As We Rush Online, How Might We Redesign Higher Education?
In what would turn out to be my last in-person office hours of the semester, a student looked at me and asked, “What is going to happen to my senior year?” My eyes welled; all I could muster was, “I’m not sure anyone knows.”
The next morning, after Tulane made the expected switch to virtual learning, I listened to an NPR segment in which the interviewee advised professors, “Try not to rethink everything … try to keep your course plan as similar as to what it would be in face-to-face as possible.”
This might be sound individual advice: we are all adjusting to a rapidly changing environment, so making it through the first couple weeks is an understandable mindset. But I also worry that if we’re all focused only on weathering the switch to online learning, we’ll miss the opportunity — and obligation — to transform higher education to meet our students’ needs both at this moment and for the 21st-century. What might we, as educators at colleges and universities, do now to be part of such a shift?
This post is meant as a provocation rather than as a guide. Below are a few questions my colleagues and I have been asking each other over the past week, followed by some interrelated suggestions.
As we make the switch to distance learning…
- …How might we help our students (especially our seniors) still have a wonderful semester?
- …How might we model empathy, creativity, and comfort with ambiguity?
- …How might we help our institutions make significant leaps forward in environmentalism, equity, and mental health?
- …How might we foster continuous learning, both with short-term feedback loops and with life-long metacognitive habits?
- …How might we ensure societies respond to crises with greater generosity and pluralism, rather than with more individualism and tribalism?
- …How might we remember to value knowledge and beauty, especially in times of scarcity and uncertainty?
Start with empathy
A common framework in design research is to identify users’ functional needs and emotional needs. As we switch to online learning, we should check-in with our students to learn what they are individually experiencing.
On the functional side: Who must travel? Where will each student be living, including in which time zone? With whom are they living? What are their internet capabilities there? What devices do they have? Do they have other access needs to consider? Katie Krummeck, an Education Design Consultant, and Gray Garmon, a Professor at UT Austin’s School of Design and Creative Technologies, created a great Google Form template to assess students’ situations. (Update: Gray and Katie also wrote a wonderful guide on how to use the mindsets and tools of design to reimagine online classes).
On the emotional side: How is each student feeling about the switch to online learning? How are they feeling about the pandemic more broadly? Are they concerned for themselves? For others? What is their relationship to the people they’ll be living with? Are they eager to get back to learning, or are they struggling to be motivated and focused given the broader changes in life?
Simple check-ins could go a long way towards building community, informing how we’ll design the rest of the semester, and modeling the empathy that should be centered in education. For more strategies, read Drs. Mary Raygoza, Raina León, and Aaminah Norris’s guide to “humanizing online teaching.”
Create experiences intentionally
First, we should address our students’ technical and accessibility needs as best as we can. We might all be swamped with technical resources at this point; for thinking through accessibility, check out Prof. Aimi Hamraie’s fantastic blog post on “Accessible Teaching in the Time of COVID-19.”
Next, we can consider how to address emotional needs through designing intentional experiences. Building on the work of others, Robert Plutchik created a Wheel of Emotions, which postulates eight core emotions. The two most likely core emotions students are feeling right now are “fear” and “sadness.”
We won’t be able to help address all of the fears students are experiencing (especially fears about the spread of COVID-19). But we might be able to address sadness by first asking, “what is lost?” And then asking, “how might we design the rest of our semester to address what is lost?”
For example, seniors might be feeling a loss of celebration, culmination, and community.
How might we help our students experience celebration in our now-virtual course? Could we design small moments of celebration into every class: perhaps with acknowledgments, times for students to share accomplishments, rounds of applause, virtual awards/badges, etc.?
How might we help our students (especially our seniors) experience culmination? What can we plan for the last online session of the semester? Could we keep a video session “open” after the last class allowing people to linger and reminisce together? Are there reflective exercises that can help students integrate what they learned in our class with other things they learned throughout college? Are there ways to allow our seniors to share advice with younger students? Derek Lidow, a professor of entrepreneurship at Princeton, assigns a personal “manifesto” for the final assignments in many of his classes — a rich culminatory experience.
How might we help our students experience community? This might be the most important question to be asking presently. Here, I draw inspiration from Peter Block’s Community: The structure of belonging. Insights from this book suggest that framing “community” as a challenge for us, the faculty, to solve is misguided. Consider two of his Principles of Strategy: “Citizens who use their power to convene other citizens are what create an alternative future” and “the shift in conversation is from one of problems, fear, and retribution, to one of possibility, generosity, and restoration” (p. 30–31). Thus, a better framing of the question is: How might we empower our student-citizens to build community in our new environment?
Many of our students’ needs might be unique to this semester. But higher education will flourish if we all enhance our ability to identify core emotional needs and design course experiences that foster them.
Identify opportunities in our new context
As the adage goes, when life throws you lemons, make lemonade. In Effectuation: Elements of entrepreneurial expertise, Prof. Saras Sarasvathy shows how expert entrepreneurs (on average) demonstrate a greater ability to leverage uncertainty than novice entrepreneurs do. “The [expert entrepreneur] leverages uncertainty by treating unexpected events as an opportunity to exercise control of the emerging situation” [p. 90].
