No Online, Ed-Tech Tool Will Save The Fall Semester

The fall semester promises to change the game in education.  With many colleges and universities going either completely or partially online, the gates have been flung wide open for a full embracing of educational technology.  Any holdouts will now be required to adopt such technology just to perform their basic teaching responsibilities.  And there is no shortage of tools vying for their attention.  Eager to displace or supplement Zoom as the go-to online course platform, new offerings from Flipgrid, Panopto, Packback, TopHat, and PollEverywhere have sprung up to meet the growing demand for bringing courses online.

With this proliferation of ed-tech tools, there is a temptation for instructors to start planning for their fall courses by deciding on which tool or platforms they’ll be using.  This would be a mistake, as we can see — on a massive scale — by considering the case of the now-defunct Institute for Transformational Learning.  The Institute poured millions of dollars into a hybrid bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences for UT Rio Grande Valley, a project that had a dedicated learning platform and app, only for the university to abandon it. The problem?  The design team put tech before teaching. They did not work closely enough with the faculty, preferring instead to deliver a product with technological appeal but short on the functionality needed by individual professors. This kind of story is all too common, with tech companies offering broad services and platforms that are sometimes difficult to adapt to particular classroom needs. A one-size-fits-all approach fails when it comes to teaching just a classroom of students.  Why think that there would be one tool that works for all online philosophy classrooms?

Finding a flawless ed-tech tool is not the best way to start putting your course in an online format.  Instead, decide what you want to prioritize this fall semester and then find the tools with the functionality necessary to make that vision a reality.  Here are four strategies for getting the planning started:

• Connect With Your Students

As recently as 2012, it was thought that massive open online courses would conquer the educational landscape, offering learning opportunities that rivaled the college experience in quality while forgoing the expensive price tag.  Their demise is now well known.  Some estimates have their course completion rates as low as 5%, necessitating a return to online courses with more of a human element.   It turned out that divorcing the educational project from an interactive educational community was untenable.

Moving to an online format will require being more intentional when it comes to connecting with your students. Strategies will differ based on course context and size, but small additions can be made to any course to increase a sense of community.  Include more stories about your day-to-day life in your lectures, and make your course announcements via video.  Have students turn on their cameras when they attend class sessions. When course size permits, learn student’s names and use them during class discussions.  Consider scheduling short, ten minute meetings during digital office hours to give paper feedback instead of just providing written comments.  If your class sizes are too large, consider having teaching assistants lead the feedback meetings.  Virtual instruction increases the need for human connection, so start designing your online course by prioritizing making that connection with your students.

• Create a Daily and Weekly Workflow

Meeting in an online format compromises the natural rhythms of the typical classroom.  Interacting with the professor, getting acquainted with other students, and receiving feedback on assignments must all take place within new mediums, requiring that students develop a familiarity with online course elements that they may not have used before.  Unfortunately, all of these new course elements (especially when they’re across multiple platforms!) can distract from the actual course content, putting the focus on successfully navigating a course website or mastering the latest chat features instead of developing philosophical acumen.

In order to minimize technological distractions, students need a regular daily and weekly flow to the classroom environment.  Maybe there is always a reading comprehension check at the beginning of each lecture.  Perhaps every week has a couple of lecture days followed by an end-of-week discussion. Whatever you do, make it consistent, using the same routine for the length of the course.  The consistency and predictability of the online framework will reduce the cognitive load for students by minimizing the amount of time they need to spend learning how to use the course tools. The first couple weeks can emphasize getting students up to speed on this online routine, freeing up time later on to dive deeper into the subject matter.

• Create a Peer Community

How students connect with a course instructor is only one aspect of creating a sense of belonging in an online environment.  Students also need to connect with each other.  For my large intro courses this fall (with enrollment caps of 120 and 180) students, I will be creating discussion groups as small as 10-15 students.  Instead of using longer posts on discussion boards offered by Canvas or Blackboard, these dialogue groups will meet an hour a week over Zoom, engaging in a structured conversation centered around the course content.  Short bursts of discussion can also go a long way.  Including time for peer-to-peer dialogue within your daily workflow will allow students to build a sense belonging throughout the life of the course.

Group work can also build a sense of connection between students.  On simpler assignments, students can give one another constructive feedback, providing mock grades using a course rubric and suggesting modifications on how to improve. You can also create more involved group projects, like collaborating on a course Instagram account or creating a philosophy TikTok channel. Ed-tech tools can  help facilitate these peer-to-peer interactions.  My discussion groups will each have a private conversation thread via GroupMe, allowing them to schedule work sessions and collaborate on group projects.  Other helpful chat functionality can be found on Slack,Microsoft Teams, or even Facebook Messenger.

• Don’t Be Afraid to Enlist Multiple Online Tools

Because there is no one solution to moving to a virtual learning environment, it might be that the best approach is to use a variety of online resources.  As you are developing your syllabus, it might be that there are considerations that favor adopting multiple virtual tools. Maybe Blackboard paired with Turnitin works best for essay submission, while Flipgrid is the state-of-the-art for creating snappy lecture videos.  If you have access to a number of educational technologies, there is no reason why you can’t mix and match them to suit your specific class needs.

This fall, I will provide course content using WordPress, hold lectures and group discussions via Zoom, facilitate group collaboration over GroupMe, and assign quizzes and essays through Canvas.  Each of these are perfectly suited for one particular element of the course.  GroupMe is better for chatting than a Canvas discussion board, and Canvas is better than WordPress for assignment submission.  There is no one ed-tech tool that is perfect for my classes, and as we have seen, it is unlikely that there will be one that is perfect for your classes either.

Professors are the only ones who can bridge the gap between the latest ed-tech offerings and the online classroom.  Instructors are best situated to understand the needs of their students and utilize the most effective technological innovations amongst the vast array of offerings.  Even then, the functionality of the latest sleek ed-tech platform may only go so far. What brings the tools to life, and makes them make sense within an online classroom, is how flexible they are in creating the professor’s vision for their students. Professors are the only ones who can locate their courses in the context of a larger educational trajectory, building community and helping students achieve the goals that they bring to the college experience.  Only they can save the online university.

Wes Siscoe

Wes Siscoe is a Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Florida State University and the Mellon Course Design Coordinator for the Philosophy as a Way of Life Projectat the University of Notre Dame. He received his PhD from the University of Arizona and has been a visiting researcher at Brown, Notre Dame, and Rutgers.  His research revolves around several themes – rationality, language, and virtue – and their importance for accounts of human excellence and achievement.