I've seen a number of different barriers with respect to the online teaching environment, both for students and for faculty. I'm very focused on accessibility issues in the online environment, and depending on the quality of the microphone, the laptop, etc, sound can be really bad, and it's really important that people can hear, and so I see a lot of challenges in the sound environment. There also can be visual challenges, it's really common that people will post slides in a font that you can't see, because of the way the picture sizing shows up. So it's important for people to understand how to change the size of their screen and zoom, to actually look at the documents. And then some best practices to help with that, include distributing materials in advance, but not everybody does that, so as you get started in this online learning situation. And individual learner could be hampered by their own technology, broadband access, and the same coming from the faculty member as their teaching. So right off the bat, people are grappling with sound, and visual cues, and we learn a lot from looking at other people reading their body language, seeing if they're interested or not, and that's much harder to do in an online environment. Some faculty talk about requiring cameras to be on, but not everyone has the bandwidth to do that, and not everybody feels comfortable always having their camera on. So there are multiple challenges to having some kind of relationship in teaching online, that you would like to have in the classroom. When the students are already known to the instructor and to reach other, we have what I call the social currency and pre-existing relationships. So it makes it a lot easier to break the ice, and have some informality and conversation, so it doesn't feel really stilted of the professor talking in the student listening, so that's another barrier I think is being able to jump in, ask questions, have more of a conversational approach. It takes some practice I think for faculty to be able to teach and run their slides, and monitor the chat box. It's something I've learned to do overtime, but it's not that easy, so it's also really helpful to have somebody else helping you as a co-pilot, as you do those things. I think some of the other barriers are really not dissimilar from a regular in-class class, but they're just amplified when you're in an online environment. Finding the information, multitasking to organize blackboard while your own Zoom, there are just some greater challenges, but I think people have had to jump in and learn how to do it, and we've moved past please mute your phone, which your zoom which was happening all the time in the beginning. But I think we could do a better job in trying to manage the sound environment, and making sure in particularly people mute. The other thing that I think is a problem until you get more comfortable and experienced, is how to make the class more engaging, because to just show up in lecture means, what's special about that? You could just pre-record it, so I think it's really important for faculty to learn how to use breakout rooms, and pulling, and other types of interactive features that are available in Zoom. And other interactive things that we've learned how to do in our online class teaching, and students similarly need to become comfortable with participating in the breakout rooms. I think sometimes have become sort of a convenient way to not show up and take a break, because you're in this more passive learning mode, and now all of a sudden you have to talk to other people. So I think that the technology is pretty amazing, and the barriers can be overcome, as long as we identify them, and work through ways to have better practices. And I think there's been just a huge learning curve of everybody, I'm on phone calls in meetings with people in their 80s, who have actually figured out some things in Zoom. So as the Zoom teacher for many different groups, I'm very proud of my older folks as well, and we look to our younger students to help educate the faculty sometimes to do a better job. And I think that being open to feedback from students through the chat box, for example, and just reach out, ask for help, learn how to do things better, don't rely on the tech people, learn how to do all the features in Zoom, and you should be able to come past, and overcome the barriers that many of us experience when we get started with online teaching. Interesting question that always comes up is, could we have identified these barriers earlier, and could we have done anything to remove them? And on the one hand I think that there's a learning curve that we're all going through, and nobody really wants to sit through the YouTube of how to do it. For me at least I want to do it, when we get a new appliance at home, my husband will read the toaster instructions with a yellow highlighter, and I'll just plug it in and start burning the toast until they figure out how to use it. So I think it's important for all of us to be aware of different learning styles that students have, so that when we ask him to learn how to use a technology, that we're aware that some will listen to the instruction video, and someone had just do it. And I think we can think through ways to help people, kind of on the fly, which really is what happened when we started with Zoom. We've all been on calls where you have to explain to someone, where the start video button is, and things like that. So we can always do more to make materials available, but I'm not sure how many people would use them, but that would be kind of an obvious thing to put on the list. I think the other thing that's really important, that I've personally been working on with folks from teaching and learning at Carey, and with support from the leadership of the school, is to really focus on all of the accessibility issues, because the accessibility issues and how you solve them. The solutions are the same as best practices in teaching, so if we aspire to those best practices, it will help make things more accessible. Not everybody processes well, not just from a hearing, and sound, and buying point of view, but some people are auditory learners, some people are visual learners, some people are kinesthetic learners. So sitting in front of a computer is probably not so good for a kinesthetic learner. So I think it's really important that we all educate ourselves about learning styles, and make sure we try to accommodate as many of