Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]: Today on episode number 476 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, unlocking our imagination inside and outside the LMS. Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and 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. Thanks for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. As of the airing of this recording, you would find me in Denver, Colorado at the InstructureCon 2023 Conference. I will be presenting and I’m presenting today, as of this airing, a presentation called Unlocking Our Imagination. Fostering student learning through curiosity and wonder.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:08]: What I’d like to explore with you today are some similar themes that I’ll be exploring there. And while I’ll be talking a little bit about the capabilities of the Canvas learning management system, many of the things I’ll be talking about are possible in other learning management systems too. So I’d encourage you to keep listening even if your university is not on the Canvas learning management system. But if it is, you might pick up some tricks that will help you within that learning management system. And I also want to note that I’ll have a link to a resources page with the slides that I’ll be sharing at InstructureCon 2023, as well as some other resources of the themes I’ll be talking about today. If you’ve been following my podcast and other writing that I do for a while, one of the things I talk about a lot are the ways in which we are hindered, not always because of things we don’t know. It’s not a technical problem or a skills problem sometimes, and a lot of times, actually, I find it’s a problem of a lack of imagination. Ross Gay shared on the On Being podcast some words that I think speak to this so well.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:19]: He said, and I quote I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice or working for justice is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We’re good at fighting, but imagining and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems. An anecdote, one of many to this lack of imagination is for us to get curious. And I have a few thoughts around how we might get curious specific to the use of a learning management system to keep ourselves curious, but also to keep our students curious. First, I’d like you to think about in whatever learning management system you use, to imagine that you are a student in the Canvas learning management system. When we log in, there’s a dashboard, and I can distinctly remember being at the Canvas Conference many years ago and them talking about how they redesigned this dashboard. And I used to design my classes a lot around very course centric approaches. When I realized, and the whole instructor company realized with Canvas that of course, students, all of us professors, we’re going to look more holistically at that.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:03:50]: So the calendar in a learning management system is going to be a combined set of dates across any and all classes that we are either teaching or learning. And when it comes to due dates and to do and feedback on assignments that people Dave done, that’s going to be things that we start again as teachers or learners from the more holistic view that carries across to all of the classes that we do. So always want to encourage us to think about where students are going to look and again where we might look. And it’s going to show up on a list of essentially what are to dos in the case of Canvas, actually called to do a list of upcoming assignments and then a list of upcoming calendar events. And there’s even in canvas a button we can click on to view the calendar and see all of those things in context. And then a wonderful addition in recent years, I say recent years, by the way, we’ve been on it for a while. Some people listening might be like, that’s not new, but it’s fresh still to me how great it is that all the recent feedback is available here on the dashboard. So I think of a dashboard for students getting in terms of their perspective of things, stuff I need to do as a student, bases and places I need to be, the calendar stuff, and stuff about my learning, feedback and encouragement, what have you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:23]: I invite us next to imagine a blank canvas. And as I’ve said at the start of every episode since June of 2014, teaching as both an art and a science, we want to think about structuring, providing high structure for things so that it’s organized, it’s not laborious or confusing to navigate, but we also don’t want it to be so predictable that it becomes rote. So have the high structure, but embedded within the high structure have moments of surprise and delight. So what does that translate to practically? Well, I encourage you to consider naming all of your modules, grouping things together according to modules, and then having names for them as well as numbers. So I’m looking at a sample screenshot, which again, you’ll have an access to. Look through these slides that I’m speaking off of today, module five, my ethical framework and values. And then underneath that, three related assignments and activities that are also numbered m 50. One, attendance and participation, eleven of twelve.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:42]: So there’s a couple of things that are happening here throughout the entire course. The modules always have numbers and names because what are the themes we’re going to explore there? Each assignment or activity has a number associated back to that module number, but then also sequential numbers so that when we’re looking in the gradebook, from a student’s perspective, it’s easy to tell what assignment I’m getting feedback on or what assignment is coming up that I need to work on. And then for things that repeat itself throughout this semester, such as is there a repeated exercise that they’re asked to do four different times? Is it a reflective journal or other type of working problem solutions, that kinds of things? In this case, attendance of participation. They know it’s eleven of twelve and it’s just that much easier. Or if it’s an exam, exam three of three, just to give an example there. So when it comes to getting people to be curious, we don’t want them to be confused. So the high structure is really important, and then within the structure we want to be able to have there be those elements of surprise and delight. And I’d like to share here a clip which I have played before on the podcast, although it’s been a while, but it is one of my favorite clips.