Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode 309 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, David Rhoads joins me to speak Hyflex Learning.
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[00:00:10] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.
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[00:00:20] Bonni: Hello. Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the arts 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.
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Joining me on today’s episode is a friend, a colleague. [chuckles] I don’t even know where to go with this since we’re living all this pandemic stuff together. It’s David Rhoads. He’s on the line with me already. I’m about to read his bio. He cannot wait for this to start. Let me just say welcome David because otherwise, it feels weird to talk about you when you’re right here.
[00:01:10] David Rhoads: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to get the conversation going.
[00:01:13] Bonni: David Rhoads has been teaching in the areas of leadership and educational technology for the last seven years. He enjoys helping faculty do what we do best by equipping us with solutions and best practices for our classroom. David has extensive experience in the area of online pedagogy and program development, none traditional enrollment and support, instructional design, and educational technology. David’s background prior to working in higher education included teaching at the high school level as well as 12 years of youth and young adult ministry.
David is passionate about helping faculty maximize face-to-face and online learning opportunities so their students can gain the most benefit from their instruction. He believes that our goal as educators should be to facilitate learning in such a way that encourages and equips students to be passionate lifelong learners. David, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.
[00:02:14] David: Thank you. Thank you again.
[00:02:15] Bonni: I’m trying to decide. We just start with where we met because we know each other pretty well. [laughs] You went to get your doctorate at a university out here in Southern California called Concordia University. I teach there and have taught there since the inception of their doctorate in educational leadership. I believe that’s the name of the program. [laughs]
[00:02:37] David: I hope so. [chuckles]
[00:02:38] Bonni: Five or six years ago, was actually your professor there, and that’s how we first met. Fast forward now, we work together at Vanguard University right up the road from that institution. We are both living our university’s response to the pandemic. That’s why I was joking about– [laughs] You get really close really fast, and not that we weren’t already close. This is a crisis, and I feel like we’re living it together.
[00:03:05] David: For sure, for sure.
[00:03:07] Bonni: I want you to share the story though because it really comes out in how you approach so much of what you do. Would you talk about yourself as a student? In fact, there’s documented evidence [chuckles] of what you were like as a student when you were young.
[00:03:23] David: [chuckles]If we wanted to go back that far, what Bonni is referring to, is as a high school student, I was the worst that probably a teacher could ever have, so much so that I was written up in a Chicken Suit For The Soul teacher’s tale book. I was the worst student that I’ve ever had … teacher speaking about me. I just wasn’t interested in what I was learning. I didn’t like being forced to go to school. It took me six years out of high school to try to figure out, “Now, I want to go to college,” because I wasn’t able to go to college because my grades was not great, and that’s an understatement. I went to an accelerated program to actually start working with you.
That’s when that started. I got into that. It was four hours a night, one night a week, eight weeks, that type of a program. I got into my master’s degree, and that was completely online, and then my doctorate was a hybrid program. Completely unexpected that I would go through that trajectory and get my doctorate especially as a student that started out this way. My passion is really to create learning environments that gives students like myself the ability to pursue their educational goals in a way that’s flexible around their, around my schedule.
I know that I would have wished that I would have some of the flexibility that we’re now trying to design at our university where they get an excellent education. I would love to extend that out to other students.
[00:04:52] Bonni: Now, I’ve heard you tell the Chicken Suit For The Soul story a number of times, and you could keep telling it, and I’ll still be amused. I love watching people’s reactions to it because most of the time, they think you’re just saying you were the kind of student who someone would write up. Can you actually just go down the next level? Do tell how did you find out that you actually were written about in a Chicken Suit For The Soul book? You’re not just using an analogy, you actually were. How did you discover that?
[00:05:20] David: I don’t normally read Chicken Suit For The Soul. It’s not a go-to, not necessarily.
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The teacher that actually taught me in 10th grade English actually contacted me, and you’ll know why here in a second, contacted me and said, “Hey, I’m about to put these story. Is it all right use your name?” Didn’t use my last name, but used my first name. She called me, and I said, “Yes, sure. I would love it.” Basically, the gist of the story is that I was the type of student that would throw things, and turn clocks backwards, and lock her out of the classroom. Just do awful things to her as a first year teacher. Basically, it was a number of years after that, after I left the class that I started teaching at the high school level, and I just happened to go into the teachers’ lounge in the first day of school, and I see her at the other side of the room.
