[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 354 of The Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, I welcome back to the show, Todd Zakrajsek, and welcome to the show for the first time, Kevin Kelly, to talk about their book, Advancing Online Teaching: Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments.

[00:00:22] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:31] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m, Bonni Stachowiak. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives, and be even more present for our students. Today, I’m welcoming to the show Kevin Kelly and Todd Zakrajsek. They are both the co-authors of the book, Advancing Online Teaching: Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments. Kevin Kelly teaches online courses as a lecture in the department of Equity, Leadership Studies and Instructional Technologies at San Francisco State University, where he’s also led as online teaching and learning manager.

He works with colleagues and universities as a consultant to address distance education, educational technology and organizational challenges. Kelly now works full-time as a higher education consultant specializing in both common and niche areas like distance education, equity and inclusion, teaching and learning with or without technology, academic technology adoption and implementation, strategic planning, professional and leadership development and more. Todd Zakrajsek is an associate professor in the department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an adjunct associate professor for faculty development in the department of clinical sciences at North Carolina State University.

Zakrajsek was a tenured associate professor of psychology and built faculty development efforts at three universities before joining University of North Carolina. At UNC,. Zakrajsek provides resources for faculty on various topics related to teaching and learning, leadership and scholarly activity. In addition to his university work, Zakrajsek directs multiple Lilly teaching conferences throughout the United States and has served on many educationally related boards and work groups. Kevin Kelly, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed, and Todd Zakrajsek, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:03:02] Kevin Kelly: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

[00:03:04] Todd Zakrajsek: Oh my gosh. You just nailed my last name, Bonni, that was so good.

[00:03:07] Bonni: I like to say it like I’m a little angry. Todd Zakrajsek, because I can roll the Rs. You taught me because you had a reimagining of your last name at some point, and I felt like I was a quick study.

[00:03:21] Todd: That’s great, it was very good. Thank you so much. What a great opportunity to be on the show. I’m just honored to be here, thank you.

[00:03:26] Bonni: Glad to have you back. Kevin, I shared this with you previously, but it feels like it’s welcoming you back because I’ve already been able to learn so much from your work and from reading your book, and I’m just excited to have this conversation today about online learning. One of the greatest challenges that I see faculty having, and I think to some extent, still myself, I don’t know that we ever get perfect at this aspect of it, and this is a visual thing. I’m going to do a visual thing and then describe it audibly but, the yearning that so many of us have to really form those authentic connections.

In a recent episode, it was talked about that some people claim you can’t build relationships with students in online classes, and the guest said, that’s like you’re standing next to an engineer and saying, “Airplanes can’t exist as an airplane is flying over both of our heads.” We know that the relationships can exist, or at least my hope would be, anyone listening can start to open their minds to those possibilities. I see it as like this dog paddling thing, and that’s why I’m dog paddling right now since you can’t see me cause you’re listening. But just, I want so badly to connect with you, but I don’t know how. I want to hear a few ideas that come to your mind for people that are fairly new to this, love those connections but are struggling to make them happen.

[00:04:59] Kevin: I think one of the biggest changes that I made that was actually a very small tweak was how I send emails to students. When I first started teaching, I basically was following the models that I had seen from my own instructors, somewhat, they’re polite, but they’re product-focused. “Hey, this is what’s coming up, this is the product I need from you.” I noticed I wasn’t getting many responses, especially when I would email those students who haven’t logged in for a week or two weeks and they’ve just gone Mia. It could be because they’re taking care of family or because they’re working, not quite sure.

I had been reading more about empathy and care, Dee Fink, Michelle McCaskey Burke, a lot of the great names. I decided that I was going to change the way I structured my emails. I instead of ITEC 299, which is my course, and then, deadline approaching as the title. I would say, “ITEC 299, are you okay?” Then, the first paragraph would be, “Hey, I know it’s a busy time in the semester, so many students have some many other priorities that they’re focused on right now, I’m just here for you. Let me know how I can help you reach the goal. I know we have a deadline coming up, contact me if you will.”

My response rate went from 10% to about 65% overnight. Students now in their evaluations at the end, or just, one even snuck up a sentence in an essay, the final essay, he’s put a thank you note to the teacher because he really appreciated the time I took to make sure that I was helping him reach his academic goals. I would say, first and foremost, it’s just a mind shift of thinking about, there’s a human at the other end of that internet connection. How do we make sure that we’re respecting their lived experience and including our course as part of that as best as we can?

[00:07:02] Todd: Kevin, if I can just chime in for a second too, and I find it fascinating, people even bring this up. Bonni, I’m just amazed that people would even bring this up but, the number of people who make connections online before they ever meet personally, marriage is pretty much all from online, just discussions first and then people get to know each other. I one time was going to be an opening plenary presenter for a conference, and Christie Price was the closing, and I’d never met her before.

I sent her a quick little note and said, “Hey, I just see you’re doing the closing, I just want to talk a little bit about what I’m doing, what you’re doing.” We emailed back and forth multiple times. When we got to the conference, she walked right up and gave me a hug. It was like we were friends. Those connections can form all the time. One of my favorite quotes, and I can’t get it exactly right, but I think I can get it close, was from Randy Garrison and Norm Vaughn wrote a book, Communities of Inquiry. I was reading along in his book and it said in there, “It is possible to have as strong of a community in a face-to-face course as you do in your online course, but you have to work at it”.

I read that like three times, and I actually picked up the phone and called Norm Vaughn who was a friend of mine, I said, “I think something slipped through an editing process. This quote is wrong. Shouldn’t it be, it’s possible to have a strong community and online courses as face-to-face if you work at it.” He said, “No, online is way easier to develop community than face-to-face courses.” I said, “How many courses have you seen where at the end of the semester, students still don’t know the other students’ names. They just know the people right Immediately next to them. You can’t have that in an online course.” That’s number one, and it’s what Kevin said too. Just the words you used, quick Zoom chats. I can have conversations with students online. It feels like I’m right there. Yes, I can’t reach out and give a student a hug if they’re really struggling or pat them on the arm. but, in every other way, I think you can make deep, emotional connections with your students and with colleagues and everybody else through mediums where you’re allowed to just be humans with each other.

[00:09:06] Bonni: I’d love for you to share a little bit more about that being human, because, I think sometimes it’s both overcomplicated and oversimplified at the same time in the sense of– and you talked about this a little bit, Kevin. We can forget that there’s a human over there, but once we realize that there’s a human on the other side, it introduces the messiness of humanness and of learning all at the same time. Think a little bit more too about other ways that you try to design courses with the memory or with the idea in mind that there are humans on the other side.

[00:09:48] Kevin: It’s helpful to let students in on the secret. Hey, one thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to be learning together, we are social learners, we are not out here trying to do an online course by ourselves, otherwise, you could do that at Udemy or one of those other online platforms. Letting students know at the beginning that creating a community and being part of it and feeling psychologically safe, as we know, the best teams have that psychological safety as an important factor in the success of everybody on the team and the team itself.

I put it in my syllabus. I put it in the opening assignments. I create icebreaker activities that allow students the freedom to connect their lives to the course, but also to each other, so to find those people who might be similar to them going through similar experiences, “I have to work. I’m going to be doing this late at night.” “Okay, you’ve got a study buddy over here,” or whatever.

By creating that structure and then pulling students into it whenever you can, if you have small groups, have the groups make their own norms so that they don’t get frustrated. If a student is busy and can’t participate, they’re going to keep moving forward and they’ll be able to handle it because they’ve talked through it as a group before they even got started. Those are just a couple of ideas that I have.

[00:11:13] Bonni: In terms of you sharing about those things, I think, Kevin, there’s a possibility that someone could do those things and still come across as very transactional. I think we need to remember that we actually have to care about those things. Though, anytime we start turning it into a checklist, although I have certainly benefited from assessing the courses that I have built using checklists, and you have many of them in the book, but there’s just this idea of, I actually have to care that there’s a person I have to want to connect.

I’ve mentioned this on recent episodes. There’s a tool that I am really enjoying, although there’s lots of ones out there like this one, the one I’ve been using is called Loom, and what I love about it is it’s just a quick way. I had zero students have any technological problems with it, but a quick way just to see a window into what they see. I’d say, “Tell me, this particular case was assessing the quality of news sources, so show me three different ways you get your news.”

