Webinar: Bridging Equity and Engagement Gaps in the Virtual Classroom

West a branch campus of howard university and tim lee co-founder and chief learning officer at CodePath.org before we get started I’d like to highlight the question and answer feature which you should see at the bottom of your screen if you’d like to ask any questions during the session please feel free as we go along and if we don’t answer your question as the conversation unfolds then we will have a 15-minute dedicated q a at the end of today’s discussion so I’d like to start today by talking about some of the challenges that remote learning presents we know that there are instructors with limited experience being asked to teach classes remotely and a lot of concern about what the full semester might look like health concerns quality concerns a whole range of concerns so I would like to ask each of you quickly to summarize what are you most worried about for the full semester and what do you think isn’t getting enough attention in the planning for the fall semester and I would like to ask dr williams to kick us off if you don’t mind jessica thank you yeah absolutely it’s so great to be here today I think one thing that I’m worried about that I feel like may not be getting enough attention currently is just the deep pervasive damage that has been have that’s happened to our students mental health as a result of both the coronavirus crisis the movements against police brutality on the economic crisis the health crisis and there was a recent study done by the global strategy group that found that 77 of our students nationwide are very concerned about staying on track this semester and those numbers are even higher for our black and brown students and we also know that nearly three-fourths of our students also reported that they are going into the fall semester with elevated stress levels our students are really stressed out and they have concerns about developing depression and anxiety and mental health issues and that these concerns are greater greater for our students that have that come from non-english speaking homes and also students of color that are at two-year institutions and latinx women so I think it’s important that we take this emotional socio-emotional factor into consideration as we plan to engage our students through remote learning in the fall and that’s actually something that I haven’t heard a lot of conversation around as institutions begin to plan thank you jessica becky would you like to take that question yeah thank you so I follow with what jessica said and as the nation’s first and on first fully online non-profit state institution worried greatly that people’s perception about remote or online learning is formed by their one experience not in fact that there are a multitude of ways to be learning online and to be engaged online so that their experience of what they’re getting will forever shape how they think that online education and the delivery through technology will be and in fact there is just all sorts of pathways and I think that learners need to find their own certainly k-12 it’s a little harder but as we’re adults to find the environment that best suits them because one online is not just one way thank you becky again would you like to take that what are you concerned about for the full yeah I mean I see two two major things I’ll kind of flip it we we’re gonna talk a little bit about how we’re impacting students but I’m gonna flip it and talk about the faculty you know so you know everything now is being scheduled online virtually and you know I don’t know if people are considering the impact of the screen time on students and even on faculty themselves the fatigue that that that that will be generated from this you know so I know right now when I look at my calendar it’s just locked in I mean I just it’s just a full calendar which normally I would not have as a regular faculty member I used to be a former chair and my calendar used to be stacked and I knew how to deal with that but I think for an average faculty member they don’t know how to do it with that where their whole day is scheduled you know so many of these many of the interactions that you have with your students with the faculty they could be done you know in a hallway conversation or at the you know at the copy machine or the copy room or you know in the hallway or something like that you know and and these are not happy now they’re all scheduled and so I don’t know if people are thinking about the the impact of the you know the screen time that the faculty have to go through but also the students themselves as well you and tim any thoughts yeah at CodePath yo so we run in person and remote courses already and we definitely see there of course there’s advantages to in-person that really have disappeared for the remote so we’ve been designing and testing this summer kind of ways to replace the peer community element of learning so when you’re thinking about designing a classroom experience you know you’re thinking about you know when you come into a classroom there’s that little time before class that you can chitchat with your students they chat with each other there’s that time afterwards there’s a very natural ecosystem that people are familiar with where they form study groups where they go hit up the student common at 3am and those kind of dynamics are gone and so as dr williams was saying you know especially in this time of greater need for emotional and other types of support you know that particular piece of support is is is gone we found that students in our summer program said that it was much more of a transactional experience rather than a holistic experience that a classroom normally is so excuse me so we’ve been kind of prototyping a lot of interesting things related to kind of reforming and redesigning that pure community aspect on the topic of supporting students we know that a lot of students are really facing a very stressful time not just because of the pandemic but a lot of discussion around racial violence the black lives matter movement obviously making huge waves which is great I’m very glad that that’s happening and in some cases overdue this discussion but I’m wondering how we can support students who are trying to learn during this very difficult time period and I wondered dr williams if you could maybe talk about some ways in which we can support students who are going through a really stressful time yeah of course I think that one thing that you know we have to do is really to acknowledge and respond to the difficult topics that come up and I think they come up in another many different ways sometimes things are happening in in the media sometimes times things are happening you know in real time but also I think that course content can bring up feelings and thoughts for people and I think that the classroom is really almost a perfect place to acknowledge some of these challenges head-on and these difficult topics head-on creatives for conversation and responses and allowing students to share some of their lived experiences and also taking that a step further and really connecting those lived experiences and those feelings and those thoughts to course content and making that course content more relevant and allowing it to resonate with students even more so I think that we need to really you know bring that that those difficult issues and those difficult topics into the classroom more and try to use those as fodder to support the curriculum that we’re teaching thank you anyone else have ideas on how we can support students and I guess I’m wondering there are some professors who might feel like it’s awkward to bring up difficult topics or it’s not really directly relevant to the curriculum so I’m curious if you think we should definitely start that discussion even if it doesn’t seem relevant to the class in hand I saw a hand there becky would you like to take that oh actually I was going to talk about what we’ve learned working for early virtual we’ve always been that the last 12 years that we so it’s a great question and I I’ve got to believe that lagaan will want to answer that one your question but to your first question really it’s about understand high touch like they have to have responsiveness we have a 24 hour turnaround time 72 hours in grading that they have to know that somebody’s on the other line and when they are virtual right they don’t know if somebody’s really there helping them going to be there to help and so when they reach out we know we have to get back to them and 24 hours honestly feels like a really long time for most of them we do our best to do that within the same day but understanding that you cannot over communicate when people are virtual because they need to know that you’re there and that you understand what they are dealing with and so it’s not I understand the feeling of being in a transactional environment but you really have to read their emails or listen to their voicemails or read their text and try to understand where they’re at and then be able to provide an appropriate response and try to move them to a solution of whatever’s bothering them around their mind so that because you’re not physically together doesn’t mean you’re not communicating because you really are you’re having to make sure that it’s on a regular basis and that you’re reaching out and also we’re finding with this high stress environment that jessica talks about flexibility and having the instructors understand where they have flexibility to not follow policy or or to follow policy as it is but that there are shades of gray and how we can manage that and making sure that the team all of our staff understand how to help students that are stressed out and need some support navigating that instructor contact and communication regarding their late or they’ve had something come up and trying to help negotiate that so that students can self-advocate and that’s what we find being fully virtual and then of course now in times of stress I think that communication point is really important I’ve seen a lot of student surveys from the spring that said students just didn’t feel as connected as they normally would to their instructors if they’ve switched from face to face to remote learning especially so that’s a really great point did anyone else want to mention support strategies helping students through this time ligand yeah yeah I would probably add to that you know one of the things you want you know as a faculty you might want to build solidarity and some feeling of connection to the students let students know that you know this class may not have been taught online it may be a face-to-face class and we’re transitioning to a new delivery method so let everybody know that you know you’re open to feedback and how we can improve the course we’re all learning we’re all in this together and then you know just being able to ask about the well-being of each of the students at the beginning of class is encouraging students to connect with each other during the class but also be accessible as a faculty member as much as you can and be able to you know direct them to the appropriate resources so be familiar with your institutional policies and protocols for for for these resources that that are available in students to students so they have you know issues that that come up and I agree with what the jessica was saying about bringing you know the a discussion about you know the crisis about what’s going on and maybe try to figure out how you can incorporate that into some of the activities and work that that you’re providing to students there was a question in the chat about how you know if students are struggling and again you mentioned you know asking talking to students is there a way that you prefer to do that to find out what’s going on with your students so you know so they you know so you should be open to having office hours but don’t just limit it to them to try to connect to you I think you should reach out and so one of the things that we were doing at the at howard west with our google relationship called tech exchange we we were monitoring you know we were monitoring the the work you know that students were doing and before they got into a situation we would reach out and try to intervene find out what the issues were what you know that were happening and try to you know try to help them resolve those issues get them back on track and so I think we have to make a considerate effort when we move into this online you know based on the crisis we have to be mindful of that and and put more energy and effort into that as a faculty member thank you and tim did you want to say anything about supporting students right now in this very stressful time completely agree with dr burst especially in a remote environment so we’ve all many of us in the attendees are teachers and we’re accustomed to building relationships in the classroom I will say going to remote this is your first time doing it it’s very very different the same tricks that you use don’t work so what we do as well that we found is it often has to be teacher initiated especially through digital channels so we’ll have teachers message students through slack which some that we wouldn’t normally do but we found that when a teacher opens a channel multiple times then the student will start to come back versus like not showing up to an office hours it’s not good enough to leave the door open basically you have to you have to bridge the connection on your side yeah another thing I’d like to share is just tactically what we did for the teachers out there that I thought was super cool I would do even when we go back to live but to kind of create that peer community we did an experiment where you know for these thousand students we group them into groups of three and they were their pod for the entire summer for 12 weeks we did crazy things that we never would have done we played jack box together we did icebreakers together all the things that you have to do to start to kind of scaffold and allow pure relationships to form so it may feel off topic I felt weird doing playing jack box with my students you know but luckily we have the tas and the tas tend to inject a lot of kind of like more age-appropriate creativity and so that was an amazing format and to dr burger’s point about keeping your finger on the pulse that’s one way we did