The Pulse app has been around for a while. In 2017, Andy Freed provided two posts about Pulse:

• A brief description of the Pulse app (the overview video seems to have disappeared from that post), which noted that the Pulse app was then “in active development.”
• A lengthier description of the features of the Pulse app, with an emphasis on making your online class “Pulse friendly” (again, the link to the D2L promotional video seems to be outdated).

In 2019, Andy provided another, meatier description of the Pulse app, which includes a link to a really useful, student-focused page with directions on how to download the app and other info.

Having used the Pulse app for a while and having thought a lot about how the app is and isn’t useful, I’ve decided that the most important thing for you, the online instructor, to know about the Pulse app is this:

The Pulse app is always working, even when you aren’t aware of it.

Let me attempt to illustrate this principle by telling a quick story:

The icon for the Pulse app on Peter’s iPad, showing no new notifications.

One summer term – maybe 2017, which was shortly after the Pulse app achieved maturity – I taught an online class in D2L. Since I knew I would be away for a few days on a summer vacation, I spent some time during the first week of class adding a page to my course intro module that notified students when I would be away, how to contact me directly, and what to expect while I was away. Later that same day, I was working out at the Sylvania fitness center (back when we did such things – oh, how I miss the Sylvania PE facilities!) and I recognized one of my students from her profile picture. She recognized me also from my Instructor Introduction page and we exchanged pleasantries (again, these kinds of casual face-to-face encounters were commonplace in our pre-pandemic world).

Then my student said the most surprising thing: “I see you’re going to take a vacation this summer – it sounds really fun.” I was a bit shocked, since I had just added the page to the course, and I thought the student would have had to pay especially close attention to my course to notice the addition of a page. So I asked her, “How did you know that I added the page?” She replied, “Because I got a notification in my Pulse app.”

To this day, I don’t know exactly what algorithm the Pulse app used (and perhaps still uses) to decide what students are notified about. But I gleaned several lessons from this experience:

• Whether you know it or not, the Brightspace Pulse app is out there and students can download it to their iPhones, iPads, and Android mobile devices.
• Once the student opens the Pulse app and is prompted to log into the student’s D2L account at PCC, the student has access to a Pulse-mediated version of every PCC course the student registered for, including your course if the student registered for it.

If you don’t use the Pulse app yourself – and most instructors do NOT use the Pulse app (based on my admittedly limited experience), here are a few things you should know about how your students are experiencing your course in the app:

• 

  The Pulse app on Peter’s iPhone shows 13 notifications. Keep up, Peter!

  The Pulse app is primarily a notification tool. That is, the app was designed primarily to help students stay on top of the deadlines in their courses – indeed, the “Pulse” name implies that it enables students to “keep the pulse” on their courses. The Pulse app allows students to track deadlines via a neat timeline that aggregates deadlines from ALL of their courses. However, for this feature to work, it is critical that you attach due dates and end dates to ALL of the activities in your course AND you check the “Display in Calendar” box for any activity that has this option. There are other good reasons to attach dates, but the key for the Pulse app is that if you don’t attach dates, the deadline won’t be reflected in the Pulse app and students are more likely to miss it.

• Students will not only see deadlines you set in the Pulse app; students are also able to create their own tasks that will be integrated into the timeline. So if students want to create their own intermediate deadlines or individual tasks, they can do so in the Pulse app and see how they fit with all of their other tasks.
• Students can also view content, which you created for the Content tool, in the app, and they can even make it available for offline viewing (essentially downloading the content for later). You can see how this feature could be really handy for students who have 20 minutes on a bus ride, say, and want to get some reading done. D2L also touts the display features of the Content view in the app, saying there is no “pinching” or scrolling required. I’ve heard some people say that the display is guaranteed to be good only if your pages are coded in HTML, but I’ve had no problems displaying PDF documents – they are easy to read. Maybe Word docs don’t display very well, but I’m not sure about that.
• 

  The Pulse homepage on an iPhone, showing the courses Peter is enrolled in.

