Some reflections on online learning
I’ve been doing some exciting work this summer, getting my hands dirty with a couple of new companies. We aren’t disclosing a ton about them at the moment, so don’t ask. It has me stretching my brain in all kinds of exciting ways that I know will be helpful to me at UCI long-term. In particular, I remember a very senior colleague at another university telling me once that she would require everyone who teaches in a professional program like ours to consult in industry if she could. I was curious about this so probed more and found a lot of insight into how important it is that we reach out, get our research into the hands of those “out there” but also how important it is that we stretch, remind ourselves what the work is that our students will be doing, and so on.
So, back to what I have been up to. This past week, I have been splitting my brain between a super cool academic conference run by the Human Computer Interaction Consortium, one of my favorite events each year, and some hands-on work with a SalesForce implementation. A couple things to know about working with SalesForce: (1) It’s a super powerful tool that has been around a long time, well, by digital standards anyway. (2) It keeps changing in an effort to meet the demands of our new ways of working. What does this mean for me? It means that the SalesForce I knew when I last touched it doesn’t much resemble the one of today. Luckily for me, SalesForce is good enough to put together an entire online learning platform: Trailhead. I also signed up for a Udemy course just in case. I’m not going to drag you into the details of what I have been learning or where I have been stuck, but I do want to reflect on the experience of learning something as an adult, using an online platform, between my regular job and family duties, because that is super relevant to my world right now and to our MHCID program.
The research really is right! Sometimes we read things in our digital media and learning journals or talk about distance based education and think, well sure, but that was this one case or this other experiment. Will it really apply? We use our best practices gleaned from the research and hope for the best. All I can say so far is this, the research is right. My experiences teaching online in MHCID and my experiences learning online this past couple of weeks completely match up with what we know from the research. This is good news! This means, we really can and should do what we know to do, and we really get the results we want.
Ten minutes is over in the blink of an eye and takes forever. In our program we try really hard to keep our videos to ten minutes or so. The research told us to do it this way, and so we listened… or tried to anyway. Our analytics so far in the MHCID program have matched what we knew… people tend to drift off or disappear after much longer. That said, it is REALLY hard to teach someone in ten minutes or less. I found when I started making video lectures that my in person lectures are really rambly. I tend to pause, ponder, restate things I didn’t like the first time, make jokes, and get distracted. Quite honestly, I am not sure why anyone tolerates this from me in person! Online though, it’s just a mess. And so I have been learning to be more succinct, to be more clear, and to finish on time. I found this really frustrating, but I was committed. Now that I have been watching other people’s videos on line, I get it. Ten minutes when you are recording is over way too fast. Ten minutes when you are watching can feel like a lifetime. I still don’t know why I can sit through a two hour movie with no trouble and watching a YouTube video longer than ten minutes is painful. I don’t understand it, but I recognize its validity.
Interactive activities really do matter. When I found myself tempted to flip over to my email or chat with my toddler who just came in to interrupt my video, I was pulled back in. I knew that at the end of each video I was watching or page I was reading, there would be a quiz or challenge of some kind. We know this too is important from the research, but feeling it viscerally has helped me build empathy for my students. I see now that we are not really testing their knowledge with these little activities so much as helping them to stay engaged and supporting their ability to commit what we are teaching them to memory.
Badges are surprisingly addictive. OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There has been an enormous amount of work on badges and the gamification of education. There are lots of problems with them, and I have my own beef with the idea of using extrinsic motivation to get people to learn things. I am learning well right now, because I am highly motivated by the need to get my work done and the sheer joy of learning something again that is so concrete and tractable. Badges alone aren’t going to make me learn a new platform. That said, man oh man, I like it when that little window pops up at me telling me that I have a new badge, that I am only two badges from a new level, that I can earn more points through more challenges. That serotonin rush is effective, and I want to find a way to capitalize on it more in my teaching.
Applying what you are learning immediately is essential. This is where the SalesForce online learning experience breaks down a bit for me. To be fair, they do a great job of getting you to immediately do a challenge that applies what you know. That’s the good part. The bad part is that you have to do it in their sandbox for them to “grade” it. From a technical standpoint, I totally get it. From a learner standpoint, though, I find it frustrating. I would do the lesson in my own area, the build I am trying to make for the company I am actually helping to launch. Then, I would do the lesson in their sandbox to get the points. Why bother with the second one when I already learned the material? See earlier point about the addictive quality of badges. This is something I want to work on more with our MHCID students. Almost all of them are working full time, and we need to find a way to get them doing coursework that applies to their work so that they can apply what they are learning immediately to their lives and not just do toy tasks to earn their badges, I mean, grades.
There really is no substitute for real people, at least not yet. As much as I have loved the instruction I have been getting online, I am also aware of how much is lacking in this setup. Our MHCID program is built on the idea that content is not canned, faculty are updating and producing all the time, and the people are real and responsive. We meet in person multiple times per year to enforce this. Everyone communicates via Canvas, Slack, email, Facebook, Twitter, and more every day. Even at a distance, the human nature of our interactions is real and out there, bloopers and all. There is just no comparison between that experience and the slick canned experience of online, static corporate training.
Learning and doing make me a better teacher. I love my forays into industry. They make me a better professor, and I’m grateful to have been able to move between academia and industry throughout my career. I get new ideas for research, and I transfer my findings back into the world. This recent experience, specifically, though has made me grow as a teacher in important ways. First, I am learning a platform that many of our students will use in their own careers, and now I have the confidence to tell them they can do it, and they can do it well. Second, I am doing it through media they are used to using in their own work and in our program, and I can really see the things we do well and things we can improve.
Making awesome gifs of Skype conversations with your co-instructors is not something we can improve upon. I mean, how can you improve upon this?
