Bonni: [00:00:01] Today on episode 95 of Teaching in Higher Ed I speak with Mike Truong about Teaching in the Digital Age.

Production Credit: [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:20] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:48] Today welcome to the show Dr. Mike Truong is the Director of the Office of Innovative Teaching and Technology for Azusa Pacific University. Mike provides Vision Strategy and Leadership for Faculty Development, Instructional Technology and Online Education at Azusa Pacific. And prior to coming to APU, Mike was the founding member at the University of California are said where he helped establish its Center for Research on Teaching Excellence and the Merritt Writing Program. Mike Truong, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Mike: [00:01:25] Well thank you Bonni for having me. Looking forward to our conversation.

[00:01:28] Well I am too. I told you before we started recording, having met you at the Lilly conference, just how completely jazzed I was about all that you have to talk about with us today “teaching in the digital age” – both where we are today as teachers and then also what what the future might have for us.

Bonni: [00:01:47] But before we get to that I also was really interested just in hearing you talk a little bit about your own career journey because so many times I know that undergraduate students that I work with and I’ve met two in my life. It’s not like they’re so different from me but we think about it as it’s some linear path and then it hardly ever is. So do you mind sharing a little bit about what your doctoral studies were in and a little bit of your curve balls along the way.

Mike: [00:02:13] So when I was in undergrad I was a major in American studies and I really loved that subject matter. And then towards the end of my undergraduate years my faculty advisory recommended you know you should look into grad school and one of the things I looked into was her ethnic studies because I wanted to focus on Asian American Studies.

Mike: [00:02:34] And so I just took that leap and I went directly from undergrad to grad and I was at UC San Diego at that time. The ethnic studies program was brand new I think it was a second year and so I got into it there were only four of us in that cohort.

Mike: [00:02:49] And you know I found that to be it’s very exciting and I got to have all this attention from our our faculty and I spent seven years at school doing ethnic studies focusing on Asian American Studies and the role of race and religion and how that interacted and then towards the end of my career there I realized the academic track that I was on wasn’t what I really thought it was going to be. And so I kind of ended up doing teaching in general ed and teaching writing.

Mike: [00:03:24] And then when the opportunity came up at the new university I opened up at UC Merced said I sort of went there as a faculty in the writing program and then from there I went on to being an assistant director of the program and then I went to faculty development and then from there I went to education technology.

Mike: [00:03:41] And then you know what 14 years later today I’m overseeing an office of innovative teaching technology and so in so many ways when I started this field and this position I have today didn’t really exist.

Mike: [00:03:56] And so I’m very fortunate along the way. The twists the twists and turns have kind of led me here today so I’m really thankful and I think I really do enjoy the work I do now.

Bonni: [00:04:07] When you shared that story with me at the conference and then hearing you tell it again. Now I just see this real strength in you of being able to see what is present and then also to see what is coming and or perhaps your own dreams your own vision for the future and navigate those and that’s really a difficult thing to do so it sounds like a real gift that you have.

Mike: [00:04:32] Well I think part of what I’ve always loved about being in education in general and higher education in particular is the the opportunities that are afforded to faculty and I recognize that towards the end of my graduate curve that I love to teach and I was I loved the classroom and I love the interactions with the students.

Mike: [00:04:51] But I realize that there’s so many ways you can contribute to higher education. And I just had this technology background just as a kid growing up I had no sort of the Atari 64 xz. I think it was my first computer where you had this big five and five and a quarter floppy disk get the load up.

Mike: [00:05:09] And I had that as part of my kind of upbringing and I wanted to see whether or not I can actually take my personal sort of a hobby. Integrated what I was doing in the classroom so I actually was one of the first first people to do a hybrid or blended teaching when I was in grad school.

Mike: [00:05:29] And you know utilize or learning management systems back in the day which is very very very clunky and old. But I think along the way it’s gave me this sort of possibility that wow.

Mike: [00:05:40] And I think there’s actually a career path here that as the technology became more and more pervasive I was able to integrate what I love to do on the personal and with the professional career path that was on and sort of the marriage between the pedagogy and technology is what are into today. I’m still very passionate about.

