Instead

14– Baking up a good online course, with Dr. Breanne Litts | Day 51

May 01, 2020 Utah State University Office of Research Episode 14
Instead
14– Baking up a good online course, with Dr. Breanne Litts | Day 51
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Dr. Breanne Litts is an explorer at heart. You can find her either in the great outdoors going on wilderness adventures, or in the classroom investigating the way people learn best. Breanne started and runs the LED Lab to investigate how people learn through making, designing, and producing in diverse cultural and community contexts. In this episode dive into online learning experiences. This is a vital aspect of the school environment during current times were social distancing has made traditional classrooms unsafe, making thousands of USU courses move online within a couple of days. 

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Today is Friday, May 1st, 2020. Utah State University's graduation was supposed to happen yesterday, some marked the occasion with an Instagram post. Others are waiting till August. It might be late, but they'll still put on that square hat, wrinkly gown, and celebrate their academic accomplishment. Coronavirus canceled a lot of events and made in-person instruction unsafe. But education continued as classes were quickly moved online. As we look back at this semester and forward towards fall 2020, it's helpful for us to better understand the online learning experience. I called on Dr. Breanne Litts, assistant professor in Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences and director of the Learn Explore Design Lab. Coronavirus has changed education for everyone. Breanne describes the challenges students and faculty have faced. She validates those experiences as she demonstrates the importance of academic empathy. She'll show you the meaning of human centered learning. She describes the worst course she's ever seen, and she also turns the Great British Bake Off into an example of approaches to education. She gave me so much of her time and I appreciated it. So I told her about how some bad instructions almost caused me to lose some teeth. My name is Wyatt Traughber. You could be trying to upload a video file to canvas, but you are listening to this instead.

To get good audio through a zoom interview, I need my interviewees to set up their call in a specific way. I have tried emailing detailed text instructions, but I've realized that they're probably not easy to understand. Before my conversation with Breanne, I decided to make a diagram. It became an important part of our conversation. If you want to take a quick look at what me and Breanne are talking about, it's in the episode art and you can also find it on Instagram under the #insteadpodcast. All right. Here's my conversation with Dr. Breanne Litts.

Thinking about giving instructions, I've tried to explain to my other interviewees how to set up their audio. Everybody is doing the best that they can. And you did it correctly. You're the first one I've sent that picture to. That's like a diagram of what to do. Do you think it was helpful?

Oh, for sure. It was fantastic. And I think I think you should, like, upload it somewhere that people can see. So then they know what we're talking about. But like, the reason it was so great is because you talked about headphones, you talked about sound, you talked about recording. You talked about environment for how to record a podcast, what the setup should look like. And it took me, I don't know, a few seconds to digest all of that information. Whereas if you had typed it out, it would have a I would have seen a big long email and been like, oh, no, I don't have time for this right now. And you visually showed what the setup should look like. And so that's way easier to digest than reading it and then  translating that so it literally just maps on. So that kind of translation process between modes, from text to visual like experience, you've just taken that out.

So you're an instructional designer. And how do you explain what an instructional designer is?

That is sort of a loaded question actually. So there's a little bit of a divide, I think instructional design communities or maybe just from my perspective, because I would identify more first as like a learning scientist. I think there's a ton of history there that maybe is less interesting. I find these academic arguments very interesting, but I'm going to overcentralized and generalize quite a bit just to just to make the tension even more real. And then people will disagree with me and I'll disagree with myself tomorrow. So it's fine.

So on the instructional side, usually the focus is on the teacher and the instructor. Right. It's literally in the word. And and then on the learning design side, the focus is on learning design. And so you're focused on the learners rather than the instructor. And so there's this kind of like, well, how can you focus on learning without focusing on teaching and how can you focus on teaching if you're not focusing on learning? But I actually think it is possible to do both of those things. And I think as long as you're really looking at the whole ecology of what is a learning environment, so that includes teachers, that includes students, but that also includes all the technologies that you're using, the space that you're learning. And I think all of those things are important. And traditionally, instructional design maybe doesn't capture all of those things in a way that would align more with kind of who I see myself, as a Learning Scientist.

So you mentioned the concept of human centered design or the human centered design process. Sorry, I don't know the precise wording. Can you explain that to me? And then can you also relate that to online course building? Because that's a very important thing at the moment.

Definitely. So humans on our design process is like humans at the center of the design process. So it's people first. So you're you're thinking about what the problems people actually have in their lives. One of my favorite aspects about the human centered design process, it's often called empathy, but I think hand-in-hand with that is just like generally having humility as a designer, because you have to come in recognizing that maybe you don't know what the problem is, maybe you're solving the wrong problem or the thing that you think is the problem isn't the problem a lot of times. Especially in crisis situations like we're in right now, which is nobody's fault, but we come in with just solutions. At Utah State, we put something like five thousand classes online in like five days. You can't do a human's under design process at that level of need.

Can you give me an example of something? Maybe I would be familiar with... like there was a before this approach and after?

Google is actually really good at this. And I don't know enough about their particular design process to evaluate the human suddenness of their design. But for example, on Gmail, they don't usually make huge interface adjustments. They always will like have a hey, we're coming out with a new model or a new interface. Do you want to try that out? And then, like, for an extraordinarily long amount of time, they will let you go back to the old interface, like always revert back to the old interface, whereas Apple like they will just release their operating system. And I love Apple. I have all the Apple devices, but they will just release their operating systems. And then you're just kind of like you're stuck. And that isn't a great experience for me as a human who's like, OK, you've updated my operating system and now I can't use my software on my computer that I needed to use.

So what you're saying is Google giving people the opportunity to kind of like ease into the new interface that's a little more human centered of an approach than Apple just being like "Here's the new version. You have to deal with it."

Yeah. And I think a lot of it is really problematizing the relationship that designers have with the users. So any movement, in my opinion, where you're inviting people who are actually going to use your design, use your curriculum, participate in your class or anything like that into the design process of of having some agency over like what their experience is going to be like. So Google Gmail is a great example of how they always let you go back, you have some agency there.

So any time you do that, you are kind of moving on the continuum of human centered design toward, I think, the ideal of what human centered design is, which is maybe not fully attainable.

This makes me think of... So I did those online braces, right. My teeth were just hitting weird and it was giving me headaches. And my dentist said, you should get Invisalign. I was like, I don't have five grand. So I did the online version and I have a fake tooth that's screwed into my jaw. I needed to let them know which tooth it was. And they sent me a dental chart and they said, yeah, just tell us what tooth it was. And so I did it. And then they sent back the rendering of my teeth before and after. And I could tell that I had marked the wrong tooth or that they had gotten the wrong tooth. And then I was looking at the chart that I had to identify my tooth with. And it was a chart designed for a dentist, and it's just like I'm not outside of my body looking into my mouth to figure out what tooth this is  I'm using my tongue and, like, imagining it. And like seeing with my tongue essentially inside my mouth, and so I redesigned their chart and said, this is what you should be sending to people. This is why I did it wrong, you know, and if I wouldn't have noticed that difference there could have been like big consequences for my mouth because of that.

Yeah, I think  that's a really great example, actually, because it shows what we often do as designers where, you know, you have experts designing something. But if they're not designing for other experts, then like you need someone to help them think about how to redesign that chart for just the general public. I mean, the way that I experience teeth is very different than the way that a dentist does. And so redesigning that, I think is really important. And I mean, I guess another example is I've been overanalyzing all of the ways in which stores have been redesigning our experience of like going to the store right now and how some like maybe feel a little bit more human centered than others. And like, I was at Trader Joe's the other day and the line was pretty long, but they have everything set up and they're just like fully informing you about the what the process is. I think the guy made an announcement like two or three times and we were only in line for like 10 or 15 minutes to get into the store.

But it's like giving that information when you need it right and understanding to help kind of mitigate people's stress; they're doing these things on purpose. They're putting the people's experience in the forefront and giving giving people a little bit more agency.

So how does this human centered design, and thinking about the people using the product, how do you kind of transition that into a teacher building an online course? What things do they need to think about before they start importing their syllabus to campus or whatever?

So I can speak kind of in terms of designing online courses, that's a different answer than the transition from face to face to online that we just had. In designing an online course, the biggest thing is to still think of it like an experience, like you're literally building an online space.

And a lot of times we're really constrained by the tools that were given or forced to use learning management systems, whatever that is, at whatever institution you're working on. And those all have like affordance design constraints, which are just design terms to talk about, like things that they're able to do and things that they don't allow for. A lot of this depends on people's individual kind of pedagogical leanings, I guess, what kind of experience they want their learners to have.

I think one of the mistakes that I've seen both as a student but also as sort of like a designer and a teacher myself, is we get really focused on like the learning objectives and what are the things that we want students to learn.

And in some disciplines, it's really straightforward, like you want them to have this content knowledge. I don't really teach those kinds of classes. A lot of the classes I teach are more on building practices; building design practices, building design skills, learning how to iterate, learning how to critique. And so it forces me to think about designing experiences in an online space. So, for example, if you think about how people experience an online space and how they are accessing your course too I think is really important. Right. So, like on the phone, we're really used to scrolling, like scrolling as a normal sort of interaction for us to use on our phone on a computer. Scrolling is like maddening in some ways because you just feel like you've been on a page forever and we're used to kind of clicking around everywhere.

And so that even like at that fine-grained level of thinking about the design of an experience too, I think what kind of discussions you would like to have, what those look like, I think online discussions and classes are really hard to design for. I don't know that I figured out a good way to do that. I know the platforms don't really afford the kind of collaborative discussion that I would like to see. I'm not actually sure why that is, because we have somehow figured out how to support online discussions and like every social media platform, but our learning management systems are still struggling.

Yeah, in one of my classes, the teacher say oh, you have to read this thing and then you have to post and then you have to respond to two more people's post... It's just busywork. And like all of our responses to each other were such BS. But I sent out some Facebook messages to people to see if they had any questions for you and Meredith Thompson. She's a researcher and a professor in the business school, she says. How do you best mimic in class discussions, because posts on canvas are OK, but seem to fall short?

Yeah, man, so this is an area I heavily critique. That doesn't mean that I'm not guilty of designing terrible online discussions, because at the end of the day, like, you need to be able to know that your students are reading and engaging with the material. One of the things that I do every semester, at least once or twice throughout the semester is get feedback from my students who are taking the class while they're still in the class to see if there's anything I need to change. And actually, it was shortly before covid. I had sent that out to my class that was already online. And that was exactly what I kind of had set up. And the students kind of pushed back on that where they were like, you know, it did feel kind of like busy work. And I thought they had been having really good discussion. It seemed like people were engaging. But one of the things that I tried so I gave them the option of uploading videos instead of writing, because in this particular class, I didn't actually very much care about their writing skills. It's not a thing that I was grading on that ended up, I think, prompting a lot more engagement with students.

And the hardest thing with online discussions, I think there are two things. One is it's very dehumanizing, just inherently. And so steps you can take toward humanizing it is are really important. And I think the video just does that because you literally see the person, you hear their voice, you can hear sort of the nuances of communication that are taken out and stripped away when you're just writing and text.

And then the other thing is we have very little of any examples of having any sort of productive communication in an online space anywhere.

Twitter and Facebook are not designed for us to have meaningful discussions with people who have different opinions than us. I think recognizing that this is just hard to have these kinds of discussions in online and online spaces because we don't have examples. So we need to like kind of own that.

And just thinking about the work Zoome meetings I've been on, I can tell that we are evolving and etiquette and a way of doing things that we didn't have before. But now that we're all on sale, we've gotten used to like muting ourselves when we need to be muted, nodding our heads and like we'll do thumbs up.

Something else we've just learned is it's really weird to end a zoo meeting and there's like some meetings that some of us want to hang out after, but we've learned that it's probably best to just shut the meeting down and hop into a new one because you get a cleaner ending. So what things have you started to notice changing because of covid-19?

So that's a great question. And I think what you just the example that you just mentioned illustrates this really nicely. It's humanized everybody, right? Like, my dog is laying on the couch over there and I'm just shocked she's not what I need right now. But like, people have their kids around, people have their pets around, the idea of kind of like, OK, I'm going to be in a suit and be super professional for eight hours is literally not an option for 99 percent of most people right now because we are forced to work from home. And that means many different things for how we're engaging with each other. And I think it's definitely humanizing people and connecting people in exactly the ways that you mentioned. I also actually am more encouraged that this is showing us how much we need and want and.

Desire, sort of like in person connection, I think it's really forcing us to explore the performances of technology and connecting with other people, what what works like when a zoom the right answer when as a phone call, the right answer, when is email the right answer?

Like it's really opening up a world of all the things we can do with technology that exactly like you said, like we couldn't we didn't think that we could do before. We're maybe like a little annoying or inconveniencing before and also highlighting the areas of things that we genuinely can't do and experiences we genuinely can't have without having this in-person interaction at all.

So what would make you want to hop on a zoom versus just call somebody? Like where where do you kind of figure out what platform or what medium to use?

Yeah. So I think if I'm having a meeting with someone like and I know that we're going to have a conversation, I would prefer to see the person. I just am not really a person who enjoys talking on the phone anyways. But so I kind of avoided at all costs the people who who I can think of that I pick up the phone and just call a lot would be like our department staff assistant, our business manager, because, like, I usually just have quick questions to them. And frankly, I don't want to write another email. That being said, I have been shifting a little bit more to phone conversations now, too, just so I can, like, go outside and walk and not be sitting on my screen on Zoome all day. So I think it depends on what kinds of things I need to get done in a particular meeting and how well I know that person and whether or not we need to take notes or whether or not we're just kind of thinking through maybe a writing piece and sort of brainstorming or. Yeah, if it's just like it kind of a quick question or I know that it's going to be a longer a longer conversation, like the reason we're on Zoom right now.

It's because I was recording functions and I know how to get your audio, but I am very much like I never been into video chatting. And like, it does make sense when you have multiple people in on a call to have.

To be able to see the faces and, you know, so you can remember who's there and so you can remember who's talking to, I mean, any time it's more than just one other person, I definitely I need to be on Zoom because otherwise it's hard to know who's talking. Conference calling died for a reason a long time ago in most professions.

Yeah, because people got forgotten and then things were said. I'm sure there was lots of wonderful stories of golf.

So, you know, if you're a teacher and you're new to online courses, what things might signal you that like, oh, you've not done the best job in building this course?

I think we we all hopefully would be able to say that about all of our courses all the time, because, I mean, whether we're moving our courses online in five days, because that's what we have, because there's a pandemic happening or we have in theory, a summer to prepare a course for the fall. We have a lot of other things happening in our lives. And so it's not like a particular course is always all of one person's time.

And I think because of that, there's always room to improve on all aspects of every course. The best way to know, and this is sort of the human centered design piece of me, is how your students experience the course, getting feedback from them.

And it takes some wisdom to kind of filter that feedback just because students didn't perceive their experience, for example, as good or they were frustrated by certain aspects. The question is not like how do I change that? So they're not frustrated. It's more is that a place that I'm trying to challenge my students to grow? If it is, then maybe it's good that they were a little frustrated. Maybe it's good that they were really challenged with their group projects because you're trying to teach them that like every design project you do in the real world is going to be a team project. We don't really live in a world where things are as individually in that way anymore and you get the opportunity to work that out in this low stakes classroom environment. And I'm OK with you being frustrated with that. And I'm not saying like my online courses are not all designed, like, beautifully all of the time. There's just like the practical side of the fact that I am an instructor and I only have so much time and I'm a research instructor on top of that, like I'm a research faculty on top of that. So my main area of time is usually in research and then teaching. But I really like iterate a lot on my classes in the semester and between different semesters. So I'm never teaching the same class, the same content and students are not getting the same experience, but that's a lot of work.

What does research look like to you? Because I feel like research can take so many forms and if you don't tell people about what it looks like, then I'm just assuming that you're either behind a computer crunching numbers or you are mixing chemicals in a lab.

Yeah, I'm doing neither of those things. So my research is all community based. I do a lot of what is called research practice partnerships. So all of my projects are partnered with practitioners in some capacity. So two of the big projects are with Edith Boin Labs, also with the six grade teachers there. We are redesigning their curriculum. And so that's a lot of everything from kind of being in classrooms, interviewing students. We're actually shifting our research online to interview 12 year olds next week. So that's going to be really interesting. And then there's there is some of the sort of like sitting behind a computer where I'm writing manuscripts and journal articles or analyzing data on computers and our data are interviews or observations or it's a lot of qualitative. So a lot of words, a lot of images, a lot of videos that students have created. The other kind of big project I'm working on right now is with the Northwestern band in the Nation and similar kinds of data. But that and we do some workshops with alongside Spy Hop, Youth Media Arts Organization out of Salt Lake.

