Higher Listenings
A lively look at the trends and people shaping the future of higher education, featuring thought leaders from across the industry. Brought to you by Top Hat.
Higher Listenings
Silos to Symphonies: Orchestrating Student Success
Higher education is feeling the pressure—from shifting student expectations to mounting demands for proof of impact. But real change rarely comes with a crash of cymbals. Sometimes, it sneaks in quietly—with the right tools, small shifts in teaching practice, and a mission everyone can rally around.
In this episode, we explore how one university quietly orchestrated a 11.5% reduction in course withdrawals. Guests Derek Bruff, Gina Londino-Smolar, and Sue-Mun Huang show us why the right tech doesn't just support teaching, it shapes it. And how aligning technology decisions to mission and values can get every section of the orchestra playing from the same score.
Guest Bios
Derek Bruff is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia. The author of Intentional Tech and Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, Derek is also the host of the Intentional Teaching podcast.
Gina Londino-Smolar is a teaching professor and Director of the Forensic & Investigative Sciences program at Indiana University. She was recently awarded the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Technology.
As Director of Product, Sue-Mun Huang leads the charge in building web and mobile solutions that make teaching and learning better. A champion of responsible tech, she’s on a mission to turn good ideas into everyday practice.
Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/higherlistenings
Higher Listenings is brought to you by Top Hat
Subscribe, leave a comment or review, and help us share stories of the people shaping the future of higher education.
I try to look for the faculty who are not the Tony Starks and the Bruce Wayans right, not the people who can do the amazing things right, but the faculty who are committed to their teaching they want to do right by their students. They found some new strategy or some new tool and they're using it in ways that are creative to them and work in their context. That's way more replicable, because if you end up with something that only works for your superheroes or this one department, then that's not a good use of a kind of institutional change.
Speaker 2:What if the real key to student success isn't superstar faculty, but small, flexible moves that add up to something bigger? Well, today we're diving into how one university cut course withdrawals by over 11%. Not by overhauling everything, but by making smarter, mission-aligned choices about teaching technology. We're joined by Derek Ruff, author of Intentional Tech, gina Lundino-Smolar from Indiana University and Su Mun Huang, director of product at Top Hat. Together, we explore how the right tech, paired with a shared sense of mission, can orchestrate student success at scale, and why everyday teaching moves, not superhero efforts, often make the biggest difference. Welcome to Higher Listenings.
Speaker 3:There are very real pressures to improve the outcomes in the classroom and at the institutional level. Yet many faculty members express feeling done. Many are pulling back on investing time in improving and investing in classroom innovation. So what steps can we take, both at the departmental and institutional levels, to recognize and mitigate this kind of burnout, while still moving the teaching practices forward across the institution? Derek, maybe we'll start with you on this one.
Speaker 1:You're right, things have been rough the last few years. I think some of the things that have been true are still true. I think faculty who want to do new things in their teaching generally need time to think that through and to plan, and they need some access to expertise. Whatever expertise is relevant to the teaching innovation that they're trying. I think the third factor that is probably more important now than it used to be is trying to foster a sense of mission or purpose with faculty.
Speaker 1:One of the things that came up in our conversations at the recent Top Hat conference was this metaphor of an orchestra. Right, I'm not a music guy so I'm totally spitballing here. But you know, you've got an orchestra, you've got all these different musicians. They're playing different parts. There's a conductor at the front who's hopefully coordinating all that. I would imagine it's pretty easy for me, if I'm playing my oboe, to just focus on my oboe work and not understand how the orchestra is fitting together. And I think a lot of faculty find themselves in that case, where they're focused on their courses, they're focused on their students, they're really dedicated to that work, but it's hard to see the role that they have in the larger institutional mission and purpose, and so I think we need to look for mechanisms that make that more visible, so that faculty feel like I'm not alone doing this right. I'm part of a bigger group that's trying to do right by our students.
Speaker 2:So colleges have poured a lot into improving student retention, right, we have the first year experience, orientation, student life programming, but at the end of the day, students stay because they're succeeding in their classes. That's a huge factor, right? So where does technology fit into this picture and how can it help actually accelerate the spread of teaching practices, actually move the needle on student success? And I'm going to turn the tables a bit here because I'd love for Brad to chime in on this question, because I know he's got a little bit of experience in this area.
