Dublin Core
Title
Shelley Rose - Audio Reflection
Creator
Shelley Rose
Date
5/7/2020
Rights
Format
mp3
Language
English
Sound Item Type Metadata
Transcription
My name is Shelly Rose. I'm an Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State University and I'm the Director of the Social Studies Program.
Which category best describes me?
Category One: I was able to transition to remote learning with little or no help.
Question 1. What are the most challenging parts of the transition?
The most challenging parts of the transition were actually the fact that I was asked to make an estimate of how long it would take to transition my face-to-face courses to completely remote learning. And this was a few weeks before the pandemic measures were taken. We were told to stay home and to transition all learning to online. And with the vision, that I would have a couple of eight-hour workdays to transition my courses without interruptions, I conservatively estimated that it would take me about a week to transition two courses and my advising load to online platforms.
What I didn't anticipate is that when the call came to do so, my five-year-old was home with me as well, doing her kindergarten homeschooling. And that caused enough of a disruption to my original estimate, that it took longer than I expected. And so that new normal, really kind of threw me off in terms of my own understanding of the task at hand, and how much time it would take me.
Another challenging part of the transition, was recognizing and responding to the student stress, my own stress, and their apprehensions about learning new technologies, not just in my course, but across their course schedules. And I tried to take this into consideration when choosing course tools. We remained in many of the platforms we were already using, like Blackboard and Google Drive and I added Microsoft Teams, partly because I already knew how to use it. As an instructor, I’ve used it in many of my courses. In fact, a lot of the students in my courses this semester had already become familiar with Teams in a larger survey course with me. And so, I felt that it would be a useful platform for us all, and lessen the learning curve for many students.
Another challenge was actually transitioning the care work, and kind of the human face of our teaching into remote learning. I mean, how do you replace discussing just about anything? Chatting with the students before class? Finding out how their day is going? Understanding some of the struggles that they have outside of the classroom?
That's hard to replicate in an online platform. And so, one of the things that I ended up doing, to kind of tune-in to how students were facing challenges at home and whatnot, was to ask various questions as kind of an extra bonus point in our online discussions, in our synchronous discussions, and also for students who are participating asynchronously. I would ask them how they were staying productive? How are they managing their time?
I'm teaching Introduction to Geography this semester, and so I've tied a lot of my extra questions to the changing geography of our everyday life, and students describing how they've transitioned their hobbies to be in to this new situation of less mobility. How students describe setting up their work spaces and things like that.
Question 2. What are the most common needs expressed by my students?
As I said, one of the most common needs was first to make sure that they were able to set up their workspaces, that they had internet access at home, that they had some kind of device for our coursework. And since we're doing a lot of writing this meant making sure they had something to write essays on, that might be different than a smartphone, because that's generally a pretty hard platform device to compose five to ten-page papers.
A lot of students actually reached out early on to ask me for time management help, and we tackled this request in two ways. My graduate assistant is amazing and one of the things that she did was, she started setting up a curated channel on our Team site for students to have articles, and tips, and tricks about time management. And she, you know because Teams is interactive, were able to interact with students and they could add their own suggestions, as well.
Another thing that we did, is we investigated and researched time management tools that CSU already subscribes to. One of them is Microsoft Planner. Since we were using Teams already, we integrated the planner app from the Engage 365 suite that we have. And this was great because it integrates with Teams, it uploads to their Outlook calendars, it helps students to keep on track and set their notifications rate. They can choose how often it reminded them to do assignments. But they can also get the satisfaction of the to-do list and checking off assignments as they finished them, which was one of the things that they expressed concerns about and enjoyed.
The final thing that I did was, basically meet students where they were. We were in Blackboard. We were on Google Drive prior to the pandemic. We adopted Microsoft Teams. But one of the things that I've done was to make sure that I have a certain amount of redundancy across the platforms. If an announcement goes up on Teams, it goes up on the Google site and it goes up on Blackboard, too. It's there in all the different places. And Blackboard emails the students, therefore providing reminders.
I've set up a weekly, week-at-a-glance overview of all our assignments and discussions for each course. Doing that for the students, I found that it has reduced their questions. It seems, when we talk face-to-face or one-on-one, I should say on Teams and in Teams Chat, that it's also reducing their anxiety a little bit about completing the course requirements.
Question 3. What new teaching techniques or tools has the switch to remote teaching prompted you to try?
So, the switch to remote teaching actually prompted me to go back to a tool that I was really familiar with, that I had used in a larger survey course, Modern World History to teach the reacting to the past curriculum, earlier this year and a couple of years ago. And so, Teams was a natural choice for me. It's a good place for teaching and advising.
Another thing that I ended up doing is, learning a lot about Panopto and video lecture capture. Not necessarily to recreate my hour-long lectures every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but to create 5 to 10 mini-tutorials, or lectures, or overviews. To help ground students in the curated material that I had gathered, for their digital content. And so, not necessarily recreating the wheel, but realizing that the transition to online learning required more explicit scaffolding of assignments, especially thinking about writing.
