[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 282 of the Teaching in higher Ed Podcast, Mike Wesch is back, this time to talk about using challenges to motivate learners.

[00:00:12] Promotion Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

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[00:00:21] Bonni: Hello, and 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 also be more present for our students.

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I’m excited to be welcoming back to the show Mike Wesch. He has been reintroduced to me through my partnership with the Association of College and University Educators or ACU. ACUs courses and community site feature many of teaching and learning’s top experts, faculty developers and practitioners to showcase evidence-based teaching practices. For more than three years now, ACU has connected me with great guests for the show. To learn more about ACUs featured experts and institutional partnerships, visit their website acue.org

Mike Wesch has been dubbed the prophet of an education revolution by the Kansas City Star. Wesch is internationally recognized as a leader in teaching innovation. The New York Times listed him as one of ten professors in the nation whose course’s quote, ‘Mess With Old Models’ and added that they give students an experience that might change how they think, what they care about or even how they live their lives. His videos have been viewed over 20 million times, translated into over 20 languages and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide.

Wesch has won several major awards for his work including the US Professor of the Year Award from the Carnegie Foundation, the Wired Magazine Rave Award. He was named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. Mike Wesch, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:23] Mike: Hey, it’s great to be here.

[00:02:24] Bonni: You may or may not know this. You’re such a educational hero to me. I’m so honored to get to have this follow-up conversation with you but I feel like I’ve been getting to follow some of the things that you’ve been doing, and some of the things that you’ve been thinking about. Would you start by talking a bit about your thinking around the language of how you describe things in your classes. I’m specifically in this case thinking about I believe you don’t use the word, homework or assignments?

[00:02:50] Mike: Yes.

[00:02:51] Bonni: You have a different way of thinking about that language. Talk a little bit about that background.

[00:02:57] Mike: Yes, so, me and my colleague, Ryan Klataske, started realizing that assignments weren’t quite working because people just think of them as something they have to do. Then we started playing with the idea of experiments. We had students doing experiments. Then we finally settled on the idea of challenges. That just seemed to click. That also helped us think about what we wanted to create for those challenges.

Instead of thinking of them as just assignments, we started thinking like, “What really is a challenge?” Not just in the sense of what would be difficult but also challenge has that sense of adventure and fun. We set the goal of creating assignments. I’ll put assignments in quotes here that would actually be so interesting and fun and useful that people would want to do them over and over again.

We currently have 10 challenges as part of our course. I’d say maybe at least half of them have reached that threshold where we find students are actually coming back and doing them again and again, even though they’re not technically assigned. That to me is the sign of success. We want to keep revising our challenges until we get all 10 of them as something that people really want to do.

[00:04:10] Bonni: I have such fond recollections of a sociology professor, when I was in college. He would do similar things. Although, I crack up because I managed to get A’s in all of my sociology classes. It was all about writing and why I couldn’t do whatever was being assigned. I’m sure you’re very familiar with these kinds of things like go into an elevator crowded elevator and stay facing the wrong direction.

He had one around driving, where you’re supposed to drive. I suspect he probably couldn’t get away with this today but you’re supposed to break the social norms of driving. Do you have students who end up where they aren’t able to push themselves through to the challenge or is that not allowed in these cases?

[00:04:50] Mike: It’s pretty rare because we don’t have anything that’s quite like that. I’m very familiar with the sociology work. In fact, one of our challenges it’s named after a book called The Un-TV and the 10 Mph Car, which are some of these experiments that come from sociology. We have one called the UN-Thing rather than the Un-TV. That allows people to decide what they give up for the week or so. Some students give up their cellphones. Some students give up chairs. Some give up shoes, all kinds of different things. We try to make the bar for participation really low. We try to provide lots of options.

Everybody feels like they have some way of participating. It’s very rare that we get somebody saying that they just can’t do it because when we get that, we just invent some alternative and try to keep inventing alternatives until it works for everybody.

[00:05:42] Bonni: Take us into the classroom when you first describe these challenges to your students.

[00:05:49] Mike: I’ve always felt like I have to sell it in a way that like if these are truly worth doing for anybody, then I should be doing them too. Man, the first challenge. Nobody’s ever asked me that but it’s quite a story really. The first challenge was just as pure anthropology as you can be. I teach anthropology. The main thing we do in cultural anthropology is fieldwork. Of course, the first challenge was just go do fieldwork somewhere locally like put yourself in a situation you wouldn’t normally be in. Immerse yourself in this culture for about an hour and then write about it.

