Wired Ivy

It’s summertime, and the living is… well, easier than last year, at least.  With the start of a new academic year on the horizon, a mere two months and change away, we decided this is the perfect season for an episode that begins to explore the choreography of moving from learning objectives to lessons to assignments that will resonate with an online audience.  

And since our very own Dan Marcucci consistently garners standing ovations from students for his innovative approach to online course design and delivery, I convinced him to sit for an interview with me about his creative process.  

It’s one thing to encourage faculty to stretch out and take full advantage of the virtual classroom, and another thing entirely to actually waltz on the walls, cha-cha on the ceiling, and boogie in the balcony.  So Dan’s going to help us trip the light fantastic.  In no time at all you’ll be dancing like everyone is watching their smartphone!

But before you buckle up your tap shoes, please take a moment to share your online teaching stories with us. Leave a voice message at speakpipe.com/wiredivyor by sending an email to [email protected].

One would have to assume that if ever there were academic subjects, and student audiences, that lend themselves to at least a flipped classroom approach to teaching, that list would have to include mathematics and computer science.  After all, math and computer science provide the infrastructure that make virtual classrooms feasible.  And yet, as we learned during a lively conversation with  Gunes Ercal of Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville and Stacey Levine of Duquesne University, both of whom teach these subjects, the pivot to online hasn’t always led to a slam dunk. 

As higher learning moved into the Fall 2020 academic term, it became clear the Covid-19 pandemic would continue to impact all professors, whether they were seasoned veterans or newly minted. Educators who had honed classroom techniques over decades had no choice but to adapt to new techniques and technology at the start of the school year, even those in disciplines with highly specialized learning environments — the creative writing workshop, for example. 

One experienced classroom professor whom we followed over the year was Liza Wieland of East Carolina University, who not only shared details of her own online experience after decades of teaching creative writing in a physical classroom, but also offered her perspective as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Development. 

Kieran and Dan first sat down with Liza in September 2020 to learn about Liza's classroom experiences — online and in-person — to that point. Then we dove deep into adjusting to synchronous Zoom classes, student Internet access issues, and making the best of available technology to serve ECU students from a distance. We also got a picture of how the pandemic impacted the other faculty in Liza's college.

As you’ll hear, the job got done but it wasn’t always sunshine and flowers. 

In keeping with a tradition started in Season One, Dan spoke with a panel of alums from programs featured in some of our Fall 2020 episodes  -- North Carolina A&T’s Online Master of Science in Agricultural Education from Episode 17, Growth Edge; Virginia Tech’s Online Master of Natural Resources from Episode 15, Field & Screen, and the Online Program in Digital Content Strategy at University of Kansas, from Episode 14, Role Rehearsal. 

As educators, we try to create a learning environment that is inspiring, efficient, and above all meets a course’s stated learning objectives.  Online learning is, by its very nature, conducive to innovative techniques. But, as with any creative endeavor, there will be hits and misses. So… how are we doing? What can we do to make learning outcomes even better? 

Following Dan’s conversation with our guests, I’ll join him for a debrief and a preview of Season Three’s topics.

Look past the equipment in an academic wet lab classroom -- pipettes, test tubes and flasks, microscopes, DNA sequencer, gel and blot imaging station -- and what’s left? When the University of California system moved to all-remote instruction, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, UC Irvine Associate Teaching Professor Pavan Kadandale had to ask himself that very question. 

Pavan shifted the focus of his upper-level undergraduate molecular biology lab away from development of hands-on skills Instead, he asked students to design laboratory experiments based on the computational techniques that have become such an important component of modern biology research. 

Pavan has strong ties to his institution’s first-gen student programs, and his research centers on how to get students excited about Biology and improve learning outcomes, so equity and inclusion were top-of-mind as he set out to design an online lab course. His take on re-calibrating the standard approach to biology laboratory experiences is a breath of fresh air, and we found his ambition to live up to his students’ expectations inspiring. We’re betting you will, too.

Artists are trained to look, to examine the world from different perspectives, to notice the smallest detail and appreciate the big picture. Maybe that’s why sculptor, installation artist, and Professor of Art and Design, Rebecca Hutchinson, saw that it was entirely possible to teach studio arts, including ceramics, in a virtual classroom… and to recognize this opportunity for expanding her learner audience a decade before a global pandemic demanded higher ed faculty see online instruction through a different lens. 

