In this episode, Phil Hill, Jeanette Wiseman, and Kevin Kelly discuss value of getting student input while making plans for Fall 2020. But that’s not always simple to do, or at least common to do. The discussion built on some of the concepts in in this blog post.

Hosts:

* Phil Hill* Jeanette Wiseman* Kevin Kelly

Transcription:

Phil: Welcome,

everyone, to another episode of MindWires COVID Transitions. I’m here with

Janette Wisemen and Kevin Kelly and looking forward to our conversation today.

What we mentioned in our last podcast that we wanted to

explore in more detail is getting more of the student perspective.

Kevin, you mentioned this in your recent blog post talking

about that COVID-19 recovery and planning must include student perspective. And

if you don’t mind me quoting you to you. You made a good point saying “to

increase student success with the planning, we have to include students in the

conversation. Right now, for the most part, we talk about students without

talking to them.”

I think that’s a really important point that we’d like to go

through today, is that whole challenge and experience and ideas about getting

student input.

In particular, because there’s been a really significant

shift over the past week or two where most focus is now on what’s going to

happen in the fall. Colleges and universities have big decisions to make and

they’re making it worth partial information. And this is a key theme of your

posts were saying, well, as you do that, you need to understand what the

student perspective is.

Kevin, it might be worthwhile if you could just describe a

little bit more of what motivated you to write the post and how you see this

challenge, including what we’re not doing so far and what we need to do more of

on getting student perspective.

Kevin: Well, what

motivated me to write the post? I teach a class called How to Learn with your

mobile device. It’s the flip side of the coin where my day job I teach faculty

how to teach online my night job grading papers related to how students are

learning with their mobile devices. And the student voice has always been

important to me throughout my career. So what’s interesting is the consistency

with the comments my own students made at the bottom of the blog post you

referenced with some of the quantitative data from surveys that are out there

in the sphere that have recently been produced and publicized. There are some

themes out there that we can touch on throughout today’s conversation that are

consistent in both areas.

Phil: But before

we get into those themes, I guess I want to first acknowledge or deal with what

I believe we’re saying, which is we’re not doing a good job of of talking with

students, getting their input and more of that perspective.

So part of the question is why is it so difficult to get

student perspective?

I mean, one of the most obvious issues is the numbers that

you have far more students than you have faculty.

But there are also other challenges, I think that we have

any time we’re trying to get student perspective and this is not just a matter

of COVID-19 planning.