I pitched this to the students. I told them, “I want all of these to be worthwhile and fun and interesting. I’m going to do them myself to make sure they’re worthwhile, fun and interesting. What do you guys think I should do?” They said, “Well, you should come out with us.” They invited me out for the night. I was like, “Man, I haven’t seen the hours of 11:00 PM to 3:00 AM for like 10 years because I at that time I had a 10-year-old. I just hadn’t been out in all that time.

They basically took me out and gave me a tour of college life. I did all kinds of things. I went to a frat party. I went dancing down in the village. It was really fun. We ended up making a podcast about it. I went back and interviewed a bunch of students that I met throughout the night. At the frat party, I stumbled across a couple who were meeting for the first time. Now it’s three and a half years later, they’re still together. I went and document that. I went to interview them. I just saw them talking for the first time and I knew both of them.

Then I went back and interviewed him it turned out that they had really hit it off that night, and that they were– Now they’re still together. That was a fun night and really set the tone I think for me in thinking about how powerful these challenges could be. In fact, there was a revelation I had that night when I was out dancing and I just couldn’t dance because I’m 40-plus and married. It was just very weird to be around a bunch of 20-year-olds dancing. I wanted to dance cause as part of anthropology, we want to participate and really feel what it feels to be in that moment, but I just couldn’t do it. I just lockdown.

I met this Chinese student down there, a Chinese international student. He was just total flow just amazing dancer. He took me under his wing and showed me a few moves and eventually got me moving. Once I started moving, I realized just how important it was to immerse yourself and to move and to participate. It stuck in my head at that moment that my students and I can’t just learn by thinking. You really have to live your way into a new way of thinking.

That really resonated with me. That became a motto for our course was this idea that we’re trying to teach things that are not just conceptual. They’re certainly not just a list of keywords to memorize. Anthropology is hard. It’s hard to encounter people who are different from you, hard to open up to them, hard to listen to them and truly listen to them, hard to be emphatic. We wanted to create challenges that would actually allow people to challenge themselves to be this person. That’s what we try to do with those challenges now.

[00:09:10] Bonni: I remember so vividly the last time we had an opportunity to talk. You describing I believe it was hitting the age of 30 although we know that’s an arbitrary number but just this separation that I remember you describing from your students. I think that we’re actually the same age. I’m in my late 40s. I remember you talking about that morning that you had to do a little bit around, “Gosh I’m not one of them anymore. “

Yet, this assignment, you seem to strike a chord that I can’t quite even formulate a question around where you don’t pretend that you’re going to dance the same as them. You don’t pretend that you’re going to be one of the cool kids but that’s what this experiment is about. I think it’s a really difficult balance where I see some of my colleagues just keep themselves at such a distance and don’t try to get anything about what’s happening with their culture and in their lives. Then the ones that is just this awkwardness of trying to be them and we’re not.

[00:10:11] Mike: That’s exactly right like, “How do you just completely be yourself while also being of great value to them?” This is where it comes down to like, “Teaching doesn’t just happen in the classroom. It’s a constant meditation.” I find myself constantly thinking about, “Who are kids these days? Who do they need to be? What can I provide for them?” Just this constant thinking and meditating on that.

I think most importantly getting my own ego or self out of the way and really thinking about it from their perspective, “What do they need?” Like, “Not what I need to do to make them like me,” but like, “what do they really need?” I think we each have different gifts. We have to figure out what those gifts are. I think one of the things that I can give them for example that I work really hard at is I essentially try to wrestle with really difficult intellectual problems that I know that they have to deal with and then try to mentor them a little bit on what I have found in trying to wrestle with that question.

I don’t know some people are against lecturing. I agree that most lecturing isn’t so great right, when you’re just going through keywords and stuff. I think there’s something of value when somebody who’s been working in a field for 20 years or so wrestles with a really meaningful important question that students are wrestling with as well. You spend say 20 hours wrestling with it and then come in and say, I’ll put lecture in quotes here, but you really doing an intellectual dance with them.

You’re wrestling with something. It’s an honest wrestling. It’s not that the answer. You let them participate. You let them ask questions and then together, you create this beautiful space where you’re all wrestling with these questions that are interesting to the students that are important to them and obviously you have some expertise to add to that. It’s a tough dance but that’s what we do.

