to uh this session session on synchronous course design for the pandemic and beyond with the subtitle of the role and flipped it blended courses so really excited about for this session today and kind of want to take some old thinking and kind of revamp it and kind of reframe it for what's happened the last couple of uh i was going to say years and then realize no it's only been months but let me first introduce myself and let's see this so i am uh stephen crawford i am the district director for the maricopa center for learning and innovation which is out of the district office of the maricopa community colleges and just kind of give you some context of where i am in the world the maricopa community colleges is made up of 10 individually accredited colleges and maricopa county here in the phoenix arizona area so it takes about two hours to drive from that corner uh where chandler gilbert is in the southeast corner all the way out to the one near good year at australia mountains about a two-hour drive um it might be an hour and a half if it's on a weekend at like sunday morning at two in the morning but uh it it's it's a big area and we're one of the largest community college districts in the country and so it's it's a very interesting challenge that we have here so here's our goals for the session we want to identify key issues related to flipped and blended learning describe how to integrate synchronous and asynchronous components in a blended course and we're going to define some of those terms to kind of maybe give them some new meaning in today's reality and then we're going to discuss some of the key qm specific review standards related to blended courses and what this means for our practice for how we do things uh with designing uh courses as we move forward through the pandemic and hopefully beyond so let's start with some of those key terms and the first one i'm going to bring up is what is blended learning and and i go back to some of the original conversations that olc had which was then known the online learning consortium which was back then known as the sloan c consortium they used to hold a blended learning conference and one of the comments and then you find this in a number of the books that came out of that area from tony pikani and and charles graham and and chuck zuban is they said a blended course should not just be a bolt-on of components and i think that's one of the things that a lot of us who were involved in blended and hybrid learning in the early days we just said oh well we'll just add this piece to this face-to-face course we'll add this online piece to it we'll bolt it on and the problem with bolting on components is you're not changing the course fundamentally if you can bolt something on you can easily unbolt it and walk away and the idea was to think about it as a palette of paint and that a true blended course you're mixing these components in a way that you're truly creating something new because once you mix those paints it is near impossible if not completely impossible to ever unblend those paints and so that's kind of the idea we want to think about when it comes to blended learning a lot of times we get obsessed about seat time and the reduction of seat time we're not going to worry about that as much though i will admit most of our institutions have some range of percentage that we like to talk about it's like unless you reduce your seat time by 33 it's not a real blended learning course but if your weekly seat time is four hours and you're reducing it by one hour that's 25 does that make it any less blended so those are some of the questions we come across also like to add if you're measuring seat time you might be measuring the wrong end of the student so that's just another thing to keep in mind as we think about blended learning courses and then there's flipped courses and a lot of times we talk about flipped courses almost synonymously with blended courses there are two very different things yes they can be done at the same time but they are really two different things and the first reference you see to a flipped course goes back to 1999. uh the the author lage um i can remember his first name but leigh he uh wrote an article for his business journal and how he took vhs tapes he would take you know i think some of us were talking about vhs earlier uh yesterday he would take his lectures he would tape his lectures put them on a vhs the students would then go watch the lectures on their own time they went to this little lab watch the vhs tapes and and then they would come to class and that's where they would quote do their homework the idea and he called it at the time the inverted classroom the idea behind this and this is what makes a flipped classroom a truly flipped classroom if you're going to do content delivery you should do it offline not in the classroom online but you should not be doing it in the classroom the classroom time where you are the expert as the faculty member that is the time for you to really shine not as a content deliverer but as an expert in the content and this is where you can help the students do better and whether that's going from group to group to assist with small projects whether that is answering questions that they have that they didn't understand all these different things those are the things that you want to do it's a chance for you to shine as an expert and and i think that's a really important thing to think about here because i i remember when i went to college there were some classes where i walked in the classroom the first thing the faculty member did was give us a couple of notes about here's some things coming up on the calendar and then he'd start a movie turn the lights off start a movie and i'd watch a movie in the class class tie would end he'd stop the movie turn the lights on we all left and we did that almost every single class and and so a better model would be to have us watch those movies on our own time and then go into class and discuss them and so that's the idea behind a flipped classroom was to kind of get away from that stand and deliver sage on the stage type of activities and move to that more guide in the side you know active learning approaches and so what we see a lot of times is with blended learning courses people will start to also adopt flipped learning at the same time because they're like well if i have reduced seat time with my students i want to make that