Speaker 3:I love it when Eric puts me in the hot seat here. So one of the things I think we underappreciate about technology is that it is infrastructure and, like any bit of infrastructure, if it's well-designed it can alter behavior in productive ways. A lot of my time at the University of Minnesota, when I was there, was focused on developing and expanding access to our active learning classrooms, and I had a research team that published the book on active learning classrooms, with a lot of faculty helping to investigate the power of these spaces, and what we saw was behavior changed, even if there was no intentional development or preparation for those spaces. Putting faculty and students in those spaces altered their behavior in ways that actually were productive of student outcomes. Students talked to each other more, students and faculty interacted in more natural and supportive ways because there was no stage, there was no front of the room, there weren't fixed seats. So infrastructure can have that kind of impact. Academic technology, when well designed and implemented, can actually help nudge faculty and students toward behaviors that actually improve student outcomes.
Speaker 1:Well, I feel like you're tapping into the kind of power of defaults there, brad, right, so if I'm going to have to teach in this classroom and there are some default settings in this physical space that are moving me in certain pedagogical directions, that's really powerful, right. And so I would be thinking about what are other places where faculty are naturally going to use technology and what are the defaults we can set that will help them to use that technology? Well, but if you're trying to get faculty to move into different spaces or do different things, it's harder to leverage the defaults there. And there I think a lot about two things. I think one is I talk about this in my talks all the time this wheels on chairs principle, right, I will claim that my favorite educational technology is wheels on chairs, because when I walk into a classroom, I have a lot of plans for the day. I want the furniture in the room to be responsive to that, right, and the technology in the room, the chairs, the whiteboards, the chalkboards, all that kind of stuff, that's all tech, and I want it to be responsive to my goals. And so I think one we think about that at a kind of individual course level.
Speaker 1:What are the technologies that are going to help faculty accomplish their teaching goals? I think we can think about that at the institution level. What are our values as an institution and what technologies are going to help us inhabit those values Right? So if we pride ourselves as an institution on kind of student-faculty relationships, well let's look for technologies that are going to support that kind of interaction. And that's where it's not just the defaults but it's also what is the. This is my message for academic leaders what kind of technologies can we provide to the whole campus that are aligned with our values, that are going to help faculty solve problems and that can be provided for faculty and students?
Speaker 1:So there's a lot less friction. So someone goes to a talk that Gina gives on her campus where she's talking about the ways that she engages her students actively in the classroom using technology, and then a faculty member is excited. And then they find out, oh, I'm going to have to, like have my students pay this extra fee or I'm going to have to figure out how to get this thing signed up and installed. Like, there's a lot of friction points there that institutions can solve in advance so that when the faculty member says, oh, I would love to be able to do what Gina is doing in my classroom. There's someone on hand who can say well, as a matter of fact, we can get you started tomorrow. Right, we've already kind of figured out those problems and you can jump right in. I think that's huge for getting faculty to overcome inertia in their teaching.
Speaker 2:So Indiana University overcame a lot of those challenges that you just mentioned in their adoption of Top Hat, and my understanding is that faculty use of the platform has led to an 11.5% reduction in student course withdrawals, which is pretty remarkable. Gina, can you take us through this story?
Speaker 4:So all of our campuses across IU use Top Hat.
Speaker 4:It's free for all students, and so we saw a huge increase in faculty wanting to use Top Hat in their classes.
Speaker 4:We've talked a little bit about ease of use and availability for students and all of that, so when we collected all this data, we were trying to figure out is it having any overall effect on their grades or their participation, their attendance these types of questions that we have to indicate that students are being more successful in the classroom, and so we looked at courses from all disciplines, from all levels, and were able to compare courses that use Top Hat to courses that aren't using Top Hat, and found that students that were engaged with Top Hat in those courses were less likely to withdraw from the course.
Speaker 4:And so we can say that this tool can be used to engage students and hopefully help retain them in that area, and we're very excited to continue looking at ways in which faculty are using this tool in the classroom, what students maybe think about using the tool in the classroom, maybe why it's causing impact on engagement and students wanting to stay in that class throughout the entire length of the semester. So we're going to continue working with some of the information that we found, but we're very excited to show that and to share that with people.
Speaker 3:Sumana, I want to bring you into the conversation here as a product developer and one who engages regularly with instructors and with students. What trends have you seen that motivate or deter faculty from adopting technologies like Top Hat?