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:08:06]: Talking about how a teacher who doesn’t rely on charisma to be able to facilitate learning, that’s a lot of pressure to put on us and sometimes can lack in substance and can be more teacher focused versus learner focused. And so this is Dave Stachowiak talking about his first chemistry class in his high school. And I want you to be listening here as you hear him tell the story. What is it that you notice and you wonder about how this teacher set up an opportunity for learning to thrive and for curiosity to be fostered. It’s the first day of my high school chemistry class. And the teacher goes through the normal things that you’d expect in a high school class, which is reviews the books, talks about the assignments, goes through the syllabus and toward the end of the 45 or 50 minutes class, he lights a candle on his desk right up at the front of the classroom. And he’s still talking and kind of going through the logistics of the course. And then he gets to the end and he says, the one thing I really want you to learn this year in this course is that you’re going to learn a lot about different properties and chemical formats, but I really want you to remember that chemistry in the world around you isn’t always what it seems.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:32]: And he reaches back and he grabs the candle still lit, picks it up, tosses the whole thing in his mouth, starts chewing, and then he says, See you tomorrow, walks out of the room. And I remember sitting there watching this in the front row of the class. And I turned to my friend Christy and we said to each other, this is going to be a great class, and it was a really good class because once in a while he would do those things. But the interesting thing looking back now is he actually wasn’t the most dynamic teacher most of the time, but because he started so strong, he didn’t need to be because we were always at the edge of our seat wondering what he’d do next. I invited you, as you listened to that story from Dave, to be thinking about what that teacher did to really foster curiosity. And the one research study around this is known as A Time for Telling. That’s the title of an article by Daniel Schwartz and John Bransford as they talk about in the Cognition and Instruction Journal, a method for developing prior knowledge that prepares students to learn from a text or lecture. And I first heard about A Time for Telling from Derek Bruff and Derek Bruff really puts this in much simpler terms and that is that if we get people curious and wondering about things and asking questions, we’ve actually primed them a bit for tolerating or sustaining attention around some of the more dense material.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:14]: So when we’re drawing from our prior learning and ideas and curiosity, we then have something to sustain us through more of the boring stuff. So we want in the learning management system for there to be again that structure. But then as we’re going, we’re finding, wait, there’s this video clip. It made me laugh or it made me wonder about something or challenged my thinking in some way. Something about it was novel or captured me because it was just different. And so those are the kinds of things that we need to infuse. So we keep drawing people back in that this is not always going to be what you expect. Another thing that I want us to consider is to imagine future you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:03]: There’s three ideas I have for you today around imagining future you. Because if you’re going to be good at providing this high level of structure, I’m suggesting within the learning management system, but also the things that will spark curiosity and wonder, we’re going to need to make this manageable. So let’s talk a little bit about three ideas about how we might do that. First off, within a learning management system, I tend to not like to update files ever. And why is that? Well, files change. I tend to get a lot of ideas. I just want to tweak this a little bit. I like to iterate over time.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:41]: And if I’ve uploaded a file to the learning management system, then I’m going to have to remember to go re upload the new version when I make tweaks to it. Instead, what I can do is link from the learning management system to a file that lives somewhere on a cloud service. This might be within OneDrive on Office 365. It might be in my case, dropbox is great. Dropbox is especially great because if I save a Word document, perhaps a syllabus that’s for a particular year, a particular date, I can then save a PDF with a generic file name that doesn’t include date oriented information. And then every semester, every year when I reteach that class and update the syllabus, I overwrite the PDF so that that link is persistent and I never have to update those links to syllabi. Within the learning management system, it’s not possible to do that with other systems. But you can kind of work your way around this just by creating archives and still having a persistent document that is always linked to.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:50]: So just be thinking about how do you link to files, documents, videos versus trying to upload things to be contained inside of the learning management system. You’re almost always going to be better off linking versus uploading. A similar idea would be thinking about embedding. Do we embed a video? Do we embed a Padlet board, a Padlet virtual cork board? Do we embed the audio from a National Public Radio podcast that we want people to listen to? And embedding is great for similar reasons that linking is such that if things were to change, then they get updated automatically if someone contributes to that Padlet virtual court board. What we’re seeing inside the learning management system is a view into that ever changing, ever evolving conversation happening out on those external channels. Or if NPR updates the transcript or something, or they add additional resources or whatever to a web page because it’s been embedded, then I don’t have to go and accommodate those changes or become aware of them, that kind of a thing. And then the last idea I have around us thinking about future you is naming conventions. And I had mentioned when I talked about having numbers for modules as well as names, and then I talked a little bit about how we might have the assignments and activities under there that are numbered.