  While the Pulse app may have started out as a notification tool, it now allows students to click into a course and do a lot of the things they could do in a web browser, such as submit an assignment or participate in a discussion (and possibly even take a quiz – I’ve never tried it so I hope someone will let me know, in the comments, if it’s possible). If your assignment requires a file to be attached, the student will need to navigate to a file on the phone or tablet, which could be tricky, although the student can also attach a file from Google docs, which has a very nice app of its own (at least on my iPhone – I don’t know how well Google tools work on Android devices).

The key takeaway is that students may not be able to do EVERYTHING via the Pulse app, but they can still do a lot.

What about you as the instructor? How can you use the app to make your life easier?

• The first thing to know is that if you go looking for materials from Brightspace to help you use the Pulse app as an instructor, you will be frustrated! There just aren’t any docs or videos for instructors – everything about the app seems geared toward helping students download it and use it. I even called the D2L help line and spoke with Keyla at the Brightspace help desk in Mexico. We had a very nice conversation (in her good English and my terrible Spanish), and in the end she admitted that she couldn’t find any documentation for instructors; she ended up sending me student “help” materials for the app.
• I mentioned that the Pulse app excels at notifications. One particular type of notification is the “push” notification you receive when you SUBSCRIBE to a discussion topic, which is designed to help students stay abreast of discussions but can also help you in the following way: If you have a “Student Q&A” discussion topic, where students can ask (and answer) questions about the course, you could subscribe to this topic, and then you’ll get notified in the app when anyone posts to this topic. This way you can respond quickly when students encounter show-stopping obstacles (“There’s no attachment for Assignment #1” etc). Subscriptions also push emails to your email inbox, but you probably get tons of email already and are more likely to lose your subscription emails among your regular emails. Only the topics you subscribe to will be pushed to your Pulse app in the form of a notification, so it may be easier to stay on top of them there.

The controversy about mobile apps

There’s a school of thought that says students shouldn’t be doing serious academic work on their phones, and that by enabling students to access their courses on their phones, we are doing a disservice to student learning – at least that’s one opinion I heard during a session at a conference I attended in February 2020, right before the big pandemic shut-down.

Another school of thought says that students are already looking at their phones all of the time, so we may as well put their courses on their phones too, making it more likely students will spend some of that screen-time on academic work.

What do you think? Are there some learning activities in your courses that could be optimized for a mobile app? (perhaps a quiz on body parts in a biology class?). Are there some activities, like writing a serious academic paper, that should NEVER be attempted on the small screen of a mobile device? (but the paper could still be submitted via a mobile device?).

What are your experiences with the Pulse app? What do your students tell you about their experiences with the app? Please let us know by leaving a comment in the Comments section below, to help us all learn how to use the Pulse app more effectively.

The best video about the Pulse app

It’s almost four years old, but I thought provided the best objective overview – one not solely focused on marketing the app to students.

The new CUBS mascot and badge!

If you have been using D2L Brightspace for a while, to teach online courses, then you will NOT be excited to hear that Online Learning is getting ready to roll out new training for instructors who need to learn to use D2L Brightspace.

But if you teach hybrid courses, or you use D2L to supplement your face-to-face classes, or you are an FDC or a mentor to part-time faculty, then you will obviously be excited to hear that Online Learning is getting ready to roll out new training for instructors who need to learn to use D2L Brightspace!

The training is called CUBS – short for “Competencies for Using Brightspace.”

Since we are all PCC Panthers, we couldn’t resist an acronym like “CUBS.” Think of the branding possibilities!

The CUBS course has some really exciting and innovative features:

• Available to ALL instructors at PCC, whether you are assigned to teach online or not! Any instructor who wants to learn more about using D2L Brightspace can take the CUBS course.
• The CUBS course will take place entirely in D2L: you learn in the same learning management system (LMS) that you are learning about.
• The CUBS course will be available to instructors on demand, at any time! Instructors will self-enroll via the professional development channel in MyPCC.
• The course uses a “hands-on” method: trainees will complete all of the tasks, in a “sandbox” course shell in D2L, that they are learning about. The tasks are the same ones any online instructor will need to be able to accomplish to get an online course ready to teach at a basic level.
• The course is self-paced: trainees can self-check all of their work on key D2L tasks and be able to gauge their progress in twelve important areas.