Bonni: [00:06:02] I’ve been so excited to have you on the show and I know I have asked you to do the challenging thing which is really take what are essentially two different episodes and we’re making it into one.

Bonni: [00:06:12] So we’re taking this gift that you have of looking at what is today and then we’re also going to have a lens toward the future. So the first piece of our episode is going to be things that we could be doing today as faculty to helping us be more effective teaching in the digital age and you have a few recommendations for us. Tell me about the importance of pain attention.

Mike: [00:06:34] Yes I think in our instant and very distracted culture that we’re in right now it’s so critical to learn how to pay attention and this is not only for faculty but I think it’s for how we teach our students. One of the references I’ll talk about later is Cathy Davidson in her book Now You See It.

Mike: [00:06:55] She starts talking about a video of people passing the basketball around and your job is to count how many times the ball is passed. And then along the way if you’re just focusing on that what you’ll miss is this person in a gorilla suit and then because toward the end the video though asked her So how many times was the ball passing.

Mike: [00:07:15] Most people can cast with their focusing on that they were able to do that. But then if you were totally focused that you totally missed the fact that there was this person in the gorilla suit kind of walking by in the video and you totally would have missed it and make her point there is that in this distracted culture.

Mike: [00:07:32] We do pay attention to things but when you’re focusing on the one thing you miss other things. And sometimes the other things that you’re missing are some of the more important critical things. And so I feel like you know this is a really critical skill for faculty.

Mike: [00:07:47] Sometimes we get so caught up in all that we need to do in our day to day life and trying to keep up with e-mails and keep up with social media and keep up with our grading and publishing and so on to stop to have that time to pay attention.

Mike: [00:08:01] So exactly what are the issues that I’m trying to deal with here or what is that learning objective. I’m trying to focusing on and have the ability to focus and pay attention. I think it’s so important.

Bonni: [00:08:14] The way that my university has been scheduling me for the last couple of years now and it looks like some huge changes happen that’ll be the case for the fall again. Is teaching three sections of the same class.

Bonni: [00:08:26] And I’ve been teaching two sections of the same class for as long as I can remember so it’s a normal thing for me to teach the same planned classroom experience multiple times during the day and sometimes people will say doesn’t that get boring.

Bonni: [00:08:40] And I think never because if I’m truly paying attention every single one of those experiences is completely different from the other one because you’re paying attention to what kind of learning is happening in the classroom and it’ll be interesting to see how I do.

Bonni: [00:08:58] I do use – as listeners will know – I used the software called PollEverywhere and I can instantly see what they are what they actually learn from what we just talked about.

Bonni: [00:09:10] And it’ll be different in the different sections it’s interesting to see different personalities different different ways that their experience in learning.

Bonni: [00:09:18] So yeah being being able to pay attention is so critical and also completely exhausting. Which brings us to your next point and that is the importance of slowing down.

Mike: [00:09:30] The effects of the digital age on everybody in general. Is this pace of faster more and it’s ongoing it’s relentless. And I think to counter that kind of effect do you really I think all of us as faculty we need to kind of find ways that forces us to slow down.

Mike: [00:09:49] And for me personally I think one of the things I try to do on a daily basis I journal and I know I journal on my digital device but it’s still it’s a process where it slows me down. I reflect on I have this. I used to do this one sentence reflexion which when I first started journaling because I just sometimes it can be overwhelming to pick up all the stuff you need to journal.

Mike: [00:10:13] But then if you can give yourself a goal ok just do one sentence and then the sentences what was the most important thing that happened today and then it kind of forced me to reflect. It forced me to kind of recount the activities and then I can do my one sentence.

Mike: [00:10:30] And in doing that I think it really does center me and it gives me kind of that idea of OK. So what was that the one most important thing that happened.

Mike: [00:10:39] And again I think this is connected to the first point about paying attention is as you do pay attention. It does allow you to kind of have that sense of intentionality and that purpose and that focus and then slowing down actually reinforces that thinking about paying attention because then when you go the next day and you realize, “Oh I’m looking at like what’s the most important thing I can do today.”