Yes, sometimes they would bring up a website of what you would expect, but sometimes they brought up their Instagram with a picture of mom and dad because that’s where they’re used to getting their news from, but you can see their picture shows up in the webcam and the little corner, and I’m convinced I should do a study on this. But I’m convinced that there’s something about the fact that it’s so small, that they don’t feel like they have to hide from it because sometimes we know that seeing yourself on camera is stressful for many people.

It’s almost like they can’t see themselves because they’re just tucked apart, but I feel all these great connections, and then also to your point, they’re able to then show these same lenses, these same windows into their lives with other people. For anyone listening that hasn’t used a tool like this, you literally click record. What is it you want to record? Your whole screen, just a window?

You want to adjust your webcam or any combination of those things, and then, as soon as you’re done recording, you click and there’s a link in your clipboard waiting for a student to paste it into a discussion board or to paste it into an email. Anywhere you could paste text or link, you can paste that, and it really is such a rewarding way to break through some of these barriers where we start to become so transactional, like forming groups, by the way, there’s so much of it where they have to unlearn all the bad history they’re bringing forward like, no, I actually really want you to have a great experience in these groups, and setting norms can be such a great way of setting that foundation.

[00:13:45] Todd: So many programs do that. I love what you mentioned, … with like Flipgrid. Flipgrid is another one that’s really easy. You can decide from 15 seconds to 10 minutes, so you can limit how much they do and it drops it in there. It gives you a chance to see something about their life, and you can also comment on it, see something about your own life, but I think as you’re doing that, just like you were talking about that, Bonni, it’s not just the tool, it’s the questions you ask.

If you really want to humanize a course, you have to ask human related questions. I can ask, “How does this relate to your life?” Or, tell me about a time that you’ve experienced this thing if you’re talking about psychology where you can draw it in ways for students to present their lives in a very safe way, because we do have to keep in mind that there’s some aspects of their lives they may not want to share.

Again, if I ask you more about your life, I’m going to remember you more as a human, and if you’re in an asynchronous class, maybe you get photos or these quick little snapshots and paste those around your computer screen. Just so you remember, as you’re doing a threaded discussion, that there are people out there.

[00:14:47] Bonni: You talked about the safety aspect and not wanting to leave anyone out. We want to be able to have learners and ourselves be able to show up in our full selves, our full identity. One of the things we have discovered about online learning if we didn’t know it before, we certainly know now is just the ways some people get left out of the picture. Kevin, I’d like to have you start by just sharing a bit about issues of equity that show up in online spaces and places and the ways in which you have seen it have a negative impact on learners.

[00:15:24] Kevin: One of the eye-opening articles that I read a couple of years ago was out of Stanford, and it was basically a study that found that a large percentage, and I think in their study it was around 94% of instructors in online discussion forums respond first, and sometimes only to names that look like white male names. I have an online class with 50 to 100 students.

I can’t respond to every student every week, so my first reaction was like, “Oh my God, am I doing that?” I immediately created a Google spreadsheet with a column for every student and a column for every discussion, and I created a conditional value where basically, I add up the X’s so that I can track who has the fewest responses from Kevin, and those are the first people I respond to the next time.

I even put it in my syllabus that, “Hey, over 17 weeks, my goal is to make sure everybody gets the same amount of feedback, and if you need more, let me know, but I’m not just going to be responding to the first people.” My original strategy was to respond to those students who didn’t get any replies from any other students, because I know a demotivational factor is, do a lot of work and then have nothing happen.

I would like to make a song and then have no one hear it. My goal is to figure out ways of addressing just those particular strategies, and then, one other example was a student in my class called how to learn with your mobile device. When I asked everybody to save their files as PDF files, he said in an email to me directly, “I’m living in my car right now. I don’t have a computer. How do I save as a PDF?”

I said, “Okay, I’m changing the rules. I just created a barrier for learning, and so, I want to take that away.” We talked about Google Docs. We talked about Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and now with their essay, but just thinking through the different dynamics where we know students don’t have adequate internet, about a quarter of students don’t have a quiet place to study and all those other equity challenges, whether it be related to access or belonging or bias or any of the other hurdles that students encounter, it’s being aware of them and taking action.

[00:17:53] Todd: I think it’s really important, and I think more and more, we need to do this just to have students do an assignment wrapper, is have them do the assignment, but also ask, it’s not that much more work, just ask them to really quickly summarize how they felt or responded to this or what their takeaway is from the assignment.

There’s a young lady who’s my daughter’s friend who is African-American, and one of the assignments was, talk about the history or different experience of your life that are family gatherings. What are customs that you have and the traditions your family has? She came from a really pretty broken family in terms of the traditional sense of that.

I think that the person who asked it really meant well, but it was extremely painful for her to think about how Christmases have worked out in the past, and what do you do when the father is not present? All these things that were really– she was ready to drop the class. I don’t think the instructor had any clue that her students would respond that way, or were forced to respond that way. Again, if you ask at the end, here’s the assignment and, how difficult was this assignment? How did it work? Did you learn something? Is there something you’d like me to change about the assignment? I think that’s important.

[00:19:07] Bonni: Yes, because otherwise, those things can get missed so easily, because we’re fish swimming in water in some cases when we’re asking these kinds of questions. What I’m hearing you both say is a lot about intentionality. I admitted on another recent episode about that– I already admitted it and I still can admit it again. There’s this thing where I can get away with winging it.

I don’t know if either of you have had experiences winging it when we’re in-person. If something’s not quite going the way that I meant for it to go, I can quickly assess the situation. I’ve got a whole imagination full of strategies to do it, and when we’re online, because the learning isn’t always happening in the moment, of course, it’s always happening in the moment for the person, but we’re not always actually looking eyeball to eyeball when that learning is taking place, otherwise, we’re not going to get this input. What you talked about, Kevin, that commitment to make sure that we are not leaving people out in terms of participation.

Now, we do want to, of course, recognize differences between introverted learners and extroverted learners, because those introverted learners really need the time to process their answers. They’re not going to enjoy it. We just call on them, they have no idea that this is coming. That’s going to cause a lot of stress for them and isn’t going to, in some cases, allow them to bring their greatest strengths. We have to adapt it, but to track it, I’m thinking I’m horrified about two weeks ago, I’m pretty good about tracking. I had 9 or maybe 12. I had the boxes on my screen, so I’m like Brady-Bunch tracking in my mind like, yes, got it, okay.

God, I was debriefing an exercise there, and then, we hung up and I went to go record the role inside of the learning management system. I thought that one of the students wasn’t there, only she had been there earlier. Then this is, by the way, the second thing I want to share. Boy, I’m just admitting all kinds of stuff today, what are you two doing to me? I am embarrassed to say this, I thought she was trying to cheat the system. I thought, “Oh, she just logged off early and thought she could get away from missing the fun that is my class.” She was on the second screen, there wasn’t enough room. I think people as people joined, someone kept getting knocked off on her phone.

I didn’t realize that there was a second screen, so not only did I not call on her, but also, I’m sitting here thinking all this stuff in my brain. I want two things out of this, from what you both have shared, we need to be intentional about inclusion in our classes, this is not something that accidentally happens to us. We have to first have it in our hearts and our minds, and then actually translate that into action. Then the second thing, I’d love to hear either one of you, if you’d like to admit anything on the show, that’d be great, so I’m not alone in this.

But when we let our messed up brains ascribe intent to students, unless that intent is, “I’m going to assume that they are doing the best they can with the resources they have available.” You’re talking about the guy in his cart. How many times, with so many of us earlier in our careers, or perhaps some of us still today be thinking, “Oh, he just wants to get out of having to learn how to make a PDF,” not even asking the question or realizing what was going on there.

[00:22:33] Todd: I’ll tell you that. Let me start with this one in terms of, first of all, Bonni, I got to jump in too quickly and say that when you mentioned introverts, I’ve said this for quite a while, one of my favorite old things to say was that, we’ve built a higher education system that’s designed for fast talking, risk taking extroverts. Those are the people who always do really, really well in the educational setting because, they respond quickly. They don’t even care if they’re wrong, they just want to be talking. They draw a lot of energy from doing that.