[00:12:16] Bonni: It’s a very difficult dance. In preparation to today’s conversation, I wanted to bring forth this idea of desirable difficulties. I actually found out that that term was coined by Robert Bjork. I’ll put a link in the show notes. He’s been on the show before. I had no idea he was the one who coined that term but it’s showing up a lot in the scholarship of teaching and learning, this idea that we want to have a learning task or in your case, a challenge that requires a considerable but desirable amount of effort. His research bears out that that will help improve the long-term performance.

There’s a lot around this would show that sometimes in the short term, we don’t see the payoff but it’s that deeper learning. Can you talk about how desirable difficulties play into your own teaching?

[00:13:07] Mike: I think what I’m trying to do right now is in many ways engage students in a way that perhaps can increase that level of desirable difficulty, almost increase desire. By showing them that if you challenge yourself in this way, you can get very meaningful outcomes out of it. I suppose that again the best way I know how to do that is to always be doing the challenges myself. That not only helps me revise the challenges if I have to but it also allows me to be in the moment with them and share with them the difficulties that I’m facing.

I think that the desirable is actually a variable here like, “How much desire is there?” Then you can elevate the difficulty based on that. There can be a natural elevation of the difficulty so that you can actually have a low minimum bar for a challenge for example. Some students will just throw themselves in and raise their own difficulty because of their desire. I think the two things that I know that can raise that desire is one, a lot of context and showing and them why it matters.

The other thing is creating a community where everybody’s going through the same difficulty. That we know anthropology studies all over the world is shared difficulty creates tremendous community. You have a nice interplay between those two is if you can create something difficult a great challenge and then also have community nurtured at the same time, the two will play off of each other. They’ll be willing to do more while also creating more community in the classroom.

[00:14:49] Bonni: Last night, in my class, we had a wonderful guest speaker come in. A lot of what he was sharing was a framework for how to tell our stories. Another of my colleagues was there. We’re in a conversation and all of a sudden, I hear my name being called. I realize I’ve been volunteered to tell my story up in front. Let’s just say I hadn’t quite anticipated that, but it ended up to be a story that I hadn’t really expected to resonate so much with them.

I think they saw me more human because I talked about a time when I was very fearful in my life and specifically some financial instability where I was convinced I couldn’t go grocery shopping and had to eat everything out of the pantry that I had bought when I was sick. Those cans of soup that you never end up eating while you’re sick and they just sit there. It seems to really resonate. I kept thinking about how as you’re putting yourself into these challenges, Mike, that yes, it’s a part of your story but you’re gifted at making a part of all of our stories.

When I listen to Life 101, and in fact just the other day recommended it to a student. He was listening to some very bad podcast from my perspective. I got to get this guy out of here. He really is just a gifted storyteller but is hearing some untruthful stories from my perspective. I’m like, “Here’s what I really want you to go listen to.” He was just so fired up after he had a chance to talk but how much do you think about that. You talked about earlier separating our ego, separating ourselves.

I think that could to some people sound flippant, but I’m convinced that there’s more to it than that with you. What are you doing in terms of just preparing to tell these stories that you know they’re going to resonate more universally?

[00:16:25] Mike: I wish I had an exact formula for that but yes, I agree, it sounds flippant and when you talk about like, “Don’t let the ego be the center.” Because everything I’d want to say, I think was still sort sound flippant and maybe get misunderstood. For example, in storytelling circles, people will talk a lot about how you have to have a reason for the story. It has to be relevant. It has to resonate. It has to have rhythm. It has to be real. I always think of these as the five-Rs. That it’s not untrue. There has to be a reason for the story. It has to be relevant. It has to have resonance. It has to be have rhythm. It has to be real. Those are those are great five-Rs.

Then like, “How do you actually do that?” That’s where I think there’s a disconnect because nothing I could tell you in the next five minutes will make you a great storyteller. You just have to really sit with and think deeply. This is where I don’t think it’s flippant at all to cut away the ego is like, “How do you sit and think about or even better sit with students and talk to them and remove yourself and really try to hear them and really try to listen to them, understand the context in which they live, the life that they’re trying to shape and the intellectual challenges they’re having without getting your own ego in there, without getting your own politics in there, without getting whatever it is.

That’s really difficult. That’s the only way to getting to the place where I think you can make those the so-called five-Rs really come alive. How do that the reason for your story is a worthwhile reason unless you know your students? How do you know if it’s relevant if you don’t know your students? How do you know if it’s going to resonate if you don’t know your students? How do what the right rhythm is if you don’t know your students? Every single R depends on knowing your students.