I immediately go, “Oh my gosh, I got to go say something.” I go, and I go apologize. I go, “I’m so sorry that I was that type of a student.” She goes, “You’re going to be treated that same way. You’re going to get what you gave back.” She was laughing as a joke and stuff like that. The main issue, she, coming into teaching, didn’t have any experience at all and was a really good student. Myself, coming into the class, I was really a bad student and knew every single way to cheat, get around the system, work the loopholes. I would just basically told my students that, and I didn’t have any disciplinary issues or anything like that.
It’s definitely a real story. I was to go from a 0.67 in grade point average in my senior of high school the As in all of my undergraduate and graduate … That’s ridiculous. I’m passionate about what I do. I think that’s why I got good grades and was able to excel at what I did.
[00:06:58] Bonni: Your emphasis on really trying to cultivate and equip students to be lifelong learners, I think sometimes, when someone might read that, it could not be understood the depth of which you have a commitment around that. I wonder if you would talk about just– Well, let’s go back to these four-hour classes. [chuckles] What was that experience like for you? What were some of the frustrations, and how does that contradict this idea of trying to cultivate more of a lifelong learning approach to life?
[00:07:29] David: I think that’s my experience with those four-hour classes. Of course, I got a lot of it, and it really was transformative. At the same time, probably two hours into it, an hour and a half into it, it was hard for me to concentrate just like any of the other students. It was focused on the classroom, packing those hours in like that, was focused on the classroom giving me all the learning that I needed as opposed to preparing me and setting me up to be a self-directed learner. It pushed me into my research passion and things like that about trying to train a student in such a way. Then in myself in that case, I wish our professor had trained me to a critical thinker.
I think it happened through my educational process, but I would like to set people up so they’re critical thinkers, that they’re learning, that they’re knowing how to find that information that they’re wondering about themselves, so that the classroom becomes more of a conversation, and practicing of that and the sharing of those learned experiences outside the classroom. As a comparison is I would rather have that time, it can be a shorter time than four hours, but being dedicated to, “What did you learn this week,” separate than the professor. “What did you learn?” I would love to apply that to my own life, and we’re learning together as colleagues even though they are the professor and I am the student in this particular case. If I’m the professor and they’re the student, I want to learn alongside them.
[00:08:56] Bonni: We’re about to transition. Just in case anyone’s having trouble following, I say it sarcastically, [chuckles] that we’re about to transition into the whole reason you and I are having this conversation today. I’d like to just do a little setup on this first. I’m going to tell a quick story that two times in my life, I have looked like on the outside like I was the best real estate timing person that ever existed and bought a property and saw it more than triple in value, et cetera. Most of us here in the United States are familiar with this housing [chuckles] market and then the crash that we had.
If you looked at, on paper, you would just think I was absolutely– I think there’s an end run documentary, the smartest guys in the room. I might be one of the smartest gals in the room. [laughs] Of course, I was not. It was all accidental timing. When I think about the topic of your research and the part of our conversation we’re about to enter into, David, you got some serious timing going on here.
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Would you talk about just timing. What are we faced with right now as we’re addressing this pandemic, trying to plan for what’s next during what’s still very much a crisis. Talk me through some of what you notice is emerging in this crisis and getting amplified that if you had known that this was going to happen, you couldn’t have planned your dissertation research any better.
[00:10:25] David: Most definitely. I think a lot of institutions are trying to figure out hw to bring their traditional program in the majority of instances, how to bring their traditional program online, and try to go, “How we can do what we do in the classroom?” Sometimes they’re trying too force all the hours, all the face-to-face time into the online environment, and I’m thinking for myself, “Why don’t we just combine it?” Of course, hybrid or blended learning has been around for a while.
If we’re able to give choices to students and we build classes with that in mind, if we come up against like this pandemic where we don’t know in the future, in the fall, if we’re going to have seat time or we’re going to have this face-to-face time, maybe we may have some, maybe we have a lot. We don’t have any idea about that. I’m thinking why don’t we just take the best of both worlds and design courses in such a way that fulfill both purposes in the exact same class rather than creating a bunch of online classes just in case something happens. Something is going to happen.
Whether that’s a student getting sick, even beyond this pandemic getting sick or athletics or people going on trips or skipping school around Thanksgiving or things like that, if you design it in such a way, it will give the ability for the professor and the student to adapt to the environment as opposed to scramble, and try to create those alternative, don’t create it as alternative, create it as to the design.
