Another Angle on Hybrid

What do we think of when we think of hybrid (learning and teaching)? Some face-to-face teaching plus some online teaching? Some synchronous + some asynchronous? Flipping the classroom? Drosos and Guo (2021)* offer another perspective on a kind of teaching that can be included in the category. They show how what streamers teaching do can be seen as a form of cognitive apprenticeship. The authors do not explicitly talk about “hybrid,” but the practices they identify – real time problem solving, improvised examples, insightful tangents, and high level advice – are relevant to hybrid for two reasons. First, they are the kinds of things often cited as why remote or asynchronous instruction is necessarily inferior (the claim being they are absent). Second, they are useful challenges: how can these virtues be built into various hybrid scenarios?

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*2021 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

Teaching with My Whole Palette

All told, I have probably spent 20 full person-years in college and university classrooms. I’ve taught courses in sociology, public policy, information science, design, philosophy, and geography. I’ve taught studios, labs, lectures, workshops, and seminars. I’ve taught in small liberal arts colleges and public and private R1 universities. If you commission me to teach or design a course, I bring to the task a lot more than just my experience and “domain expertise” and (hopefully) wisdom. I bring to the task a whole lot of STUFF. An attic and garage and toolbox full of STUFF. Time was that stuff was in filing cabinets, notebooks, and stack of paper in my university and home offices. Now it’s mostly on the hard drive of my computer or stored in the cloud.

That stuff is the palette from which I can paint a course.

I’ve got syllabi and draft syllabi, bibliographies, annotations of readings, outlines of readings, PDFs of readings, diagrams of the argument logic of books and articles, lecture notes, scripts for videos, exams and problem sets, solutions to problems, catalogs of learning outcomes and course and program objectives. I have instructions for assignments, examples of student work on those assignments, and rubrics for evaluating that work. I have descriptions of classroom activities, examples of important concepts, and agendas for class sessions. And I have slide decks, countless slide decks, multiple versions of slide decks, decks of slides removed from other decks of slides. And I have stuff that’s out there on the net. YouTube videos I’ve made and videos of others that I’ve curated. And Sound Cloud files. And bookmarks in my browsers that are more or less (mostly less) well organized according to a system that sort of looks like what I teach and sort of looks like what I write about and sort of looks like the institutions I’ve worked for. And then there are the courses I’ve put on my institutions’ learning management systems (LMS); most of the material there is the stuff I’ve already mentioned but sometimes the LMS copy of something is the only one I have. And the question banks I’ve developed, hundreds of problems and solutions inside of courses on Canvas or Blackboard that are basically unretrievable. And I have course evaluations that occasionally have good ideas for subsequent iterations of courses and smart ideas that I’ve committed to paper when proposing new courses or applying for course development funding of one kind or another.

It’s a giant trove of stuff. To go through it all would probably take as long as it took to develop it in the first place. To find particular things can take even longer – the thing you want is always the last thing you find.

When you commission me to teach that course, all of this stuff is the raw material from which I will, in theory, compose a new masterpiece. Except probably not really all of it because the primary mode of organization of this material is, for all practical purposes, “the pile.” Even when it’s filed alphabetically in drawers or arranged in hierarchical directories on my computer, most of it is out of sight and even further out of mind. You hire me for the breadth and depth of my palette, but what you get is pretty much constrained by my ability to remember where things are and actually find them once I do. And that ability does not correlate with how smart I am about other things. Call it recency or availability bias or just poor housekeeping, most of my stuff is not really available and I spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel.

Now that kind of reinvention is not always a bad thing. Sometimes the essay your re-write, in tears, perhaps, after losing an entire draft is better than the original. But it is always time consuming and the result is often no better than before and thus represents a missed opportunity to iterate and improve. “What is to be done?”

Analogy: Bibliographic Software

Long ago accomplished scholars were keepers of troves of index cards. They read books and articles and scoured archives and processed interview transcripts and committed each tidbit to an index card along with keywords and citations. The workflow of scholarship was arranging and rearranging index cards into sections and chapters and books. Among other functions, this practice allowed the scholar to rigorously cite their sources.