Knowing other people ultimately requires some diminishment of ego in some way. We could flush that out a little bit more I guess ego typically would be made up of your fears, maybe you’re afraid that they’re not going to like you, maybe you’re afraid that they’re going to think you’re stupid. If you teach from those spaces, you end up not being the best teacher you can be because you end up teaching to basically impress them and make them think that you’re smart and hope that they like you.

That can lead to just I don’t know. It doesn’t lead to resonance. It doesn’t lead to relevance. It leads to you using big words to sound smart. I don’t know. That’s tough stuff. All I can say is that I wrestled with it, wrestle with it, wrestle with it and then I go in the classroom and sometimes it succeeds. A lot of times it fails. When it fails, I just come back to my office. I lay down on the floor. I figure out like, “What went wrong there?” You just think really deeply about it until you can figure it out.

[00:19:35] Bonni: When Derek Bruff was on the podcast recently, he told a beautiful story about his daughter making a video. She entered a contest ended up winning the contest if I’m remembering the story right. One of the things he shared about was how much footage she had to generate just to get something like a two-minute video. Derek, I apologize in advance because I’m going to be way off with my numbers but it was something like three hours of footage for two minutes. It was that extreme of a difference between those. I think that’s part of the thing that when I look at your work and you’re just so brilliant, I keep thinking about some of the videos that are on A-N-T-H 101, Anth 101, that it just feels like I’m with you, you’re putting your bike helmet on, [laughs] you’re getting the shoes on and I don’t even enjoy riding bikes so that I’m having a great time riding the bike with you. That just in development and every single piece of video I’ve ever seen you do that it looks effortless but it’s not. Correct?

Then how much is left on your editing floor in terms of just your idea generation and then once you actually pull the camera out, could you talk a little bit about that process?

[00:20:50] Mike: That number that you got is about right. It’s typically like 100 to 1 in terms of footage to act what actually ends up and then that doesn’t even begin to speak to all the scraps of scripts that get left behind that never even get shot. It’s a tremendously difficult process. Even then, that stuff you’re referring to, I was making two years ago, I look back at that stuff and I’m like, I’m not happy with it anymore. I’m exploring new storytelling styles and I’m going to try something new. I’ve been working on that for two years behind the scenes and I’ve never shown anybody the work. I show close colleagues and friends that work to get feedback but I haven’t released it to the public yet.

I’m just always doing that. I think the important thing here is, I think our whole media world is filled with people doing things that look effortless, [chuckles] actually full of difficulty and that can lead people thinking like, “Man, I’m no good at this.” If you want to do this kind of thing, you have to realize just how hard other people are working and not get discouraged when you see something that looks great effortlessly and then you’re looking at your stuff and be like, “Man, this is terrible.”

I deal with that a lot, as well. Definitely my biggest gateway to procrastination is my perfectionism. I have to be really careful about how I look at other people’s material and make sure, again, this is getting ego out of it. Just every day, you have to just do work to get better. In fact, all the video work I ever do is in a folder on my computer, that’s called Practice. Every time I start video editing, I remember, it’s practice.

[00:22:44] Bonni: You have generously allowed me to show one of your video pieces which I’ll be talking about a little bit later on in some speaking that I’ve been doing. One of the things I always try to follow it up with, because of that, it’s too easy to look at what you do and go, “Okay. That’s not me, sign me out.” I show a drawing that I do, I do a little bit of pen casting which for listeners who may not be familiar with that is where I draw and it’s taking a video of me drawing and then I speak over it, I almost give a lecture over on top of my little seven-year-old drawing.

I just feel the room move where they go, “My gosh, I’m so embarrassed on her behalf. I can’t believe she just showed that.” It is embarrassing, except that it’s also part of me to say, “No, you don’t get to give up that easy.” I don’t get to give up that easy, that if I can’t set my ego aside, I don’t do this for my students. I got to have dinner about four months ago with a student who she’s been out of school for three or four years and she can still– I experimented with this and it’s very simple instructional design whole part.

I experimented in consumer behavior where I would try to in the beginning those first couple of classes, do the whole. This is all of consumer behavior and it was a hand-drawn image of a t-shirt and there’s things written and some tattoos on there and then there’s holding a shopping bag on one hand and old fashioned television with an antenna on the other. She could still tell me she remembered things from that drawing because then it would zoom in within weeks two, three, four et cetera and then it zoom back out. I kept doing this thing.

It’s very childlike in terms of the drawing and they giggle and they say, “Did your son draw that?” “Actually, that’s me.” They remember. If I can just get out of the way and we don’t have to start that big. We don’t have to start at 100 to one, what if we just started at three to one or five to one?

[00:24:47] Mike: Honestly, with video and especially with online teaching, I think it’s so important to have a personal presence in some way and your voice and your image are just really profound personal pieces. I would say even just turning on your smartphone on selfie mode and talking to your students for a couple of minutes off the cuff and throwing that up there and just invite them to do the same. As the first thing you do in the class, it’s just so simple and you’re not setting the bar high because you’re just saying, “Hey, I turn on my phone, can you guys do the same and then send it back?”

Then I do that at the beginning of my classes and just my online classes and I just keep it as a pin discussion at the top so then when people are talking throughout the semester, they can just go back and see other people’s introductions as well. That’s like a really low level, entry-level into the video world and I just really think it helps with that sense of presence and connection is so important.

[00:25:52] Bonni: I took an online class with Sean Michael Morris a year or two ago and he had the same thing where show us where are you right now? Show us the space that you’re working in or taking this in. There’s a woman who she was a motorcycle rider, she had just finished her ride, she was just, “My gosh.” Talk about being able to see the world through our students and our fellow learners’ eyes, it’s really powerful.

[00:26:18] Mike: It is. That’s why I really have come to love teaching online because I do these challenges and these challenges often have a photograph and sometimes a video component. Boy, it’s just so great. People will think this is impossible to save it. I love my online class. I think sometimes there’s so many things that are better than the in-person class and one of the big things is this use of video that we do. I feel like I get to know the students so much better in their actual environment.

I also lecture out in the world, so to speak, so I don’t think about what would I say in a classroom when I prepare for a quote lecture. I think about, “What do I want to say? Where can I go out in the world to show my students how this works?” Then I go out in the world and try to do that. That’s my favorite thing to do and that’s really changed my mind about teaching online.

[00:27:18] Bonni: Before we go onto the recommendation segment, I’d love to have you share a little bit more about what you’re doing now but also your future plans for this work?

[00:27:27] Mike: I’m taking a sabbatical here in a couple months and I’m going to take my whole family, including my three boys, ages six, nine and 12 and we’re basically going to go around the world and do some of these out in the world lectures. As an anthropologist studying all humans at all times in all places, it just made sense to actually go out in the world and create content for my online classes by going to interesting places and talking to people about how they actually live their lives rather than just talking about it in the classroom. I’m going to be gone all next Spring doing that, traveling with my family. That’s pretty much all I can think about right now because that’s a big project to put together.

[00:28:09] Bonni: Before we get to today’s recommendations, I wanted to share a little bit about today’s sponsor and that is Text Expander. You can really unlock your productivity with text expander, take those repetitive tasks that we do, things that we type repetitively and our text documents and spreadsheets and web forms and more. Also, across teams help keep our messages more consistent by sharing snippets with each other. Text Expander for teams even lets us save those in a collaborative way and have more consistent communication and really ease the road for responding to those commonly asked questions.

Text Expander is available for the Mac, it’s available for Windows, it’s on Chrome and it’s also on the iPad and iPhone. It’s really essential to me in my productivity. I just type a few keystrokes for example and up pops the show notes, variables for an episode, so what’s the episode number? Who’s the guest? That gets populated a number of times across the show notes for a given episode.

It’s a really wonderful way to save yourself some time so that we can spend it doing the important things. I talk about this at the start of every episode being more present for our students and to me, that means the world when I can save a little bit of time. In fact, I get an email from Text Expander that tells me just how much time I saved and it really does make a difference in my workflow. Thanks again to Text Expander for sponsoring today’s episode.

My first recommendation will not be a stranger to you. Yes, it is one of your videos. It is The Sleeper and I alluded to it earlier. This video has transformed my teaching and my thinking and you mentioned that this is not just the work that we do once I have to– It’s a good thing that you’ve allowed me to show it in so many of my talks. [laughs] It’s like I just need to keep being reminded of it and in case people haven’t seen it, you definitely should click on the link in the show notes but it’s really a story of misperception and I would say it’s also probably a story of ego. I just wanted to share a quick story that had happened to me. I wish I could say it was years ago and I’ve learned so much but it just was a couple of weeks ago. There’s a student who, she’s very expressive in my class and so I can often tell what kind of a day that she’s having but I keep making the mistake of thinking this is somehow about me.

It happened most recently when I had a guest speaker coming in and as regular listeners might remember, I really like this gadget called the Meeting Owl and the Meeting Owl sits in the middle of a table and it’s got a 360 degree camera on the top of it and so it integrates really nicely with zoom and if somebody starts talking across the room from me, it’ll automatically focus the camera on them and it’s just really seamless. It looks like The Brady Bunch but not in quite as equal proportions of the frame. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. I’m talking. I’m sharing something before the guest speaker joins and I’m just what is going on?