Speaker 5:From a product perspective where I see it working well assuming some of the barriers like costs have been solved for is when a product is really easy to use so that the cost of switching doesn't feel so intimidating. But even so, you're still going to run into resistance if you can't show value really quickly. And so for change and adoption to happen, you need to not only make it super easy to switch, but you need to show as early as possible, like here's, how it could help you and it doesn't have to necessarily be a monumental change, right, but any kind of leading indicators early as possible. Let's say you're trying a new tool Within 10 minutes, you can kind of test drive it, simulate it, and you're like, okay, I can see where this could go. You try it in your classroom the next day, a week later, you're already seeing some small shift, some leading indicator, when you get those results back really quickly. That, I think, is the hook and that we've seen in products that are really successful.
Speaker 1:I think a lot about kind of helping faculty adopt new technology and what they're thinking about. And you know, I mentioned the wheels on chairs, right, every instructor uses technology in their teaching. Some of the technology is analog and it's super familiar. And, to your point, suman, people know what it does. Right, when I walk into a classroom and I see a chalkboard, I know what I can do with that chalkboard. Right, I know how it's going to be helpful and how it's not going to be helpful. Onto my teaching context, right and Subban, you mentioned the kind of seeing the value early on. Usually that's because there is some problem or some opportunity a faculty member has identified in their teaching. Something's not working the way I wish it were, or here's this thing that I think would be exciting if I could make it happen.
Speaker 1:And so I think another ingredient is trying to kind of tap into the problems and the opportunities that faculty see, because then once you start to move that needle, it's connected to something that they value and they find important.
Speaker 2:I'd like to go back to you, Gina. I'm curious to know if there was a turning point in your school's adoption of Top Hat or something that you did that really helped build trust and faculty buy-in.
Speaker 4:When Indiana University decided to use it as an enterprise tool, meaning that students don't have to pay for it anymore right, it's fantastic. So we saw a huge, a huge increase in use. And I'm one of them, right, I was using it in a large enrollment class for attendance to engage 300 students in a large lecture class, right, but I don't really think I needed to use that in a small lecture. I only had 30 students where I could quickly take attendance, right? However, now it's free for my students. So now I start using it even in my lab courses to see if students are prepared for lab and give them a pre-lab quiz instead of on paper. Now, I'm using a technology tool that's easily graded for me, right, Whereas I probably wouldn't have adapted it if I knew it was going to cost my students money, and so I think that really influenced a lot here.
Speaker 4:And then you know the support. I mean and I know I said the support, I'll say it again but you call, there's someone on our campus that's trained, that knows how to use the technology. You could sit down as a new faculty member and learn how to use it within 30 minutes. It's not difficult. So that really goes a long way.
Speaker 1:And I'd love to second a part of that that I saw a lot at Vanderbilt University where we had faculty who might want to try a tool like Top Hat in their class, but if they were going to have to pass those costs on to their students, they weren't going to just do that for a class session or two so they could try out the tool right. And so that was a real barrier to just experimenting with the technology is, if the kind of cost is very high for even a tiny experiment, then a lot of faculty aren't going to do that, and so once that barrier is removed, then you have a faculty member who's like I don't know if I'm going to do this, but I'll try it once, right, it's so much easier to try it once, and that gets a lot of faculty over the hump and then they realize this is the kind of dynamic I'd like to have in my classroom. I'll try it again next week, right?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I want to go a little off script here. Gina and Derek, you have both, more than once in this conversation, already pointed to the barrier of cost. In my experience, and increasingly in this climate that we're in, budget constraints and affordability are both bearing down in this way that make committing to an enterprise technology very challenging and, at the same time, the investment in educational technology is dwarfed by the investment in other technologies that are essential to operating the university the enterprise technologies. How do universities begin to understand the need to recalibrate around investing more in creating a modern classroom experience that is actually infused with these technologies?
Speaker 1:I remember quite distinctly the summer of 2020, when my institution found itself in a bit of an existential crisis. We had very little track record of teaching online and yet we needed to teach online that fall and we needed to do it well, Our students had given us a fair amount of grace in the spring for the kind of emergency remote teaching, but we had all summer to get ready. Our students were going to expect us to know what we're doing that fall. I remember the day the provost essentially turned to me and said I want to pay for like five technologies this fall that are going to help a lot of faculty and students. What should I pick? And I was like, oh, I have a list, let's do this right.