What opportunities might be present in our new pandemic-driven context?
What can we do online better than we might in-person? Screen-sharing makes it easier for a group to see one person’s work. It’s easier to crowd-source notes with google docs or similar tools. Break-out-group functionality might make teams feel like they have a more private workspace. What might students gather and share from their new geographic communities that could enrich and diversify the material of our subject’s study (while maintaining social distancing, of course)? UPDATE: Prof. Eugene Korsunskiy (Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth) started this crowd-sourced brainstorm of potential advantages to online learning.
Create the society we’ve imagined now
Expanding on this principle, how might we exercise greater control of this rapidly-emerging context towards co-creating a better society? Campus coalitions have been organizing for environmental sustainability, justice and equity for those who have been historically marginalized, and a holistic approach to wellness (especially addressing the wave of anxiety-related health challenges in the generation currently in college). Many of us have lamented the slow pace of change in higher education; well, change is not slow right now, but new behaviors and structures will calcify quickly. As higher education is rapidly reborn, how might we center environmentalism, justice, and wellness now?
Learn from experts in access
This semester, I’m co-teaching a course on critical disability studies in Tulane’s Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship minor. I have been learning a lot (my colleagues are the experts in disability studies — I am bringing some social innovation and social entrepreneurship experience). In our last class session, Prof. Krystal Cleary and Prof. Anne-Marie Womack shared resources created by Prof. Aimi Hamraie’s Mapping Access lab and the Healing Justice podcast to help instructors consider facets of access in the transition to online learning.
My colleagues also introduced us to “Access Intimacy,” first articulated by Mia Mingus. “Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs. … Access intimacy is also the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives.”
Adapting to this COVID-driven environment is different in innumerable ways to adapting to an ableist world. Yet Mingus’s writings might inspire us to ask, “how might we find unique forms of intimacy in the interdependence that a pandemic demands?” Could we show gratitude to each other for being compassionate as we struggle with new technology? Could we find opportunities to slow down the pace of life? Could we create moments to be together non-verbally online? Could we take a greater interest in each others’ lives beyond the boundaries of academics? And, as distressing as it is to contemplate, if those we know experience sickness or worse, could find relational depth in sharing grief with one another?
Share the power, share the responsibility
If ever there was an opportunity to shift towards critical pedagogy, it is now. Our instinct, as faculty, might be that we must be the sources of clarity and structure in this seemingly uncontrollable environment. But perhaps there are ways to move more power and responsibility to students: how might we give our students real control rather than just the feeling of it?
Rather than just shifting his preexisting syllabus to virtual, Fred Leichter, Executive Director of The Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity at the Claremont Colleges, is giving his students the option of switching their design project to, “Redesign the Distance Learning Experience” in his experiential learning course. Thus, he is fostering engagement through relevancy and building ownership through shared responsibility. And he is enabling his students to co-create higher education into an evolving and ambiguous future.
Build continual learning processes and habits
Learning how to leverage feedback can help us excel this semester and beyond. Whether we plan synchronous or asynchronous lessons, they will not work perfectly right away (or ever); and some issues will be easier for the us to recognize than others. Thus, we will need feedback loops to truly build an excellent student experience. Feedback Labs is a non-profit whose mission is “to make feedback the norm in aid, philanthropy, non-profits, and government.” They have many great case-studies and principles on their site. My favorite principle is that feedback should be “Inclusive and Insight-driven: Share and interpret feedback in a timely manner with people receiving services in order to generate mutual understanding, insights, and solutions.” Can we include surveys or exit-tickets in our now-virtual courses? Could we create a standing Google Doc in which students and faculty can brainstorm ways to improve the experience together?
At the societal level, there are times in history when major disruptions increased individualism and tribalism, and there are times when major disruption increased generosity and pluralism. Some students have already experienced catastrophes; for example, our students from the greater New Orleans region lived through Katrina as children. For other students, this might be their first experience of significant societal disruption. In either case, what practices could we build into our courses that prompt our students to learn about themselves from this experience? And what are we learning about how we help tip society towards generosity and pluralism, not just now but also when future disruptions inevitably arrive? Could we build time into our courses for reflecting on what we’re learning about:
- How we navigate uncertainty;
- What we value in life;
- and how we influence communities and societies?
Metacognitive habits can help our students (and us) learn both how to adapt this semester and how we might influence a likely-tumultuous 21st-century.
Remember why we do what we do
It is possible that some are feeling like the communal pursuits of higher education are frivolous (even unjustified) amidst a global pandemic. To answer this concern, I defer to C.S. Lewis. Below is a lightly-adapted excerpt from “Learning in War-Time,” a sermon he gave to Oxford University shortly after Germany invaded Poland and Great Britain declared war.**
“…I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If humans had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil … turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. [But humans] are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.”
Practice self-compassion
It is often easier and healthier to do what is inspiring than what is expected. But we should also show ourselves the same compassion we would show our students: if we feel overwhelmed, perhaps it is ok to focus on weathering the next few weeks before we’re ready to tackle the aspirations above.
Rafe Steinhauer is a visiting assistant professor at Tulane University’s Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. He has a Masters in Education and an MBA from University of Virginia, where he studied innovation education.
Sources and references
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