as valuable as possible because i contact time with my students that chance for interaction is so important so let me use that in the best way possible and we're going to talk about some of those techniques that you can use here as we go through heather you might recognize this from the old days um this is how we did distance learning back in the uh in the 90s and early odds and i had to go back into the wayback machine on the internet and find this graphic that i had on a website from 2007. um i really want to highlight the uh that square of table and the monitors on the screen yeah that's zoom from like 13 14 15 years ago essentially uh you would sit in a room you have microphones in the ceiling you've got monitors all around you and there's cameras and you would have other virtual classrooms and today you know and in fact in that period we were just beginning to experiment with um with the predecessors of zoom using uh different internet technologies we had avoided those technologies like the plague prior to 2007 because they were so unreliable and in fact and that's why you see a satellite control room and we broadcast courses literally all over the world including aircraft carriers at sea and and that was how we delivered for uh virtual learning or remote learning as we would call it today um so all these things that we're doing today none of this is new we we did this 20 years ago the only thing that's new is we're doing it from our house everybody else is doing it from their house and we have a really good internet uh to give you an example in 1999 uh we started video streaming courses and what would happen so the classrooms we had for the regular satellite classes those rooms we had one-way video from the main studio classroom with a live studio audience of students and they would broadcast to community colleges all over virginia and even washington state and an olympia and all sorts of military bases and other community colleges and including here in arizona yavapai and uh and then there would be a two-way audio bridge over the phone because we couldn't do this we couldn't get the audio back um so with that setup our students who were on the internet they had a lag time of minutes so they're watching this video stream that's coming across the internet on their on their phone modems i mean we're talking you know we're not talking mega bits yet but we're talking a very you know today it'd be painful for you know our our kids would roll their eyes if they if they had to use the internet uh that we had back then they they use what we call high-speed internet and then they would um then they would communicate to the classroom via chat and we had a student who sat in the room who would then be the voice of the student the only problem is sometimes those questions were coming in three to five minutes after the faculty member had moved on and so we had to have a human in there to kind of monitor and go okay that question's already been asked so i'm not going to ask it on behalf of that student because they're going to get that answer in a few minutes anyway um thankfully we've moved on from that but you know a lot of what we're doing today again is coming back to these these principles of a virtual class so the next thing i want to do is i want to take an activity here and i want folks to put into the chat when we say you know we we like to use the terms in the classroom we like to use the terms you know online i want to think about things differently let's think about asynchronous versus synchronous learning and so from that mindset what are things that your students can do on their own on their own time in their own place for learning purposes so what are some some examples you guys can drop in and i'm going to give you just get things started i'm going to drop in the very first one and that is watch video lectures so what are some other asynchronous ideas oh good i'm going to try to keep up i see readings um discussions i can spell homework assignments uh quizzes try typing and interactive lessons i like the photo essays group work and i should have set this up as two columns but that's okay all right and that's a good number of items i'm in here so i got the oh simulator i'm going to go up to interactive lessons simulations i don't want to miss that one and then online tutorials slash practice exercises so yes there's a lot of things that our students can do and what's really nice about this list um i'm even going to go so far as on quizzes i'm going to say exams um oh someone's getting creative and making me happy service learning thank you um and let's spell it correctly so you know one of the things about um you know i i i saw a number of people who earlier who were early adopters of blended learning what they would do is they would do all these great things online but yeah they'd make the students in front of them and take the exam and and i'm not going to promote the the spyware software that a lot of people are using but there are a lot of ways to do exams online that don't involve spying on students all right so if these are examples of asynchronous learning let's talk about what are some examples of synchronous learning so what would you guys think of it these are the things that are done best in uh in interaction live and i'm going to start off with one of them that is on both lists just because i think it's a good one to start with that's discussions so what else do we have labs yes group activities again oh for some reason my spell checker is not catching my misspellings presentations all right good oh that's a good one from the arts ah i'm just gonna say props not all right so that's gives us a good start here oh language practice so when we look at these two lists of things you know this is where creativity can really come into play um when i first started developing online programs one of the things is foreign language could never be done online because of language practice it was one of the comments made unfortunately then some of the folks realized because they said the students speak the language so much in class and then in reality you discover there were people like me who did a really good job of just being a syllable behind everybody else in the class so i hid in the group voice and so everyone thought i was doing well i was just actually faking my way through the course hoping to get my c and move on um but when you go online you can actually have