In an online environment, actually, you have an opportunity to fight against those folks always having the upper hand. I wrote a blog years ago, and it was called Students Who Don’t Participate in Class Discussions: They are Not All introverts. I just want to jump in there and say this real quickly because, the quiet person may not be an introvert. It might be somebody who is English a second language, they have speech issue, they’ve been criticized before. There’s lots and lots of reasons that those students are quiet. If we remember, there’s a lot of reasons why those students are quiet, I think that’s fabulous for giving them an opportunity.

In terms of admitting something, I got one for you in terms of, I’ve always been a very fast talking risk taking extrovert. I got sick last year pretty seriously and I got the COVID kind of fogginess that comes along, and I had it. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this when people get COVID, oftentimes they’re foggy thinking, they have a hard time processing information. I had that for about four months.

For the first time in my life, I caught myself wanting to jump in in conversations my friends were having, but I couldn’t keep up with the conversation. For anybody who has known me, I’m usually driving things pretty hard, I tell you, it was a huge eye-opening experience for me because I thought, “This is how a huge chunk of my students have been trying to learn for years and I didn’t give them the opportunity when I would ask the question and the second that they haven’t responded, I immediately start talking again.” It was a real big eye-opener for me in terms of what my students will go through at times.

[00:24:41] Bonni: Kevin, is there anything that you would like to admit, a failure of any kind? That thing you’re ashamed off but you would like to bring into a conversation?

[00:24:46] Kevin: Oh, goodness. How long do you have? I think when I taught my class as a hybrid course, I was doing my best to help students with their time. I would try to make a good balance of the face-to-face activities, and I try not to lecture a lot. I use many lectures and then lots of activities. In one class period, I just had less period, the students weren’t really engaging a whole lot for whatever reason. I said, “It seems like it’s a good place to stop, let’s push this online.” Everybody left for the day and one student came up and she said, “Hey, you can’t give up on us like that again.

Some of these students are coming an hour here and then an hour back. This is their only class for the day and we only spend an hour or whatever, and we’re going to do some work online. It’s great. I respect that you’re trying to work with students, 80% of them whom at San Francisco State have jobs at least half time.” I’m thinking about all these different factors, but I didn’t think about, again, that human side. These students have made an effort, they showed up and I didn’t show up fully by being ready for the same way I would have when I taught preschool. That winging it is something that I used to do all the time.

Students are about to get disruptive, “Oh, let’s sing the calendar song in Spanish.” I need to have that same bag of tricks, like it’s the cat when I’m teaching online, when I’m teaching a hybrid course or what have you. Just because it’s an interesting thread that we’ve had with the introvert-extrovert thing, and Bonni, you brought up that it’s not always easy to do in the classroom situation.

An analog to that strategy that I use with the Google document, the Google spreadsheet is to have every student create a name card on an index card. That’s the stack of cards you use when you are ready to ask a question to whoever’s on top. Then you keep going through the stack, and if the student doesn’t have the quite the right answer, rather than doing what we normally do and fill it in for them, you grab the next card and say, “It’s phone a friend from who wants to be a millionaire,” and then, they are going to help you complete the answer. Then you shuffle the stack and students come to class– Tom Angelo used to call it a positive sense of anxiety or stress. They come to class prepared because they know they may be called upon at some point in time.

[00:27:34] Todd: One quick teaching tip before we move on is, I learned this from a faculty member years ago. I feel so bad because I don’t remember exactly who it was, but I’ll give credit to the faculty at large out there. He said, “For an asynchronous class, he gave an assignment that was to all students to send him a quick email, and it had to be under 100 words. If you had had the opportunity to say one more thing in class but didn’t have the opportunity to do so, what would you have said?” Then he used that to fold that into the next class period. I thought that was a genius comment.

