How online teaching and learning can support the public mission of research universities
Michael Tassio
INTRODUCTION
On every university campus, there are a handful of courses that have a reputation that reverberates into all corners of the university. These courses are taught by faculty who have become local or national legends and who have left a legacy through their research and teaching. When my own institution joined Coursera, we sought to give some of these faculty access to the global scale of Coursera’s platform. Put simply, the reach of the platform gave an educator the potential to touch as many learners in one or two years as they might be able to touch in an entire career of teaching on a “brick and mortar” university campus. As an institution with its foundations in liberal arts and social justice, we looked for courses beyond those that provided skill-based competencies that were (and still are) in high demand on platforms like Coursera, drawing instead on “big ideas” courses that might change the way Coursera’s learners think about, encounter, and respond to the world around them.
I consider myself lucky to work at a university with Professor Bettina Aptheker, whose venerable career as a Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies includes the publication of several significant books and decades of teaching during which she transformed the minds and lives of students. I had been in conversation with Professor Aptheker for several years about the possibility of creating an open version of her popular course, Feminism and Social Justice. One afternoon, following an event that brought generations of alumni together to celebrate Professor Aptheker, she excitedly agreed to take on the project. The shortened version of the course would ultimately consist of Professor Aptheker’s working definition of feminism as a movement, a philosophical perspective, and a driver of social change, followed by three case studies to unfold the definition. Within just a few months, the course was released, and to date, nearly 90,000 people have taken it – a figure that may eventually eclipse the total alumni base of my university over its 55-year history. Yet the impact of the course can be more meaningfully measured through the voices of its students—particularly those living under more repressive governments—who reflect on the optimism and hope that they’ve gained through the course as they develop action-based frameworks that provide them with greater resilience in their lives.
This is just one example of online education’s ability to be transformative in shaping a better world. One can imagine other globally available online courses that take on major environmental issues like coastal erosion, and that use pedagogies such as project-based learning to allow students to work together at scale across geographic locations and time zones to create solutions to pressing environmental challenges. Online education, when done well, has the potential to bring about a more equitable future where vastly more people have access to a world-class education. Whereas environmental justice broadly aims to address inequities by increasing engagement from those most marginalized, online education at this level removes the privilege of being able to attend an elite in-person institution by creating conditions where the barriers to access are reduced by making educational materials ordinarily taught in college classrooms available to all. From an institutional perspective, it gives institutions the power to harness online education to further their public service missions beyond local or national boundaries.
The learners who engage in courses on Coursera, however, do so without expectation of direct engagement with their professors. These courses were (and still are) largely asynchronous and designed around the concept of providing meaningful instruction without synchronous instructor-to-student interactions, and even without personalized feedback on assignments from the instructor; rather, all grading is automated or relies on peer-to-peer feedback through instructor-designed rubrics. The scale of enrollments in these courses renders professor engagement with students improbable; yet this type of engagement is a cornerstone of the educational experience on a university campus, making the very notion of credit-bearing online courses or degrees a radical idea that at first glance upends a foundational understanding of the context of learning as being relational between students and educators.
At my institution, the University of California Santa Cruz, prior to the pandemic, credit-bearing online courses were largely created by self-selecting individual faculty. There were some notable exceptions; but for the most part, online courses were proposed and designed by a small group of faculty inspired by the potential to leverage educational technology to create engaging and novel learning experiences. The courses were built around podcasting assignments, simulations that gave immediacy to what students were learning, field recordings that could only feasibly be gathered in an online course, assignments that culminated with video presentations, and a proliferation of low-stakes assessments and opportunities for peer-to-peer engagement. All courses were designed and developed in teams of faculty, staff, and students. Quite unlike courses designed for Coursera, these courses presented an institutional risk, in that the learning experiences of students would be scrutinized and there needed to be clear evidence of their educational efficacy. Even with faculty driving the process to create online courses, if student learning was not demonstrated to be at an equally high level to in-person offerings, any institutional effort to develop online courses would have been shuttered.
The aims of online education can drive toward equality, equity and justice. Pulling from the examples above and looking across the literature, a primary motivator for faculty in developing online courses has been to extend access. This motivation is especially salient for universities like my own, which are located in towns that are tourist destinations, and where off-campus housing leases are often written to exclude the summer months. In this context, offering online courses during the summer allows students to complete coursework and make progress toward degree completion that would otherwise require significant cost and personal sacrifice for students to take time away from family or work responsibilities. With these goals in mind, my campus has focused on the development of asynchronous online courses that provide more temporal flexibility and can be offered during the summer. Another way that online education can drive toward justice is through the intentionality of course designs that prioritize student achievement. This is especially true of asynchronous online courses where every element of a course has to be considered and crafted prior to the course being offered. At my institution, all online courses are developed by teams of faculty and instructional support staff, making the design process even more iterative, and the courses ultimately more dynamic and engaging. Throughout this volume you have been introduced to a variety of projects—debating climate engineering, public engagement on climate justice, exploring future environmental and climate epochs—that are central to high-quality online course design. With online courses, there is an even greater need for deliberate and thoughtful elements of course design that engage and inspire students in the way that all of the projects discussed in this volume do.