[00:11:54] Bonni: I was listening to a podcast this morning, and it was talking about that we’re just not very good, both as human beings. He was also specifically talking about the media of which he is part of. He was criticizing himself, looking at his own media empire and analyzing how well they’ve succeeded and failed at addressing the news around the pandemic. He was saying, we just have to educate ourselves and get better about reading news and generating news around probabilities. He gave the example of that, when he looks back at the coverage of the 2016 election here in the United States, that they knew that there was a 30% probability that Donald Trump would become president.
They acted like therefore there was a 0% probability that he would become president, and that we just tend to do that. I’m being clumsy with my words because he’s said it so much more eloquently than I just did. I want to echo what you just said, that everything you’ve taught me about Hyflex Learning and you know I just resisted parts of it because I feel like you have to just wrestle through some of these things. I’ve been teaching in higher education for over 15 years no, and some of the ways I’ve done things, you have to be able to integrate new ideas. This is a pretty radical one from my perspective, but then once you get it, I’m like, “Of course, this makes sense because we can–” Speaking of probabilities, I feel like it’s got to be close to 100% that something’s not going to go like we planned it in the fall.
[00:13:27] David: Exactly.
[00:13:28] Bonni: It might be something that doesn’t go at the institutional level. I think there’s a really high probability of that from all the reading and everything I’m taking in. If I’m wrong about that or I think you can even be right, but just like that 30% I was referring to, “It didn’t turn into fruition. There was an 80% likelihood, but actually it didn’t come to fruition.” Down at the student level , isn’t there a 100% probability [laughs] or %97.5 that at the student level during normal times, let alone during the time we’re facing now. In terms of what is emerging both out of your research and your practice, and what you’re advocating is really being able to look at instead of taking what happened in a classroom and just bring it on over.
This gets talked a lot about, like you said, with hybrid learning. I’ve been hearing that for a long time just because you may have lectured for 45 minutes or whatever, don’t do a 45-minute video and think that you’ve nailed it or whatever. That’s been coming up for a long time, but the element that hasn’t been coming up is really this radical flexibility. Talk a little bit about, if I were in your class, David, I’m taking the class with you and it’s a Hyflex class. Let’s take eight weeks just as a range, and tell me a little bit about what experience I would have as your student in terms of Hyflex Learning specifically.
[00:14:58] David: Yes, most definitely. When you come into the classroom, let’s say specifically in a online or a hybrid course, a lot of your content is arranged within a learning management system. Ours happens to be Canvas. You would look in that learning management system and three-quarters of the class is done by every type of student, meaning both online and on ground, whatever type of student you are. You see that, but then you have a, maybe a fourth assignment in this particular example that’s created to be an alternative or an equivalent learning experience for those students who cannot make it into the campus.
You have that particular assignment that’s worth a certain number of points, that meet the exact same learning objectives in the online environment as they do in the face-to-face environment. Say, a professor such as myself will be in the class teaching and going toward these particular learning objectives, and then it could potentially look completely different, but meeting the exact same type of learning objectives, whether it be a written assignment or a video assignment or whatever the case may be. You’re reaching the same learning outcomes and both types of students are getting excellent education at the same time as opposed to, “If you don’t get the face-to-face, then you get the constellation prize of the online.”
It’s not a constellation prize. Both of them are excellent ways to reach the exact same learning objectives. It gives students the opportunity if from week to week– For the most radical extension of this principle, a student could if you designed your courses in such a way, every single week, a student could decide, “I want to go online or I want to go on ground,” and they could go back and forth. They could potentially be 100% online and never go to on ground, but then there’s knowing they have the ability to choose, increases their satisfaction, increases their performance.
That’s basically what it would look like to the student, but you can even also give a class like that in such a way that the professor has the power where they go, “You know what, this week is online and this week is online.” They can choose according to the circumstances of the school. The structure of a Hyflex course gives both the professor and the student the ability to be radically flexible like you said.
[00:17:07] Bonni: There needs to be a Hyflex Learning, but you’re not quite doing it right. I need a dip my toe but not quite. I’ve been experimenting with it. I feel like I’ve had a number of failures with it. I see so much of the promise that I want to persist. I just want to mention some of the failures that I’ve had just so people don’t think this is like super easy that to do, snap your fingers and you’re done. I would say it is up there if not at the top of the most difficult kind of course experience you could design, especially if you don’t have good experience with both formative and summative kinds of assessments.