Speaker 1:And so you know, I don't want to be in a kind of existential crisis every semester, but I think if we have a good sense of what the challenges are that our institutions are facing, if we really want to value student learning and student success and student retention, then we need to think carefully about how we're allocating our scarce resources. And that's not to say we just pour money into educational technology willy-nilly. We still have to make informed choices about the tools that we adopt for our campus certainly, but I think there's a big picture question about kind of our priorities and how we allocate those scarce resources.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I just want to say too I think that faculty have a lot of good ideas, and when you start to see that faculty are paying out of pocket for certain tools to make their jobs more effective or reduce some of the tasks, I think that that's really going to be an indication that this tool maybe should be an investment of the institution, and so that's one way too is to include those faculty, give them opportunities to suggest learning technology. Allow them to do a pilot is really going to help as well. So some of that bottom-up kind of approach.
Speaker 3:So I want to dial in a bit on the scaling. Even if you succeed in getting the budget and you've invested and the university is committed to a technology, you have this additional challenge of navigating the change management that comes with really getting the full value out of that investment and really having impact everyone hopes that will have on student success. On student success so you've mentioned one, for instance, making sure faculty are involved in the decision-making early. That's one really important way to kind of get some momentum behind the adoption. But what are some other missteps or pitfalls? What are some really good practices that folks should be building toward when they're going to make this kind of investment?
Speaker 1:So I have kind of a silly answer and then a slightly more serious version of that same answer.
Speaker 1:So I have kind of a silly answer and then a slightly more serious version of that same answer.
Speaker 1:So one misstep I've seen is to pay too much attention to faculty superheroes, and so I try to look for the faculty who are not the Tony Starks and the Bruce Wayans right, not the people who can do the amazing things right, but the faculty who are committed to their teaching they want to do right by their students.
Speaker 1:They found some new strategy or some new tool and they're using it in ways that are creative to them and work in their context.
Speaker 1:That's way more replicable, and so I think that's one. And the related piece of that is sometimes it's easy to think that all teaching looks like the teaching I'm familiar with, and one of the privileges of my position as a teaching center staff member is I get to see people teach in lots of different disciplines all around campus and I get to see the different ways they teach, the different contexts, the different structures, and so sometimes it's easy to say, oh well, this tool, this change is going to work really well for this type of faculty member or in this class, not realizing in fact there's a great diversity out there, and so I tend to look for the tools and the strategies that are actually kind of flexible enough to work in lots of different environments, because if you end up with something that only works for your superheroes or this one department, then that's not a good use of a kind of institutional change and that's not a good use of a kind of institutional change.
Speaker 3:I think this is a really interesting tension, because the more flexibility you build into a platform, the more complex the use may become. Right, suman, I want to bring you into the conversation, just as a product developer and somebody who thinks about scale differently. What do you think we should be doing or providers should be doing, and any responses you have to the conversation you've heard so far?
Speaker 5:The reality is is we need something that can meet people where they are, and where they are and what they need in the moment in time will be different. But I think this comes back to one of the things Derek and Gina mentioned right at the beginning, which is, if you are working towards a common goal, if you know where you're going, it's okay. If you're taking a different path to get there, and this is where I think data comes in really importantly, because data allows you to understand are you moving the metrics that you want to be moving? Are you actually having the impact that you want to be having by doing all these different things? And that allows you to keep yourself on the right track, even if the path that you take because the way that you're doing it, the way that you're using maybe the same technology but in different ways I want to add a wrinkle to that.
Speaker 1:There's different kinds of difference here. To garble my words a bit, Brad you were referring to. Like what I see when I open up Microsoft Word, right, it can do all kinds of things and that makes it a very complicated software package to use right. So that's a real concern. I'm interested in pedagogical flexibility. So when I'm teaching a class on Zoom and I run a multiple choice poll, that's a very simple bit of technology but I have seen faculty in every discipline imaginable use a multiple choice. They're making different teaching moves in the classroom. The technology doesn't have to necessarily be complicated to be really flexibly used across different teaching contexts.
Speaker 3:So we've been talking around data a lot in this conversation. Data is increasingly recognized as really an essential component for driving student success. Almost no institution now isn't investing in infrastructure to reveal data that can help them direct resources and know that they're succeeding and improving student outcomes. So what role do you all see data playing in moving classroom innovation forward?
Speaker 1:So it's pretty common now to look at something like a DFW rate for a course students to get a D or an F or a withdrawal as a kind of measure of success, and I think that makes a lot of sense, right. These are metrics we should be paying a lot of attention to. If students aren't completing our courses successfully, that's a problem. Sometimes faculty get a little defensive when you start sharing that kind of data, and I've seen it slow down conversations as often as I've seen it speed up conversations, and so what I like about the 11.5% reduction in withdrawal rates is that it's a success story that can be shared. Right, it's not a kind of sometimes you got to pay attention to the problem, you can't ignore it, but I find often sometimes the wins, the successes, that data is more compelling for faculty.
