Thanks for Not Doing A Bad Job of Putting Your Course Online: A Post-Mortem
On March 13th, 2020, several colleagues shared an article with me (Please Do A Bad Job of Putting Your Courses Online) that went viral in the early days of the coronavirus, as thousands of educators had to completely rethink how they taught in the middle of a semester. As we spent our spring breaks lesson planning, articles like this were a source of comfort, even a bit of defiance in the face of events beyond our control. Our top institutions advised minimum viable courses with pass/fail or credit/no credit options during the “panic-gogy” of the past semester. Two months later, we’ve graduated our seniors and already started a new summer semester,waiting in anticipation for news about whether fall semester will return to campus or continue online or in some sort of new hybrid format. Many educators felt relieved to make it through the semester and Happy Hour Zoom sessions have become a popular faculty bonding activity.
This last month has been rough on academia, with 113 institutions associated with a layoff, a furlough, or a contract nonrenewal resulting from COVID-19. This has affected at least 37,181 employees (including student workers) and the numbers are expected to go up significantly this summer. Meanwhile students all across the country are suing universities for refunds on their tuition, unsatisfied with online classes. This is in part thanks to the marketing efforts of South Carolina attorneys who launched the website College Refund2020. Silicon Valley types who have long predicted The Demise of Higher Education As We Know It® are placing bigger bets on the disruption, predicting that thousands of universities will soon go out of business and only the elite institutions, who can forge partnerships with the tech giants, will survive and be responsible for educating the masses.It feels as if a century-old covenant between higher education and society — already fraying under rising costs and unmet expectations — may have snapped under the weight of this virus.
As I write this and look back at that viral blog post from March 13th, I feel a sense of relief that many of our colleagues did not listen to this advice to strive for mediocrity, and what felt defiant at first began to feel like an obstinate strategy to use teaching as a bargaining chip against the future. But mostly, I think this view of online education incorrectly frames its future as to be decided by technology. I think that’s wrong. I believe that it will be the power of storytelling and a reinvestment into learning experience that elevates education for tomorrow’s learners.
I’ve spent my academic career with one foot in both worlds of academia and technology. For the past four years I’ve served as an advisor to CASEWORX, and have been working to utilize their digital technology to maximize student immersion in my classes. This experience has turned my Intro to Entrepreneurship course into a hybrid “flipped classroom” approach to teaching. For my class, I use the CASEWORX platform to place students in scenarios they may face as entrepreneurs, scenarios that are full of complexity with no clear right or wrong answer. In addition to the video, there are several links, documents, discussion questions and other supplementary materials available before the student is forced to make a decision in the case. They then have to reflect on their decision and debate their choice with a small group of classmates in an online forum in the platform (similar to Slack) before coming to class.
My philosophy for teaching entrepreneurship has always been to take on the role of a “producer.” I attempt to produce an experience that gives students as much exposure to different types of entrepreneurs, situations, resources, technologies and problems/opportunities, all to help develop the entrepreneurial mindset. Flipping a classroom allows professors to be such a producer of experiences and using digital technology, we can creatively design exceptional experiences for our students that will make them proud of their decision to attend our universities, while expanding their minds from outside the classrooms that we’ve been temporarily removed from.
I learned a lot about being an educational storyteller recently through YouTube. Last week I was invited to be a guest on a popular YouTube series called The Try Guys. With over 7 million subscribers, this show reaches an audience not too different than our universities: college-aged, diverse across ethnicity and gender, unburdened by the prejudices and baggage of their predecessors.
In the episode I was involved in, the host (Zach) announces that he is going to start a new tea business and begins to share his journey in real-time with The Try Guys community,spanning over six episodes. I was simply amazed by the engagement of the audience (66K likes, 2.5K dislikes and about 12,500 comments) and how much the audience absorbed my academic musings in their comments. If you watch the episode, it’s not hard to understand why these guys have such a large audience. Through authentic storytelling, they have captured the attention and curiosity of millions. Despite low production quality (pandemic-limited to Zoom), their storytelling is more powerful than ever. They display a level of vulnerability and connection with the viewer that brings you into their world (and literally their homes). Their adventurous spirit to try new things is contagious because they passionately describe it, using humor and clever edits to keep the storyline moving and compelling. The video is nearly 14 minutes, which is quite long for YouTube content, however most of their viewers make it through the end because — like any good story — their audience wants to see how things end. Not everyone loves the characters, as evident by the critical comments, but the content evokes an emotional response that leads to the immersion investment. This is the “secret sauce” that strong educational storytelling brings; it immerses learners in an asymmetric, illogical, unfair, wondrous world that more closely resembles their reality more than any lecture, textbook or Powerpoint.