[00:28:05] Bonni: Oh, I really like that. I haven’t tried that before, but I do always purposely try to leave spaces, because like you, Todd, tend to talk fast and move fast. That’s not always the best thing and not always going to draw out the greatest strengths of the people that are there. Intentionally creating these spaces that are slower, quiet or perhaps even silent and giving people a way of engaging that way, that’s a really helpful one, I have to try that. Sometimes what I like to do that’s similar to that, Todd is, I recently had a class, they watched a movie, and it was actually a really neat thing. They had a really well-developed pre-screening questions before the students, and I was able to use that from their guide for a documentary, and then some from after they did all that all asynchronously.

Then, when we came back together as a class, it was, once again, now that we’re we’re together, what did you think about the movie? But also, from all that’s happening in the world, did you now think differently about or notice more because of having watched it? It was a documentary by the way, called American Factory. It’s about manufacturing in the United States. As of this recording, there’s a lot that’s happening in the news around it. It was like, “Who wants to talk first?” Because they all had a lot that they wanted to engage about and ask questions about. If I hadn’t done that intentionally and just slammed into the next topic, I would have missed those opportunity to deepen the discussion.

[00:29:36] Todd: There’s so many of those, but I do want to catch quickly too is, I’ve really put a lot of thought into this recently. There are certain students that I connect so well with, and it just occurred to me a couple of years ago, the students I connect well best with are the ones who are much like me. They like the same sports, if I mentioned bicycling, they like bicycling, if I mentioned something else, they like that. I’ve made it pretty easy to get along with the students who are just like me, and the students who are less like me, it’s more work, and so, the students who’re opposite of me, that’s the most work.

I’ve decided probably about a year and a half ago that I would put the work in necessary to get along with the people who were not like me. I think that has changed how I look at all the classes. When I see somebody who looks very different from me and for whatever reason or a student who comes in late when I may not have come in late, or a student who, when we have a pizza party, will grab four extra slices and wrap them up and slide out and look like they don’t want anybody to see them instead of thinking, “Oh, they’re trying to sneak away with extra slices.”

Now I sit back and think, I wonder who they’re feeding, and maybe it would be, they took four slices because the people in their house haven’t eaten today. Again, look for the people who are not like me. I think, again, it humanizes it, but it causes great connections too.

[00:30:54] Kevin: I build that into my assignments, where I ask students to find someone who has posted something similar or has a similar belief about the topic that we’re studying, and then someone who’s completely different. So, their prompts are different. Or for someone who’s along the same lines of thinking that you are, find something that will extend them or challenge them beyond where they’ve gone with their statement, or maybe an article that might help them think about it in a different way or what have you.

The people who are different, ask questions to understand why they think about those things in a different way so that you can basically get better at interacting with people who aren’t like yourself. I’m trying to prepare students for being global citizens.

[00:31:44] Bonni: Before we get to the recommendations segment, I wanted to ask for your advice in one area that is very much related to building online courses. I think back to something that Todd said earlier, perhaps we should just say all courses. I know for myself, I struggle a lot because I just want them to be amazing from top to bottom. I don’t think I have exactly perfectionistic tendencies, but I think I probably share some characteristics of just, I want every module, every exercise to be this incredibly engaging experience and to have them want to talk about it with friends, et cetera, and that’s just not possible.

What guidance do you have for those of us who want excellent online or any classes to manage the workload ourselves? Because, we are all under such an amount of stress with COVID or without COVID, if people are listening to this years later, we’re still going to be struggling with not having enough time because that certainly comes up a lot in our talks about what we do.

[00:32:46] Kevin: I’d say to your listeners, it depends on where you are starting, and we all have different places. We all begin the journey at the starting line, but some of us have been running this race a little bit longer. For people who are just getting started, maybe last spring, they were forced into emergency remote teaching and learning and they’re just trying to figure out the best ways to keep student success high, keep motivation high, and want a couple more strategies, and that would be the way I would frame it.

Think of one or two things that you can add to your class, either the transparent assignment template as a way to make sure that first-generation learners are going to know why they’re doing assignments, as well as what they’re supposed to do and how they can be successful. Or, thinking about the structure of your course and making sure that it’s easy for people to find things so that they’re spending the time on the learning, not on navigating your course materials, all those different aspects, but being consistent and picking something that works for you and use it throughout the semester.