Speaker 3:One of the missteps that institutions can make when they commit to a data path is to fail to build the necessary trust and understanding regarding how the data will be used.
Speaker 3:When we rolled out DFW rate data at Ohio University, we invested an enormous amount of energy. Our provost's office invested an enormous amount of energy in making sure everyone understood how this data was going to be exposed, why it was going to be exposed, what use it would be put to. So I think you have to create the conditions for revealing the stories that aren't so good and acknowledge like teaching all students to success is, it's a moonshot challenge. You are confronted with enormous diversity in readiness in all kinds of things that matter. So understanding, falling short as something that will happen over and over and over and the data is meant to help us, you know, find the hotspots and address those collaboratively and in a supportive way is trust building. That has to be done, I think. Otherwise you are going to create the kind of environment where that data is going to be suppressed. People are going to, you know, mount resources against the truth of that data, and so on. So I think it's a real, necessary step to take.
Speaker 4:I think that we also want to remember that it's not just quantitative data, it's qualitative data that we can gather as well, that can make sense of those numbers right. And so, yeah, we can get a bunch of numbers, but without meaning behind them and what that relates to or makes those correlations between what's going on and what's happening, they might not really tell us the whole story. And so it's not just quantitative, it's not just numbers, but it's also voice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I feel like we're coming full circle a bit in a way too, because there's that the fear factor we sort of started this portion of the conversation with. But you know, like we talked about earlier, that shared sense of mission or purpose, because I think that that changes things if we're all trying to move the needle together in a certain area, and how we use data is one part of that strategy or that plan. I think that that can help shape some of the fear and uncertainty that people may feel around trotting out DFW rates or other sorts of metrics. So we've been talking about scaling educational technology, and let's assume that we've actually successfully done that. So, first of all, congratulations, mission accomplished, or maybe not, because then what? How do you think about keeping the momentum going so innovation doesn't just fizzle out?
Speaker 1:So I'll get up on my soapbox now, Brad Awesome.
Speaker 2:I feel like Everyone's standing right now. By the way, If you're listening to this, we're all standing on soapboxes at the moment.
Speaker 1:So you know I'm a teaching center guy. I think about faculty development and when several years ago we took over at my center the support for faculty around the LMS, and one of the differences I saw in how we did LMS support and how some of our colleagues in IT did LMS support is that they were often trying to solve faculty technology problems quickly and efficiently, which is great, and we had to do some of that too. But we were also trying to help faculty improve their teaching skills over time, and so I think that is part of the recipe for sustained change over time is that the faculty themselves are more equipped to teach well, to solve problems, to adapt, to change right. So I always think about how can we also do the professional learning for faculty and other instructors that they are developing their skills, because teaching is a career, right, it's a profession, and the context in which we teach, our goals are going to change over time and so we have to treat that as an ever evolving set of professional skills.
Speaker 2:I do want to call out something, though, because this is an honor having all of you on the call and, derek, you also have a podcast, intentional Teaching. I'm sure hopefully many of our listeners have heard that. I understand you hit a major milestone recently 20,000 downloads and I'm assuming that's now and counting.
Speaker 3:And counting yeah.
Speaker 5:That's wonderful Thanks, thank you.
Speaker 2:So if you'd like to hear more from Derek and some of his guests, I'd encourage you to tune into that and with that, thank you all so much for sharing with us today. It's been a really enlightening and interesting conversation for us.
Speaker 3:Take care.
Speaker 2:Higher Listenings is brought to you by Top Hat, the leader in student engagement solutions for higher education. When it comes to curating captivating learning experiences, we could all use a helping hand. Right With Top Hat, you can create dynamic presentations by incorporating polls, quizzes and discussions to make your time with students more engaging. But it doesn't end there. Design your own interactive readings and assignments that include multimedia, video, knowledge checks, discussion prompts. The sky's the limit, or simply choose from our catalog of fully customizable Top Hat eTex and make them your own. The really neat part is how we're putting some AI magic up your sleeve. Top Hat ACE, our AI powered teaching and learning assistant, makes it easy to create assessment questions with the click of a button, all based on the context of your course content. Plus, ace gives student learning a boost with personalized AI-powered study support they can access anytime, anyplace. Learn more at topatcom slash podcast today.