it because the pods kind of stayed together they actually did their their projects together they would be on zoom in their we gave them each individual zooms they would stay on the zoom for three hours at a time working on their problem sets or their projects we had to get them used to that kind of dynamic we had tas rotating through each kind of working pod so it was it really allowed us to be a lot more responsive as as as students were struggling where we could we could quickly identify and intervene three weeks later is far too late you really want to hit it that same week that they’re struggling and like dr becky was saying kind of flexing policy or giving additional support or whatever it is that you need to do yeah can I say one last oh sorry go ahead no no I I was going to find some comments so there someone wrote that there is a disconnect between the faculty who have taught you know traditional versus online and I agree with that you know there’s a saying that you know you teach how you were taught and so I think we can learn a lot from k-12 we need to look at the pedagogical practices that they’ve been doing to engage students and we need to incorporate incorporate them into higher ed and and and this and because we’re online we need to do it we need to be mindful and proactive in doing these things like exit tickets when you you know when people in the course before they dismantle we can get a pulse of where everybody is before they leave so we know how when we connect the next time how we can intervene and remediate whatever issues that may be coming up and I just wanted to add for instructors because I my email and phone numbers in our student portal so students can call or email and text me anytime and what I find where I have to get involved with a student and a faculty member if the faculty member picks up the phone to call a student who seems to lee in distress or is upset about something it defuses that situation and I know the younger generations don’t like talking on the phone but where they’re upset and where that instructor can encourage them to get on the phone and they can have a real connection and talk in real time wow then it would just solve a whole host of other issues that happen when suddenly I have an email chain and I’ve got 10 emails back and forth wow that’s really crazy and it’s not solving the student’s problem or concern and it’s making the faculty member more upset it just escalates so I just encourage instructors and faculty professors where you have an upset student or if there’s something that seems to be awry if you pick up the phone and call or send an email and say please call me it would really help that student emotionally and academically usually to get back on track thanks jessica and lindsay I think that personal communication is really important because you can feel like you’re a number if you’re in a huge online class right you might miss that personal connection with your instructor following up from that there was a question about engaging with large online classes so hundreds of students and potentially one class does anyone have any tips about engaging with large numbers of students and how you manage that without it becoming overwhelming for the faculty so back in the day with moocs we actually took that and broke them into small sections so I don’t have something to really offer in terms of managing 100 or 200 students that’s interesting because you would do that if you were in a physical classroom right because you can run it people can go up after class and ask questions less likely that that’s going to happen in a huge 200 person online class and so what we ended up doing is putting them into sections and then having facilitators and instructors that were working with each one of the small groups inside of the larger class yeah so so I would agree with that I think breakout sessions you know that’s a great tool for allowing me to do that facilitators in each of the breakout sessions could be teaching the student teaching assistant excuse me or even the near peer mentors that could be in those particular settings to kind of facilitate the discussions and help with feedback if that’s not if you’re not able to do that if you don’t have those type of resources then as a professor or faculty member you can actually you know migrate from one breakout to another breakout and spend time in each one of them before bringing everybody back to the back to the you know the central classroom this summer we had we had 700 students in a zoom session and the the way that we manage that was one we shortened everything lecture wise to 30 minutes max 45 minutes then we did we heavily utilized I’m sure you all are familiar with the feature the zoom breakout room feature where we had those pre-assigned groups so you kind of push a button you can put everyone in random groups hey meet anybody group of three group of five group of six whatever you want you can also pre-assign groups which we utilized so we would have everyone and kind of pre-assign groups consistently so it feels you don’t really feel like you’re in a 700 class you feel like you’re in a six person class and that was kind of our modality and the thing that I think was and this is mostly for higher ed I think I know there’s folks here in k12 as well but for higher ed we did something I think we we do again which is we spent an inordinate amount of effort recruiting industry professionals so for each of the breakout rooms you know we had 150 industry professionals who committed to coming each week and spending two hours with the students so they were able to kind of they were instructed to kind of proc make sure that everyone in the breakout room is talking all the cameras are on you know which is which is something that you kind of have to like it’s going to be off by default it’s very hard to get them turn on their cameras and then lean into kind of the discussion so they were we had kind of a proctor for each one so again a tremendous amount of effort to recruit this number of industry volunteers but there’s only several hundred thousand cs students in higher ed you know and there’s millions and millions and millions of engineers and I don’t know about other communities but as you all know the tech community is very active in volunteering volunteerism so it was it was some work but not a crazy amount of work to recruit then I think there’s a dialogue with you all I’d be very curious about like because the problem interesting questions became well how do you select almost not how do you recruit it how do you select down how do you train you know because there’s a lot of you can’t there’s a lot of you know training required for good good mentorship as well yeah and the only other thing that I’ll add that wasn’t mentioned I think these are all great suggestions and particularly that peer-to-peer mentoring I think you know we have to leverage that but I think and this is more less about the course content but more about supporting the student more holistically is remembering that particularly for some of our students of color and low-income students it’s really important for them to have community and that’s one thing that they’re reporting