I had those kinds of things, but I just didn’t have the organizational system. In fact, even still today, I still don’t, David. I did finally get convinced by you that I should use the attendance feature that’s inside of our learning management system, which for people’s reference is Canvas, it’s not a good attendance tool because I’ve become so reliant on a mobile app called attendance too that was designed so well. This guy is phenomenal. It’s just so customizable and it’s also built in like where I can use it with Dropbox, and I can put their photos in there and a CSV file, and all of that comes across, and I’ve got a random feature.
It’s just that he’s designed it so well to be the best attendance tool by the way, for in-person classes. [chuckles] We’ll get to that in a moment. What I was really missing in terms of that is that I was always perfectly willing to tell students like, “Hey, if you want to know what you have in your attendance, just let me know. I’ll be happy to email.” It has a really cool email feature that will send them exactly the dates that they’ve been there, and that they’ve missed and all that, but I was really relying on a student to know when they needed the help to have that information. It wasn’t integrated in with their grade until the very end of the semester at which point it’s too late to do anything about it.
You really helped me around attendance, but I still was clumsy with it. The idea that you just mentioned, Hyflex Learning, right now in my class, if you come to class then you marked present, and I do have a lot of interaction and formative assessment, it is not lecture, but then I’m making it up as I go, “If you don’t come to class–” It’s clumsy. I’m marking them absent just so that it’s a record, but then I tell them, “If you email me, then I’ll take that thing and I’ll put it in.” It’s clumsy. I’d say you need a little bit better organization around attendance and talk a little bit about what does a person need to do to really organize it, so it isn’t so hard.
Because once it’s set up it’s beautiful, but in terms of those things like attendance and other things in terms of navigating this, flexibility that the student could not come or they could come.
[00:20:02] David: The thing that you would start with as a professor when you’re building a class, hopefully where we all are doing this is you would start with learning objectives and you had mentioned those out and sometimes we think the learning objectives are every single sub point within a textbook. We look at the table of contents and we say, “Oh, those are our learning objectives.” We should have 8, 10 whatever the number is at the beginning of the class I want them to leave this class with these learning objectives. Have always those at front of mind at the beginning of the class. Announce what those things are.
Either you can do it in video and in written form. A lot of unique things about Hyflex is that you want to put it in writing. You want to put in video, you want to give it to them a bunch of different ways. In this case, name what your learning objectives are every time you give them an assignment, and then specifically within Canvas, I would recommend those would be within modules and to minimize things … for the students, but to remind them of what they’re going to learn, learning objectives, and why they’re learning in the first place, which would help with motivation. Then you go, “What would I do to reach this learning objective in the classroom?” Think about it, do a lesson plan. “What would I do in the online environment?”
Just create them both at the same time and then attendance and engagement in the classroom equals attendance. Engagement in the online classroom would be whatever you have designed as, read this, watch this and assess this. Quiz, writing, video, you give them as many opportunities and as much flexibility within the type of assignment that they’re turning in, as well as the flexibility to attend in different ways.
[00:21:37] Bonni: Now, you talked about in the classroom and it makes perfect sense. A lot of us are accustomed to what would that experience look like in a classroom. I do want to mention that there is this misnomer that if I then hold a class on a web conferencing tool that I’m out of the classroom. I’m in the classroom, what would I do there? Then I’m in the classroom, just happens to be online. What do I do there? Those are really equivalent to one another with the exception being that people don’t quite all have the tools down for how do I address–
We were just talking about Zoom bombing, like how do I get someone out of that? How do I set up a password for this? There really are a lot more similarities between those two things than the other. I know our fears, David, is that people say, “Rhis is just not working. This is just not working. This web conferencing too.” I’m not even going to say the name of it. Just pick one that you’re using. It’s like you’re making the assumption that what you were doing in the classroom was working great from a learning experience to begin with. That’s a real thing that I know you and I are seeing happening a lot. What you’re not saying is that, “Oh if I was in person then that’s like part of Hyflex. Then if I wasn’t in person then we’d meet on this web conference–”
No, you’re actually talking about something else altogether. Talk us through that. Help us understand a little bit more about where we need to go with these comparisons and distinguishing between what would normally happen in a classroom or in a web conferencing thing, and what gets added in with Hyflex Learning and any examples that you have too, would be great.
[00:23:26] David: For sure. I would probably go back to every type of professor. Every type of course needs to be reevaluated toward learning outcomes, so that you don’t just put back teaching online. In this particular case, you go, okay, there could be a point where you’re reevaluating these things and you determine because in general this type of model works like a flipped learning model. Where you do a lot of the theory outside of the classroom and you’re doing some assessment, you’re doing reading and you’re watching and things like that, and you’re doing the discussion and application and practice within the classroom.
A lot of times within a traditional setting what’s happening inside the classroom is lecture, which is theory. I would recommend that all professors reassess and try to figure out, “Do I need to just pigeon hole all of this stuff since I have so many class sessions during this. If it’s an 8 week or 16 week session, I just need to fill all that time. It’s not about learning objectives. I would even reassess and try to figure out if this is specifically applicable as we go into fall where we may have to reduce time in the classroom to go, “What do I need to do in the classroom where I believe that this is best done face-to-face.”
Like of course could be biased. Everything could be done best face-to-face, but you go “In general theory, outside of classroom practice and application, inside the classroom.” Then you cycle back and forth, and refer back to the other types of learning. I would just have a professor and myself just reassess what those things are, potentially reduce their seat time. Which would make it more of a hybrid than it would a traditional face-to-face class and then do what’s best online, which in some of the examples that you’re giving, there are some students that will shine in the online environment as opposed to shine in that face-to-face environment. You’re having other students come alive.
A lot of the testimony that I’m hearing now most recently is, “Oh my gosh, I’ve never heard from a student at all,” and now they’re sharing in the online environment whether it be Zoom synchronously or whether it be like a discussion forum asynchronously. It gives every student the ability to thrive within that environment. Of course, the preference may be I would much rather be face-to-face but preference doesn’t equal reality. Because reality is I work full-time or I have a family or those things. If we maximize the time we have in the seat, but we don’t maximize the time just to maximize the time because we think this is the right thing to do.
Then if we do that, then the flexibility increases just for the fact that you have less times that you have to meet. There’s less times at something in life of the student or the professor can happen if you reduce that time and then you have the flexibility. Will that happen during the time that the class is meeting? Now, I can just come back and look at this and go, “I’m going to watch this, hopefully, short video,” if you recorded something in the classroom. That is applicable to the online environment, relatively short so they they can hardly do an attention span and engage with that, and engage in a different way but not a subpar way. It’s equivalent as opposed to a replacement or alternative.
[00:26:35] Bonni: Before we go on to the recommendations segment, I did want to ask you probably the most important thing about having written a dissertation on something like Hyflex Learning. What were your findings? What can we definitively prove? I’m kidding. What were your findings around Hyflex Learning? Does it work? Does it not work? I realized it’s more nuanced than that.
[00:26:55] David: Yes, most definitely. Basically the study that I did compared traditional courses that are 16 weeks long in a traditional setting with undergraduate students to 5-week classes that were Hyflex classes. They have those choice from week to week to go online or on ground. Some of the students were online, meaning that they’re out of state and they could’ve never come on ground, but some of them were on the area and they came when they could. Sometimes they get sick, sometimes they had work, those kind of things. What I did is I tested through survey data through performance. Automating the final grade. Was able to pull them all together and since study both satisfaction and performance.
What was found is performance, there was no statistically significant difference between the modality. It was crazy to think there’s no difference. Same learning objectives done differently. In most cases, there were different professors. I know those shortcomings, those things that we could study more in the future. When compared it was basically the same grades when you average the grades. In the area of satisfaction, there was two areas specifically that Hyflex rose to the top, which actually we found significant findings in that students wanted across the board an easy to understand structure to make sure that they can navigate through the course in such a way which was in general more structured courses having to land on the online environment or Hyflex environment than traditional, but then also expectations, very clear expectations.
Sometimes the professors can put those expectations within the syllabi, but sometimes they change those assignments, and they don’t change the syllabi. They contradict one another and things like that. If you build all those specific expectations and structure it into the learning management system, it will bring more satisfaction. That at least, for this specific sample and this specific institution, satisfaction was up for those specific reasons in the area of Hyflex. I would love to do more study in the future as far as as length of course and things like that. I think in general those things can be taken into account and improve traditional classes.
This doesn’t have to be a Hyflex class. You know what I want to be very detailed. I want 12.5, I want APA format, I want this many pages. I want this many words. Give all the expectations, so when they give it to you, you can go, “Why didn’t they do this?” Because you didn’t ask for it. I wanted to read your mind. That’s basically a very short synopsis of the findings, but it then pushes me to future research. We want to see as far as the ages are concerns, we’re talking about the type of learner, the age of learner. We want to be able to research those students to see if age specifically, even in different age brackets when they become more self-directed.
Then what type of pedagogy helps to create that self directed learner. In Hyflex, you want to like slow into it where you’re going to make that transition between pedagogy and andragogy, and of course there’s an andragogy that goes back Back into high school of course. At the same time, there’s pedagogy that comes into the college undergraduate environment that you want to figure out a way to bring the student into andragogy and that self-directed learning, so they can become that type of learner outside the class and then they have their own personal knowledge managementwhere they’re going, “I’m passionate about this, I’ve found what I’m passionate about.
I want to find out more about this and it’s not for the fact that I just have to put this back on the test. I have to write a paper about it because I’m really excited about that.” The only way they can discover that is through this type of a process and they’re not going to discover it if they’re just, “Please listen to me for 45 minutes a day and then give me the information back on a test,” and it’s the exact same thing that’s in a textbook. I’m not going to be excited about the learning. I don’t think any student is really super excited about that. That’s how the professors are going, “I totally remember, that’s the best professor … he just spoke the whole time. I never was able to speak and discuss and engage.”
Alongside flexibility comes responsibility, both on the student side, but on the professor side as well is how they create their assessments and create their engagement in such a way that students can become passionate about their learning.
[00:31:09] Bonni: I could keep talking to you about this for such a long time. [chuckles] They normally tell us to keep up, the experts.
[00:31:17] David: The podcast experts.
[00:31:18] Bonni: The podcast experts tell us to try to keep our episodes around the commute time, the average commute time in the United States, which is 40 minutes. Anyway, it is the time where I get to thank today’s sponsor, and this is the first time they’re sponsoring. I love that most of the time the companies that sponsor Teaching In Higher Ed are just an integral part of my life. This company definitely is, it is SaneBox. I know, David, you haven’t ever used SaneBox before. I wrote about it in my book, the productive online and offline professor as just really one of the key tools for me in managing email. David, I feel like email, I used to think it was hard to manage email. [chuckles] That was child’s play.
If you think about, with regard to email, all the challenges that are there, you need to focus, you get distracted, important emails get buried in there with the stuff that doesn’t matter. You’ve got all these receipts coming in and stuff that you have to save but may not necessarily need to do anything with. You email someone and you want to hear back from them, but it’s cumbersome to track that. All of that gets addressed with SaneBox, and it does it just so well. It creates email boxes for you that sort things. They have some really cool default ones like you would expect a sane later, stuff you don’t need to look at right now.
There’s different folders, you can also say, “Remind me of this in three days.”You can even train it. You could create your own thing and say, “Hey, automatically sort this out.” If it sorts into the wrong place, which by the way, it hardly ever does. I hardly, hardly ever have to do this, but if it’s sorted something into the wrong place, its intelligence wasn’t quite intelligent enough, I just drag it either back into my inbox, if I want to say, never sort this again, or into the proper place that it should go. It’s really, really a smart tool. In terms of privacy concerns, it’s not reading my email. I set the accounts up within SaneBox, but it’s just looking at the subject line.
It gets smarter and smarter and smarter over time with what subject lines should go where, such that when I look in either my work or my podcasting/personal emails, the stuff that’s in my inbox really belongs in my inbox, really belongs there. By the way, sometimes if someone gets a message that’s like, you’ve never asked to get this email and it’s like, “Buy this from us. If you want to unsubscribe click here.” Hopefully the listeners know this, if you click there, sometimes you’re just confirming that you’re a real email address and you’re about to attract a ton of new spam to come in.
If you don’t already know, like if I bought something from a company and three minutes later, I get an email from them that, you’re on our newsletter now. I can click unsubscribe there and they’re going to follow the anti-spam laws. If it’s a company I’ve ever heard of before, you can drag that into what they call the sane black hole, and it doesn’t notify them that you’ve done that, but you never see that again. Because occasionally I’ll get these ones where I’m like, “I don’t know how it got in your email, but I never want to see it again.” It’s amazing. SaneBox is today’s sponsor, I just want to thank them for joining Teaching In Higher Ed.