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:15:30]: And I mentioned I didn’t call attention to it at the time, but I mentioned for example, having M 50 one attendance of participation, eleven of twelve, that zero one, rather than having it M five one. If I ever go above nine assignments or links or things within a given module, my numbers aren’t going to line up very well because in the case of M five one, that’s only taking up one digit. And when I get to M 510, it takes up two digits and it just makes it less pleasing visually, less organized, a little bit more cluttered for naming. So if, you know you might have more than nine of things, it’s always a good idea to do the 10203. Well, now that we’re talking about future you future me? When it comes to file naming convention. If you think you might dave more than ten or more than 100, I guess I should say more than nine, more than 99, then you want to leave those digital placeholders so that when you look at things, or other collaborators look at things in a file, a window of files and documents, they will be numbered correctly. Because if you numbered it, let’s say corporate social responsibility one, corporate social responsibility two, corporate social responsibility three, and so on and so forth, by the time you get to ten, if you haven’t done the 0102, then ten is going to be right underneath one. It’s going to go 110, two, et cetera.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:23]: And so the numbers aren’t going to work out. So having those extra digits in there and I don’t want to overwhelm you with a lot of ticky tacky things around file naming, but I encourage you just to think about it. What will be my file naming convention for the course assets that belong to the different classes that I teach and being consistent about that? If a date matters and you want to easily be able to navigate it, then I like to start with a year, a four digit year, a dash, a two digit month here in the United States. I realize that’s different in other countries. And then a dash, and then the day, a two digit day. So if it’s the first, it’s zero one as opposed to one for the same reasons I cited earlier. So get familiar with file naming conventions, the kind of characters that you should and should not use in file names. Your operating system, Windows or Mac may allow you to use particular characters in a file name.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:24]: But if you upload it, or you try to sync it with Cloud Services, or it goes into SharePoint or another website or something. If we’re using characters that are not allowable or cause difficulty when we upload things to the Cloud or in the web, it’s just going to make it that much harder for us. So getting used to the best characters to use, best naming conventions to use, and being consistent on that is really being kind to future you. And I’d like to end this part of the episode just to encourage us to keep imagining it can be so hard. We get overwhelmed, so much going on, all these things are tugging at us, causing us stress. And if we have high expectations, and sometimes that can be high expectations coupled with perfectionism that can really cause such a toll over time, we can be so unkind to ourselves and not acknowledge the work, the really heart and soul that we put into our work as teachers and learners. And so I want you to be in a space where you’re kind enough to recognize we can’t do all of the things that we hear about on podcasts such as this. It’s just not possible to draw from all those sources of potential expansions of our imagination and take action.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:19:52]: So we really get encouraged from different scholars and experts and writers to start small. And one person who of course has an entire book with that in the title of it is James Lang’s Small Teaching Everyday lessons from the Science of Learning as we think through what we might draw from that book, it’s here’s some ways we might motivate students and help them be able to persist in their own learning. Here’s some ways we might be able to make use of the science of cognitive psychology and teaching and learning. What is it that we know can help to foster both longer term memory skills, learning around things, and also deeper, more meaningful learning for students? I mean, just small, small things. So not allowing ourselves to get overwhelmed. I think about Tom Tobin and Kristen Behling’s book about universal design for learning and this whole plus one approach is there one thing I can take away? I’d encourage you, even as you’ve listened to this podcast episode, maybe you go take a look at the show notes and just pick one thing that you might try in the coming term, your coming class. Just pick something small. And James Lang has this in Small Teaching, this part of a poem by Mary Oliver that I just every time I hear it, take deep breaths and it resonates so much with me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:18]: This is Mary Oliver’s Instructions for Living a Life, she writes, pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. In many ways, I think that’s what this podcast has been for all these years is just me paying attention to teaching and learning and caring and wanting to be better, and then being very interested in having conversations with other people who are wrestling with similar issues that I am. It’s been so fun to have done this for all these years, nine plus years now. And I’m not alone in terms of struggling and just wanting to do right by our students and care well and support them. A pedagogy of kindness, like Kate Denel told us in recent episodes and with her book by the same name, a Pedagogy of Kindness, be astonished, Mary Oliver tells us. To me, this is about gratitude and thankfulness and trusting our students and who they are and who they are becoming, and really just being astonished at what they are currently capable of and imagining in the most positive of a sense of what they might be capable of in the future. And Mary Oliver closes The Instructions for Living a Life that she has for us to tell about it. That’s why I’m so grateful for these podcast conversations that I get to have, and I do get to have so many at my university.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:45]: My job has evolved so much over these last years. When I started teaching in higher ed in June of 2014, I was in a role as a professor doing full time. I had a four four load, four classes in the fall, four classes in the spring, and now I teach one class in the fall, one class in the spring, and I am a Dean of Teaching and Learning. So it’s more of administrative leadership and leading the areas of our faculty development, our library, and our areas of educational effectiveness and institutional research. Speaking of telling about it, by the way, really having some great conversations with us. Getting better about making the work that we do visible such that the organization can make more effective decisions and really getting to celebrate the successes of our students and all of the ways that their learning and their own work and efforts make such a difference both now and in the future. And so when we get overwhelmed, it’s too much. There’s too many ideas, there’s too many people everyone else hasn’t figured out.