regularly that’s being lost when they are at home alone I’m taking these courses and so I think whenever the opportunity is available to try especially for like first year students who are you know this is really their first experience bringing in get a family allowing for opportunities for family support systems also be educated so that if that student is running into technical issues or you know trouble that you know maybe mom or maybe grandma or maybe brother could also say hey remember you can reach out to this tutoring center or remember there was you know your faculty your teacher said you could call like have you emailed yet you know and so when we empower the communities around our students to also have information that they can give our students and that’s also very helpful because research has also shown that you know when students are struggling they’re most they’re getting most of their advice and support from family not from thank faculty jessica I’d like to ask us to talk about some of the benefits of remote learning and perhaps some of the things that are positive that we could take from remote learning online education when instructors go back to face and face face-to-face instruction which hopefully will happen soon maybe in the spring maybe the summer next year if the fall doesn’t work out too well I would like to start with becky would you mind telling us perhaps some things that you think face-to-face instructors could learn and take from online education and incorporate it into their classes and something beneficial that’s a great question what we are finding particularly with the younger generations is the customized learning pathways so that they have the tools and are empowered to identify which assignment they want to do that speaks to them they have choice and they can create and pick the tools that help them learn they all get to the same learning outcomes but we allow them to create customized learning pathways through the technology which could also still of course be done in to face but it’s thinking about how can you offer students the area of choice because everything now they get to customize they customize their tennis shoes they decide they’re eating only green or red m m’s that is the way that we are seeing consumers move and our students are looking for the same sort of opportunities and so as we come off of this online fully remote learning as you are learning to use that technology to create these options and choices you’ll see that the students move into them and so the second part of that is data we are always looking at the data on what students are interested in what where are they just disconnecting we know that they go into a module and try one activity and are gone right so we know that that’s not a probably a good one but we are always looking at that data and so this tracking of behavior so that you can understand what’s engaging and what’s meaningful to the students and what’s working for the instructors and as they’re getting to the learning outcomes right so to for what instructors are looking at is are we actually getting to those learning outcomes and all that data tracking is really helpful in that and so that collection and analysis will help everyone students be better instructors be better schools and higher education institutions be better at what they’re doing to engage to really make sure that students are achieving the learning outcomes and are able to demonstrate that so those would be the things that we hope that they would take from where we are today thank you lagan would you like to add anything any positives from teaching online that you would take into face and face instruction yeah yeah I think I I I’m probably one of the one one faculty member that does a lot of things it tries tries a lot of different things but I think those that are just strictly face-to-face you may want to consider now trying to flip your classroom and what you could do is you could you know provide reading or viewing of lectures you know at you know to the students at their own pace at their own time and then provide them with some type of description of a deliverable for the next class so that when you meet in class the class becomes more of a dialogue a discussion between the faculty members students students between students and you’re reflecting on your you know on on the the outcome or the output of that deliverable and so you put emphasis more on the inquiry of you know in terms of the learning experience the other thing is you can require students to actually give feedback to each other so when they’re listening to other you know others report out you know based on that deliverable other students are giving them feedback as well so everybody’s engaged and so that’s one of the things that I did that I’m doing currently but I think it makes sense to do this also in in the face-to-face world another thing is to go back with becky was talking about personalized learning you know the building the ability to allow students to master concepts to be able to do things at their own pace and to try to achieve specific competencies I think you know you know these are some of the things that I’ve learned that are that they’ve been working very great very good in this scenario that we could apply as well in the face-to-face mode thank you jessica is there anything you’d like to add any things that you would like traditional instructors to take away from the remote learning experience yeah one other thing I’d add to the personalized learning is the ability for remediation within the course I think which is very unique because you know that all of our students are learning at different rates and they you know they have different knowledge gaps and so to be able to meet those in real time as you’re developing your course is is really helpful I think another thing that I would like for us to one thing that I’m encouraged by is the fact that now that we have an opportunity to move courses online it really is causing a lot of our faculty to you know from an equity perspective face you know the fact that one all of our students don’t have all the same access to space time and resources right and we’re having to deal with that in real time and we see that through you know issues arising around access to technology and other things like that and so I think it’s it’s been really helpful for faculty to begin to redesign and rethink their courses you know with that in mind and that’s not something that we always have traditionally had to think about and so I think that I would like you know us to continue to carry that back when we when we transition back to face face you know that acknowledgement that you know we’re not all in the same playing field even though we’re all sitting in the same classroom all students are showing up with different amount of time different amount of access to technology and so we need to design courses with that in mind for sure thank you did you have any thoughts on on things we could take away from online online learning into face-to-face instruction yeah I think one of the things that you know there’s all these amazing instructors across america but it’s very hard for instructors