Next time around, I like to say, you can just think of this as a cumulative, a snowball effect where next semester you can add another thing if you wish and keep going. When people look at my courses, I always say, “Remember, I’ve been teaching this class for 10 years. I don’t expect anyone to gamify their class, use universal design for learning all the things that I’ve added because I’ve done it piecemeal over the course of 10 years is 20 semesters.” That’s a long time and I’m never satisfied like you mentioned, and so I’m constantly making improvements. That what Tom Tobin and Kiersten Bailing in their Universal Design for Learning book call it a plus-one mentality. Think about one thing that you can do to increase equity, to help students succeed.

[00:34:40] Todd: I like that, and as you do that, I’m just going to head on to say, this is my behavior modification background, set a goal, set a clock and grade yourself. As you add one thing, set a goal. Here’s the one thing I want to add, decide on a clock, set a clock, I’m going to give myself one hour to do this. Then when the hour is done, give yourself a grade.

Did I do it? I get an A, if I didn’t do it or kind of did, I get a B, if I’m only one quarter of the way through, and it still stinks, I get the F minus minus, and I have to figure out how to do better. But each time if you do that, again, as you do these smaller things, incremental things, you want to make sure that you’re not spending six or seven hours to do one small thing. Again, that just causes you to be fatigued. Again, set the goal, set a clock and grade yourself.

[00:35:29] Bonni: Oh, that’s such great advice from both of you. I wanted to mention, if you want to learn more about how to do what Kevin and Todd just suggested, a great prior episode is with Maria Anderson. I’ll link to it in the show notes, but she describes her cadence that she uses, in this case, for a math class, but it would apply to any class where she has a segment for learn, a segment for explore and a segment for apply.

She just carries that down all throughout the class, and it is one of those things where we do need to fill the buckets like you were talking about with your story earlier, Kevin, we don’t want to– it was planned to be this long of a class and we only do a portion of it, so we do need to fill those buckets, but the buckets don’t have to be perfectly full, and they don’t have to– just to have that combined with what Todd said around my goal is, today, I’m going to get these two modules done.

I’m going to get the learn, the explore and apply for these two. How much time do I think that’ll take me? Nudge it up a bit because we always go on a few rabbit trails on these things, but set that clock and then cut ourselves off, and that’s enough for today and tomorrow we can set the goal for then.

[00:36:38] Todd: Like metacognitive teaching, oh I love it. Metacognitive teaching.

[00:36:42] Bonni: This is the point in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and first off, I would like to recommend the book that we have been talking about, but also we’re really talking about all of the experience you each bring to higher education beyond what you wrote in the book, but I still would like to recommend it. The book is called Advancing Online Teaching: Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments by Kevin Kelly and Todd Zakrajsek, my two guests.

The forward is by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, who was mentioned earlier in the episode from Kevin as someone that he’s learned a lot from. It’s an excellent book. I think of it very much as it’ll help you get your mindset right around the core issues of equity and inclusion, not leaving any learners behind and doing that in an online context. As someone who has been doing this for a long time, I still picked up on techniques that I can make use of in my teaching. I think it’s an excellent resource.

If you’re brand new, there’s lots of things in the appendix and along the way, they’re not going to leave you behind. But also, if you’ve been doing this for a while, I think it really spans a lot of types of expertise. I’d suggest that everyone check out Advancing Online Teaching. Then my second recommendation is in an entirely different category, but before we pressed record today, we were going and talking about some of the prior recommendations.

I hadn’t really noticed it until I went to the recommendations page on teachinginhighered.com/recommendations, how many people have been talking about moving their advice to make sure we’re exercising or we’re moving that’s come up a number of times in the last six months, not surprisingly, and something I am getting such a kick out of. If you own an Apple watch or you’ve been tempted to buy one and you have the cash to do so, there is a great new service out from Apple called Apple Fitness+, and it is great.

It’s got all different kinds of exercises, if you’ve got a stationary bike or a treadmill or a rowing machine, or even just a set of weights, there’s even dance classes you can do with no equipment at all. It’s funny, I’m not sure if I’m actually going to do anything about this, but I think there’s actually a lot we could take away from the instructors for our own teaching. I think people might think that was a little bit maybe cheesy if I were to decide to write about that or speak about it, but truly, the energy that they bring, they’ll look right in the camera and say, “I believe in you, you can do this.”

