Wired Ivy

In Episode 40, “globetrotters.edu,” Sandy Strick and Karen Edwards at the University of South Carolina, described how they created virtual study abroad trips for their Hospitality and Marketing students.   Initially, they needed an alternative when the pandemic stopped international travel, but they discovered they had created a valuable format to use for learners who couldn’t travel for myriad reasons.

They got Dan thinking about his own work in global education,  so he challenged himself to rethink his approach and to design a virtual trip as an integral component of the complete global experience. 

At the end of Episode 40, Dan offered to report on the results, and now this episode is his chance to make good on that promise and tell us what he learned this summer.

By now, practically everyone who has a connection to academia has heard that the traditional audience for higher education is headed for a demographic cliff. In response, colleges and universities are exploring ways to attract an older audience of degree completers and life-long learners to bridge the gap. But who counts as an adult learner, and how do we retain them once we have their attention?

School isn’t the central hub of a non-traditional student’s life; rather, school is one of many spokes on a very full wheel.  To attract and retain this audience of students requires a willingness to stop expecting that, once admitted and formally welcomed, they will adjust to meet the campus status quo.  True inclusiveness means designing and delivering courses, programs, and services that fit into their lives, instead of expecting them to rearrange their lives and schedules to fit the rhythms of a campus they may never visit.

But how do we tailor educational offerings so they are not one-size-fits-all?

It’s especially appropriate that we’re taking a deeper dive into the topic of virtual field experiences on this Wired Ivy Footnotes episode because as I’m speaking, early in May 2022, Dan is in Europe having just completed a study abroad experience with a group of our students in Finland and Estonia, and he’s just started to working with a second group of students in Switzerland and Italy.  

As he mentioned in the previous episode, which featured his interview with Karen Edwards and Sandy Strick of University of South Carolina, and Tori Ellenberger of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, Dan was so anxious to use some of their ideas for virtual study abroad content that he re-wrote his pre-departure lessons immediately following that conversation. 

He’ll report on how that new approach landed with students, and whether he was able to observe any immediate benefits compared to previous trips he’s lead, in an upcoming Summer Shorts episode. But before Dan left, he and I made some time to discuss what we see as a few potential long-term opportunities and benefits that could result from continuing to blur the line between in-person and virtual experiential learning.

As the world reopens, in fits and starts, higher ed is attempting to speed away from the pandemic as quickly as possible. But the end of the academic year is now on the horizon and, for academics, that means it’s time for an assessment.  A glance in the rear-view mirror, a review of the virtual content and activities created to address a specific, limited-term situation, and consider whether some of those tools might be more durable than intended.

Such is the experience of today’s guests. Faced with university travel bans and course rosters full of students who were counting on study abroad programming and credit hours, Karen Edwards and Sandy Strick of the University of South Carolina, and Tori Ellenberger of Australia’s Deakin University, shifted gears from globetrotting to web surfing with barely a tap on the clutch pedal.  

In the process, they discovered a fleet of readily available digital resources that addressed their immediate needs, allowing students to meet the same personal, cultural, academic, and professional learning outcomes established for in-person educational travel. 

But wait, there’s more!  The resulting instructional strategies will be used to augment upcoming board-a-physical-airplane excursions, a new intentionally virtual study abroad course has been approved at University of South Carolina to be offered each summer going forward, and Wired Ivy’s own Dan Marcucci has revised his approach to leading global study after hearing Tori, Sandy, and Karen describe their experiences and insights. 

Trust us, you’ll want to take notes!

Educators who are engaged in online teaching are, at some point, going to hear the words "quality matters."  At first mentioned, this seems self-evident. As educators, we understand that the quality of our course design content and delivery is important for learners to have a productive and hopefully optimal learning experience. No one would argue with that. 

But that is small case quality matters; the myriad initiatives we take upon ourselves to continuously improve outcomes.  There's also capital letter Quality Matters™, which is often abbreviated to the trademarked QM™. This Quality Matters™ refers to a very specific certification process for online and hybrid courses. 

In this Wired Ivy Office Hours explainer, Dan takes listeners through some of the history, ambitions, and critiques of this standard rubric for online course design.

It’s time for Wired Ivy Office Hours!  A quick but deep dive into an online higher ed term or concept to cultivate effective communication and weed out confusion. 

Prior to 2014, academic institutions in couldn’t legally give non-resident students access to their online courses without going through a costly and lengthy case-by-case approval process for their classes and degree programs, and negotiating reciprocity agreements with the states their prospective students called home. 

That's how a non-profit organization known as NC-SARA got its start, as you'll learn in this quick explainer episode! 

Listeners who’ve followed Wired Ivy for a while now will know Dan and Kieran are firm believers that course design needs to begin with the learning objectives, regardless of academic level and mode of delivery.  And yet, when we listened to the previous episode, Made to Measure, we couldn't help but notice it doesn't include any guidance on how to develop those all-important learning objectives.  This Footnotes is a first installment in that long-overdue conversation.

High-stakes academic assessments create conditions that motivate students to cheat.  At the same time everyone wants a laudable level of academic integrity in higher learning.  Fair or not, for many years there has been a dismissive accusation that online learning was particularly vulnerable to massive cheating.  Then, when universities made the wholesale emergency pivot from in-person to virtual classrooms in March 2020, there was a corresponding and predictable uptick in anxiety over how to prevent cheating when the instructor wasn’t even in the same physical location as the learners. 

This all conveniently ignores the fact that ensuring academic integrity has been a perennial goal and challenge in all forms of education, regardless of the mode of delivery.

Test proctoring software and plagiarism checkers are offered as high-tech solutions to what has been framed as a problem created by technology.  We will set aside, for the moment, legitimate apprehensions raised by these software solutions – collection of bio-metric data, spyware and privacy, promoting a surveillance culture, malware vulnerabilities, to name but a few. 

The important point is this focus on technology is a distraction from the underlying problem.  High-tech fixes only encourage an arms race where  students improve their methods, and educators increase their policing tactics.  It doesn’t mitigate the reason for cheating – we included in the show notes links to research about this. 

But academic integrity shouldn’t begin with Crime and Punishment, it should start with Sense and Sensibility.   What if, rather than trying to win an academic integrity skirmish, we make assessment activities that promote the original learning objectives? 

A popular perception, especially in the Age of Covid, is that online instruction consists solely of delivering lectures via Zoom to a Hollywood Squares screen of boxed faces and, therefore, doesn’t allow for personal connections to form between instructor and instructed or between learners.  

Tell that to students who have taken online classes from Wired Ivy co-host Dan Marcucci!  As Dan explained in Episode 23 - Anatomy of a Lesson, the virtual classroom is an excellent venue for fostering a dynamic, engaged community of learners… as long as you’re willing to apply a little creativity to your concept of a lesson. 

In Episode 30 - Ocean Onliners, our guest Elizabeth Sanli offered perspectives from both sides of the virtual podium – she teaches online courses for Memorial University - Newfoundland and Labrador's University and she's currently an online student, pursuing a Bachelor of Education to go along with her PhD in Kinesiology. Returning to class as a student has raised Elizabeth's awareness of the ways in which instructor expectations may not align with learner preparedness, and she offered an idea for how to address this.