The and the data that I use is very much in process because I'm looking at the design process.

So what do you learning when you're working with these kids? Like, are you just learning new ways to teach that specific subject or are you learning new things about learning in general?

Yeah, the goal is definitely, I think, more in the latter camp of how or what can we learn about learning and what does this what does this tell us about what's possible in this sort of designed environment that we've created?

I think looking at the variety of examples across kids and sort of the different ways in which kids can engage through. Or story by creating their own technology. So I'm really interested in how students learn through making or producing or creating. And I usually in terms of specific learning, I'm looking at some maybe identity like cultural identity side of things, as well as some disciplinary sides of things, but not necessarily in terms of like quote unquote, standardized learning outcomes, more in terms of do they feel like they're doing science? Do they identify as a scientist like that kind of thing?

Yeah, I, I come from a rural community and this is definitely me talking about coming from a small town is a theme throughout every interview I do. And I kind of feel bad about that. But I also don't you shouldn't. OK, in hindsight, looking at my educational experience, like I notice that oh I did not understand, like I'm involved with some undergraduate research stuff as part of my job and I see those kids in those opportunities and I just go, oh, like, that was an option I should have taken, but it just didn't feel like it was for me because I would have been asking for help coming from a small rural town like where being independent is the best thing that you can possibly be. It's a wonderful thing to live out there.

And we don't often look at the challenges and the consequences of living so isolated, what challenges or things maybe people don't consider people having to overcome?

I mean, I can share a little bit about my own experience, and that may or may not answer the question. So I'm the first person in my family to go to college and neither of my parents have even an associate's degree. I believe my dad has like a certification. And my mom, I think, actually went back to school to get a certification at some point.

My experience has been, and I still feel this even as a professor, honestly, there's a huge difference culturally and how you relate to other people and what people can afford to do in the world.

Right. Like there's very differences in financial. I mean, for me, it's a big when my parents and my family understand what the heck that I'm doing in this world, that is academia just on a very basic level. And that isn't to be condescending or have any sort of low expectations for them.

It genuinely is, because these are completely different worlds. When I go home, I'm home. The way in which we talk, the way in which we really is very different than how I am at the university. And I think I guess just recognizing that we live in this cultural world, that we are cultural beings. I've tried really hard to not hide that anymore, basically, which is maybe not something that I felt like I could do as a graduate student in the same way, and I don't know if that was because of.

Grad school, as much as it was because of my perceived sort of lack of power and sort of just the general culture shock when I kind of entered into the academy through grad school. Everybody has kind of an individual experience and there are a lot of invisible or I guess invisible to someone who might not know challenges around finances around sort of explicit cultural differences like culture around. I mean, people make assumptions about everybody when they look at them like that's just kind of how we are able to process the world. And I mean, my stepfamily all from like northern Wisconsin. So I'm very familiar with kind of like the rural mindset. And you're just kind of stepping into a different world and a different mindset in a different way of life. That's true for rural students. It's true for first generation students. It's true for all of our students of color, people who have any disabilities seen or unseen.

The hardest time with I enjoyed, like the in-person class, like I love being in class and I love lectures, but her assignments, I was used to teachers writing what I needed to do in the instructions for the assignment.

Right. And then the rubric and the learning objective. That's all gravy that I would look at if I wanted to. But I was doing really bad on her assignments and I was going through her feedback. And then I was looking at the rubric and the learning objective. And she had hidden info. I don't know how intentional it was, but there was critical information in either of those things. And so I had to balance between three different documents before I could even do an assignment. And then like I kind of did a dirt bag thing and I rewrote all of her assignments description so that I would have done them right the first time.

Yeah, I think that designing online learning environments is just as hard as is the challenge for the the teacher and learning how to engage with a well-designed online learning environment or really any learning online learning environment is difficult for the student like that is the thing that the student has to learn. Online learning, I think is sort of an ongoing conversation within a semester or across sort of the same class with different groups of students. How much support do you design for your students and how much do you allow them to expect them to kind of explore and figure things out because you're not meeting in person and you can't do that sort of Q&A clarification with assignments?