With respect to these reflections on the benefits of asynchronous learning, I note that the students who are often the recipients are those who are less likely to have the privilege to enroll in a purely in-person learning environment. This creates a high-risk scenario for universities in charting strategies for online learning that prioritize equity and justice. If the students benefiting from online learning are those who are most likely to face challenges, then what must be done by institutions to ensure student success? I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic, while forcing the proliferation of emergency remote learning as well as more online course offerings, gave vision to the potentialities and limitations that may otherwise have taken years to experience and reflect on. Drawing on my experience directing my institution’s online learning unit, I reflect in what follows on the benefits, concerns, and opportunities for online learning that I saw as a result of the pandemic. My hope is that these reflections provide a roadmap for faculty and institutional leaders in creating the conditions for online learning to be successful—for students, as well as for faculty and for the institution as a whole.
COHORT-BASED COURSE DESIGN PROGRAMS
The centerpiece of my institution’s response to instruction moving to emergency remote instruction was to develop a cohort-based course design program. The program, named Integrated Course Design for Remote Instruction, supported hundreds of faculty in the transition to remote and online instruction. Designed in collaboration between the campus’ teaching center and the team that supported online learning, the program provided a pedagogical and technical foundation for transitioning online, which gave cohorts of faculty the opportunity to intentionally design learning experiences that leveraged the online modality. We used educational theory, particularly backward design and L. Dee Fink’s notion of situational factors, but we did not let theory drive our instruction. More importantly, we mimicked sound course design through the program using a structured modular course in Canvas, integrating active learning throughout the program, and setting up opportunities for faculty participants to adopt new approaches and to connect with and be inspired by one another.
The redesign effort required instructors to pay attention to learning goals, course outcomes and objectives, and the many elements of courses that impact student learning, such as assessments, communications and community building, projects and group work, rubrics, and the educational technologies that can be adopted to meet learning goals. This is to say that significant attention needed to be given to the many elements of a course that have an impact on learning; and this often led to the engagement of course design and production teams made up of instructional designers, technologists, producers, and videographers, which might work across departmental or divisional boundaries in support of teaching and learning. This was possible due to the way the pandemic drove units together to more holistically support teaching and learning.
Cohort-based course design programs are rare, and yet they have significant potential for impact. Far more often, faculty opportunities for course improvements are individualized and often affect just one or two aspects of a course. Instructors are left to “fend for themselves” and the results of their process of redesign are rarely shared with other educators on campus. Using cohort-based course design programs can provide the conditions for faculty to engage with teams, often in learning communities staffed by learning professionals, to thoughtfully apply these approaches to the full redesign of courses.
ADOPTING EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES THAT IMPROVE LEARNING
Online learning is unique in that it is necessarily facilitated through the use of educational technologies. Yet these technologies in themselves are not a substitute for thoughtful course design. In my experience, the most effective course designs are those that rely on a multitude of technologies to accomplish their aims. There are three key areas where I have seen educational technology have a significant impact on learning: to enable low-stakes assessments, to build community, and to encourage engagement.
Online courses often rely on the use of frequent low-stakes assessments that allow students to gradually build their knowledge and demonstrate learning. Low-stakes assessments are helpful in that they give students a sense of their progress in a course and what they need to focus their effort on; they also show instructors where their students are succeeding, and where you as an instructor may need to apply additional effort to support student learning. In online courses, low-stakes assessments are often quizzes; but there are more complex examples, such as isolating parts of an assignment, or even an exam, and evaluating them individually to provide feedback as students progress. Use of low-stakes assessments can decrease the reliance on course designs that emphasize the peaks and valleys of traditional midterm and final formats. While low-stakes assessments can increase the labor required for evaluating student work, this is often mitigated by use of educational technologies like polling and quizzing systems that provide immediate or automated feedback.
