…Part three in a three-part series, continuing from Brave New Worlds, the following explores lessons learned from remote teaching/learning experiences during a global pandemic.
Original image from Harvard Business Review
GREAT IDEAS ARE NOT POLITE. THEY DON’T TRY TO FIT IN. —Marty Neumeier
Just over 10 years ago, marketing industries and political campaigns did something a bit unusual. Noting that their customer base—millennials at that time—were highly digitally savvy and demanding individualized content—content aimed directly at them as a person, rather than at them as a demographic—they shifted from the one-way content push to a personalized strategy.
This strategy—participatory design, or participation marketing—invited the audience to build their own personal brand messages. Old Spice was one example, pulling their audience in using tweets that the man your man could smell like would then respond to via YouTube videos.
Our audience grew up with this type of personalized interaction. They came to expect brands to shift to their needs and desires. And for the most part, the world responded. But academia, with its one-way lecture communication, the sage on the stage, sort of didn’t. Especially in the online format.
Now is our chance to change that.
Students want a customized education. One they build themselves with the assistance of the university, rather than one built by the university, mapped out semester by semester, class by class, with only a few options for true exploration. Yes, there are accreditation issues to consider. But that four-year undergraduate plan, and that 2-plus year graduate trajectory? Students today are looking at those as walls, not paths.
They’re scared. The recession, political context, climate change, and now pandemic and returned recession have them wondering if there will be a place for them at all after a four- or two-year degree. Instead of putting off a future that may not exist, they are hoping to find work now, and are turning to other options to find the skills needed to get them.
Certificate programs, digital badges, and other microcredentials—ideas that started swirling in the academic circles around the same time participation marketing came into being—are finding a new life as employers peruse resumes for easily identifiable skills and students seek clear credentials to find secure jobs.
All of these options provide a “just for me” education opportunity. And many students are latching onto them because of that.
THERE IS AN ART TO FLYING, OR RATHER A KNACK—THE KNACK LIES IN LEARNING HOW TO THROW YOURSELF AT THE GROUND AND MISS. —Douglas Adams
Online education, despite perception, offers the opportunities for global engagement and networking. This makes it easier to recruit faculty and work with other universities and professional partners on unique projects that will build highly-sought skills.
It also opens the potential for students and faculty to expand on traditional learning materials through the structural implementation of a flipped classroom model. This, in turn, opens new ways of interacting with faculty.
Its structure allows us to break content into smaller chunks of information, which can be implemented into non-traditional modes such as certificates, badges, or other microcredentials.
That stackable content can be used to establish content libraries that can be utilized in multiple classes, across the university and around the world.
It would benefit from a more blended strategy, wherein faculty and students come together regularly to discuss the materials of that week, or just check-in to see how things are going.
And it will have a bit of a challenge overcoming the new bias of current students—that their 2020 experiences are par for the course in online classrooms.
Now let’s consider how these might mix and expand.
One of the amazing things that COVID did was open our academic institutions to international partners. Faculty from all universities reached out to their colleagues around the world, inviting them to participate in remote class experiences. This opened new conversations and new networking opportunities that had only been roughly touched upon prior to the pandemic, turning these unusual experiences into a new norm.
What if we built on that, establishing more strategic collaborations and partnerships with various universities that might augment our own curriculum? For example, what if The Design School partnered with the D School at Stanford to create a new Design Thinking and Innovation Management degree, calling on the strengths of the D School’s Design Thinking and The Design Schools Innovation and Venture Development programs. Or an Urban Design degree pulling on the strengths of the University of California’s Environmental Design and The Design School’s Architecture and Landscape Architecture programs? The options are only limited by our imaginations.
Or what if we rethought the class experience entirely, learning from our successes over the last year of remote teaching? At the moment, with few exceptions, the current industry standards for online course structures include a mixture of written content, recorded lectures, supporting videos and audio recordings. Perhaps a few demonstration videos. And probably a discussion board where questions about the content are discussed each week.
But what if instead we opened it up to a more blended environment, thus providing those human interactions that let faculty check in on their students, and students recognize they’re learning from a living, breathing human being, not an algorithm or group chat?
And what if we pulled apart the standard class content structures, breaking lessons into more modular pieces that could easily stack across the university? A design thinking lecture taught in creative writing? A music lecture taught in nursing?
That content could then be used in new combinations to create unique certificate options that could attract younger students, who may be worried about committing to a four year-degree plan, or maybe a post-graduate professional, looking to improve a couple of skills so they can get that promotion. In either case, lessons would be stacked to support transferring credits into a full degree plan, or they live on their own as an unaccredited certificate, complete with microcredentials needed to attract prospective employers.
WE DON’T TEACH JAZZ. WE TEACH STUDENTS. —Ellis Marsalis
On March 10th, 2020, The Design School announced to its dean that we would be moving all courses to remote learning, effective immediately. This came almost a full week before ASU announced its pivot.
After locking up all studios and classrooms a few days later, then Director Jason Schupbach and I headed out to the parking garage, a wee bit giddy. Not only had we just shifted 1700 onsite students and 100-plus full and part time faculty into an entirely online learning environment (in the course of three days), we were excited by what this meant.
We recognized that the pandemic was not good on so many levels. But we knew this was a pivotal moment in academic history. While we were about to completely isolate ourselves and our students, we were also opening up our pedagogy and collaborative relationships in ways that others had said would be impossible.
Walking away from him, toward my car, I yelled out to Jason. “This is going to change everything.”
I had no idea.
I won’t go into the clear disparities that this move illuminated, or the obvious challenges that many of our students—most of which are first generation college students with immense family obligations—faced. We knew we needed to keep them in the forefront of our attention, as we also knew that any of our first-generation or minority students who did not stay engaged faced steeper odds of remaining in school than their white classmates.
Nor will I dive into the concerns we started having over the mental health of our students as we opened zoom each day, watching their grooming and cleaning habits change, their faces move from patiently hopeful to overwhelmed and exhausted within the first month.
But I will point out that many of our faculty recognized the issue quickly, and as such, shifted how they taught.
One faculty member began holding midnight mindfulness classes, helping students learn how to breathe through the anxiety and come to terms with their feelings about the world.
One started using the class meeting time to learn more about their students, asking questions about their pets, what tv series they’re binging, and what issues they’re having getting their homework done, all as a means of helping them relax and recognize that those missed hallway conversations can still happen.
And one instructor recreated a semester project, requiring students to record themselves working on homework so they could create a virtual community. This sounded like a really cool project, but it was actually designed to let the professor get a peek into their home environments so they could see how the students were really doing, stepping in with resources to help when needed.
So what does a couple of COVID pivots have to do with online education?
They’re our key to the future of academia.
The connections our students say they want from their college experience exists, thanks in large part to the pandemic. Our necessity to move everything to a remote format provided us, not just with a clear picture of the massive holes we need to plug, but also the strengths that come from a blended learning environment.
And it warped our sense of time—synchronous and asynchronous are no longer part of the conversation in our discussions about online education—at least not at ASU.
Flipped classrooms and blended learning are the key pieces needed to build lifelong learners ready to change the world.
So let’s figure out how to do this on a larger scale, and lead the way for all of academia.
…more to come in Who Knows What the Future May Hold…