students submit audio assignments so they can't hide as much there's a lot of things on this list that synchronous i would say you can also do you know asynchronously as well but there's a lot of things on here i would say they're really good uh for doing things synchronously and so this is where it's a good time here to start thinking about formative and summative assessments uh for those of you who uh who don't use these techniques much i will tell you that for a flipped classroom especially formative assessments is how you can really make the uh the that in person that that synchronous time so much more valuable um so what i what i mean by that is um there's a concept in flipped classrooms and in flipped learning that we call the ticket in process and so what will happen is um i might as a faculty member have you review a bunch of content you've got to read these assignments watch these video lectures i put together etc and i may ask you to take a quiz so that i know a you you comprehend the the materials if you can't pass you know so if you take that it's an ungraded quiz it's a formative assessment i just want to know where you're at and so you take this quiz prior to coming into the synchronous session and then i look at the the quiz grades are at the quiz grade but they actually the results from the quiz because again it's not graded i look at the results in the quiz i can automatically start that synchronous session knowing where they're going to be questions and so i could start that session by going i see where a couple of you all had some uh some questions and were unsure about this topic and i can go zero in on those exact areas and not you know and that way because a lot of times we go does anybody have any questions and no one raises their hand because of the fact that they're like no i'm not going to raise my hand because i read everything it made sense to me but then when you challenge them with a formative assessment you make them make a decision on something and that helps them it helps you understand if they understand and because it's not graded yes they may not take it seriously but the thing is it those who do will help you get it where it where it needs to be another thing you can do for formative assessment is maybe it's part of a group project and you're required to bring in certain you know go back to the photo essay if you're doing something on say environmental science you may ask the students to take pictures of certain types of things that they're going to bring into the synchronous session and then use it in group work to build an understanding of of what's going on so it doesn't have to be a quiz it could be anything any activity that shows their understanding and something that can be useful to influence what you're going to do in the in the session this is completely different from a summative assessment where the summative assessment is did you learn what you were supposed to learn by now and you know those are your exams those are your your your end of the semester projects those the ones that are the highest stakes has all the grades attached to it um and so those that i just want to make sure that we have an understanding of the difference there so let's talk about the qm standards and what they have to say about blended learning so there are seven standards that if you go through the annotations have specific instructions for what to do with blended learning one of the things i want to note is that when you look doing a qm course review you are looking at the evidence in front of you and so that's a very important thing because remember we're not evaluating a person's teaching we are reviewing the design of their course and so that's why there's no qm rubric for face to face because while there are artifacts there aren't as many artifacts to review as there are for an online course and so when we look at a blended learning course we have to kind of walk that line because we know there aren't going to be artifacts of a synchronous session but we do know that there's going to be artifacts of the online portions and that's why when you look at this we're going to zero in specifically on four of them do the instructions make clear how to get started and where to find various course components that's a very important one because you're kind of you really want to show the students how this course works together when you look at 1.2 again learners are
introduced to the purpose and structure of the course and that could be super super critical here during the pandemic because a student may go well are these online sessions via webex and via zoom and all the microsoft teams or google meet or whatever tool you're using are they required do i really have to be there can i pass the course without doing that if you don't articulate those things that can be a very difficult proposition and once you do go back to the classroom you will find that um that that you do have uh situations where the students are like well is it optional what if this what if that and uh and yes jj i agree completely that the rubric is in applicable to face-to-face courses but i'll come back to the review part the artifacts aren't there um and that's why i want to hit 4-2 on that artifact that relationship between your use of instructional materials in the course and completing those learning activities is clearly explained when you think about what's happening in a face-to-face course you know you kind of just like oh yeah i need to mention something and you throw it out there's no artifacts of that there's because you don't because that's not part of the design unless you have that written down somewhere in in the syllabus but when you were doing this as an online course that needed to be clearly articulated and we're going to talk about a technique for doing that and then of course 5 2 talks about the learning activities provide opportunities for interaction that support active learning and so if i was to pop into here you know again we're talking again that the course uses both online and the face-to-face setting again we're using some using the terms that i think are about to kind of go away um the learning activities occur the two settings are connected by a common thread and that's a very key phrase in five two's annotation that common thread and we want to talk about creating that common thread so again i know i made my joke about c time i'm not going to make it again but when we think about face-to-face courses this is how we traditionally think about them we think about oh i have a three credit hour course i have my students who sit in front of me for either an hour and a half on tuesdays and thursdays maybe maybe mondays and wednesdays maybe it's an hour on monday wednesday friday but bottom line is i have them for about three hours and i have them in front of me for three hours and then i look at the homework time and typically most institutions say that you should be doing you know for every hour you're in the classroom you should be doing two hours of homework and that's why our policies are written and that's what leads us to that total time of a student should be taking nine hours for for the course now when you look at it from the the blended course point of view you see that okay i'm going to reduce my seat time by one-third that means i'm taking one hour of classroom time and i'm moving it online and this is how we've always communicated how to do a blended learning course you reduce the classroom time you increase the online time and the homework time just magically never changes so i'm going to propose we think about this very differently going from this point on and we think about it totally about synchronous time versus asynchronous time you know we stop getting rid of this in class homework and online if you're teaching a traditional face-to-face three credit hour course that means you have three hours of synchronous time and that synchronous time may occur in the classroom it may occur online live online like we're doing now and it may also occur in a combination of the two in a high flex type of model but the bottom line is there is an expectation that the students will be in a certain time online in front of you in some method for three hours per week and then that they're gonna be on their own doing other stuff whether that's homework or other items for six hours and so if you're doing a blended blended learning course and you're reducing that by 33 you're going to reduce that one hour of synchronous time you're just going to move that one hour to asynchronous you're still going to have that rigorous course at nine hours of work for the student you're just reducing the amount of synchronous time and that's i think that's a very important mindset to make now that we've kind of moved into this pandemic error and we've accelerated some of our thinkings this is the evolution i think that needs to occur is that we need to stop thinking about all these different categories of online in class this that and the other we just need to think about when do i have you in front of me and this is very important because while many of our students have we see that they do succeed in online courses there's a lot of research that shows how great online is but one of the things like you know faculty like to remind me is not all students are suited for online courses and i agree they're not self-regulated they don't have the ability to do scheduling especially for our younger learners um but we do have a number of learners who do not like synchronous learning they don't like that time they would rather be fully online so this is about making sure we have the right courses for the right students also um if you take a look at today's inside higher ed there begi there's an article in there today where they're beginning to talk about how do we transition this into the long-term thinking um and this is i think the idea if we start to start thinking about courses between synchronous time and asynchronous time it will help us tremendously okay so we've talked about all these different things what does this mean for course design itself so let's approach our synchronous time how do we use that to our our best advantage and let's talk about that thread from 5.2 that common thread the model i like to think about is kind of pre-class class post-class mindset and that is there are things that students need to do to prepare on their own for that class time or synchronous time and then you have that class time where they actually use that whatever they prepared for they actually do it and that's what they're going to do via video conferencing or in person and this is where uh the person who talked about labs is so important because if you were going to do a lab where you could have the students do all the preparation before they come you know that they can do review all the materials maybe review some all the information they need to review that way they can come into the lab be fully ready to go and then they conduct the lab and then you have your post class section which is again asynchronous time and you can kind of do that wrap up and reflection you don't want it to go okay class is over we're done with that we'll start on the next thing um you wanted there to be a flow of some sort and so one of the ways i'd like to represent this is through this diagram of that you should be flowing from asynchronous to synchronous back to asynchronous back to synchronous this nice flow in the class so that they're it that way the students understand the ebb and flow of the course they understand i prepare here i get ready for the synchronous time i'm right you know you're providing that regulation with that schedule i come into that synchronous time i we do something that because that that what i did before class was valuable it wasn't just an activity i think one of the worst things we do is ask students to read a chapter and then in the classroom we lecture on the chapter we tell them what they should have read um no if we hold our students to a standard they will meet those standards whether it's high or low they'll meet them and so as they and then the thing is once class is over that synchronous time is over what do you do if you just go okay that's it get ready for the next chapter you're kind of paying an injustice to what you just did let there be a reflection period you know that way if there's any assignments due give them that asynchronous time to wrap it up and then you can provide back and then and then you kind of switch gears in asynchronous time and flow to the next one so i've got a specific example that i was working on um so one of the things is that you know let's say you have your learning objective and your learning objective is and this is how i kind of like to plan things out and for the record there these slides are on the qm website