That's really valuable time, actually, with students. There are tons of things you do as a teacher in a classroom, in person that you don't realize you're doing in the classroom, in person is. But like some teachers will plan everything and then make an online class and it will go really well because that's how they teach a much more improv oriented and how I teach. And so there's a ton of things that I do. And I learned when I started teaching online. There's so much that I do in the class that I forget about when I'm teaching online. And so figuring out how to design spaces to facilitate those kinds of interactions in a way that makes sense in an online space. So, for example, like you could have a Q&A time about particular expectations for assignments with students that they could, like, drop into what I do, because students for some reason usually don't drop into those. But what I do is I will walk students through an assignment with a video. It depends on the sort of the importance of the assignment. But usually it's just like a couple of minutes that I'll just walk through the expectations and highlight the important parts.

But if you still do all of those things and students don't kind of like take advantage of the resources that you're giving them, then it's it's really hard as a teacher to, like, know what areas you need to support and what areas you really need to expect students to kind of just own a lot of that kind of pedagogical work and clarifying of expectations or outlining what assignments are it. It just happened so much faster in asynchronous class live then.

I mean, it's like five minutes of class, whereas in an online space, particularly for big assignments, you need to like preface that the assignment is coming, read the assignment description and read the assignment description like weeks before it ever comes, because then students are sending you questions, you know, the day the assignment is due or the day before because they didn't realize that this was coming. And I think online learning just kind of shifts kind of that script between teacher and student and who's responsible for what. And it's it's just an ongoing negotiation in that regard.

What simple things could teachers start doing now to improve their courses?

I think little things that are really important to do is just checking in with your students, which I know most teachers are doing. We're in the middle of a pandemic. People's lives are really in the whole world right now. And so I think the biggest mistake we could do is just go business as usual. And one of the things I did hear from a lot of the students, particularly the undergrads I have a lot of undergraduate research assistant across my projects, is they got like their workload increased significantly when they their courses transitioned to online and that.

Was a byproduct of a whirlwind of a mess in terms of that, like it's nobody's fault literally, but it is a byproduct of just taking content and putting it online without thinking about how to redesign that experience.

And so I think taking a step back and looking at what you are expecting of your students right now? And even for me, like the thing that I just keep doing is like, how do I actually feel right now as a human in the middle of this pandemic? And like what is feasible even just for me?

And then recognizing that, like, a lot of my students are in even worse situations because they are or just generally like students are very food insecure or housing insecure and have just generally life things that they need to care about and take care of right now.

I mean, it took me a couple of weeks to realize the impact that this was having. The idea of there not being a late assignment, the idea even in K-12 of like what are you using grades for right now? Because grades in unless you're accounting for all students, individual kind of like context and sort of family situation or living situation or ability to access technology situation and have good Internet, then you could be unintentionally penalizing them in their grade because they don't have good enough WiFi to participate in the class in the way that you want, which is actually true for a lot of our students at Utah State as well. It's it is definitely a case by case basis, but I think for sure checking in with students and.

Just being empathetic, which is, again, like sort of the step one of human centered design process, I think in another non pandemic situation, I would have very different, more practical answers. But I, I just am so sensitive to the fact that, like, there isn't a cookie cutter solution in this particular situation. And I mean, my students have gone through some pretty crappy things in the last few weeks. And I think just being really flexible is really important.

Can you tell me about the worst designed online course you had to take?

So I had a colleague at another university that wanted help designing a course technology integration, kind of like for I think it was in a teacher ed program. It was built out on a website, which is definitely not an unusual approach. The first challenge with that when you take a course, rebuild it on an external website, but then you're still using maybe the learning management system that the students are interfacing with to, for example, like turn in assignments, because now you have these two different experiences that students have to manage, one, where they go to get their content and then one where they have to go back. It's just problematic because it can become confusing.

And so the the challenge for me and this is more of maybe an approach, just sort of a pedagogical difference and just general ethos difference of like if I'm teaching a class for thinking about how to integrate technology into the classroom, I'm definitely thinking about when to use a particular technology and how do you know it's the right case to use it.