Our future is unknown and based on the articles I’ve shared earlier in this post, there is a lot to be worried about. We will still have runaway costs in education, there’s still a persistent digital divide creating further inequity, the craft of teaching itself is still under fire from universities to parents at home, and so on. But none of these issues are alleviated by committing to the bare minimum when it comes to online teaching. Forget about the lawsuits or the threat of extinction….it’s just the wrong attitude to take for the work we do! If COVID-19 has any silver lining, it is the opportunity for educators to be the best future versions of ourselves. And I’ve already seen it begin!
My mentor “Grampa” Fred Kiesner taught entrepreneurship for 40+ years. He was one of the first in the world to teach this topic at the university level, and is one of the reasons why it has any legitimacy in today’s business schools.
He is one of the most passionate educators you’ll ever meet and is extremely proud of his “kids,” who are the 20,000 students he’s taught over the years. He’s been retired for nearly a decade and lives several hours away from our campus and due to health struggles has been very limited in his ability to come back to campus to see our students.
However, in the weeks following the Stay-at-Home order, Grampa Fred learned how to use the camera on his computer for the first time and Zoomed into two of my classes to deliver his famous lecture on entrepreneurial failure. Keep in mind, this was his first time ever teaching online! I observed in awe at how this living legend quickly adapted to the technology in his 80s, with limited eyesight, and still managed to personally connect with each student in the Zoom classroom. In fact, it was easier for him because their names were listed next to their faces. A natural storyteller, Grampa Fred engaged both classes with his stories, which sometimes would go off on a tangent or involve humor or other contextual details.
I realized that it was because of these elements (and not despite them) that students would remember the details of his lecture and relate to the message he was sharing, more than any other guest speaker in our class (based on how often he was cited in their final exam essays). He told the most authentic story in his own unique voice. Zoom didn’t make this class a success, nor did the camera on Grampa Fred’s computer. All they did was facilitate and distribute his story, the one that has captured the imaginations of tens of thousands of his former students throughout decades. The one that made its educational impact countless times before.
As educational producers, we already have many digital tools we need through our school technology platforms and other accessible free/low cost technology options. The challenge is to create and/or curate content to allow for such a pedagogical approach to work. I’ve never felt so close to my colleagues despite the social distance. This past semester inspired a level of collaboration unlike anything I’ve been a part of. Bonded by a shared crisis and freed from everyday logistics, we shared best practices with one another and voluntarily met more regularly with one another.
In my department, to substitute for our normal Preview Day at the College of Business, I created a video with help for my department and many students for a video I labeled as an LMU Entrepreneurship “Doc-zoom-entary” to welcome our incoming students to learn about our program. A few weeks later my colleague Professor Ellen Ensher asked me to help her co-produce a fun graduation video for our seniors. Both projects took me back to my high school days in Kalamazoo, MI and reminded me of the potential of creative collaborations through our community using digital media tools. Constraints and creativity have a very interesting relationship with each other!
I’ve seen so many beautiful examples throughout the country of how educators are being more vulnerable during this time and doing incredible things for their students. There has certainly been a domino effect of such good deeds and positive content in the spirit of John Krasinski’s Some Good News. Again, a hit YouTube series that can be a source of inspiration for professors. This show works on many levels because it doesn’t try to be anything that it is not. The production uses basic technology (evident by the logo artwork designed and colored by Krasinski’s daughters) and iMovie style editing to replicate the news format we all are familiar with to share only positive stories during COVID-19. And everything in the show aims to fulfill a simple mission — “to remind us that no matter how hard things get there is always good in the world.” It’s a brilliant show, and is perfect evidence that we can all lean into this role of a content producer/curator through experimentation. We all have access to the same tools as John Krasinski uses (just watch a few seconds in the video below to see how many of his fans made their own version of the show).
Beyond the innate power of story, this crisis has altered the mechanics and user-experience of learning, in ways I don’t think will revert back. COVID-19 has turned millions of people into content creators in new ways. It has collapsed schedules and forced reevaluations of heretofore “untouchable” processes. It has also turned millions of people into brand new online learners during quarantine. In March, Coursera received over 10 million course enrollments in 30 days and ran 45 million sessions, an increase of 67 percent compared to the month of February. COVID-19 has fundamentally changed our relationship with time and space. I won’t sugar coat it: this is a further threat to the fixed classroom on a pastoral campus, and this has real ramifications for our capital-intensive institutions. But I implore you to separate your anxieties over the business model of higher education from the craft of teaching. I encourage you to choose a growth-mindset over a fixed mindset
Below are some tips that I’ve shared with my colleagues on creating/curating content:
Length
- Be mindful of the length of the content you are creating/curating. Attention spans online are much shorter than in real life and there are distractions that we are unable to try to control as we are just a click away from another window.