and there's a handout of this that we'll talk about uh more that you can use as a word doc uh in your own uh course building so you you you basically you're gonna try to your your students are going to build something they're going to build develop a unit of training using an isd process and so you may have yours used to go okay what do i have i've got i want students to watch video lectures because i've got presentations on these that i've put together i've got sample plans i want them to look at maybe there's a chapter as well i didn't have room on the slide to throw that in there you know i really want to make sure my students really know what the isd process is before they start using it you know do they know what comes before what and what contains what and then i want them in a group to actually develop a training model so these are the things i want them to do these are the activities and then what modality does that work best in and we can argue that in the groups that could be both asynchronous and synchronous but you know we're going to put the primary focus on synchronous and then i look at the assignments i have i want them to demonstrate that comprehension of the isd process first and then i want them to develop a unit of training and then that final assessment obviously will be to develop that unit of training so this is kind of the flow as we think about what are we going to have people to do so then you're going to plan this out and then this is let's say this is over two class sessions so obviously the topic and this is just a little snippet of what could be done you know they're going to look at a view they're going to view that online lecture pre-class they're going to review the isd process and i might actually send this to the students directly and say this is what you have to do you have to review the isd process you need to take this online quiz and then you will come into the class where we will discuss the isd process again i'm taking that online quiz and going what is their understanding and doing a deeper dive and providing more context than what was provided or what they might need and then we're going to form groups and start exploring training topics and then there's going to be an online quiz that's due that's obviously before the class but the groups are going to submit a topic area for their trading unit and i might have them do that either at the end of the synchronous activity or i might say you know what take an extra day or two depending on if this is a weekly course versus every you know an hour every year every other day i would say okay now submit your topic area online you know hammer it out and get it get it submitted and that now brings us next to the next uh week where they're viewing online presentations about using the isd process first they were learning about it now they're learning about how to actually apply it and they're going to start assembling their resources develop an assessment plan and then they're going to actually develop that plan they're going to bring those resources into the synchronous activity this way and maybe i again using using the tools we have i can create breakout groups send them out to their groups as the faculty member i can bounce from group to group to group offer them uh advice and have them answer questions and and provide a critique as we go through they all can get that individual small group and then we can bring everybody back together and do uh and have them present their plans to each other and that's okay and then when and then when the class is done they have a chance to finish up their assessment plans and then post and then they they do that in the post-synchronous time so i want to make sure i leave time for questions and i also if the if the q and facilitator if irene if you could put in the chat how much time i have left i forgot to start my timer um this is you know there's a word doc in the resources area and i want to make sure i leave time for questions so there is a word doc that you can download that says okay let's let's think about how would i put this together in a course and i put it together by weeks and you can download this and oh like i see a good i see some questions coming in so we'll answer those here in a moment and then also if you want to think about it from an integration workshop you know with the different learning objectives i probably should have these reversed but you know starting with that learning objective and then go what goes where so let's hear judith asked what are some best practices of making students accountable for the pre-work that is required before the synchronous session so again that ticket in process i think is really important what i will what we discovered in a lot of the studies that have that have been focusing on this type of learning is that the students the students will react to how you behave and so for an example if you don't value those low stakes uh formative assessments then what will happen is that um they won't value it either so if you if you cite the quizzes if you cite those let's call them surveys more than quizzes if you cite those surveys that say hey i saw where half of the class did not i had questions about this and we had some uncertainty let's talk about this more the students will realize oh this is a valued piece of of information and they will do that in the physical classroom i've actually seen faculty stand at the door and if the student hadn't done didn't bring the piece of paper that had all the answers written out or they didn't taken the online quiz yet they physically would not let them in and that's a model that i've seen a lot of faculty use and when you think about today's uh video conferencing environment with the waiting room at the front end you know you could actually go through hey you haven't done this five question quiz yet or five question survey yet please go do the survey and once you do and i see you've done it i will let you into the classroom i've seen faculty do that at different levels from the community college through university um i again i don't know if i would do that personally but i know it works for them and so that's that's a really good one as well um i think again it's like it's like how we treat readings i think one of a lot of the reasons why students don't read chapters before they come to class is why read the chapter if and i've been in those classes where we're going