to share best practices it’s very expensive to convene it’s very difficult to shadow you know other instructors courses and so I think remote represents a really interesting opportunity because as dr burge was saying right like because he’s very experimental with this format and flipped classroom is not that controversial you know a lot of people believe in football flipped classroom but it’s hard to make that leap you know you don’t want to experiment on your students you don’t want to mess well you don’t you want to experiment but you don’t want to mess up the experiment you don’t want to have like a thinker semester and they’re like oh my goodness you know that that wasn’t a good outcome and so with the with with so many of us trying to figure this out online there’s also an amazing collaboration opportunity because I can drop into a howard class because it’s all it’s online anyway you know I can see how dr burge is executing that flip model our classes are running every tuesday saturday right now you know this summer we’re still we’re still in session so any of you all can you know drop in and see how we’re executing that breakout room system that I was talking about with with the mentors would they have their mentor training cheat sheet that they’re prepped with and then the instructor has their kickoff and and so on so I think that’s a really cool aspect that I hope we take forward you know I talked to professors and they’re they’re I’m asking how much are you working they’re like 60 hours a week and I’m like 60 hours a week what are you doing oh I’m I’m creating all this curriculum I’m like we’ve all created that curriculum before you know so a lot of reinvention of the wheel in k12 and higher ed we do it too because it’s hard to it’s hard to make do that convenient collaboration process but I think it’s uniquely interesting now now I can hop in and observe any of my sites going on which I think is really cool I think that idea of collaboration is really interesting and something that online learning kind of uniquely facilitates because an expert can drop into your class you know very easily so I think that’s a really interesting idea and I’m wondering if any of you have seen increased collaboration between institutions or you know if if you think there’s an opportunity for course sharing as you mentioned there’s a lot of duplication of effort especially in these lower level courses you know why aren’t we sharing more yeah yeah so I’m I first hand I’ve I’ve experienced an increased collaboration with not only industry but also non-profit so we we actually partnered up with CodePath as well so we we have integrated them into our curriculum in various courses but we’ve also integrated again with the industry so I actually had practitioners coming into my classroom either as instructors co-instructors project facilitators guest speakers mock they do mock interviews mentors to students you name it and you know because we’re constantly trying to solve this alignment between you know what academic academia is teaching students you know which is more knowledge-based than what the industry needs which is more competency skills you know where they actually take this knowledge and they can actually apply it within the context and so I you know so I fully have embraced it I’ve seen more companies reaching out to to try to partner I think also that as tim was saying there’s a lot of content that is already out there I think amongst the historically black college community we are starting to come together more and develop a repository with content and curriculum that we can all share to sustain our institutions as we’re going through this crisis yeah so that’s really interesting thank you becky have you had institutions reaching out to you as an expert in online learning and someone that’s developed a lot of online courses already is there a way that you can work with other institutions yeah we actually do and in fact the department of ed has a transient student status so it allows us to work with other institutions to provide courses online that they need that have been vetted by their faculty and then they can enroll the student so the student stays with their home institution we provide the education and it just seamlessly transfers back into the student’s record because we’ve done that at the administrative and instructor level so we are continuing to find pathways to doing that and have those type of agreements with all sorts of institutions and happy to add them in where that makes sense for those institutions and those instructors that oversee their courses we do it for dual enrollment for high schools so k12 we have some great partnerships in that and what I love about that is we are the online and we have the credentialed faculty but we do it in a way where their the instructors or their teachers that they know are part of this process so if it’s on ground then they’re able to be in the classroom and the kids are on the computers and we have our master instructors so that the teacher in the classroom is getting some exposure and has a relationship with the professor that is the online part of the global of csu global and what we’re doing but then it has a relationship with the kids because we want to make sure that they’re getting the best experience possible so they get the best of both worlds and we’re able to help support and provide dual credit for those k-12 schools and districts and then doing the same thing at the collegiate level which is where can we help and what course do you need and yes we have that does this do these learning outcomes meet your needs and yeah we’d be happy to pro teach that and then send it back so we have those kind of pathways created and seeing a lot more of it of course not during covid jessica I know that you’re from a network of is it 12 years older institutions do you think I’ve seen some interesting collaborations come out absolutely so yeah two network partners come to mind who have really interesting services that have really grown during this pandemic one is the virtual virtual mentoring circles through educause that allow for faculty to come together across you know the nation around a specific subject matter and have guided conversations together and that’s been just really interesting and helpful for a lot of faculty and then another service is the loop network which is offered through itsy formerly ed serge that allows for one-on-one connections between faculty regular one-on-one connections similar to what would happen maybe at a conference right like you may just kind of run into someone and spark up a conversation and the next thing you know you know you’re sharing resources it kind of fosters that same kind of somewhat random but conversation one-on-one with the with someone who’s in your field who’s a peer and allows you to start networking and building your network in that way and so I think that you know a lot of us are missing the opportunities that we would normally have to maybe go to conferences or see each other face to face and so we’re having to rely on these you know virtual mentoring virtual networking tools and platforms to create those same type of relationships and