R3 2.5 March 13, 2024 New Guide to Teaching with AI (Resource); Coming Full Circle with Remote Instruction (Reflection)
In this issue of R3, I’m going to share an experience I had that felt to me like peak remote instruction – one where I was online, and the students were in person.
First, though, I want to share a new resource that I think is going to make quite a splash: the brand-new book Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, which officially comes out in April. I got to check out an advance copy, and without getting too far into a point-by-point summary here, I can say that it represents a big leap forward in AI-related resources and advice available to college faculty.
One of the reasons why is that the authors deftly balance detailed instructions and prompt texts with bigger-picture issues like academic honesty and what it will mean to work and learn alongside AI in the future. I also appreciated that the authors took such a strong stance on these complicated questions; you won’t find much in the way of on the one hand/on the other hand, more-research-is-needed types of waffling in this book. This is especially impressive given how fast-changing the AI scene is right now. (I say this from experience, as someone who’s agonized over how much of-the-moment detail to put in books about educational technology lest the copies roll off the printing press already outdated.) I think there are going to be a lot of well-thumbed copies (and bookmarked digital versions) on the desktops of faculty professional development leaders in the year to come.
On to some reflections on exploring the outer edges of what’s possible in remote hybrid instruction, which I unexpectedly ended up doing in last week’s meeting of my graduate Teaching Practicum course. Like much of the innovation that’s happened over the last three years, this idea was borne from an urgent-bordering-on-emergency situation.
A bit of background: Teaching Practicum is a face-to-face format seminar-style course with about nineteen students. Much of the in-class time is devoted to having students present and share feedback on teaching activities (active learning exercises, short-form lectures, structured discussions) that they have designed. These are almost always geared to a face-to-face setting, and especially for novice instructors, would be difficult to convert to an online setting.
Like any live presentations, these activities take a lot of class time. And so, I was anxiously monitoring our schedule as we first lost a day to a majore winter storm. Then, I was hit with a sudden medical crisis that wiped out another class day. That acute episode was (thankfully) resolved, but soon after that, I got the news that I’d need to stay home from work for at least a few more days to .
Typically, I wouldn’t sweat a lost class day here or there. I’d built in what I thought was a reasonably buffer of catch-up days in the middle and end of the semester, and in my other classes I’d previously coped with a row of snow days by converting segments of lecture-type material and individual activities to various online formats. But that approach wouldn’t work for my students’ carefully crafted in-person activities, and we’d overrun the buffer I had set up after already having spent hours re-scheduling the sequence of presentation times.
Everyone’s stress levels would be escalating the longer we were in limbo about the looming schedule disaster. And so, I floated a plan with students: I’d stay home on Zoom, and they would convene in person.
When I sent out the announcement, I pitched the Zoom-combination idea as a way to stay on track, but acknowledged that we would need volunteers to make it happen. Key among these volunteer positions was a Zoom runner – a student who’d be responsible for setting up the video and audio, coordinating the various slide decks and so on. We also would need a convener to be in charge of starting class and facilitating discussion, and a timekeeper would be helpful as well.
My students weighed in loud and clear: They wanted to try it. Within the hour, I had my three volunteers lined up and a plan in place.
As I settled in to watch the action from home, it was pretty surreal to experience what thousands of our own students did during the height of remote instruction: following along with the classroom-supplied video and audio, chiming in by chat or handraise a few times but mostly, just watching and listening. Even as a veteran of many Zoom faculty meetings, to me this felt new and strange. The audio and video was a bit dicey, especially during the more active discussions and demonstrations, when it occasionally became too abrasive or overwhelming to follow. But overall, it worked well enough for me to offer the same feedback and grading of the student work that I normally would. And my students ran the meeting masterfully.
Maybe some of you have tried something like this yourselves, but for me, it was brand new, and I came away with some reflections that will stick with me.
The first is that we in higher education do continue to reap benefits from the new equipment and new skills brought about by the pandemic. Those who’ve heard me speak about this before know that I am no fan of the “silver-lining” narrative, one whose toxic positivity paves over the tragedy of that time. Even so, it is undeniable that we faculty ended up with a much bigger repertoire of techniques and a better assortment of equipment to run them on. I was incredibly grateful not just for the newly-installed AV setup (which I never had access to in this course before COVID-19), but also for the fact that students could adapt so quickly.
I was also reminded of the original hyflex design concept, and the conditions that are necessary for it to work really well. I’d heard of this idea first as a way to offer more flexibility for graduate students, presumably in smaller seminar settings, who could opt in and out of face-to-face attendance over the semester. My experience underscores the importance of having an established routine and knowing each other reasonably well before attempting hyflex participation. Just the challenge of recognizing who is speaking, in and of itself, becomes more manageable when you have had some face-to-face experience with the group. It would be more challenging still to be a full participant in a group if you’d never had the chance to attend in person. I will have all of these considerations much more in mind if I ever do have the opportunity, or need, to design a fully hyflex course from the ground up.
More profoundly, though, is what this experience says about rapport with students, and having that rapport flow from an underlying ethos that’s become more important to me with every passing year. This involves the core belief that students and I are in class to accomplish the same thing – to help them build knowledge and skills at a level that can only really be accomplished in a structured class setting. These “same-side teaching” principles keep surfacing as I seek to create a better class environment with each new semester, and as I now try to neutralize the adversarial, trading-work-for-points system that tends to be the default if we don’t actively work against it.
Without that same-side teaching philosophy as a foundation, how would that missed day have worked out? Students could easily have read the whole situation as a free day off, and without their willing participation in the reverse-hybrid-hyflex experiment, I wouldn’t have been in any position to insist on trying it. Uninvested in the material or agenda for its own sake, they’d have considered it a bonus if I was forced to drop assignments or cut out big chunks of reading to make up time. So I came away even more impressed with my students, who instead of doing any of those things, stepped up to keep us on track and were game to try what was on the face of it, a pretty strange way of holding class.
If, at the end of the day, we want the same thing, students and I can work together to get there. And if every now and again, that means a class with students running the show, that’s what we will do.
R3 1.17 September 15, 2023 Reflection: Teaching from the Same Side
PSY 665: Teaching Practicum in Psychology Syllabus
PSY 665: Teaching Practicum in Psychology Reading List
Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning