringing about these students while forgetting about the vast populations of other people who would be extremely well served by a college education. 

In developing courses of study, we consider what kinds of courses we offer, when we offer them, and who teaches them. Considering modality can be part of fine-tuning ways we grow and develop our programs. Of course, we also do consider where students are and many places offer distance courses for this reason, but online includes not just meeting needs of the distance learner who cannot come to campus.

Remember, while not all faculty may be in a hurry to return to online teaching, almost all faculty indeed are trained veterans in online and hybrid teaching, and we can adjust our scheduling to account for their talents as well as our students' needs. In conjunction with this, students are now experienced at studenting in different modalities. I know, some of it has been a real struggle, but students have online and hybrid experience we can build from--and non-traditional students have developed similar skills and experiences in their increasingly virtual work lives.

This kind of thinking has obvious implications when, for instance, trying to meet large populations like adult learners who may have full-time commitments but want to further their education.

But modality can shape more nuanced enrollment strategies. If you are growing a new program and hoping it can serve as a double or dual major, time flexibility may open that door for many students. The same goes for minors. In either case, scheduling issues can be an obstacle, especially on small campuses where course offering cycles can be tight and inflexible.

The flexibility of synchronous remote learning is one component. Course availability really opens up when we have asynchronous courses that remove time constraints.

Conversations about flexible scheduling often centers on students, but faculty can get the same benefits. Pushing classes into evening hours, at least on the campuses I have worked, is usually not popular. But offering courses that require no evening travel because they are remote synchronous or don't have evening hours at all because they're asynchronous can accommodate faculty.

We account for numerous factors when designing courses of study, but modality may not be prominent enough. We can use modality as part of strategic approaches to building curricula--and broaden our vision of the audiences we wish to serve.

Note:

1) For example, see the CHE's "Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?" or Capture Higher Ed's "How to Climb Higher Ed's Impending Demographic Cliff."

Fifth annual GSOLE conference this Friday

This Friday, January 28, the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) will be conducting our fifth fully online annual international conference, "Visions and Sites of Online Literacy Education."

Conference Co-Chairs Cat Mahaffey and Tess Evans--who are also GSOLE Board Members--have assembled a terrific event, again providing an excellent opportunity for the many people interested in online learning in general and online literacy education (OLI) more specifically to gather and discuss the opportunities and challenges of online education. GSOLE is now a 500+ member-strong organization!

It's a full-day affair with over 70 presenters, as you can see in the conference program. GSOLE President Dan Seward provides a short welcome video and tour, and already available is a Praxis Poster Hall. The conference features seven concurrent sessions and plenaries by Central Michigan's Troy Hicks and the University of Florida's Laura Gonzalez. Links to all of these events will be activated on Friday. You can follow the activity and discuss your experiences using #gsole2022.

You can still register, and this event is designed to be user-friendly on the wallet: It costs $10 for GSOLE members and $5 for students and contingent faculty GSOLE members. 

This year, we're grateful to the University of Houston-Downtown Master's Programs for sponsoring our conference, and I hope attendees take a look at their programs.

GSOLE is constantly improving and evolving. Listen to Dan's welcome message to hear how the conference is responding to trends in online learning and how GSOLE is connecting both new and old voices to chart the next paths in OLI.

A lost year? Maybe not

Campuses are nearing the end of the fall term, and widespread analysis has already begun of how college students, especially first-term students, have fared academically. After all, these are the students who went through more than a year of "pandemic learning."

The articles are everywhere. Many fear that high schoolers spent a year spinning in their chairs at home while low-quality videos stood in for actual instruction. "My kid learned nothing!" is a common refrain I have heard.

But in higher ed might we see another side? Will we perhaps see in college students a maturity toward their treatment of both time and learning responsibility?

Students moving from high school to college face many transitions. Academically, the work is challenging, but they also face the problem of proportions.

In high school (and before), students spend the majority of their learning lives in classrooms, moving in a structured environment--i.e., to the ring of a bell--from place to place. They spend some smaller amount of time at home doing home-based work. In college, those proportions are abruptly switched: They move to an environment with a little bit of time in a room (and, in many cases, no one requiring that they be accountable for being there) and an enormous responsibility to do work on their own.

This is one of the great pain points in transitioning to college learning, one that has brought down many a promising student.

But the fall '21 college students have already been through learning that to be successful required a lot of independence. They have had to soldier on at home, working in distracting environments in rooms not set up for learning.

So as not to appear obtuse, I want to be clear that I am talking about fall '21 college students, the ones who have pushed through high school and arrived at the next academic stop. There other populations not in college as well as younger children that certainly require a different lens of analysis.