maintain them thank you I have heard anecdotally that a lot of companies are not doing internships this year because of financial challenges but right before we started this discussion I know that becky and tim were talking about virtual internships and the progress that’s been made there and I’m wondering if each of you could talk about how you can prepare students for a pretty challenging environment where unemployment’s pretty high and connecting them to employers what ways can instructors do that right now you want to take it tim first I love tim’s program by the way so I can’t wait for you all to hear what he has to share you want me to go ahead and go so csu global does because we’re fully online and our students are in every u.s state and territory in 60 countries we have to have some sort of opportunity and our mission being workplace success through higher education requires us to make sure that they are work ready and able to function well within a their job so they can move up or keep a job or be able to actually secure that job so we have been working from the beginning with apprenticeships and internships and we do them virtually so we will partner with a student’s current employer maybe they’re in marketing they want to go to accounting so we will arrange that and work with the instructors so that the instructor can oversee what’s going on and that the learning outcomes are being met through an internship or an apprenticeship and we are now also have paid apprenticeships for students that are looking to secure a career in instructional design multimedia and we have partners for that and and I know tim’s got things in coding so we are making it work and students are coming out with pay and and then jobs at the end once they’re finished with our certificate programs now and courses and degrees in many ways our our playbook hasn’t changed it has been affected of course we all have been affected by I think 30 of our students had their internships rescinded this past summer of our students I think that’s been a pretty stable stat in the tech universe as we’re making the rounds to prep for next summer there certainly are companies that are pausing their internship programs for now either either temporarily or potentially you know you know definitely depending on what happens but there are still a lot in tech right because CodePath is tech focused we are fortunate there are a lot of companies still hiring and still running internships and virtual internships so it’s the same playbook that we teach them and we enable them with it but it’s a little more elbow grease so we just prep them for the little bit of extra effort that will be required you know we’ve all weathered recessions here before I mean we’ve here in the dot dot boom crash that was pretty that was pretty terrible time for me to graduate the 2008 period we’ll weather this one too so we just prepare students for that mindset that you do probably need to double the number of outreach that you’re doing we teach them how to manage their search process like a sales process so it does require a little bit more top of final work and I think when we were talking before the panel began so much of our world in a decade has gone through we all use technology in every industry right and so to be able to have virtual apprenticeships internships it’s really not that foreign simply because we’re all using technology tools doing work maybe at our desks physically but yet we are then communicating and working virtually with teams even when we were just working before covet happened so I think that the world has shifted and it is going to take employers a little bit to figure out how they create apprenticeship internship programs that they’ve always done face-to-face in a physical environment and put them online but with the tech tools today that we’re all using every day it just makes that process really easy it’s just rethinking almost like what lagaan was saying regarding you know you just don’t take a class that you were teaching face-to-face and just throw it up online and it’s it you do have to think through how is that experience going to work and how am I going to still get to the outcomes even if it’s the same class same thing with these apprenticeships so it’s it’s getting those employers to think a little differently but the tools now are so technology driven for work for the workplace that it really will facilitate that process so I’m really excited about the future and for students that maybe can’t get to a physical location to learn to be an accountant or in a marketing or to do coding that they can do it from their homes or their workplace and learn the skills necessary so they can move into the next job thank you before we get to the q a I’d like to ask you to touch again on the idea of experimentation and we talked a little bit about flipped learning there was a question about using oer open educational resources I’d be curious what you all think instructors should be could be experimenting with right now and you know how you ex whoops we lost you oh we lost you I’m sorry can you hear me now yes okay great sorry about that I wanted you to ask you about experimentation and how we experiment responsibly whether that’s introducing something like flipped learning or open educational resources how you experiment well and responsibly can’t can I yeah that’s kind of interesting so one of the things especially in this in in in the situation that we’re in now you have to you know realize that you may not be able to cover all of the content that you would normally cover in a face-to-face scenario that’s that’s one thing so the other thing is I think you know when you’re trying something new you have to get some feedback and you have to try to close the loop the faster you can close the loop I think the students will have a great experience they’ll learn and then you can recover and you know take those things and translate them across many of your classes so being able to close that loop and and then when you find out that something didn’t work you still have to get those students to meet those objectives you know the learning outcomes or whatever and so you and so that may that may mean that you know you’re you’re going to spend a little bit more time on a specific topic because okay maybe this experiment didn’t work what we’re doing doing it using the flip model maybe I do need to give a lecture or maybe maybe I need to have some some some in-person type of interaction there so so yeah I think that’s that’s what you have to consider I just like to add to that I think you know the high flex model which is really you know kind of the buzz right now I think it’s a good example of that right because you know on the one hand it’s it’s a great idea to allow your students to kind of choose the modality that they want to learn in and choose versus asynchronous but you’re also challenged to create all of these different learning tracks that are all equal and that don’t put any of your students at a disadvantage you know and that’s that’s actually really hard to do and so I I think you know just kind of continuing what you’re saying that you know you’re right like there has to be some type