The CUBS course is designed to serve two groups simultaneously:

• Instructors who want to learn more about using D2L but haven’t yet been assigned an online class to teach; and
• Instructors who have been assigned an online class and need training to prepare them to use D2L effectively, at a basic level.

Every instructor who is assigned to teach online will continue to undergo a skills assessment prior to commencing the rest of the OIO training. Those who have no experience with D2L can use the CUBS course to prepare for the skills assessment, but anyone who completed the course independently will still get credit upon successful completion of the skills assessment.

So that’s the low-down on the CUBS course – the training that prepares instructors to use PCC’s LMS.

The other part of the training – all of the OTHER stuff you need to know about teaching online (humanizing your online course, techniques for teaching effectively and equitably, etc) – will be included in a new course that is currently in development.

We’re planning to roll out this new online-teaching course in fall term 2021. Watch this space for more details!

If you have any questions or thoughts or ideas about the new training program, please reach out to me via email. I’m happy to field any questions or steal any good ideas.

Thanks to my colleagues in Online Learning, especially Heather Guevara, Greg Kaminski, Monica Marlo M-G, and Michael Moss who have served on the training-revision team since last year, and also to the thousands of online instructors who have taken the OIO training since 2006 and taught us so much about online learning.

When I first started teaching history, I had a deficit mindset as I approached my students. They didn’t know US history, I thought. Or if they did, they only knew a sugarcoated, simplistic version of it. This deficit lens kept me from appreciating the skills, assets, and knowledge that my students brought into the classroom. But in an online setting, how could I learn more about where my students came from and what they already knew? I already had them introduce themselves to the class in the discussion board, which was interesting, but not usually very deep.

The solution for me was to develop a “History Autobiography” assignment due in the first week. It gives students a way to share what they want to share and I’m blown away every term by what I learn about them that I wouldn’t have known from their photos or their class introductions.

This assignment could easily be applied to most disciplines. What kinds of questions might you want to ask your students? How can you introduce them to disciplinary thinking through self-reflection? What kinds of assumptions do you make about your students before class begins? How can they connect their lived experience to your discipline?

Here are the assignment instructions:

For this assignment you are going to write a short autobiography of how you have been socialized into the story of the United States. In other words, you are going to tell me about how you have learned about the story of this country. The autobiography should be 1-2 pages long, double-spaced. You also have the option of submitting the assignment as an audio or video recording.

Some questions to think about:

• What was the story of the United States that you learned in school?
• Did the history you learned in school reflect what you learned from your family, friends, and community?
• How has the media influenced your understanding of US History?
• Does the study of US History leave you feeling empowered or disempowered? Why?
• Have you seen your own story reflected when you have learned the history of the United States?
• If you did not grow up in the United States, how did the history of the US intersect with that of your home country? What were the impressions you had of the United States not living here?

This does not need to be an overly-formal assignment. The goal is to get you thinking about how you have learned US history in the past.

If you have completed this assignment in one of my courses before, please include reflections on how your understanding has changed by studying US History at the college level. Or, you can choose to write about a current event and how your understanding of it has been influenced by the history you learned in the previous course.

As we think about new assignments, we always need to be mindful of our own workload and how it fits into what we are already doing in our courses. It would be easy for me to read these and write paragraphs in response to each one, but then it would not be sustainable for me. Unless there is something concerning in the autobiography that needs to be addressed (and there have been a few of those), in response to each submission I simply write “Thank you for sharing your story,” and each person gets full credit if they submit.

I encourage you to give this assignment a try, and I hope that your appreciation of what your students bring into your classroom will then impact how you approach other parts of your course. At the very least, it serves as an amazing reminder of the breadth of experiences and perspectives in each of our classrooms.

If you liked this, feel free to check out more of our recorded encore presentation topics and keep an eye out for future offerings this Spring!

As we announced last term, we’ll be reprising some of the more popular sessions from the Online Faculty Summit in a program we are calling The Summit Encore.