to read them aloud in the class anyway or we're going to have the faculty member pretty much lecture on the chapter section by section and is like well why read the chapter when you're going to tell me what i need to know anyway i think it comes down to that and that's what and that's one of the biggest mistakes we've seen with faculty doing flipped learning is that they go oh my goodness the students did not read the chapter or they didn't watch the videos now i have to lecture on all of that shove it all into that that compressed synchronous time and do the activities i had planned and we call that a class and a half you know sometimes the best thing you have to do is say you didn't do the work you're going to be behind and you're going to get the grade that you deserve and and we do see where faculty um where where they you know they're they're like oh i'm nervous this is this is obviously pre-coded they're like oh i'm nervous will my course evaluations go down and we've seen in a lot of studies where people were implementing blended and flipped learning where yes the course evaluations did go down initially the students complained i felt like i was teaching myself more than i was being taught and that's because i knew the students in the class before and they didn't do it that way and then what happens is the second semester the evaluations go up now the funny thing is a lot of times the evaluations went down but the grades went up and then and then that second semester the grade stayed up and the evaluation started to increase and often by the third semester the evaluations and the grades were higher than they were before you flipped the classroom or before you went to a blended model so i think a lot of that has to do with the fact that they they go this is just how it's done and the comments that the students make once they settle in with this model is that they see the faculty member as so much more valuable in the end because those students in the beginning they see the faculty member often as a content deliverer and just regurgitating content but when you get to that higher level the students are going they're an expert they know everything they they could answer any question i had on the spot and and they just helped me get through this and so it it does change that relationship with this being a pandemic you know there's there's an old saying never let a good crisis go to waste nothing is normal anymore you can get away with making extreme changes in your course for the better and have that work out and so this is the best time in my opinion to do some of that um are there any other questions or muddiest points and that's why i have the picture of this nice mud road are there any muddy points that you're kind of getting stuck on that you want to ask about at this point about how to do things and i will comment you know that that reading the chapter i mean i i'll admit as an undergraduate i was that student who never read the chapter uh i i had books i never opened and nowadays we have another problem uh the students can't afford the books and so for those of us who are fortunate to use open educational resources that is a very very big thing to do and i think that's something to think about more and more is what are we asking our students to do and what you know and from that point of view if your lectures are covering everything in the chapter my question is then why do you have the chapter why are you making the student buy that book in the first place if you're creating video lectures and you're creating video content or you're creating multimedia content that covers all that material asynchronously then why are you also making them read the chapter because that's an expense they don't need um my my recommendation has been if you're going to lean heavily on the book then what you should do is your your lectures and your presentations should focus on deep dives in the context where you live and that you know and so that way you can kind of hit certain points and just go where the book can't go um let's see here what are some ways to incorporate group work and asynchronous classes well you know i think again the discussion boards and these tools that we have available i i'm really fortunate to be in a community college district where we made webex available to everyone every single one of our faculty staff and students have access to our webex tools and so they can interact as long as they have internet bandwidth and that's another issue at no cost they don't have to go find platforms and so having that interactivity is so important especially during a pandemic and and it provide and even not during a pandemic i mean it's always hard to get i mean it's hard to get students together even when we were in a classroom and so having these tools available giving the students the the option to use video conferencing to use discussion boards to be asynchronous those things are very critical google docs uh those are great resources um and then i think using that synchronous time where you do have everybody together giving them a little time to just check in and make sure we're good and you check in with them to make sure that they're good as well um bethany asked about high flex you know i i when when i first rediscovered high flex in the very beginning of what mid-march um you know with everybody else you know i did a deep dive i read a lot of material on it and my problem with i think i'll start with high flex i think is a really interesting model to help us to help our students make that choice between do i go in the classroom or do i do this online but the bottom line is both activities are synchronous and i think that is that's the most important and that's why i'm thinking that you're suggesting we stop thinking about in class and online but we think about asynchronous versus synchronous and so the fact that you can deliver a synchronous experience both in person and uh live online at the same time i think is critical my problem with high flex is the amount of technology that's required to be put into each and every classroom for it to be effective if you're a faculty member who walks around the room that means unless you have a wireless mic and the camera who can follow you you're going to be off camera and off mic a lot and if the students don't have if you don't have good microphones in the ceiling the students who ask questions in the classroom won't be heard