Mike: [00:11:03] Is it you know working with that one student? Or is that trying to finish that paper or is it trying to prepare for that presentation and know what you’re saying about being able to kind of prioritize, I mean just to do that one thing.

Mike: [00:11:15] You know what’s that one thing that’s the most important thing you have to do today and to slow down and to kind of have these practices of journaling and reflecting and reading. I think it just lends to that ability to kind of step out of the chaos of the day to day life and to be able to say OK I need to slow down so that I can take notes of what is the most important thing happening.

Bonni: [00:11:40] One of the former guests on the show who has become a friend Doug McKee from Yale has talked about journaling in each of his classes after he teaches each of his classes and he hasn’t phrased it as a one sentence reflection but it easily would serve the purpose of just write in one sentence what worked what didn’t.

Bonni: [00:11:57] Today in that class and if we use the technology and if if whatever journalling tool it is we are using has some kind of a tag system or even just a search function. Then we could have a hash tag the name of the class and then a hash tag with whatever you’re going to name that particular lecture.

Bonni: [00:12:17] You want a name or a learning objective you want a name and then the next time you were going to do class planning for that whether it’s next semester or you’re not going to teach that class again for two years.

Bonni: [00:12:27] What a difference that can make because most of us don’t slow down myself very much included when something’s broken about whatever it was we just did not have the time to fix it right.

Bonni: [00:12:37] Then during the semester but if we don’t capture that somewhere we’re not going to really get to have what is often called double loop learning. The idea that we’re learning from our own learning and if we don’t slow down enough to have that reflection we completely miss it. So you’ve inspired me. I’ve not done and I just know that it’s possible to do.

Bonni: [00:12:56] And one of the people I really like to listen to is a guy by the name of Tim Stringer. Tim Stringer is as big in the personal productivity space and one of the things he talks about is if we really love the tools that we’re using we’ll use them more.

Bonni: [00:13:12] And I know for many people the journalling app on the Mac that they just absolutely love is called Day One and they just came out with some new versions on the Mac and on the iOS devices and such a beautiful application so it’s nice when you have a tool that you really like to use do want to share what you used for journalling.

Mike: [00:13:29] That’s exactly what I use Day One. So yeah. The nail on the head. So. I’ve been using an for about 2, 2 and a half years or so and yeah I do look forward to. New features and the new version they haven’t they have multiple modes multiple pictures images you can add and add some other additional features.

Mike: [00:13:48] But for me I really like to keep that journaling experience as simple as possible because no everything in life is not simple and so I just load my page and I get it. Usually have an image and that’s where I try to throughout the day take pictures of my day.

Mike: [00:14:06] You know whether it’s a picture of the meeting I’m in or the classroom or moon or whatever the case may be it just so that there’s possibility of that image to kind of represent the most important thing that happened in my day.

Bonni: [00:14:18] And for people on the Windows environment Evernote is a platform notebook system that would work really well and also now Microsoft has been doing some amazing things with their note that program called OneNote and that would be another option. Many campuses now subscribe to Office 365 you might even have it on your computer and not realize it but other good options for journalling.

Bonni: [00:14:45] Tell me about being human.

Mike: [00:14:48] It’s an interesting recommendation because I think everybody thinks we are human why do we need to be human. I think for me what that means is I try to prioritize in person flesh in the flesh kind of interactions over virtual ones when possible or when it’s appropriate.

Mike: [00:15:08] Oftentimes I think we turn to texting. We turn to e-mails we turn to all these virtual ways of communicating first. And because those are the easiest and those are the most convenient and then we sort of pick out that human touch the human face to face interaction. No a lot of been hugs and written about this.

Mike: [00:15:31] Now Sherry Turkle from MIT. She has written a couple of books about this and no one in particular is talking about I think Alone Together.

Mike: [00:15:39] And she talks about how we as human society at least in the West we really do expect more from technology than we do from from one another. And what she means by that is we we oftentimes do turn to those virtual ways of communicating are these virtual devices. Now we turn on our phone first before we would get up or a seat and go walk down the hallway and talk to our colleague or something like that.