And so those are the kinds of questions that I would want to have in that kind of class. This class was all about the tools. And so every and like the many different ways that you could use the tools, it was just so much content.

The reason that this irks me so much is, one, it was not a great experience for the students design wise because it's just content overload. The other is that I just feel like this is because this is where like one of my areas of expertise. But I just feel like if we're designing a class that's going to support teachers ability to integrate technology into their classroom, we need to have conversations about the fact that, like, not all of these technologies are good and not just like adding technology for the sake of technology is good.

A pencil is a technology. Sometimes it makes more sense to just pick up a piece of paper and a pencil and like write something down or write something on the whiteboard or then like make a PowerPoint, for example.

So my follow up question to that is I know that sometimes in some of my classes we had to upload like a video to campus or something. And canvases really picky about the kinds of video forms that you can upload. I'm a videographer, so I knew like, oh, I just need to change the Kodak and resize and stuff it like. That's an insane thing to explain to my 50 year old, classmates who are trying to get a master's degree. And so a lot of them just would uploaded to YouTube and then share a link. And so if it makes sense for a teacher to use a different app or a technology outside of canvas or the learning technology that they have, what would your advice be to them and how to integrate those technologies? Or like how to wisely do it so that the student experience is still positive?

I think that a lot of it is anchored in the kind of experience you want your student to have for our final product exhibition for my digital make it a learning class. Usually we do like a big thing on campus. Students invite their friends and family, people from our department or college people from across campus come and see their projects. They're really awesome like projects.

And so and that's like a really meaningful experience for them. We ended up doing it on YouTube and that took a lot of discussion and honestly negotiation just with the students. I checked in with them and I give them an opportunity to opt out and have a voice in that because it meant that we had to have it public on YouTube in order for you to participate. Like I still wanted them to be able to talk to people about their projects and and interact with people about their projects. I know, like even myself, I'm really sensitive about what kind of social media platforms are on or what's public and what's private. And so I gave my students the opportunity to kind of have alternative options or something. I think when integrating different platforms together, it's really about clarifying, like where is the home base going to be? So I told my students, our home base was going to be slack and it was any major announcements I sent out on slack and on canvas just to be safe. But like all of my students were on slack, I saw them all there. I made that really clear. And I think that's part of why that transition went fairly well.

All things considered, when you're putting different technologies together, you should never do it just because you want to. You should have a problem or an experience that you're trying to design for your students. And the current technology is not affording you the ability to do that. So then the question is what is the technology that affords this and how do I integrate that into the current space that we have? So if you're already on a canvas course and you want to do something outside of canvas because you want your students to have this really meaningful experience that canvas doesn't afford, then you need to identify that technology and create a path for them. That's really clear. It's like you're building a road from one technology to the other and anticipating all of the potential problems that could happen along that road, like what are the potholes, where the construction signs and thankfully in the world that we're in today, most of that stuff is already available. If you use a platform like I, I have yet to see one that doesn't have their own kind of how to tutorials and video introductions.

And then on top of that, you add YouTube, where everybody is putting up how to's for everything and curating some of those resources to mitigate any of the potential issues that could happen.

Canvas is just notoriously hard to upload videos to, and I have instructions kind of that show like here are the different ways, like here are the common problems. Here are the different ways in which you can upload your video.

I also think when you're adopting technology like that. So, for example, on the student side, the thing that's usually the most stressful is like, oh no, my assignment is late and I'm going to get docked points and they're really upset. And then they get mad because the technology is the thing that, like, inhibited their ability to get there. I mean, I've had students send me emails where they're like I've spent hours trying to upload this movie or this video that you asked for and I won't upload. And it's like, you know, their Wi-Fi is not good enough or they were trying to upload their own file type or something and like, the Help Desk is closed.

And so I think I mean, as a teacher for me, I'm like, OK, like I'm not going to dock points because the technology was dumb and like, could you be lying to me? Like, maybe, but yeah, I don't really I mean, if you get it to me the next day then like, what difference does that make? And I think that's sort of again, like the flexibility of expectations you have to have a technology is like it's going to fail and it's going to fail in ways that you don't anticipate and the students shouldn't. They definitely shouldn't be penalized for that.

I really appreciated it when teachers had, like, straight forward, like late policies that made it easy to make decisions about technology for me.