In upper-level history courses, most of our courses are writing across the curriculum courses. And how do you scaffold writing? Well if face-to-face, you talk a lot about thesis statements, you talk a lot about the techniques of writing, the experience of writing, in class.
When we're online, it turns out that having planning assignments, having students have checkpoints, really helps you remain in contact with the students throughout the writing process, making it less solitary. They can talk to each other on Teams, for example, in a live discussion and that way when they write their thesis statement, you give them feedback. When they turn in a bibliography, you can give them feedback. When they turn in a rough draft, you can also intervene to make sure that they're on track. And so, this is one of the things that I really thought critically about as I switched my classes to remote learning.
Question 4. What new insights have I gained about teaching in general?
In general, it's a little soon to say. We're three to four weeks into teaching remotely and one of the things that I know really made an impression on me, is actually that the students’ rhythm of work has changed. It used to be that we have a lot of students working full-time, they’re working on campus, they’re involved in sports. I had a lot of quizzes. I had a lot of assignment due dates that tended to be on Mondays or early in the week because students had time to work over the weekend. In this situation, lots of students are working from home and a lot of students have strange, or additional work schedules depending on what their jobs were before or after, the pandemic.
And so, one of the things that I did was to open the window for submission of assignments, from Mondays and having them due at the end of the day, to opening the assignments and having them due on Wednesdays at the end of the day. So, if they wanted to maintain that rhythm of work on the weekends, they could. If their rhythm of work had changed, it gave them a little more leeway, to get the assignments or the quiz or whatever it might be, in later or in the middle of the week.
Question 5. How might this experience change your teaching when you return to the classroom?
This experience has affirmed a lot of things that I thought I needed to be doing in my classroom. I create a lot of open educational resources for my students in general, even for face-to-face classes. Originally, I did this to reduce textbook costs. But also, when we teach in an online setting, when our library is closed due to the pandemic for example, we really need to curate and create materials that can be digitized and available to students, without having physical access to books. And so, curate and create materials is where I am at right now.
I'm already thinking ahead, to keeping open educational resources in all online delivery. And that's not to say that we're going to keep all these courses online indefinitely. But it's easier to then take that digital material, and use it in a face-to-face course, than it is to plan a course for face-to-face, and then transition to completely remote learning.
If you were already thinking about having open access materials, then you know the restrictions of not having physical access to books and textbooks for example, won't be as big of a problem when you make the switch.
Thanks for this opportunity to be interviewed.
Which category best describes me?
Category One: I was able to transition to remote learning with little or no help.
Question 1. What are the most challenging parts of the transition?
The most challenging parts of the transition were actually the fact that I was asked to make an estimate of how long it would take to transition my face-to-face courses to completely remote learning. And this was a few weeks before the pandemic measures were taken. We were told to stay home and to transition all learning to online. And with the vision, that I would have a couple of eight-hour workdays to transition my courses without interruptions, I conservatively estimated that it would take me about a week to transition two courses and my advising load to online platforms.
What I didn't anticipate is that when the call came to do so, my five-year-old was home with me as well, doing her kindergarten homeschooling. And that caused enough of a disruption to my original estimate, that it took longer than I expected. And so that new normal, really kind of threw me off in terms of my own understanding of the task at hand, and how much time it would take me.
Another challenging part of the transition, was recognizing and responding to the student stress, my own stress, and their apprehensions about learning new technologies, not just in my course, but across their course schedules. And I tried to take this into consideration when choosing course tools. We remained in many of the platforms we were already using, like Blackboard and Google Drive and I added Microsoft Teams, partly because I already knew how to use it. As an instructor, I’ve used it in many of my courses. In fact, a lot of the students in my courses this semester had already become familiar with Teams in a larger survey course with me. And so, I felt that it would be a useful platform for us all, and lessen the learning curve for many students.
Another challenge was actually transitioning the care work, and kind of the human face of our teaching into remote learning. I mean, how do you replace discussing just about anything? Chatting with the students before class? Finding out how their day is going? Understanding some of the struggles that they have outside of the classroom?
That's hard to replicate in an online platform. And so, one of the things that I ended up doing, to kind of tune-in to how students were facing challenges at home and whatnot, was to ask various questions as kind of an extra bonus point in our online discussions, in our synchronous discussions, and also for students who are participating asynchronously. I would ask them how they were staying productive? How are they managing their time?
I'm teaching Introduction to Geography this semester, and so I've tied a lot of my extra questions to the changing geography of our everyday life, and students describing how they've transitioned their hobbies to be in to this new situation of less mobility. How students describe setting up their work spaces and things like that.
Question 2. What are the most common needs expressed by my students?
As I said, one of the most common needs was first to make sure that they were able to set up their workspaces, that they had internet access at home, that they had some kind of device for our coursework. And since we're doing a lot of writing this meant making sure they had something to write essays on, that might be different than a smartphone, because that's generally a pretty hard platform device to compose five to ten-page papers.
A lot of students actually reached out early on to ask me for time management help, and we tackled this request in two ways. My graduate assistant is amazing and one of the things that she did was, she started setting up a curated channel on our Team site for students to have articles, and tips, and tricks about time management. And she, you know because Teams is interactive, were able to interact with students and they could add their own suggestions, as well.
Another thing that we did, is we investigated and researched time management tools that CSU already subscribes to. One of them is Microsoft Planner. Since we were using Teams already, we integrated the planner app from the Engage 365 suite that we have. And this was great because it integrates with Teams, it uploads to their Outlook calendars, it helps students to keep on track and set their notifications rate. They can choose how often it reminded them to do assignments. But they can also get the satisfaction of the to-do list and checking off assignments as they finished them, which was one of the things that they expressed concerns about and enjoyed.
The final thing that I did was, basically meet students where they were. We were in Blackboard. We were on Google Drive prior to the pandemic. We adopted Microsoft Teams. But one of the things that I've done was to make sure that I have a certain amount of redundancy across the platforms. If an announcement goes up on Teams, it goes up on the Google site and it goes up on Blackboard, too. It's there in all the different places. And Blackboard emails the students, therefore providing reminders.
I've set up a weekly, week-at-a-glance overview of all our assignments and discussions for each course. Doing that for the students, I found that it has reduced their questions. It seems, when we talk face-to-face or one-on-one, I should say on Teams and in Teams Chat, that it's also reducing their anxiety a little bit about completing the course requirements.
Question 3. What new teaching techniques or tools has the switch to remote teaching prompted you to try?
So, the switch to remote teaching actually prompted me to go back to a tool that I was really familiar with, that I had used in a larger survey course, Modern World History to teach the reacting to the past curriculum, earlier this year and a couple of years ago. And so, Teams was a natural choice for me. It's a good place for teaching and advising.
Another thing that I ended up doing is, learning a lot about Panopto and video lecture capture. Not necessarily to recreate my hour-long lectures every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but to create 5 to 10 mini-tutorials, or lectures, or overviews. To help ground students in the curated material that I had gathered, for their digital content. And so, not necessarily recreating the wheel, but realizing that the transition to online learning required more explicit scaffolding of assignments, especially thinking about writing.
In upper-level history courses, most of our courses are writing across the curriculum courses. And how do you scaffold writing? Well if face-to-face, you talk a lot about thesis statements, you talk a lot about the techniques of writing, the experience of writing, in class.
When we're online, it turns out that having planning assignments, having students have checkpoints, really helps you remain in contact with the students throughout the writing process, making it less solitary. They can talk to each other on Teams, for example, in a live discussion and that way when they write their thesis statement, you give them feedback. When they turn in a bibliography, you can give them feedback. When they turn in a rough draft, you can also intervene to make sure that they're on track. And so, this is one of the things that I really thought critically about as I switched my classes to remote learning.
Question 4. What new insights have I gained about teaching in general?
In general, it's a little soon to say. We're three to four weeks into teaching remotely and one of the things that I know really made an impression on me, is actually that the students’ rhythm of work has changed. It used to be that we have a lot of students working full-time, they’re working on campus, they’re involved in sports. I had a lot of quizzes. I had a lot of assignment due dates that tended to be on Mondays or early in the week because students had time to work over the weekend. In this situation, lots of students are working from home and a lot of students have strange, or additional work schedules depending on what their jobs were before or after, the pandemic.
And so, one of the things that I did was to open the window for submission of assignments, from Mondays and having them due at the end of the day, to opening the assignments and having them due on Wednesdays at the end of the day. So, if they wanted to maintain that rhythm of work on the weekends, they could. If their rhythm of work had changed, it gave them a little more leeway, to get the assignments or the quiz or whatever it might be, in later or in the middle of the week.
Question 5. How might this experience change your teaching when you return to the classroom?
This experience has affirmed a lot of things that I thought I needed to be doing in my classroom. I create a lot of open educational resources for my students in general, even for face-to-face classes. Originally, I did this to reduce textbook costs. But also, when we teach in an online setting, when our library is closed due to the pandemic for example, we really need to curate and create materials that can be digitized and available to students, without having physical access to books. And so, curate and create materials is where I am at right now.
I'm already thinking ahead, to keeping open educational resources in all online delivery. And that's not to say that we're going to keep all these courses online indefinitely. But it's easier to then take that digital material, and use it in a face-to-face course, than it is to plan a course for face-to-face, and then transition to completely remote learning.
If you were already thinking about having open access materials, then you know the restrictions of not having physical access to books and textbooks for example, won't be as big of a problem when you make the switch.
Thanks for this opportunity to be interviewed.
Original Format
Audio recording
Duration
10 minutes, 36 seconds