But students who have made it through the doors of their higher institutions of choice may show an unprecedented veterans' experience in college-level learning styles, in which they had to be independent and even perhaps kind of aggressive in their learning, seizing things opportunistically. 

Maybe we have something ourselves to learn here, a result of the blending of e-learning and earlier academic independence. 

I wouldn't wish last year on us all again for anything, but perhaps we can find something salvageable in at least some of our students' education experiences.

Things both great and small in synchronous online writing courses

I teach my online writing courses (OWCs) asynchronously, with only touches of synchronous elements, such as a first-week meeting (that I also record for those who can't attend). I have long discussed the reasons why I teach this way, including because in an asynchronous writing course, everything students do is in writing.

Our field, however, is giving increasing attention to the possibilities of synchronous courses. I recently had the pleasure of serving as a member of the dissertation committee of Kimberly Fahle of Old Dominion University, whose dissertation, "Collaboration and Community in Undergraduate Writing Synchronous Video Courses (SVCs)" explored a number of fascinating elements about learner experiences in asynchronous courses.

Fahle, who successfully defended earlier this year and is now the writing center director at York College of Pennsylvania, raises several major considerations and observations about SVCs, including some underlying reasons for students’ general reticence for verbal participation when compared with textual communication, the need for modality-specific training, and the general impact of interfaces on learning and teaching.

These major conclusions aside, one of the many strengths of her excellent dissertation was her exploration, through discourse analysis, of detailed aspects of learning in synchronous, online meeting-based environments.

I'll give you a great example. With regard to interface, Fahle wrote that students were sometimes reluctant to speak in class because in the web meeting app for their courses, the face of the last person who spoke would stay prominently on screen until someone else spoke. One of her students said, "I think also the fact that the last person to speak [...] the camera stays on them until someone else speaks [...] makes people maybe not want to speak."

Think about this in terms of an onsite class. It would be like when someone speaks, everyone turns to look at that person, staring zombie-like, until someone else takes the initiative to speak. You could see how that would stifle class dialogue and likely course community.

Through her students, Fahle highlighted such an interesting, and easy-to-overlook, observation. When you consider such a dynamic, you can see how for many students this would be challenging and for shy students possibly withering and debilitating. It also demonstrates how a web platform suitable for business-type meetings might operate in totally different way for education, particularly in courses aiming for discussion--such as an OWC.

Addressing concerns similar to this would take some serious user-centric consideration. As we further explore SVCs and any technologically-faciliated environments, these are exactly the kind of details, from the student eyes, that we need to consider.

Learning about the student experience in OWI

What are students doing and experiencing in online writing courses (OWCs)? How do they feel about learning in their OWCs? What do we really know about this particular learning context/environment? Our Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) (I'm co-chair) is eager to learn more and is engaged in several research projects and initiatives to answer questions like these.

Since the publication of our committee's Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for OWI, our group has structured its efforts along the lines of a three-year plan: year one was “Institutional Matters”; year two was “Faculty Matters”; this year is “Student Matters.”

For me, I have been curious about the fact that many teachers might not have a good anchor for thinking about our OWI students' experiences for a simple reason: Many teachers have themselves never taken an online course. So, simply put, in onsite instruction, while teachers can draw on their own personal histories when developing their pedagogy, online, they’re often adrift because they don’t have the background to know what a course “looks” and "feels" like to an online learner.

Onsite, a teacher might remember what it was like to sit in the back of the class or receive praise or work next to an annoying (or charming) partner or sit in a room with a hangover – uh, I mean head cold. But if you haven’t taken an online course, it could understandably be difficult to envision a student’s experience with discussion boards or the pressure of taking a timed quiz in a dorm room or how it feels to speak up using a microphone and Webcam in an online synchronous classroom. What are those activities like?

Our committee wants to help fill in the gaps in this knowledge, especially clarifying students’ experiences in terms of access and disability. Our primary initiative is the OWI Student Survey. Several of my colleagues have worked hard to create a series of questions to help us understand what is happening for students in OWCs. This fall, we’re piloting the survey, but if any of you are interested in sharing it with your students, please reach out to me.

The survey process and results will be part of our workshop and panel presentation at next year's CCCC in Houston. At CCCC, we'll also be exploring several other aspects of students and OWI.

All of this work dovetails with a project I’m engaged in right now with one of my own students – I’m going to hold off on disclosing exactly what we’re doing for another month or so, until we see where the project will ultimately lead, but we're basically working on co-authoring an extended narrative of an online course as seen through the eyes of not just the teacher, but the student. This is another effort to provide a view of how the online writing instructional environment looks -- through student eyes.