I've added constant procrastinator. Like, I do have problems with that. So, yeah, it was nice when teachers would trick me into assignments to getting assignments done early, you know, like I'll give you extra credit if it's done a day before. And then I would do it and then I wouldn't get it done on time. I wouldn't get the extra credit, but I would have done it well. And on time, obviously, I couldn't have teachers tricking me. Like, you can't tell people to give you a surprise party. But when I had teachers who was like, oh, if it's a day late, it's 10 percent off. And then I, you know, and would be like three hours, you know, it'd be midnight and be like, well, I can keep working on this and upload a crap paper or, you know, I can take that 10 percent.

And to do something better, and so I really appreciated that and it would it would have been nice if it was. You can't get if you turn it in late, you can't get higher than a 90 percent, but I'm going to still start subtracting from one hundred.

So how has your you said that, like, professors don't really get taught how to teach. How has your perceptions or understanding of teaching changed throughout your education?

I was definitely a student that cared a lot about grades, and I know that students care a lot about grades. And I think the further I get away from that, the more I forget how much grades matter to students. And the more like my goal for the students is to get is to gain experience that actually is going to help you in the career that you want. And that doesn't always translate to getting an A in a class and that but it does end up being that you're you're meaning that you're getting kind of a collection of experiences that.

Are going to make you a more competitive applicant because you're a critical thinker and a creative problem solver, and you can deal with the ambiguity that is inherent in any design process.

So I have a couple of cookbooks, A few will explain how to do a recipe and there are three steps, but obviously there's way more steps put together into those three steps they have. And then in other books, there will be like 10 steps. What like are the advantages of disadvantages to breaking up recipes and other 10 steps or three? And if you don't have an answer for that, that's fine.

No, I actually I'm all on board with the baking comparisons. do you watch the Great British Bake Off ever? It is really helpful because it shows that it actually shows three different kinds of ways in which you could structure a learning environment. So you have the like signature where they know what they're going to make and they need to like respond to a particular challenge and make something.

And then you have the mystery challenge. Is that what they call it? They call it technical. So they have the technical challenge where everybody has the same recipe and they get a bunch of ingredients that maybe some of which they've never seen before and they have to somehow make a thing that they don't even know what it looks like.

And then there's the showstopper. And so the showstopper is, you know, you make the best, most extravagant version of bread that you can make or something like that or cake or something. And there might be a few constraints, like it needs to be three tiered or something like that, but it really is whatever you want to make it. And then part of that output is their story with it. So is their narrative. So I think a lot of times students think that oftentimes learning in K-12 is the technical challenge, because those standardized test scores are such high stakes and nobody actually knows what there may be looking for, and it's all kind of a mystery, right? In higher education classes, at least in our department, we are much more in the showstopper world where there's not actually a right answer.

But your story and your narrative along with it really, really matters a lot. So it depends on what kind of experience you're designing for and then how much detail you need to give. And then I definitely always think that simple is better. If I look back on maybe the first online course that I designed, there was probably for sure a way too much text in it compared to what I have now. Part of that is just learning how to respond based on what students like. Oh, I didn't clarify that the right way. So here's this. Or figuring out how to design the information in a way that is is a little bit more visually consumable. So you can have a block of text or you can have maybe different kind of visuals giving very similar information. Those visuals take a lot more time to produce, which is why it's taken a few iterations to reduce that text in my courses.

And I'm definitely a fan of simpler is better, but that's partly because I'm going toward more of those showstopper kind of projects and most of my classes where, like, there really isn't a right and a wrong here.

All right. That was my conversation with Dr. Breanne. I loved talking to her and she changed the way I think about online learning experiences. If you know teachers who are having to adapt their curriculum to the online environment, you could give them a call and let them vent their frustrations to you. Or you could just send them a link to this episode and let Dr. Breanne take care of them. But really, I do need your help sharing instead. So tell somebody about your favorite episode or post it on your Facebook page. This episode was edited by Nick Vászquez and Me Wyatt Traughber as part of our work in the Office of Research at Utah State University.


Human centered design
Building an online experience
Mimicking discussions
What we can learn about learning
Challenges for both teachers and students
Being flexible is important
The Great British Bakeoff