by the students who are live online so there's some physical problems with high flex but as a concept i think it's brilliant and very important um and let me go through here i'm trying to catch up how do you convince faculty to look at their remote course differently i think right now it's easy and that's why i said don't look don't let a good crisis go to waste because we're all looking at things differently here in maricopa we made the decision in april that we were going to go as online as possible as we could here in the fall and some of our colleges uh were already beginning to do eight week courses so what they decided to do was anything that was face to face would be only in the first eight weeks of the semester and then everything would be online or live online in the fall some colleges have achieved 91 online courses uh in one way or the other either live online or regular online um and a lot of those colleges are doing the exact same thing in the spring they said you know what we're not even going to try in the spring uh i think it's one of the benefits of not having to worry about dorms and and and some of the auxiliary services being a community college that a lot of our universities have but that's just something to to keep in mind so i think this crisis we don't know how long this is going to last is the answer and the thing is we don't know and we saw we're seeing schools if you read brian alexander schools are still they're toggling right now they're making the decision yesterday that yeah we can't do this online this face-to-face thing anymore we have to go online and so by thinking in the synchronous versus asynchronous mindset and preparing from that point of view i think it sets us up for for better successes down the road because we don't know most people don't know what spring is going to look like still they have an idea i mean we know arizona state university is going to rinse and repeat for lack of a better term what they did in the fall in the spring we know again number of our colleges like that one i mentioned about how the the first eight weeks was face to face well they're doing the inverse in the spring the second eight weeks is the only time they're gonna do face to face so by having this flexibility and not getting obsessed about in person versus online thinking and i think that's going to be the key thing instructional designers that key piece just get people thinking synchronous versus asynchronous who cares if it's video who cares if it's in person yes there's gonna be some limitations especially in the labs but if you can just kind of get over that first hump i think you're in a good spot um let's see do you see any indications that synchronous online courses are here to stay i think the answer is yes lori um i think they do serve a significant population um it's the reason why high flex was a popular idea years ago to start with the idea that a student who and again living in a metropolitan area or leaving in a rural area where getting from one point to another could take an hour if i am working and i get off work 30 minutes late and i can't get to my six o'clock class now but i have the option to stay where i am and do it online i think that is a synchronously online i think that's a valuable experience especially considering the fact that i might prefer to be synchronous because the fact that i'm not self-regulated enough um i also think about that point of view of um again with with the flu let's get all let's get off the pandemic we have the flu people are sick how often do students come to the classroom sick who shouldn't be there um if there are a number of times i you know i just think about myself you know they're dealing with kids they're they're you know they're dangerous to drive because they're exhausted but they they're so committed to their education also a lot of our students are stuck with transportation security issues if they miss a bus they can't get to the classroom if they can't get to the classroom they can't participate in the class so i think these synchronous online activities are going to be valuable for those students because i go i miss the bus i can say home i can still do my class i can still succeed any other questions out there well i will here's my contact information feel free to email me or tweet me any questions you might have i'm i'm hit me up on linkedin i am more than happy to interact with anybody who has questions if you want to explore this area more feel free to talk to me um i i really want to see you know one of the things i'm really excited about is the opportunities for us to collaborate and the fact that we're not in a room together to hand out business cards and have conversations about what you're doing or maybe questions you have that you aren't willing to ask or don't want to ask in front of others for sensitivity purposes feel free to reach out to me either on linkedin on on twitter or via email and because i really think that as we look forward into the pandemic you know as our keynote speaker said this is an evolution and this is an opportunity to do some things that we probably should have been doing years ago um i hadn't i had an opportunity to participate in a face-to-face event last week scary as it is in downtown tempe arizona and the number one comment that came up was oh my goodness we should be doing this this way from here on out this change should be permanent there are a number of changes we also said should never occur again if we can help it but there are a lot of things we're like going this is an opportunity not you know march was about surviving april was about surviving this summer was about preparing and as we move through the fall we should now be trying to adopt new mindsets on new approaches to do things and that's why i really wanted to to propose and think about synchronous course design because this is i think synchronous online courses we did this in the 90s with telecourses this is itv all those old teletech net from the old dominion terms everything old is new again and this is an opportunity to rethink it in a new way thanks steven that was a great presentation thanks heather yeah i know it just reminds me of the teletechnic days at odu so yeah heather and i yeah we won't say what decade it was in but it wasn't this millennia yeah that picture was great with the the um square with the you know we did a lot of our grad classes like that happened
2021-01-06