I’m glad to be able to spread the word about SaneBox, and there’ll be a link in the show notes for you to go and take advantage of a special deal from SaneBox. I just want to thank them again for sponsoring. Now, David, we get to go on to the recommendations segment. I know that you’ll appreciate this one. This one’s dedicated to you. [laughs] One of the things they laugh about us at Vanguard is that, if we’re meeting in the institute for faculty development, we just pop up and a lot of us have Apple watches. When it tells us the hours we pop up and we just randomly start stretching in the middle of a meeting.
It’s not weird for us, everyone’s just, “You shouldn’t sit that long. You shouldn’t sit that long.” There are some, How to Ease Your Quarantine Aches and Pains by Danielle Kosecki and it was on Medium. This is exactly what I need because I’m sitting too much and the stretching is really important. That is my recommendation for today. I saved my other two for a later episode because I’m excited to hear what David has to recommend today.
[00:35:28] David: Excellent. I have about 13 recommendations.
[laughter]
[00:35:31] Bonni: I know, I totally do too.
[laughter]
[00:35:35] David: I will do three, and the reason I’m doing three is because they’re all interconnected. First one would be Innovator’s DNA by Jeffrey Dyer, Clayton Christianson and Hal Gregersen. That was beginning my foray into disruptive innovation and studying that which led into the jobs to be done theory, which is basically customers in general hire companies to fulfill a certain job that they’re trying to do. They’re going to education, they’re doing it because they’re going to college because their parents wanted to do it because they want to get a better job, whatever the case may be. To combine disruptive innovation and jobs to be done helps, specifically, we’re talking about higher education, people to set themselves apart.
That brings me to the second one is, Competing Against Luck, also by Clayton Christensen and it’s also by Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David Duncan. That’s a book that doesn’t just do higher ed, it doesn’t focus on higher ed only, but a lot of different industries about try to set yourself apart using jobs you’ve done in disruptive innovation theory, where you iterate and you change and you transform, and you improve rather than just sitting and staying the same, trying to get up ahead of the curve. That comes with a third book, all of these are connected to the Christensen Institute.
You’ll see some of my bias here, but it’s called Choosing College by Michael Horn and Bob Moestra. It specifically hones in on college, and that book is for parents, for students and for administrators of the schools to be able to figure out, ‘How do I apply jobs to be done in disruptive innovation to my institution?” Then it’s specifically for students trying to figure out, what is my job going in to getting this degree, not just going to get a degree just for the heck of it, but knowing why before you enter. It’s a great book for parents, students and for administrators, especially in this time where we’re going to need to set ourselves apart as higher ed institutions because there’s a lot of institutions now just scrambling and throwing all their stuff online. You want to have excellent education as opposed to just do it as a- like what we talked about earlier, as a consolation prize.
[00:37:35] Bonni: David, I’m so glad to get to work with you. I learn so much from you all the time in pretty much every conversation. As someone who’s a committed life-long learner, I’m just so grateful for that and just grateful for your servant’s heart and how well you’re serving our faculty, which ultimately serves our students. It’s just a joy to get to collaborate with you and wrestle with these ideas together. I was going to say fight, we don’t fight, we wrestle with ideas. I think it’s just the best, really, healthy communication and we have that throughout our department and a big part of that is just the way that you come in, you bring your expertise, but you’re also humble and we’re always learning. I just love that about you and I’m so glad to have you as a part of the team.
[00:38:12] David: Thank you. I’m excited to be a part of it, I’m excited to have this conversation. I love helping people and helping our faculty. It’s like my passion and my job at the same time.
[00:38:22] Bonni: Isn’t that the best? Absolutely.
[music]
Thanks once again to a Dr. David Rhoads. [laughs] That really comes off the tongue nicely. In case you didn’t get this reference, he’s a newly doctored doctor. It’s fun to get to celebrate with him. As of this recording, we’ll be celebrating actually virtually because we won’t be doing that in person. There’s cake, I think, but it doesn’t have any calories in it. [chuckles] That’s the best cake you could ever hope for. Thanks to all of you for listening to this episode. I hope you’ll go check out the show notes and go check out about SaneBox too.
I think it’ll be a great tool to contribute just to ease in a little bit of the load around email. It’s really an integral tool for me. If you’d like to go to the show notes there at teachinginhighered.com/309. Check out David’s bio there too and the links to all the resources that we talked about. See you next time on Teaching In Higher Ed.
[00:39:21] [END OF AUDIO]

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.