I think it’s about me and I’m really testing patience because I was getting apprehensive. Having someone come in and you hope that the students will connect in all of this. I wanted to go, “What is it?” But I kept myself calm. “What’s going on?” And she, “I’m having a bad day and every time that camera looks at me, I am just reminded of how bad of a day it is and how bad I look.” I thought, “Bonni, you did it again. You thought this was about you. It’s not about you. Why is this such a wrestling you described it as earlier.” I just think we can’t watch the sleeper enough and we can’t learn from those lessons enough.

I think it’s a really great thing that I’ve learned not to vocalize every thought that comes into my head because I’d be a much worse teacher for it.

[00:31:55] Mike: Yes. That’s definitely true. We mistreat our students all the time when we think it’s about us. That’s one of the most common things that we do.

[00:32:01] Bonni: Yes. Then my second recommendation is a graphic novel. I guess they call it a graphic narrative. It’s called Out On The Wire. It’s by Jessica Abel. It also reminded me a lot in reading it of what lands on the editing floor which I talked about earlier. Let’s just go behind the scenes of seven of today’s most popular narrative radio shows and podcast including this American life and radio lab and it’s just phenomenal. I know many of these podcasts to get to see some of the behind the scenes of what it took to get that kind of rich audio is just such a delight and I am not a big reader of that format of book. It was really fun. I really enjoyed it. I suggest that people go check out that book.

[00:32:50] Mike: I love that book. I actually use it as a textbook for my digital ethnography class where we talk about storytelling, real storytelling of real-life stories. It’s just fantastic. She also has a podcast that went along with that. She recorded herself as she interviewed all this people that became part of that graphic novel so there’s, I think, 13 episodes.

[00:33:11] Bonni: I didn’t know that.

[00:33:12] Mike: Yes. They’re great. There’s even workshops that go along with me and it’s all free. If you want to teach from that, it’s absolutely fantastic.

[00:33:21] Bonni: I will definitely be looking that up. Can I put up under your recommendations added to the list because I don’t want other people to miss out?

[00:33:27] Mike: You open the big box here of things that I love when you mentioned that, but I’d say the thing that I love recently is that DaVinci Resolve video editing program is now free. There’s a studio version that’s worth $300 but you really don’t need it. Boy, it’s so feature-rich. It’s a great alternative to Adobe Premiere. It’s a high-end editing program completely free. I think they’re making a play here to basically just grab some market share. Everybody loves it. Lots of people are switching to it, even the pros. Definitely use that. I highly recommend it if you’re editing anything and it’s a great way to get started because it’s pretty simple.

Along with that, you can check out free video websites like Videvo where you can download free video clips. If you’re shy about being on camera, for example, or you’re teaching online or just trying to create a video for your class, you don’t necessarily have to be on camera, you can grab some of these awesome clips and put them down and start editing lay out narrative over the top of it and you can actually do some pretty cool story-telling and great videos just like that. Those are the two big ones. Also, I made a video about teaching online that is really close to my heart right now.

If people want to check that out, that’s 10 tips for online teaching. We’ll put it in the show notes, I’m sure. That’s very close to my heart right now because I really think online teaching can be done well and there’s a big future in online teaching and I think we have to do it well or the quality of education in general is not going to be so great since so much is going to be online, I think, in the future.

[00:35:13] Bonni: You spoke of this when you talked about having yourself do the challenges and that’s what keeps them so great. If we’re not learning online ourselves, we’re never going to be good online educators. That seems such a disconnect.

[00:35:26] Mike: It’s a strange world right now where there’s never been a better time for learning. You can just learn so much and there’s so many great teachers out there who are not calling themselves. We’re all just sharing fantastic material together online and that really changes the role of the teacher. We’ve been thinking about it now for a couple decades. I think it’s getting to be crunch time here where we really need to think deeply about our role as educators in this new landscape and no better way to do that than to pay attention to how you’re learning online and then think about how you could mentor your students to be better learners in this new media landscape as well.

[00:36:15] Bonni: Mike Wesch, it’s been such a pleasure to get to have this additional conversation with you. I’m just so honored and just love your work so much. Thank you for your time.

[00:36:23] Mike: Thank you for everything you’re doing. I think this is the hub for me for learning new things and so this is a very valuable thing–

[00:36:32] [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.