We are recording all of the Summit Encore presentations and collecting the recordings on one handy page. Click on that link to open a page that contains links to the following useful presentations:

• Casey Twining: Creating Engaging Activities with H5P
• Stacie Williams: Tips and Tricks for Using D2L Rubrics
• Andre Temkin and Melany Budiman: Connect to Your Students with Voicethread

If you’d prefer to attend presentations in real time and ask questions of the presenters, then you’ll want to put the following presentations on your calendar:

• January 28th at 11:00am: Jimena Alvarado Real-time Conversations at the Center of an Online Classroom
• February 12th at noon: Rondi Schei Spicing Up Your Brightspace Course
• February 26th at 1:00pm: Max Macias, Heather Guevara, & Casey Twining Learning to be Culturally Responsive Online This session is cancelled. When it’s re-scheduled, we’ll announce it here.

All presentations will be held in Zoom, so you can attend from wherever you are able to connect to the Internet. And every presentation will be recorded and made available for you to view later, if you’re too busy to attend the presentation.

We hope to see you at an upcoming Summit Encore presentation!

As we announced earlier this month, we’ll be reprising some of the more popular sessions from the Online Faculty Summit in a program we are calling The Summit Encore.

On Nov 7th, we held our first Summit Encore presentation:

• Casey Twining: Create Engaging Activities with H5P
  

Click on the title to open a page that contains a link to a recording of Casey’s presentation.

H5P is an exciting new tool that allows you to add interactivity to your online lessons. For example, you may have wondered what your students are getting from videos you want them to watch. With H5P, you can not only know whether your students are watching the videos – you can also find out what your students are getting from the videos as they watch them.

Here’s a list of upcoming presentations (more will be added in coming months):

• November 21st at 2:00pm with Stacie Williams: Tips and Tricks for Using D2L Rubrics
• December 4th at 11:00am with Andre Temkin and Melany Budiman: Connect to Your Students with Voicethread
• December 12th at noon with Blake Hausman: Diversification, Not Tokenization

All presentations will be held in Zoom, so you can attend from wherever you are able to connect to the Internet. And every presentation will be recorded and made available for you to view later, if you’re too busy to attend the presentation.

In coming months we’ll share more great topics in this space.

We hope to see you at an upcoming Summit Encore presentation!

Back on May 3rd of 2019, several hundred online faculty attended the very first Online Faculty Summit at Cascade campus.

We, the summit organizers, heard a common lament: “There were so many good sessions that I had to pick and choose. I didn’t get to attend all of the sessions I wanted to attend.”

Take heart, online faculty! Thanks to the wonders of technology and to the generosity of your colleagues, you now have a chance to view some of the presentations you missed.

During the 2019-2020 academic year, we’ll be reprising some of the more popular sessions in a program we are calling The Summit Encore. All presentations will be held in Zoom, so you can attend from wherever you are able to connect to the Internet. And every presentation will be recorded and made available for you to view later, if you’re too busy to attend the presentation.

Here’s a list of upcoming presentations (more will be added in coming months):

• November 7th at 11:00am with Casey Twining: Create Engaging Activities with H5P
• November 21st at 2:00pm with Stacie Williams: Tips and Tricks for Using D2L Rubrics
• December 4th at 11:00am with Andre Temkin and Melany Budiman: Connect to Your Students with Voicethread
• December 12th at noon with Blake Hausman: Diversification, Not Tokenization

In coming months we’ll share more great topics in this space.

We hope to see you at an upcoming Summit Encore presentation!

Licensed from 123RF, attribution: Александр Ермолаев

Selective vulnerability is an important tool you can use to build what Hammond calls “a different type of relationship with your students” – one that will allow you to reach dependent learners.

Selective vulnerability is a somewhat counterintuitive idea, because we who teach can feel a lot of pressure to be the experts – the ones who know everything and have all the answers. Our authority to teach stems from years of study and preparation, and we don’t want to “lose face” or look bad in front of our students. Yet there’s a lot of research that suggests exactly the opposite: students (and humans generally) connect more deeply and more quickly with instructors (and people) who show vulnerability.

Hammond cited a book called Click: The Magic of Instant Connections (also in the PCC library – good job, PCC librarians!), which tells the story of a hostage negotiator who used selective vulnerability as a way of connecting with very desperate people in difficult situations – probably nothing like what you’ll ever experience with your online students. But there are some parallels: you as an online instructor don’t have a lot of time to connect with your online students – maybe 10 or 11 weeks at most. The hostage negotiator is under intense pressure to establish a connection and find an avenue of de-escalation; you as an online instructor have a similar challenge, as your online students often see your online class as a learning experience to be gotten through, and they can feel a bit trapped by the experience.

But what about the “selective” part of selective vulnerability? I recently did a little experiment at a conference of online educators, where I asked a group to read a description of a fictitious instructor’s approach to her online class. The fictitious instructor was named Sammy Davis (the conference was in Las Vegas, after all) and Sammy shared A LOT about herself with her online students, including her prolific crafting, documented on Pinterest, and especially her interest in all things “shabby pink” (which is apparently a real thing). Also Sammy invited her online students to follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, in case Pinterest wasn’t enough. I was surprised by the reactions to Sammy’s self-disclosure: one instructor thought that shabby pink would alienate the men in the class! But there was widespread consensus that self-disclosure can be taken too far. The group agreed that when you disclose facts about yourself, to your online students, you want to be selective and intentional about what you disclose.

Implications

What are the implications of using selective vulnerability in your online teaching? I’ll venture to name a few.

1. You can connect with students by sharing your own struggles in learning the academic subject you are now teaching. I recently heard Ann Cary, online faculty mentor for math, talk about how she is unafraid of saying to her online math students, “Math is hard, and I once struggled with it myself.” When you do this, you are showing a type of selective vulnerability that gives students permission to reveal their own vulnerability in the learning process. Then you might gain the level of trust that allows you to become the “warm demander” that the student really needs to hear from.
   

   Attribution: 123RF Copyright : Ivelin Radkov

2. Tell your story, and be particularly generous in telling stories from your academic field. Hammond notes that modern brain research has revealed how storytelling activates parts of the brain that are similar in both the storyteller and the story-hearer! There is almost nothing more powerful than a good story in creating a connection between teacher and learner. Yet I feel compelled to add that when I review online courses, I am often struck by how generic they are – how devoid of stories and personality they are. I sometimes think that online instructors have received a secret memo requiring their online courses to be formal in the extreme – present only the facts and just the facts, and then assess the students’ knowledge of the facts, but never ever venture into the forbidden realm of stories and emotions. Instructors in our CTE fields in particular have so many great stories they could tell about, say, hairy moments in firefighting, clever solutions in the building trades, and near misses and averted disasters in the medical fields.
3. Even when you show vulnerability in a specific and intentional way, not every student will feel a sense of connection. Some years ago, I was working with a group of trainees in the lab who were learning about the LMS (learning management system). The group was struggling in ways that are typical for people new to an LMS, and the skills of individuals ranged widely, which is also common. I decided to show a little selective vulnerability by admitting that I myself had struggled to learn the LMS and continued to learn something new almost every day. I added, “I’m still not an expert in the system – there’s still a lot I don’t know.” A man sitting at the back of the lab piped up: “Okay, so when are we going to hear from the experts?” It was a slightly crushing moment for me, but in hindsight I can see that this particular learner wasn’t the type who would connect with me, as his instructor, based on a shared experience of struggle. Instead this learner wanted just the very best info he could get his hands on, and that’s fine. I later learned he taught high school full-time, so he probably had little free time to indulge in empathy for his instructor. But I think the moral of the story is clear: If selective vulnerability isn’t having an effect on some students, you’ll need to find another way of reaching them.

What about online?

Having pondered the implications of using selective vulnerability as a teaching strategy, I want to return to the original question: What does showing selective vulnerability look like online? Here are a few directions you might take:

• Maximize opportunities to show selective vulnerability in one-to-one interactions with your online students. Self-disclosure with your entire online class is still important, but the more you get to know individual students, the more easily you can spot situations where showing vulnerability could work particularly well with certain students. Also self-disclosure happens more easily and feels safer in one-to-one interactions, for both you and the student.
• Be especially alert for cues that your online students provide. The online introduction that your students provide can become particularly important as a source for discovering information about students that you can use to establish a connection with them. Max Macias recently showed me a list of questions to ask online students – everything from hobbies and sports to places we grew up and foods we loved as kids. If you know nothing about your online students as individuals, you won’t have points of connection to make with them.
• Zaretta Hammond talks about the importance of being “authentically human” as you make yourself open to forming the types of relationships your dependent students will most benefit from. Anything you can do in the online environment to reveal your “authentic humanity” is going to help in this regard. I often hear from online instructors, “I hate the way I look in my online videos” or “I hate the way I sound when I record my voice.” My advice is to try to get over these feelings – we all think we look and sound terrible online! (and I blame Hollywood: who can compete?). Any media you can use to show your authentic self – and it can be as simple as a photo of you with your dog or cat – will make it more likely that online students will see you as vulnerable and human and worth connecting with.

Wow – I’ve issued a lot of challenges here, and I know my own online courses don’t yet live up to them. But we’re all on a journey.

Further reading

Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Zaretta Hammond. Corwin, 2015. Available at PCC library.

Click: The Magic of Instant Connections. Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman. Broadway Books, 2010. Available at PCC library.

The idea of the educator as “warm demander” actually originated in the early 1970s from Judith Kleinfeld, who described a teaching style that most benefited native students in Alaska, and the idea has been refined by others since then. Later researchers defined the idea as a “combination of high expectations for academic performance that teachers place on students and supportive, instrumental relationships between students and teachers” (Antrop-Gonzalez and De Jesus, 2006).

Many of us can probably remember a certain teacher who was warm but demanding – one who wanted you to do your best, who demanded more than a prosaic effort. This teacher was the type of person you did not want to disappoint, and maybe this teacher was one reason you yourself decided to become a teacher.

Combining high expectations and high support

How can those of us who teach online become “warm demanders” of our students? What teaching behaviors will lead to that magic combination of high expectations and high support?

A key behavior is what Geneva Gay calls care. A warm demander exhibits sincere care for students, in large and small ways. Recently in this space, Stacie Williams described the care she shows her online students by reminding them of important deadlines. The good news is that care can be demonstrated in small and subtle ways – it doesn’t always have to be a grand gesture.

Sometimes it’s easier to explain a concept by talking about what it is NOT rather than what it is. Kleinfeld created a matrix with two main behaviors:

1. How much we demand of students – from “active demandingness” to “passive leniency”; and
2. How we balance the personal and the professional – from “personal warmth” to “professional distance.”

Combining these two behaviors gives us . Do you place yourself in any of them?

1. The Technocrat demands a lot of students but keeps a professional distance. This teacher works best with independent students, and can be viewed positively by students for having enthusiasm for and expertise in the academic subject – even though the teacher is cold toward students.
2. The Elitist maintains professional distance from students but also demands little. This instructor gears learning activities toward independent students and lets dependent students flail and fail. This lack of care manifests in low expectations for dependent students, as these students are allowed to disengage from learning.
3. The Sentimentalist is all about personal warmth but demands little from students. In fact, this type of instructor may even make excuses for students’ lack of academic performance, a tendency which also manifests in low expectations. The instructor may be liked by students but is also viewed as a push-over.
4. The Warm Demander has an explicit focus on building rapport and trust AND has high expectations of students. This instructor “encourages productive struggle,” as Zaretta Hammond put it.

Earning the right to demand

Probably the most useful concept for me is one that Hammond calls “earning the right to demand.” I’ve heard many instructors, over the years, vent their frustrations about not feeling as though they are able to reach students who are struggling. Now I wonder: Is this the missing ingredient? Will dependent learners fail to respond to teachers unless teachers have somehow earned the right to demand more of them? I recall a mentor saying, shortly after I started my first teaching assignment in the early 1990s, “Students have to know how much you care before they care how much you know.” Maybe he was onto something?

Implications for online teaching

Okay – time to circle back to online teaching. What are the implications for online instructors? At this moment, I can think of three:

1. Maximize opportunities, when they arise, to show care and personal warmth in the online environment. New online instructors always ask, Will technology allow me to make strong connections with my online students? My answer is always yes, but establishing connections in the online space is different than it is in the face-to-face classroom – and I would say it’s fundamentally harder to do in the online space. There’s an old saying: you get only one chance to make a good first impression, which is doubly true in an online class. We who teach online need to make every email and every discussion posting count – show you are a warm and caring instructor who is invested in the success of your online students.
2. Discard some of your ideas about independence in the online environment. I’ve been hearing for over 20 years, since I first got involved with online education, that the online environment is really best for independent learners. I still hear it all the time. But if you adopt a “sink or swim” mentality with your online students, are you dooming some portion of your students to failure? Zaretta Hammond talks a lot about so-called dependent learners – students who are more dependent on the instructor because of their life circumstances. These students need more support, and different kinds of support, such as stronger “cognitive scaffolding,” than other students. I’d recommend you start to think more widely about the many types of students who might show up in your online class.
3. Provide different paths to reach the same destination. This concept has always been really challenging for me, since I was taught that the instructor is responsible for making choices about the best way to learn a subject. While we’d all agree that NO guidance is unacceptable, we might also agree that different ways of learning may produce equally acceptable results. I’m reminded of the mother of ten children who was asked by one of her children, “Which of us do you love most?” She replied, “I love each of you in exactly the way you need to be loved.” A good teacher is like this, in providing the type of support the online student needs to be successful, and in this effort, technology can be really helpful. You can make a video that will appeal to some students, while others might prefer to read text, or work with text and images. And you can provide different kinds of assignments and assessments for students to choose from.

Becoming a warm demander is certainly not easy or quick, but I think it will pay great dividends for your online students and for your own effectiveness as an online instructor.

Further reading

Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Zaretta Hammond. Corwin, 2015. Available at PCC library.

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, & Practice. Geneva Gay. Columbia University, Teachers College Press, 2000. Available at PCC library.

Judith Kleinfeld’s many studies of native students in Alaska, where she been working since the 1970s and is still working today, in 2019.

• Information-gap discussion doesn’t work well online: Most discussion in the face-to-face world involves what are called “information-gap activities”: I have some information; you don’t have the information; so you ask me for the information and I provide it. You are then satisfied. But this type of activity doesn’t work well online – in fact, it curtails discussion. Online discussion tools are tailored for more expansive discussion, which many instructors find more challenging to facilitate.
• Everyone has to participate online: If you were to audit your face-to-face classes, you’d most likely find that a core group of 5-10 people actually does most of the talking; the other 20-25 people are mostly silent. So your face-to-face class only seems to have more robust conversation – the majority of your students don’t actually get much from it. But herein lies an opportunity: the quietest, most withdrawn students in your face-to-face class can be the most talkative and interesting online. Still, it’s challenging to involve everyone in an online discussion.

Image credit:

Here are some tips for getting the most from online discussion:

• Require a product of discussion: The best discussion, online or face-to-face, involves negotiation between and among participants, brings in strong evidence to support points, and reaches a conclusion. These good things rarely happen when the goal of discussion is merely … discussion. The traditional discussion prompt – “Make your point and respond to one other person’s post” – is practically a recipe for boring discussion. I like to require a “consensus document” as a product of online discussion, which forces students to come to agreement on a problem or controversial issue and then justify their agreement or lack thereof.
• Use small groups: Group activities in the online environment are more work to set up – assigning students to small groups takes a bit of effort and organization. But most online instructors swear by the quality of small-group online discussion. How much can you really add to a discussion between 25 or 30 people? Not only is it intimidating to talk in front of that many people, there’s usually nothing new to say after 10 or 12 people have had a say. But in a group of three or four students, it’s much easier to venture a fresh opinion or offer a new perspective or point out neglected evidence.
• Use the “post before reading others’ posts” setting: Version 10 of D2L has a new setting for discussion topics. The setting keeps a student from being able to see anyone else’s posts until they have posted to the discussion board for that topic. This setting should help to cut down on some of the “lurking” and “loafing” behaviors you see on discussion boards, and allow you to assess an individual student’s contribution more accurately.
• Use a grading rubric that emphasizes quality over quantity: Students will give you what you ask for. If you ask for a certain number of posts, students will provide it – and usually no more. But if you set a number of postings as a baseline and then establish criteria based on quality of postings, you’ll get higher-quality postings. A rubric is a great way to communicate these standards.