Mike: [00:16:06] And so for me I know when I’m physically here on campus I really try to partes that in person human kind of interaction and that means no getting away from my machines and be able to say no let’s take a walk let’s have lunch let’s do that the traditional kinds of conversations that typically doesn’t happen. This occurred digital world that we’re in.

Bonni: [00:16:28] There are a couple of things I really took away when reading her book. I read Alone Together right when it first came out and it helped for me stop being so angry at students for being rude.

Bonni: [00:16:42] What I would perceive as being rude you know you’re sitting in my office and your phone’s going off. How dare you look at your phone. That whole idea that this is somehow their fault. And I was so much better than that when I was in college.

Bonni: [00:16:54] And to realize that it was their generation that was so yearning and still is so yearning for attention from their parents and that many time their parents were sitting at the park on their own devices and they just couldn’t get them to get off their own screens so they kind of learned it from the social environment that they grew up in.

Bonni: [00:17:18] And I hadn’t really realized that it felt like that because I had kids much later in life than I thought it was going to be able to I feel like I missed a generation or something that was kind of interesting to imagine because I thought my mom was a stay at home mom as I grew up and I never yearned for attention from her in the sense of.

Bonni: [00:17:35] She did by the way teach me to never get bored and you know read read alone or play alone. It wasn’t like we weren’t expected to learn how to emerge from boredom and we were really good at that. But just the idea that it would never be if I had something serious I needed to share with her that she was going to be sitting on her computer or sitting on the phone or what have you.

Bonni: [00:17:54] So yeah I think that’s one wonderful thing I took away. And the second thing I took away from reading and reflecting on her. Her second book and her first one her second book is Reclaiming Conversations was just that it’s the importance of us modeling and teaching that for our students and that instead of seeing it as how rude that is I could actually teach them that because I put my phone away and even sometimes when I’ll explain it I’m going to be put in my phone away because I want to give you my undivided attention.

Bonni: [00:18:23] It’s really. I’m so glad that you’re here. So nice to connect one on one and that can have a lot greater impact on them is just watching that be modeled.

Mike: [00:18:31] Yeah I think you know this is not just in the workplace it kind of seeps into your personal life too and often times you know in our household what I walked in the end of the day I come home I try to sort of put my phone and my computer in a corner and sort of the office and know our offices and our dining room is all one big room.

Mike: [00:18:54] So it’s not like I can escape the room by. I put it in that corner and then I heard it don’t touch it again until I’m done with it. Putting the kids to bed at night. For a start my evening routine.

Mike: [00:19:06] But I think you know before I doing this I would be like always still be on the phone. Wow. No I’m home and of course the kids look at me and like OK play with me. OK and then of course I’m cast there with them.

Mike: [00:19:20] And so I think get this practice of being present in person prioritizing the human person before you and to kind of give them their full attention that they deserve. I think it’s so important and so critical and teaching and then learning environed because oftentimes that’s what is the most meaningful and most impactful experience of the teaching learning to that exchange of ideas between two people trying to work through those things and not sort of having these distracted conversations.

Bonni: [00:19:55] And speaking of disconnecting and making sure we’re focused. Tell me more about disconnecting digitally.

Mike: [00:20:03] I think it’s a real discipline to be able to turn off digitally and all our devices and to leave that behind. There are so many ways that we can connect today and the default is to be connected all the time and know what the books I read that has really profoundly changed my habits is William Powers’ Hamlet’s Blackberry.

Mike: [00:20:27] And in that book he talks about this idea of the conundrum the connected life – what a phrase – and how on the one hand we think of these technology and we know these technologies are helping us do these amazing things that we’re more productive more efficient more impactful than ever in our society.

Mike: [00:20:45] However because it’s such a pervasive and invasive type of culture that’s taking place we become sort of slaves to it. And when you’re always connected then there’s no time to really disconnect and we know we really have lost that discipline to kind of take the Sabbath you know he talks about taking off the digital sabbath and he describes in his book – you know he and his family started practicing a Sabbath where on Friday – from Friday evening to Sunday evening – they would literally unplug their Wi-Fi turn off and plug their computer and there would be no digital content – not even on the television – I don’t think that they even used television for one year.