- If you are curating existing content, you can always direct students to the specific part that is relevant for their experience, just like you might by cueing up a certain scene in a video clip in class. The more time you save them, the more they will engage in the content. Here’s how to do it on YouTube.
KISS Principle
- Put yourself in the seat of the viewer and remember the KISS principle (keep it simple stupid!) The goal is to keep the students engaged in the content, not to impress them.
- Remember that students have much less sensory access in online environments. They have less spatial awareness, it’s difficult to look at multiple elements on a screen at once. Their sense of hearing is degraded and altered. With this in mind, aim for simplicity and less things to do, not more.
- While experimenting with new technology (if you are creating new content), we may be tempted to try to play with all the “bells and whistles” and divert from the original purpose.
Recording and Editing
- If the content involves you lecturing on video, don’t forget that you have your own style that works in a classroom already for this. The challenge is to capture that in a digital format while staying true to yourself and looking and sounding natural.
- As a studio musician myself, I realized how much different it was to play in a studio environment vs a live show, but quickly learned to appreciate the ability to have “multiple takes” and being able to listen to a recording while in the studio and adjust the way I played the song accordingly, almost in real time. There’s no shame in multiple takes.
- Online lectures give us an opportunity to deliver precise messages in multiple ways. We can use different types visual and audio to make content more interesting, emotional, clear and less confusing. And similar to television, the initial delivery of the content doesn’t need to be perfect. Don’t obsess, and don’t give in to perfectionism.
- Editing tools are becoming easier to use. If you have time, try to watch your content and edit accordingly to reduce length to feature the most important information you want to distribute. Shorter is better.
Curating
- Try to explore and see if there is already valuable content out online that we can share with our students. The flipped classroom approach works when this content is most compelling (and doesn’t feel like homework). It’s amazing how much content is out there for free. Here are some resources that might be helpful. Also, this toolbox includes more great resources (though mostly relevant for entrepreneurship courses).
- You can edit curated content together with original content you create! Here’s how to download videos to your computer so that you can edit them together with your footage in iMovie or any editing software you use.
- Once you go down the rabbit hole you will probably collect more content than you need. Curating content will require you to select on the most valuable materials to share. Content doesn’t need to be perfect though. Remember that you give them activities around the content that help the intended lesson to be learned. Framing is the educator’s job; this is where you can shine.
Reflection
- Sharing content is just one part of the flipped classroom approach. Giving students a lens to view the content is critical. Try to provide thoughtful reflection questions to prep students in advance as they view what you’ve shared.
- The curated content (or created content) is like data. It still needs to be interpreted. Adding a reflection component to the content gives students a purpose for viewing the content and you can prime that purpose through the direction you give them.
- I find that having students reflect publicly among peers using the blog/discussion forms helps boost engagement in the content and thoughtfulness in the reflection because their own peers will read their insights. Especially at this time, when students may be feeling isolated, we have an opportunity to give them good reason to interact with their classmates. A flipped classroom approach could pair students to complete an activity or assignment together through the virtual tools you can use.
- It’s also beneficial to put students into smaller groups to debate and discuss the content and the reflection exercise prior to the class. The online learning experience degrades quickly with large groups.We do this in CASEWORX and it definitely boosts engagement and deeper thinking prior to class. Zoom or your CMS (Brightspace, Blackboard, etc.) should have all the tools you need to do this! If not, here are some other resources that might help.
- If you have a TA or assistant, this is where they can really help. Setting up cohorts or troubleshooting tech issues can take an online session off the rails very quickly. Have your TA get up to speed with the platforms you plan on using, and stick to them.
I truly hope we are back on campus this Fall and can see our students once again. However, hybrid education is likely here to stay and if you can leverage it to improve storytelling and learning experience, students will naturally be more engaged in other elements of the course and we can elevate class discussions regardless if they are over Zoom or in person. Channeling your own hidden YouTuber star, tap into your own authenticity and vulnerability to create and edit lessons in a different format that can transform into compelling stories that students can relate to and want to interact with. Let’s combine our collective wisdom from years of developing educational storytelling and learning experience, and plan for the future.
Whatever happens, we are not going back to what was before. So, once again, thank you for not doing a bad job of putting your course online.
Jason D’Mello is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. His research revolves around new venture teams and co-founder dynamics. He is also the Head of Research at CASEWORX.