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:23:51]: I’m the only one struggling. I know that those are the kinds of things that we can tell us. And the expression that I love around this is think and think. And that is think and think. And I do know how lonely it can be, and especially if you haven’t formed those networks of people that care as deeply about teaching and learning as you do. And I’d like to leave you with these words of encouragement from Mary Oliver where she writes whoever you are, no matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over, announcing your place in the family of things. That was from Mary Oliver’s. Wild geese.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:40]: These are some ideas of how we might unlock our imagination, foster student learning through curiosity and wonder, and some ideas of how we might do that within a learning management system in general and the Canvas learning management system specifically. And I’m looking forward to sharing some similar thoughts at the InstructureCon on if you download this episode, the day it airs, on the very day it airs, but otherwise if you’ve downloaded it a little bit later, then you can know that I Dave. Hopefully a great time there and a fun time reuniting with some people that maybe I haven’t seen in years, who knows? So I encourage you in the show notes to go look at the link to the resources page that I mentioned to you that’s available where you can go and follow up on some of these resources. I’ve got a bunch of videos that are really fun around Curiosity and Wonder and I also have some videos that I recorded around how I created some of the things that I talked about a little bit more how to on some of the things within the Canvas learning management system specifically that I talked about in this episode. This is the time in the show where I get to give some recommendations and I wanted to recommend jared Quinn and his colleagues from Wake Forest University released a whole series of resources that address the most common questions that they get from instructors who are new to teaching online. And they’ve created short, vibrant and practical guides to addressing those questions. And they’ve called it the Design Studio jump starts. They’re a collection of one page handouts, and they give us a jump start on designing an online course in ways that help avoid the most common tensions that we face as educators.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:35]: And they’re really nice. They’re really vibrant graphics. And I’m just going to name some of the topics here. So there’s one. I love the title because this is, of course, making me have flashbacks to music of my youth, but video killed the lecture star. Creating videos for online courses. And when we go and access the one pager, we can see different types of video types. We might create some tech tips around this and encouragement and advice about helping us do this more effectively.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:06]: Creating videos is about connection. The jump start guide emphasize for us. Here’s another one about Positivity in the syllabus. So it’s positivity silla bus and it’s a little bus theme, it’s a little play on words there. I really like it. Creating a syllabus for online, and they talk about things like having a warm, welcoming tone, inclusive language, and providing the schedule and grades, and then some different things where we look at the instructor expectations, the learner expectations and how to contact you, and then ways to even enhance your syllabus a little bit. Is it video highlights or annotating the syllabus or even trimming the syllabus? Which is something I highly recommend, by the way. Instead of duplicating your calendar of when things are due and what dates you’ll be lecturing or talking about or doing activities around what, how about including that in the learning management system, which has a far superior calendar because it combines the information from all the classes someone is enrolled in in one place and even has the ability to subscribe to that calendar in one’s primary calendar, such as in Outlook or another calendaring app.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:24]: So far superior, but I could just go and go with each one of these. And I just encourage you to take a look at these guides or perhaps even get a group of colleagues together and talk through these. This could be a quick 20 minutes conversation that you’re able to have around the handouts, and then people have that as a resource to follow up on. So that is my suggestion. And thanks to Jared Quinn for tweeting about this and for your leadership in making these possible. The second thing I’d like to recommend is that there is a new version of a Note app that I, Dave recommended previously. Shiny Frog is the company that makes Bear the Bear app, and they just released Bear 2.0 and it’s a complete rewrite of their popular Notetaking application, which is available for the iPhone, iPad, and the Mac. And they’ve got new things in this version of Table, how you can fold sections in.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:25]: So you might want to just tuck information away, a whole list of things, and only expand it out when you want to access that information. A table of contents and backlinks so we can link between notes now and we can also link within a note and get down to it. There’s a feature which I have not tried yet, so I’m sure I can’t recommend it, but a newly designed sketching within the app that I can’t wait to give a try to sidebar pinning, which I’m excited about because I have some notes that I access more regularly than others. Custom fonts, new themes, link and PDF previews. There’s all kinds of things that we’ve been waiting those of us that are Bare users have been waiting for this one for a while, so I encourage you to go check out Shiny Frogs new release Bear 2.0. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger podcast.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:30:31]: Production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. I would encourage you, if you have not yet, to subscribe to the email updates. From teaching in Higher Ed, you head over to teachinginhireed.com subscribe. And once a week in your inbox, you’re going to get the links from the most recent set of show notes, some quotable words that don’t show up in the episodes, some other recommendations that are just things I’m checking out but that don’t show up in the primary recommendations, and a little peek at the episode that is upcoming. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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