Mike: [00:21:31] And what that experiment helped them as a family and helped him particularly to understand, “Wow.” I mean when you are able to disconnect digitally and you have that moment of human touch and focusing on the solitude and on the reflection it did lead to a happier more fulfilling and productive life.

Mike: [00:21:50] You know he didn’t feel like he was missing out or what he was, you know, online again. He actually was more focused and was more intentional and he got to see things in a different perspective because of that downtime.

Mike: [00:22:02] And so I think you know as faculty oftentimes we are just so I mean our work is eight to five. You know we’re always constantly thinking about the next thing, whether it’s preparing for class, preparing for a paper, preparing for the next conference and to always be on – can actually have detrimental effects on our productivity.

Mike: [00:22:23] And so if we can care enough to have that discipline to turn things off. And so I’ve tried a some light version of what William Powers has done. So from Friday evening to about Sunday afternoon I don’t turn on my computer but I do have access to my phone. So if I were to do work it’s less productive because I just get frustrated I can’t write this as fast or oh I can’t do this. And I oftentimes just give up.

Mike: [00:22:51] But it’s interesting discipline and it’s an important discipline and I think we all need to cultivate that discipline that you’re talking about how great to to make it hard for yourself to do because that really can then shape those those behaviors.

Bonni: [00:23:07] One thing that really helped for me was to stop thinking about that it literally had to be an entire day because when I think about the word Sabbath in my particular case it’s actually not accurate by the way it’s an inaccurate.

Bonni: [00:23:18] But but I thought about oh it has to be all of Sunday and I would think well when I’m teaching these doctoral students a lot of them that’s their day to really devote to schoolwork and of course ideally I’d like to say gosh it would be so great if they got to take a day rest but they didn’t.

Bonni: [00:23:33] And so I think well I couldn’t go the whole day then because they might really have a question and I would feel like I was letting them down in some way. And so a good friend of mine said How about 6 o’clock Saturday until 6 o’clock Sunday. And it’s such isn’t such an easy solution, but it was right there in front of me and I just didn’t get and that made so much more sense to me to take the 24 hours but to take it not for an entire from sun-up kind of until the until I went to sleep that night I mean that really really made a big difference even though it’s probably so simple.

Mike: [00:24:06] Yeah I think it’s more of the spirit of the law than the letter of the law. And I think as long as you are intentional about being able to kind of disconnect from the digital world to not always be checking stuff e-mails or social networks or whatever it is. That’s really the meaning behind that Sabbath is to be to disconnect – have distance – and to leave it behind for a period of time. And then when you come back you’re a lot more focused and refreshed.

Bonni: [00:24:35] It really does give us power to create things in our own mind that when we’re on those trails just doesn’t have the space or context to happen.

Bonni: [00:24:45] Well the second part of our show is we normally do recommendations but you have shared about three powerful books that have you’ve reflected on this and we’ll be sure to link to those in the show notes which will be at teachinginhighered.com/95. But I’m going to take this opportunity to let you share a little bit about the future of teaching in the digital age.

Bonni: [00:25:09] And particularly my recommendation today it’s going to be for people to visit your department’s website and especially I really found helpful your section on the blended learning and that has some wonderful resources to studies that you have done in looking at blended learning at your institution and then you also linked to other studies that have been done it’s a great place to visit.

Bonni: [00:25:32] But I know specifically you’re going to share a little bit about teaching in the digital classroom and an event that you had around this. Tell us about this event and some of the things that came out.

Mike: [00:25:44] So last fall our office which is more of a teaching learning office partnered with our I.T. office and we said no let’s work together on putting on an event that will allow faculty to have a glimpse of what the future classroom might look like.

Mike: [00:26:00] And so we know we work together on the agenda and we invited vendors and we sort of had the really different types of scenarios. And so for example the set up that we had was a one button studio which we learned from Penn State where basically the faculty were if they wanted to record themselves doing a lecture voiceover or some sort a video of them doing something they would be able to go to the classroom or this room and put it in a little USB memory stick.

Mike: [00:26:36] Press one button the lights were turned on the camera to start recording the audio would be perfect the lighting would be perfect defraying everything would be automatically perfectly framed and ready to go and all the fact we would have to do is just focus on the content of what they want to do and it can be a blue green screen.

Mike: [00:26:57] They can add graphics in the background or they can have other things that can be layered on top. But the idea is that today because there are so many more ways that we can teach and one is to kind of have more that visual the video multimedia content and a lot of fact they have told us it’s just really challenging.

Mike: [00:27:15] I’m not that technical I don’t know what equipment to buy and I don’t really know how to do this thing and so with the one button started with kind of taken all those intricacies of doing the video recording and sound recording away.

Mike: [00:27:30] And basically it’s this one button they start to press a button and when they’re done they press that one but the same button and it stops and then it just downloads it to their thumb drive or they can actually upload it to there. Now we have Google Apps here and so upload it to their Google Drive and it’s done.

Mike: [00:27:47] And obviously there is there are no faculty who want to have a cleaner better finished product would do some minor editing but we know we can assist them and that’s usually the easy part. So that’s one of the examples of the things and then we also have other things like the 3D intel that Hewlett-Packard had the stimulation 3D virtual reality type of software tools that they were introducing and faculty.

Mike: [00:28:14] And I think one of the nursing faculty was really interested in this one anatomy virtual reality he put on these classes and we can kind of go into the operating room and you would sort of feel a slice and dice like a human body and know this little tool and it was really really neat and because it’s something that I think isn’t really in the mainstream at this point.

Mike: [00:28:40] But I think in the next five years I would say virtual reality and the simulation would be very, very much part of the higher ed. And so we as an entire event…

Mike: [00:28:51] So we have this for three days and we had over a hundred faculty come through and you know the consistent feedback that we got was that they really were inspired by some of the technologies at the same time they were a little intimidated because they were like well I don’t know how I’m going to do this because I’m not that techie or I’m not.

Mike: [00:29:08] And this is sort of part of our job as our in our offices to make sure no we we can come alongside and we support them and we sort of provide them the handrails that they need to be able to kind of walk down this path.

Mike: [00:29:22] And so we always tell them and you’re not alone. We’re here to help you and support you in whatever you need whether it’s the training whether it’s just to think through how to integrate your curriculum or think through how this might change the way you currently teach.

Mike: [00:29:36] I mean that’s sort of the nice piece that of our office knows that we will come alongside so the bring the pedagogy with the leading the technology as opposed to the other way around which oftentimes a lot of people talked about.

Mike: [00:29:49] Now if you start with technology and then you kind of tack on pedagogy usually you don’t get great practice but if you start with pedagogy and then you look at how technology can enhance and improve the pedagogy that’s really where you create you get great learning.

Bonni: [00:30:03] One of the things that you mentioned was this one button studio and that could easily be something where if I if I were hearing about it for the first time I’d be thinking well we could never do that. And actually you mentioned this was originally coined that word or phrase one button studio was coined and created by Penn State.

Bonni: [00:30:22] And I will be linking to their site in the show notes but I just went there right now so I could link to them and they have an app even now with a Mac OS app the one button studio is now accessible to everyone around the world. The app integrates with third party hardware to give you the automated and streamlined video recording studio.

Bonni: [00:30:40] So that idea that implementing this on a campus they’ve already built the blueprint for you. And in fact they even have the whole setup what they bought and what some different tiers are of purchase options you could have sort a year if I recall it’s sort of like Goldilocks and the three bears the minimum requirements and then the next tier and then if you really wanted to knock that out of the park kind of idea.

Mike: [00:31:02] Yeah. Yeah. So yeah that we’re in the midst of building that One Button Studio and we’re hoping to have that available by the summer so that we can sort of do a soft launch of you know just giving a space – a chance to try it out and then and this is really related to our blended learning initiative because one of the big pieces of blended learning is how to put some some of your content online.

Mike: [00:31:26] And this is where I think we can have faculty come in and record their lectures and be able to have chunk smaller chunks of content put that online and then free up some of the time in the classroom to build to focus on interactions and engagement piece.

Bonni: [00:31:44] This idea of addressing the real real legitimate concern of I’m not that technical. This all feels too beyond me. I see that come out in your web site and how you’ve designed it. I mean that you could not have accidentally stumbled upon that friendly Web site to navigate. What are some of the things that you think about when putting together resources for your faculty on the web to make it seem really more accessible and doable to them?

Mike: [00:32:11] I mean one of the things that we need to recognize and we want to help faculty is that now they are busy. They have so many responsibilities upon their shoulders and we want to make it as easy as possible to access materials and we subscribe to a lot of professional development materials like Magna publishing.

Mike: [00:32:31] They have a 20 minute mentor commons which is a library of videos 20 minute videos where you can just go in and listen 20 minute video from this expert in let’s say discussion – how to facilitate discussion or how to do active learning.

Mike: [00:32:47] And they just go and watch something and quickly be able to use that and apply it in their next class. And we also have the Wiley Learning Library and so we subscribe to a handful of these resources in addition to the things that we’ve done.

Mike: [00:33:00] So most of what we try to do is make our resources as on-Demand as possible so that busy faculty who may only have time – they may not have time to come to our workshops or have these individual consultations but they go to their website and if they get what they need and it accomplishes answers their question then that’s really what we’re trying to aim for is to that service self-service on demand as much as they can get.

Mike: [00:33:29] And if they obviously we’re here for them if they want consultation we also continually offer workshops and institutes and ways for faculty to dive deeper. But yet we try to as much as we can make things as practical and as available possible on our website.

Bonni: [00:33:46] Well it’s such a great thing to be able to come and browse your website. And again my recommendation is that people go click that link and check out all the great resources that you have up there and think about how people may be able to implement those in their own teaching is not by the way only for people listening from faculty development centers but also people listening who want to incorporate more blended learning into their teaching or other things that you heard during the episode or are available on their website. Is there anything you want to say about teaching in the digital age before we close the episode.

Mike: [00:34:21] Sure yeah. So here’s my concluding remarks. So I think Bonni I appreciate the fact that you’re doing this podcast because I think this is such a important conversation to have. And now I’ve started listening since I met you at Lilly a few months back. You know I started listening a couple of episodes and I feel like you know when I do that I feel like I’m part of this larger conversation that this community and oftentimes no faculty if if they’re just doing their thing day in day out day.

Mike: [00:34:50] And. It could seem a little bit isolating and to lack that community it can be a very discouraging feeling and so I think to be able to listen to their podcast and to build to have conversations like this.

Mike: [00:35:02] And so I just encourage all the listeners and future listeners to to keep tuning in and to be able to contribute to the conversation because that’s really where the power of Teaching in Higher Ed is and that the people who are involved who are engaged who want to help advance the profession. And so thank you for what you do continue and hopefully we can help support you in any way we can.

Bonni: [00:35:26] Well you’ve already done just that by being willing to invest your time with me. I think we spent two hours at that conference [laughing]… I was hungry to learn from you. And now you’ve spent more time really investing in the broader community so thank you so much.

Mike: [00:35:41] Well thank you. Yeah. This has been fun. I look forward to hearing about what others are doing in higher ed.

Bonni: [00:35:49] I could have kept talking to Mike for another two hours and kept going strong probably after that. But you all probably have things that you need to do. So we’ll just plan on having him back on the show in the future and thanks again to Mike for contributing to this community and just for understanding I guess the strength of what we all have as we connect with just this passion that we have for teaching those of you that are listening who have yet to subscribe to the weekly update that I send.

Bonni: [00:36:18] What you’ll get is all the great show links I’m going to link to a bunch of stuff on their website as I mentioned. And the great tools and resources that Mike mentioned. You can subscribe and it’ll come automatically in your inbox just once a week.

Bonni: [00:36:30] And in that same email will be an article most weeks about either teaching or approach to productivity written by me. You can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and I want to thank the so many of you that have been responding to my question about how I can support you in your professional development.

Bonni: [00:36:48] Over the summer I’m getting a lot of good feedback and some ideas percolating for how to just keep this community growing and the conversation continuing throughout these summer months that are coming before we know it. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.

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.