Rebecca teaches using a collage of instructional formats and technologies that allow her to connect with learners, and facilitates their connection to each other.  By combining asynchronous communication and sharing, real-time activities to build observation and resourcefulness skills, virtual co-working periods for project development, and one-on-one weekly mentoring sessions, students in Rebecca’s class may be geographically distributed but they’re not creating in isolation.

Our guest this week, Chastity Warren-English of North Carolina A&T State University, is uniquely qualified to cultivate an online graduate program. That’s partly due to her training in agricultural education, a career she chose early in life. Shortly after the germination of her own graduate studies, she was chosen for an internship that helped her to blossom as an online instructor. 

Ag Ed has historically been an early adopters of educational technologies, including virtual instruction in its many forms. Online learning is particularly well-suited to an Ag Ed audience at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Drawing on her own experiences as a student, and a teacher, Chastity is always looking for new ways to meet her students’ needs while also encouraging them to suggest solutions to the obstacles they face as adult learners juggling family responsibilities, the demands of travel-dependent jobs, financial hurdles, equipment limitations, and spotty access to broadband. It’s this talent for collaborative problem solving, and nurturing the same in her students, that allows Chastity to provide them with the professional edge they need to grow their careers.

Whether the subject matter is undergraduate poetry or graduate creative nonfiction, a writing class would appear, at first glance, to be almost perfectly suited to the virtual classroom. We’ve all read the novel and seen the film adaptation’s opening scene of an author, a libation for company, the muse for inspiration, and a laptop to capture the experience. Everyone knows writing is a reclusive endeavor, right? 

Yes, because at some point it’s just you and the pen and the page… or perhaps you and pixels on a screen. 

And also no. Few writers always take their solitude neat. In most cases they’ll add at least a shot or two of social now and again... over coffee, or at happy hour, maybe while attending a weekend workshop. 

But in the real virtual world of higher ed, how can an educator compose a course that allows both full-time students, right out of high school, and part-time adult learners, juggling work and family, to partake in the benefits of a creative community? 

Our guest, Daniel Stanford, will share the abridged story of his life as Composition Coordinator at Pitt Community College in North Carolina. Dan’s taught hybrid and asynchronous online courses since pre-LMS days, and he continues to try new tools and strategies for meeting learning objectives, engaging students, and encouraging collaboration. Listeners, this one’s sure to be a page-turner! 

Imagine a traditional college class. Chances are, you'll picture an instructor standing in front of a chalkboard, whiteboard, or projection screen in a room or auditorium of seated students taking notes. At the same time, you know from your own educational experiences that learning isn't limited to to lectures, discussion, lab, or field trips during the scheduled meeting time. For example, readings and homework assignments completed outside of the classroom are included in the time-based calculation of credit hours. Depending on the subject, instructors may also include independent activities designed to move students out into the world as a way of deepening their understanding of the topic at hand.

Understandably, faculty teaching for-credit distance education courses have tended to follow the familiar format, with the primary difference being how the instruction time activities are delivered — live-streaming or pre-recorded. Yet, educators often struggle with how to include fieldwork, broadly defined, when the course is delivered in the virtual classroom, if they even recognize this type of assignment as an option.

With video conferencing fatigue taking a toll on students and faculty alike, what better time to consider adding some physically active learning assignments to your syllabus?  Our guest for this week's episode, Jim Egenrieder of Virginia Tech, provides inspiration and tips for integrating Field & Screen. 

The curtain is rising on another academic year — admittedly it's odd one — and another season of Wired Ivy! 

Now COVID-19 has shoved online teaching in higher ed from backstage to center stage… in university operational plans, in faculty development offerings, in the lives of students and their families, and in the news. Six months in and counting, there’s an expectation building among fans and critics alike that it’s time to move on from the dress rehearsal of emergency remote instruction to professional-level productions… or at least an overture of better things to come.

As such, in Season 2 our goal is to provide Innovation Inspiration through conversations with your colleagues… knowledgeable, inventive, courageous educators from diverse disciplines and institutions, sharing ideas that you can try in your own virtual classrooms. We’re opening with Role Rehearsal, an exploration of the Socratic method* for the virtual stage, directed by University of Kansas' Doug Ward, to be performed asynchronously with student-audience participation.

*Those of you who have listened to Season 1 might remember that in Episode 7our guest, University of Florida's Thomas Hawkins, mentioned that he was looking for suggestions on how to use the Socratic method in online courses.