those different styles as possible in our teaching. So for example, having slides that are readable, while you're reviewing the material, while you're talking about it. Some people will listen, some will look at the words and read them, and of course the recordings, which I think that was standard right from the beginning, was very helpful. But I think barriers that were not really aware of have to do with learning style, and how well both the technology can meet learning needs, and how well faculty can adopt their teaching style to accommodate visual learning, auditory learning, and processing things like that. So I think checklists are really important, and it's important before a solution is put into place, to think about the problem you're trying to solve, and ways it can be solved, and then go for the technology solution. Problem I see is that sometimes a solution is put into place, that hasn't considered if that really is the best solution. And that's particularly true with some of the accessibility issues, so I think it's important to make the checklists, but start with, what is the problem we're trying to solve? People can't come to class, we have to teach them remotely, what's the best way to do that? So I just would encourage people to go upstream, to what what's the problem, and what do we really trying to accomplish, rather than totaly adjust what we do to the technology? Let's start with what is the best way to do what we want to do, to solve the various communication problems at a minimum that we have, so that we can then plan the best solutions? And it may take us down a slightly different path, or lead us to explore features that we weren't aware were available. I think one of the barriers that we all face is that you need a buddy to talk to, who can sort of informally advise you on how to do things that you might not know how to do, and we have put into place at Carey Faculty and Staff who volunteered to play that role. And I think that's also a really critically important role so that people can quickly reach someone. You're in the middle of running your zoom class, and you don't remember how to do the breakout rooms or whatever. People need to be able to call somebody on their phone during the class and get that help right away. So we have lots of formal infrastructure to help with blackboard problems and zoom problems, but that informal parts also really important. And we have a large network of really smart people at every school, students, TAs, faculty and to really do what we can to build that community and make people really accessible to each other so that we can get help in real time. So I think those are probably the main things. So my answer is part sort of structure and process and really thinking through, and then the flip side is, how do you solve the problem in real time? You know you're in the space shuttle and the steering wheel broke off and you need the duct tape. So we need our zoom buddies to service like the duct tape during our sessions and I think helps us a lot too. Having now gone through the months that we've been teaching remotely and online with zoom in our online courses, it's a good time to think about what the implications are both right away for our next steps and with the long term implications are or were for students, so we can think about how to adapt to those implications. And I think some of the immediate implications had to do with the fact that students needed to learn how to use all the technologies and I'm guessing they were probably further ahead of the curve than many faculty in doing that. But the short term implications were that we had to figure out how to really support their learning needs an their technical needs so that we could make it the best possible experience and at the same time had to work with faculty and all the staff that helped the faculty actually be visibly providing the course. We had to adjust in real time to make it the best possible experience for students. So I think the short term implications for students were that they had to learn and adapt, and we had to get communications from them to understand what we needed to do. So it's really important the short-term implications that students do communicate, and of course that we reach out for that feedback. I think the long-term implications are interesting. There's sort of two fold. One, we should be able to do much better as we get more experience teaching this way, and we're all learning from each other about what works and some best practices, and some new ways to do things. And at the same time, I'm a little worried that students might think, it's going to be more of the same like it was in the beginning, and they might either not want to take the courses right away, or have some concern about their ability to do the work or learn in this environment, or just found it really difficult for them. And some may have found it really great and and don't want to go back to the old way, but I think that we need to be cognizant of the fact that students could have some long term fatigue around how we're teaching online and through remote access and take steps to make up for that from a teaching point of view. We know more broadly there a lot of social-interpersonal issues that we need to support. And, basically, I think the long-term implications for students that they're not getting that community benefit of seeing people in the hall before class, during breaks, etc. And, of course, in hybrid learning we're going to try to make up for some of that, but if for some reason we can't do hybrid or we're continuing with an online course, I think the social implications for students are really great and we need to think about that part of their learning experience and not just the course material. So, it's important I think to think about student needs more broadly than their educational needs. So, I guess long-term, keep making it better, keep in touch with students, keep getting their input about their experience and what's needed and be prepared to look for what are the warning signs of disengagement? Is it everybody has their camera off? I think those are some of the potential longer term implications that the engagement levels may be different. So, we have to really do a good job keeping track of the impact an effects, again, not just academically but also the social needs of students and how they can get all their extracurricular needs met, which is such a critical part of being in school as well.