Modern scholars are apt to have bibliographic software like EndNote, Mendeley, or Zotero to fulfill this function (along with eliminating the tedious task of writing footnotes and typing up bibliographies). It’s not unusual, in fact, for a scholar’s bibliographic database to contain a record of every article, book, and website they have every consulted. Over the course of a career they might catalog tens of thousands of references.

Teachers should have a similar tool, but not just for references.

What If There Were a….

What if there were a platform – be it digital technology or just a disciplined way of doing things – that afforded me a synoptic (def. “affording a general view of a whole”) view of my stuff along with any conceivable subset or slice or abstraction of my stuff (show me every problem I ever wrote that has anything to do with learning outcome #distribution or show me all of my slide decks on APIs or which course syllabi include Foucault’s Discipline and Punish?).

Moreover, what if there were a platform that would allow me to create a draft syllabus by tagging items in a bibliographic database or the rough draft of a lecture by tagging annotations and/or slides? What if problem solutions automatically knew about related problems or good review material to recommend to a student who’d found the problem challenging? What if learning outcomes knew what class activities or lecture sections they appeared in? What if problems knew that students who had trouble with this problem also had trouble with this other problem? What if slides knew about alternative examples of the concepts they described? What if sample problems were as easy to embed in a slide as in a homework problem set as in an exam? What if a code notebook example could be tagged for inclusion in a slide deck? What if lecture notes and slide decks and videos were synced and cued to one another? What if any pedagogical artifact that I’d be willing to share with a colleague were accessible to them without me having to be involved?

These are a few of the affordances I imagine for a pedagogical information system worthy of the 21st century.

Why is Educational Technology so Inelegant?

In this IHE blog post Joshua Kim asks a simple question: why isn’t educational technology more elegant? The answer, I suspect, has to do with the way the EdTech market works: most of the purchases are done by people who don’t actually use the software and most of the users don’t have a choice about what software to use. 

A common pathology in higher education is that decision-makers get to impose decisions on staff, faculty, and students with little accountability. The tracking of outputs and outcomes related to inputs is so lax that the costs of decisions are impossible to ascertain.  

I’ve proposed what I call the “iPhone test” as a thought experiment for those who want to do better: the next time you are buying software for faculty or working up a policy on course revisions or designing a form for students to fill out, imagine that people are free to ignore it or have to pay $100 to use it. Can you make it elegant enough vis-à-vis their daily work that they would?  Can you design it in such a manner that the main reaction is “this is cool”? 

First Food Courts, Next Academic Content Franchises

My conservative prediction is that within five years we will see examples of not-for-profit private colleges turning into franchises for textbook publishers such as Pearson or Cengage.  The relationship will be similar to the one colleges now have with their food service vendors.

The academic content and platform industries (textbook publishing on the one side and products like BlackBoard and TaskStream) will soon converge.  They companies that brought us the mediocrity by turning text books into Time magazine look-alikes and the companies that turn teachers into data entry clerks know a gold mine when they see one.  Students are already accessing all manner of internet content as a part of their education – why not figure out how to package the lot of it and license it to colleges and universities who will market it to students for you? 

There are almost too many contemporary trends supporting this convergence to keep count.  

The play being made by textbook companies has long been facilitated by faculty members who over-rely on textbooks (either because they are over-worked teaching 5 courses a semester or because they’d rather do their research than teach or because they are burned out).

A lot of investment in educational technology is motivated by the dream of allowing administrators to manage education centrally. As often as not there is a direct tradeoff: centralized information and control equals more clerical work for faculty and increased attractiveness of out-of-a-box teaching.

Meanwhile, the push for competency-based education that “emphasizes assessment rather than instruction” further dupes us into believing in “full digital learning experiences” as the El Dorado of higher education.

One could continue with what accreditation agencies and state and federal education departments and major educational philanthropies are up to, but you get the picture. 

This from most recent issue of Chronicle of Higher Education: