Episode 3: Terraforming Online Environments

Timestamps
5:34 -- Specific online considerations
8:03 -- Presence
13:53 -- Guidance
20:40 -- Navigation
29:02 -- Conclusion

Kate C.:
Hello and welcome to Episode three of the Kates Discuss podcast. I am Kate Crane.

Kate T.:
And I'm Kate Thompson.

Kate C.:
We are educational developers at the Center for Learning and Teaching at Dalhousie University, which is located in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq. We are all treaty people. In this podcast, we discuss various topics surrounding pedagogical practice in higher education. Today we are discussing “terraforming online environments, the importance of navigation, guidance and presence”. Before we get started, our producer, Jake will take a moment to provide some timestamps that might be of interest. This serves as an outline of the discussion and might also help you skip around to sections of particular interest to you. Take it away, Jake.

[Jake gives timestamps]

Kate C.:
Okay, so today episode three. Yeah, we are sitting here, doing a very last-minute planning, but on purpose, because today we wanted to do something a little different. We wanted to plan a little less for this episode, and we wanted it to be shorter. So, playing around with a slightly shorter format; and one of the reasons why we wanted a shorter episode in between our last and our next, is that…we wanted to present some, as I just said to Kate, thoughts-in-motion. We're thinking some things through about online teaching, and we wanted to share them as they're kind of still up in the air and being formulated by myself, Kate T., and our other colleague on the online pedagogy team here at Dalhousie. We were thinking through: what on earth is this episode about? And we came up with this brilliant metaphor, terraforming, to convey what we think is involved when you go about designing and facilitating your online courses.

So, this came about… contextually, here at Dalhousie, there's teaching evaluation changes happening, there's sort of personal interest on our team about discerning what is good online teaching? You know, we're post-pandemic. I think we're all still concerned about what good online teaching is, post-pandemic; expectations are evolving…. And I think we saw some things in our experience just consulting with people throughout, the now, years, that, I think we've come to understand that there's a lot that you have to recreate in the online environment to make it go like your face-to-face courses in an organic sense, yeah.

Kate T.:
I think I'd like to talk a little bit too about the context in which we started discussing these particular concerns around online teaching that are different from in-person teaching. So, we are working on this rubric, an online course rubric that instructors could use to take the pulse of their online course; see what sort of aspects of it are doing really great, and what could use work, and that kind of thing. And in doing that, Kate, and all three of us, but mostly Kate, looked at a whole bunch of existing rubrics to see what there is. So, we don't want to, like, totally re-invent the wheel if we don't have to. Something that we noticed, though, about most of these rubrics is that they end up being huge because they incorporate not just the stuff that's specifically important to online teaching. They incorporate all important pedagogical considerations about course design, and writing your learning outcomes, and aligning your class activities and assessments with each other and with the learning outcomes, and all that sort of standard stuff that is true of designing and running an in-person class as well as an online class. If somebody is just looking for an online course site rubric, it's likely that this isn't their first rodeo with teaching, and that they're probably already knowledgeable with respect to some of those general ideas about how to teach and how to design a course. And so, it was like, okay, so let's have a rubric that’s distinct, and not just some replication of other rubrics. So let's have our rubric just focus on what is unique about the online experience.

Kate C.:
Exactly.

What makes the online space unique? (specific online considerations)

Kate T.:
And should we just like rip off the Band-Aid? Like, what kinds of things did we pick up on that are particular considerations about online compared to in-person?

Kate C.:
Yes. So I think what one of the things that is happening in the rubrics that we've seen is a lack of recognition that an online environment is, in fact, a unique one. And you can't just sort of go armed, just with learning outcomes in an alignment and design. You can't just sort of go armed with, you know, your person and your learning outcomes and just teach the course in the way that it kind of flows out in the in-person classroom.

Kate C.:
So there is this notion– you've seen the rubrics, right–that it's like, as you're saying, Kate, it's sort of like, here's what you got to be doing to be an effective teacher. And then we'll just kind of add on some online, you know, online considerations. Here's what you have to do to kind of make it…maybe the words are accessible; or like logical or navigable. So I think we're coming in from places like, okay, you have to take nothing for granted when you are teaching on space, which means that a lot has to be created, intended and nurtured and called into being and made explicit; intentionally designed.

Kate T.:
Yeah, yeah.

Kate C.:
To go back to those words that I believe we said in the introduction, the key things to teach anything online well are: presence, guidance and navigation. And I think maybe many of you may be very familiar with presence.

Kate C.:
It's an ubiquitous idea in teaching and learning. And navigation and guidance—I think also mean what you think they mean. But we also, I think, kind of excitingly, are adding maybe a bit more fulsomeness to those two things. So, Kate, I know you've been working on presence in our shared document. Do you want to start there?

Presence

Kate T.:
Yeah, let's start there. And I think, like you said, this is probably something that anybody who's been doing any online teaching is, hopefully, aware of. But the idea is: in-person you don't have to do very much to have presence because you are literally present. They can see and hear you and you're interacting with them, in person. So that's why it's not something that you have to consider in-person. It just happens naturally.

Kate C.:
All of those physical cues are so important.

Kate T.:
But if you've ever taken an online course, sometimes you can, you know, you get dumped into this online course space and there's stuff there, there's content. It might even be really well-organized. It might be clear, like how you're supposed to navigate through it and what you're supposed to do first and when you're supposed to do this stuff. But you can have an online course that feels like there's no instructor present. And that might be fine for some, like, MOOCs or whatever, but for a university course, it's not what we want. There needs to be some interaction between the instructor and the students, and the students need to feel the presence of the instructor.

And so we're working on sort of fleshing this idea out, like what are the different ways that you can be present in your online course, and what sort of specific things can you implement in your online course to ensure that? So, we could go into detail about those three things, but essentially, like, is it clear that you're there? Are you making announcements periodically? Are you contacting students other ways via email? Do you have office hours? Are you responding on the discussion board to the discussions that they're making? Are they getting your feedback quickly and efficiently when they submit work? Is there a sense of your unique personality traits and interest in the course? Do they know who you are, and not just like your research interests or academic interests, but you as a person and as a real human who they could connect with, socially.

Kate C.:
Yeah. Great synopses. I don’t need to add anything there.

Kate T.:
The reason that I feel like this is so important is because it really makes a difference in the class. And, of course, if it doesn't have this feeling of online presence from the instructor the students aren't going to learn very much from it. They're going to they're going to drop off and not complete, or they just have no way of interacting with the instructor, or one another, to really make sure that they're understanding and grasping concepts. So the learning that occurs is going to be fairly superficial. If you don't have this kind of presence really well built into your course.

Kate C.:
Such good points. And I want to emphasize that, because, you know, presence isn't just kind of like a nice add on, like, oh, the learning will happen anyway. For me, presence is like the actual, key foundation upon which learning is possible. Yeah, presence and interaction. And you know, I find that in my, in my own experience, like just being able to connect with someone, an instructor, knowing where they came from, or knowing what they're interested in, or seeing the love that they exude for their topic, or even disinterest or hatred. Sometimes maybe there's a topic they don't like; it’s actually quite catalyzing [for] a student, because you're like: “Oh, this person's interested in this. I wonder why?”; Or, I see some emotion around this topic and I can kind of tap into my own, you know what I mean? It's just super key to being engaged in the content. But in my mind, as a foundation, as the diving board to learning. Not just as a nice thing to have.

Kate T.:
I think you're totally right. So, the injecting of your personality and your uniqueness into the course is going to be engaging for students. It captures their attention and it also makes them feel comfortable to reach out when they need support about something and then kind of as well. If you want more than a superficial level of understanding, students are going to have to do active learning, and engage with the content, and apply and evaluate and all those higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy instead of just reading and then regurgitating facts, right?

And so if you want that to happen in an online course, you have to be interacting and engaging with the students in order for it to happen. I don't know of another way to do it. Another reason or another sort of piece of evidence that shows how important presence is the fact that, like our jobs as instructors still exist, even though we have all these amazing online technologies for teaching and learning. At some point you need [presence] in order to get what you need to get from a course, right?

Guidance

Kate C.:
Next is, I think, guidance. And this, I think is where our metaphor, our terraforming metaphor comes from in the strongest sense. So what we mean by guidance is all the ways that students need to be both presented with a model of behavior and also presented with the values and the priorities of the course in really explicit ways so that they that they have a real sense of a world. You eluded to this, Kate, when you said a few minutes ago, that when you plug in for the first time, you go to course, you sort of you enter into a flat place. It's sort of a flat, alien world. Nothing's happened yet. Even if there's stuff there, there isn't a person to indicate what's important, and what's maybe the less important, or where the center of activity is going to be. And it's rather a void that you kind of have to fill.

Kate T.:
Yeah.

Kate C.:
In terms of guidance, what we mean by that is guidance in the creation, and in the active being of a community of learners. So that means behavioral norms, maybe even intellectual norms, discussive norms: how does one behave in this new world?

And what are the rules of this world, right? Or the rules of engagement? Because students, as we know, there are 1,000,001 ways to behave on the Internet. Plus, all of your other teachers who might be teaching online have their own norms and procedures that they expect you to follow. You need to guide students into this ethical world of the class.

Kate T.:
Something that I think about when I think of guidance to is an example from some concept like I had of one faculty member that I consulted with a lot through the pandemic who had always taught online for her entire career. Yeah, sorry, taught in person for her entire career. And she was transitioning to online and it was very difficult. But through our consultations I remember her saying to me at the end, like, I've become a better teacher overall because of these consultations, because with respect to guidance, particularly, what I'm thinking of right now is she had written assignments for students that she wanted them to do, and in her mind, she knew exactly the criteria that she had for what she wanted. She would verbalize [in-person] those to students, and that had been enough. According to best practices, you would have assignment instructions written down and you would have a rubric that you would hand out to students. But for her purposes, it had it had been fine.

Kate C.:
This the potency of the physicality. Students could get a clear idea and because they could ask questions for clarification, she could talk about it in numerous classes.

Kate C.:
Over and over. Yeah. So yeah, it's potent.

Kate T.:
But when we were setting up her Dropbox for assignments online, there's this description box and I'm like, “well, this is where you would put what they need to do”. And, she's like, “Well, what do you mean?” And so I started asking all these questions, like, how long is this assignment going to be? What is it that you need them to do and when is it due? Can they submit it early to give feedback from you? And just other tips that she had never even thought of; like, I suggested, putting a maximum page limit, so that she doesn't get, you know, 25 books to read.

Kate C.:
How had she been delivering that information before your advice?

Kate T.:
Just verbally. And I think she would say what it is that she thought was important. And then I assume either students would ask for clarification and they would ask the questions that she hadn't answered in her initial description. She was doing synchronous sessions, so if, if I hadn't given this sort of direction, she probably would have just used the synchronous session as like the proxy for the lecture. And therefore she would do everything that she would have done in a lecture in the synchronous session anyway. So yeah, she said, “you know, my assignments were much better this year because the students had a better idea of what it is that [I] was looking for.” And so the initial ones that they submitted were of higher quality and the students were much more well supported.

So, there’s some room for thinking about guidance in in-person classes as well, but in the online world, it's even more important. And if you're not guiding students properly with these signposts that tell them what they should do and when and how, they're either going to not know and fail to complete the stuff that they need to complete,

therefore, failing at achieving the objectives of the course. Or, you're going to get, like, 7 million emails, which is not good either.

Kate C.:
What’s fun is that we're, we're going to you're using this rubric genre to kind of think through this or we're coming up with like indicators of what guidance might look like. That's everything from setting an asynchronous discussion protocol; to really leading through the assignments, like, in multiple ways. Maybe you do a video and a written instruction, right? Like, that's even better. Yeah, because, again, like, the virtual worlds are flat until you create that architecture.

Navigation

Kate C.:
Kind of social sense and the cognitive sense and then and then maybe moving into our third category, in this kind of spatial-geographical sense, maybe as a metaphor. You’re sort of landing on Mars, you're terraforming your online space, and you’ve built some stuff up: giving students a map through all that. And so when we use the term navigation—so we've covered presence, guidance, and now to navigation. What we mean by that… probably what maybe comes to mind [are] accessibility issues; the links work; and the content is laid out in a “logical” (I'm using air quotes by the way, listeners). It always hangs me up with these rubrics because this word “logical” is so interesting to me, because, logic relative to what?

Kate T.:
Something that I have noticed is that when you are designing something online, what you think is logical is going to be very different than a person who shows up there after you've created it. Because you know everything that already exists and you know why you created stuff and where you put it. So, it makes sense to you because that's where you would put it, but not everybody would would do that. Right?

Kate C.:
Right, exactly. Yeah. So it's all about that. So, you know, [navigation] you know, logic and like navigating through the content of the course, and like week to week, etc., etc,. But also what we're thinking, it also includes those navigational directives through, like, the pacing even of the course; using the environment to actually represent those higher priorities.

Maybe something has to go on the home page in a widget because it's actually like a, it's a constantly referenced thing and it's super important to the course, so don't put it in a content module because again, it’s going to reflect an emphasis of the course, that isn't going to be apparent, because you can't stand there, waving your arms about, and raising your eyebrows and, maybe, using a different tone that conveys so much in the physical classroom.

Kate C.:
So navigating through the place, through the course structure.

Kate T.:
You know something that's just came to mind, though, you said, “Put it in a widget here, instead of buried.” And the first thing that came to mind was like, in addition to that, because repetition is a huge thing. I remember consulting with some faculty members who were like, “Where do I put this?” And I was like, you need to put this everywhere.

Kate C.:
Yeah.

Kate T.:
And there's this, there's this idea that redundancy is something you should avoid. My perspective is that sometimes, for certain things, you are going to need it to be at least linked. Like you don't want it to live in multiple places necessarily, but you've got a widget on the home page that shows, you can click on that, it takes you to the syllabus, and that is located in a “logical” place in the orientation folder in your content area, and that's where the syllabus lives. And then you might link to the syllabus as well in the assignment instructions to refer to it for the grading scheme, or something like that.

Designing the user experience of that. Knowing when students, or where, students might look, putting yourself in the student's shoes and thinking about where they might look.

Kate C.:
Redundancy is not a bad thing. The other thing I was thinking about too, that we haven't explicitly talked about, but what comes to mind is, especially as more and more instructors move towards more small, formative assessments, or maybe scaffold assessments: communicating the stages and signposts of those things in the online space can be… if you just leave that to maybe one announcement and one instructional piece and like, I don't know that that's enough. So it kind of like this, navigation, that again, has to become much more explicit in the online space because we just lack a lot of those cues outside of the physical world. Yeah, you know, you know, giving those signs and signs and signals like, okay, this is what happens at stage one, this is where you turn it in; this is what we're looking forward to next week. This is what you do now.

Kate T.:
Putting things into context so that there's a way to see the big picture and there's a way to zoom in. And moving in between those things is really seamless, too. I'm thinking of like course concept maps and things like that.

Kate C.:
Yeah, I wish to see more of those.

Kate T.:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is related to what we're talking about, but I think the course concept maps are a really cool activity, like a class activity. But also I also think that it's a great idea to just put it in your syllabus.

Kate C.:
Absolutely. Yeah. Having those multiple, you know, a syllabus is a bit of a map. You know, Brightspace is a bit of a map. An actual site map. Remember site maps, back in the day? Some web pages might actually have a site map.

Kate T.:
What’s on this web page? How do I get there?

Kate C.:
Terraforming.

Kate T.:
Yeah. The one thing I wrote down can I just. Can I tell you like I was sort of like trying to… speaking of the big picture, that's kind of what I wrote down my little network. And so, you know, we have navigation, guidance and presence, and just my overall internal sense… let me what you think of my internal definition and understanding of these things to simplify it.

Kate T.:
Navigation. Good navigation means it's clear what is there on the website, and where to find it. Guidance is that, what's there is easy to understand and it's clear, and the journey through the course is clear. And then presence is that the instructor is a big part of what is there.

Kate C.:
The instructor is…almost acts as a key. They're kind of like the portal. They're almost a portal through the, you know, through which to experience the course, in some ways. That's a little hard to explain, but that's actually kind of what it feels like.

Kate T.:
Well, I think that that's always true. And then some of this other stuff that we're talking about is the fact that, in the online environment, the way that you would guide students has to be different because you can't do it in the way that you would naturally do it. And so, we have to like offload some of that guidance in these design choices that we have to make. And we're just not used to doing that because they come naturally to us just from having grown up and lived in-person.

Kate C.:
I like these succinct statements for each of these.

Kate T.:
What's here? How do I get around? The stuff that's here is easy to understand and consume and the instructor is a big part of what's there and there's.

Kate T.:
Hmm. Yeah. So, I think that's a good description of what we've been thinking.

Kate C.:
I think that sums it up nicely.

Conclusion

Kate C.:
Our next like, like I said, this is sort of thinking in mid-air and kind of our next steps. We're just going to keep talking about this. We, hopefully, will have a podcast email soon specifically for the podcast. So, you know, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Kate T.:
That's right. Yeah.

Post-credits musings: On verbal stumbles