I actually literally feel like they actually do believe in me, and it’s so silly because, of course, they don’t even know me, but just, it’s a really well-done thing. I find days when I am particularly struggling to get there and I’m on quite the streak right now. I think I’m about 150 days straight of what they call closing my rings on. That means that I got at least 30 minutes of cardio, which is how Apple Fitness comes into the play, but on days when I’m thinking, “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this.” They really help me just get completely immersed in the workout.

Again, if you have an Apple watch or have been tempted to buy one and you want to check out the Apple Fitness+, it is a terrific service. If you love music too, it’s such great music, and then you can download it to a playlist even and listen to it later on and work out on your own. Those are my recommendations. I’m going to pass it over to Kevin for his.

[00:39:58] Kevin: Something that I’ve been digging back into, because this Friday, I’ll be involved in a social annotation exercise as a precursor to the Online Learning Consortium Conference. I have used a number of tools for that digo, but this one will be done with hypothesis, which I love also. Just remembering that some students may benefit from a collaborative reading exercise, especially if you throw down the prompts in advance so that students are aware of what they are expected to take away from a passage as opposed to having to figure it out, read pages 11 to 25 and there you go, can’t be your only instructions, and so, hypothesis and other collaborative reading tools.

If I can sneak in, there are some that also allow you to do a video like Classrooms alone and others, that if you do those things like Flipgrid, as Todd brought up earlier, you can have those reactions directly into the timeline of the video itself.

[00:41:05] Bonni: Oh, interesting. I’ll have to check that one out. I’ve not heard of it, but I do know in hypothesis you can paste a video from YouTube, but I always find that rich media really engaging. I’ll have to check that out. All right, Todd, what do you have to recommend today?

[00:41:18] Todd: Oh. My first recommendation is just the mindset. I’m going to go off the grid there and just say, I think it’s so important when you’re teaching to keep in mind that you do not teach a class, you don’t ever teach a group of students, you teach individuals who comprise a group. We’re always teaching individuals. If you just keep in mind, you’re teaching unique human beings and every one of them is struggling with something, we all are. Just keep that in mind. For an app, I’m going to go with hello. I do have an Apple watch and I was looking for a way to monitor my sleep.

But, there’s one thing we know for sure about learning, is that sleep is incredibly important for learning, it’s incredibly important for just social interactions, your health, all kinds of things. Your immune system shuts down if you don’t get enough sleep. We lose weight when we sleep, we heal when we sleep, we consolidate memories. Focus on your sleep people. The app Pillow is a very good way to keeping track of sleep cycles. I got to tell you, 33% deep sleep last night, I’m rocking it right now.

[00:42:21] Bonni: I love it. Except that I thought you said that the app you were recommending was Hello. Then I realized the third time you said it cause it’s a little hard hearing over here. Third time you said it, you said Pillow. That makes a lot more sense to my brain, the Pillow app. Thank you both for coming on, not just to talk about the book, which is really, I wouldn’t have recommended it if I didn’t feel that people should pick it up, but also, I just loved getting to learn, I always learn, Todd, from you, when we have a chance to connect.

Kevin, this is the first time we’ve ever spoke personally, but I’m excited about this just being the start to the learning process for me in a more personal way. Thanks so much for coming on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast and contributing to the community this way.

[00:43:02] Kelvin: Thanks so much for the opportunity, and can’t wait to get in trouble again sometime in the future.

[00:43:09] Todd: I always love the conversations Bonni, you are amazing. 350 episodes, I remember when you started this thing, incredible work you do, thank you so much for everything.

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[00:43:22] Bonni: I extend my gratitude once again to Kevin Kelly and Todd Zakrajsek for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Thank you for challenging us to be more intentional as we design online teaching. Thanks for your book, Advancing Online Teaching: Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you have yet to sign up for my newly formatted and newly recommitted to every single week chuck full of great resources newsletter, you can head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and have those coming into your inbox once a week. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.