of feedback loop that you have to continuously check and that model is one that you know would certainly lend itself to to needing that so that some you know even inadvertently you know putting students at a disadvantage while trying something new and then to add on to both what they said it’s tracking that data we are always watching to see what is happening in every section every course where students are disconnecting where they’re achieving outcomes whether or not and how do we bridge that gap or is that not working and then we immediately get that course fixed or or updated in a way that will work so that we can see that line of achievement so the data component in watching the data can help with this whole idea of experimentation I get that it’s scary and you certainly never want to put a student at risk and so by watching what’s going on in small small sizes small classes and few students and in understanding are they successful and how do they do we went we now offer a master’s program it’s a six-week program we’ve always done eight and it’s a masters of organizational leadership and it’s a little different format because it’s senior more senior leaders and looking and we we ran a pilot we did that and it was at our expense but we wanted to make sure that the learning outcome achievement was the same for this different this new format to what our standard eight-week course format has always been you know were we at or better and so the data watching is absolutely crucial when we’re experimenting and when we have this luxury of being fully online and remote and using technology because technology tracks all that I think another thing we we did in our partnership at howard west with google we we did a lot of postmortems and so we as faculty got together weekly and talked about issues things that we’re trying to experiment in class how they work how that didn’t work we were constantly again collecting data looking at the data and then you know tweaking how we would move forward so I think you know incorporating that postmortem at a weekly level also at the end of the semester you know being able to look back and then reflect and make changes where it needed you know thank you I’d like to remind everyone if you have a question now is the time to ask you can do that at the q a feature at the bottom of the screen I hear a lot of questions about synchronous versus asynchronous which one’s better should I be doing both and there was a question about that and I’d love to ask each of you what you think the best balance is jessica baby would you take that one that’s tricky I because I think there are advantages to both I think you know if you are looking at it from an equity perspective you may see a asynchronous if you’re looking at it from an engagement perspective which is just as important you may say synchronous you know I think there there’s a lot of research that show that both both ways have its advantages and disadvantages and so I think that you know you really have to kind of do what works best for your students I mean I think I’ll you know have to I’m interested to hear what legan and becky have to say here but I think from my experience and what I’m hearing in the field you know I think there’s a strong push for asynchronous like I said when you’re thinking about access issues of access at issues of equity issues of respecting the fact that students have work schedules and have lives and but I think the challenge that keeps coming up with that is it’s really hard to keep students engaged and you know that that’s an entire another set of set of issues that we’re really struggling with lack of student engagement is the number one issue for faculty we’ve seen that it heard that again and again and again and it’s also the number one issue for students so I think it’s it’s it’s difficult to find a balance there yeah again I would agree with the jessica that I mean I think it’s you have to kind of gauge your students you know figure out what works what works for your scenario you know and this is where you have to incorporate the feedback you know and do some postmortems I agree asynchronous is is obviously definitely more accessible but there’s many ways to do it there’s many ways to engage people asynchronously through technology through discussion boards and group me’s and all kind of ways that students are connected to these days that you can keep that you know engagement you know there you know so I think it’s just it’s just it’s really a case-by-case basis to be honest with you and following up with what gun said about the asynchronous so sasha global’s always been asynchronous and it’s about the type of student and what you’re doing and because our mission is working with modern non-traditional mostly adults although we have first-time first-year freshmen and we’re doing very well with them but because of who we serve made sense to do asynchronous now we serve freshmen we know that they like having live classes so now we’re doing both so they the instructors will do short to jessica’s point you can’t make this long so these are 7-10 minute clips and so they’re doing short sessions with them and then we store them in the classroom so that those that couldn’t get there maybe they’re working or have other activities during the day so they can go in in an asynchronous way and get caught up on what happened they can see what’s going on in the chat the questions that are answered and get filled in but for those students that really want to be live in time with an instructor they have those periods of time to be able to do that and so that’s how we are solving that but up until really the last couple years we’ve always been fully asynchronous online and when you look at our data for first to third term it’s almost double the national industry standard for non-traditional learners and then our completion rates of degrees is almost double as well and it’s fully asynchronous generally until just recently so we are trying to meet the needs of the younger generation and we get it so that instructors thankfully are willing to do that work for us and it’s been I think really connect helps with connection in a virtual world and so we will always keep learning and working and looking at our data and our student survey feedback after every course to understand what is it that they really need and some subjects need more support than others as well there were a couple of questions about engagement and a faculty member here said that he has virtual office hours but people aren’t turning up and I wonder if any of you have tips on how to encourage students to attend these things that you’re offering and you know show up yeah we have the same issue we now that’s why we have this 24-hour turnaround on contact because students don’t just show up at a given time they all want it to be when they need it or you know their busy lives I get it so it really is how responsive can we be when they need it because when they need support they want it done one of the things that we’ve done and I think tim you mentioned this which was open office hours where their zoom video is up and they’re doing work and when somebody comes in to ask them questions or whatever