Students choose in-person learning in part as an opportunity to develop lasting friendships with their peers. They are immersed in living and learning communities that are rich with opportunities for interaction, both within their courses and in their residential communities. In online learning, as was experienced during the pandemic, students can quickly feel isolated, and it is of greater importance to design opportunities for community building in online courses. Educational technology can often be an asset for helping to cultivate a sense of community; we did this through the use of tools that facilitated real-time peer-to-peer engagement by – for instance, annotating documents, engaging in peer review, collaborating on concept maps or through brainstorming activities, creating virtual galleries, and facilitating project-based collaborations. We also integrated tools that helped instructors get to know their students, and for students to get to know each other, for instance, through informal video introductions, ice-breaker activities, pre-course surveys, and so on. All of these tools, when used well, can help students generate a sense of community and belonging.
Using a learning management system (LMS) like Canvas can help instructors with outreach to students, particularly early in the term. Used in combination with low-stakes assessments, the LMS gradebook can be an outstanding tool for checking in with your students. It allows instructors (or teaching teams) to send automated or individualized messages to students based on their performance in an assessment. For instance, for all students who miss an assessment, an automated message can be sent to them; the same can be true based on a student’s performance in the assessment. Use of the LMS in this way allows instructors to make connections with students that demonstrate their care and that can have a positive impact on learning. These communications, especially in large courses, are not feasible to make without the automation of the LMS.
INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATION TO SUPPORT ONLINE TEACHING AND LEARNING
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the pandemic was how it brought together disparate units and divisions around a common goal to support teaching and learning. The divisions of Academic Affairs and Student Affairs came together; as did Information Technology Services and Undergraduate Education; as did the library and the Registrar’s Office. Where once there were more rigid lines around providing support for faculty or for students, there was unity to help ensure the success of the educational mission. On my campus, these collaborations resulted in our instructional continuity group, which was responsible for the innovations and support that have helped sustain our institution through the pandemic. New resources were created, such as Zoom Corps, which pairs faculty with undergraduate students trained to use Zoom for instruction; or “Ask A Slug,” which is a single button in the LMS that simplifies the process for students to be connected to a large network of support services: websites to support teaching or learning; a platform that provides a community of practice for teaching online; or “Slug Support,” which provides laptops and other equipment to students in need; and so on. The instructional continuity group was desperately needed, and it created a model for working across divisions and units to support online learning. Within my own division, two units that had always worked adjacent to one another—the teaching center and the online learning team—worked so productively together during the pandemic that they have restructured as a single teaching center that can provide leadership and support for all modalities of teaching. In a fundamental way, the pandemic revealed just how much collaborative effort is required to holistically support faculty and students with online teaching and learning.
As much as COVID-19 has done to show the potential for a positive reshaping of online teaching and learning, there are causes for concern too, which in my experience are often expressed through an excessive optimism about the potential for increased access. The desire to achieve educational equity in online learning can at once positively enable access and generate conditions that may not be sufficiently conducive to learning. Extending access can accomplish an important equity goal, but it is counterproductive if it results in student performances that are poor. I’ve seen this most notably through in-person course offerings that provide an option for students to engage synchronously or asynchronously online. In the literature, these are referred to as hyflex, blended, or flex courses. While this format may work well at the graduate level, at the undergraduate level—and particularly with large courses—it can suffer in several ways. First, very few classrooms are currently equipped with the technology to enable students attending remotely to be well integrated in classroom discussions and activities. The technology that is more commonly available relegates online students to a single display in the corner of a classroom. Additionally, engaging students who join online requires more technical and instructional support than the instructor alone may be capable of providing. The technology will improve, as will the ability to teach simultaneously to in-person and remote students; but for the time being we need to better understand the educational efficacy of blended learning environments, and this must impact how we think about course design in learning environments that prioritize choice in how students access course materials.
Moreover, as was painfully apparent as universities transitioned to emergency remote instruction, there are clear barriers to engagement in online learning, such as hardware, software, and internet infrastructure, which universities must be mindful of. If students are unable to participate due to a lack of any of these features of online learning, universities ought to make them available to students, as so many have done during the pandemic. While the admirable aims of instructors and administrators alike to increase access may be aligned with equity goals, justice has to remain central to the conversation. Access alone is insufficient if those being granted access aren’t also being given an equal opportunity for academic achievement. As technology will increasingly help facilitate goals of equity and access, technology itself ought to remain an enabler and not an end in itself. It is through course design, and iterations on design, that faculty will develop online courses, and curricula, which drive toward equality, equity and justice in online learning. It is my experience and hope that a lasting effect of the COVID-19 pandemic will be for institutions to place greater emphasis on refining the institutional structures that support teaching and learning. With the continuation of online learning, it is now essential that institutions have strategies to support online teaching and learning through cohort-based course design programs, the adoption of educational technologies that are aligned with student success, and the facilitation of institutional collaborations that more holistically support faculty and students alike.