they’re there so almost like open office hours but virtually and so that has some level of success but what we find to be the most helpful for students where they get the most value is when they ask for help that somebody immediately gets back to them certainly within 24 hours and same day if possible that’s what we find in our environment yeah like for us like we’ve seen the same thing that everyone else has seen which is office hours typically see five percent utilization if it’s offered in the normal way so what we do is well we’ve done a couple of things related to that so one is we survey for student topics and we always do optional topics in office hours so it’s kind of student-driven conversations about xyz and so we’ll send the survey ahead of time we’ll you’ll get to get a pulse for what the interest is and then we’ll say okay cool in office hours we’re gonna I’m gonna talk about like this topic during this time it will also review the homework the second thing which might be unpleasant for educators is there’s a reality for higher ed and maybe everyone that the time that they’re working on the homework is very close to right before it’s due so it you know you want you don’t want to train for that you’re like but if you want to just predict human nature whatever you set the deadline of the assignment to an hour before is when they’re going to work on it and if that’s when you position your office hours and say also this is also when I’m going to review the homework you know I did electrical engineering at university of texas at austin and well I went to office hours because the ta went up there and literally did the problem you know so I don’t know how you all feel about that from an integrity point of view but that’s how that’s how we all showed up to the office hours because we knew the ta would be reviewing the the project so those two strategies for kind of engagement thank you I think we have time for maybe one or two more questions there was a question about engage helping students in low-income areas with access to technology internet access a couple of you have mentioned keeping video short the advantage of that being not just for attention but also if you’re downloading that video that it’ll be easier to download it short or maybe just audio so any suggestions on helping students that might struggle to get access to laptops or internet access yeah that’s I you know I know I know at howard university where make you know we’re partnering up and we’ve I think we receive funding you know under the circle you know some some of the covet funds whatever to to purchase licenses and then also equipment for students in need that may have accessibility issues and equipment needs from that standpoint I don’t know you know I think you know being able to refer a student to to resources locally wherever they are staying I think you know obviously that would be great but it’s you know is that scalable and doable you know I don’t know if it’s scalable to be keeping track of that but you may recommend that they may seek out maybe some local resources to to help them with getting you know access you know and equipment so forth jessica did you have any thoughts on that how we yeah I think this comes up a lot when we talk about assessing learning which is just a huge challenge I think right now in the field right like how do you assess and I don’t even just mean you know test taking but just how do you assess that a student actually has learned especially when they have google and you know they have they have everything right at their fingertips and so I think that you know one one way that instructors may want to begin to think differently is you know getting really creative about how they are assessing their students and how their students can relay what they’ve learned back to the professor and maybe doing so in ways that aren’t real that aren’t reliant on technology you know might might be something to consider thank you so much when we started working out there’s a question about accessibility or asset assessing both okay yeah one of the things I just want to mention one of the things that we’ve incorporated is we do interviews you know even before you know we use industry partners to help us do this but even before that you know one thing we would do to make sure that students actually mastered that that content would have them do mandatory we call it exit interview and and we could pretty much know okay they they they’ve retained everything all right we are pretty much a time so just to close I would like everyone to share a resource that they have found useful during this time whether that’s something that helps you with online learning techniques whether it’s something about race and the black lives matter movement something that you’ve found useful and that you would recommend to others and becky would you mind sharing sure I highly recommend the book grit by angela duckworth for all of you instructors teachers I teach as well never ever give up on a student because it talks about with all the data on the research that has been done so it’s this great synopsis of that in this book about you could be really smart you can have a high iq and still not be successful so it is that grit factor to success and that people can overcome anything and learn just about anything and be really good at it yeah like anne would you like to share anything yeah I just want to plug a black learners matter movement so there’s a there’s actually a webinar coming up in about two hours east coast time and they’re going to talk about more of this but they’re also going to give a list of resources that you may find helpful in this again it’s a black learner’s matter yeah so I posted the link there thank you jessica yeah so shameless plug for my network but we just recently put out a playbook entitled delivering high quality instruction and online in response to covet 19. It’s a faculty-focused playbook and the goal is to help faculty improve course design and teaching and learning in an online environment with the focus on equity it’s targeted for faculty or student aligned for the first time and the link is in the chat but you can also find it on our website at everylearnereverywhere.org thank you and tim yeah so again for those instructors who are teaching online for the first time I think you’re going to find that it’s so difficult to collect connect to your classroom compared to when you were teaching in person I love slido as a tool you know slido gives you a way to understand real time if you if a student asks a question if other students are interested in that same thing so it takes a little bit of training to get your class to use it but once you do it’s it’s you know I think there’s nothing better the teacher wants to do than kind of understand the pulse of the majority of the class not just the kind of active student so that’s my that’s my favorite kind of tool for that thank you so much I think we need to end it there thank you to all of the panelists for joining us and hopefully everyone watching took something away whether it’s an idea or a tip or a trick and I wish you all luck for the full semester thank you very much thanks lindsay thank you