Curriculum Design to Enhance Online and Hybrid Learning

On today's session curriculum designed to enhance online and hybrid learning is especially relevant as we continue to experience a shift back to online teaching while so much was learned from the first pivot to online back in 2020 there are always ways we can improve the online and hybrid experiences for our learners i'm excited to welcome dr david halpen instructional designer from radford university carillion and rhona blankenship instructional designer from caroline clinic to share some best practices and considerations as we work to enhance the online and hybrid environment all right now i'm gonna hand things over to you dr halpin all right thank you and thank you for everybody who's uh joining in here if for some reason you can't hear me or anything's wrong please chime in somebody chime in and let me know but i'm just gonna assume that everything's working okay um rona say hi hi everyone thank you for having me as a part of this discussion looking forward to sharing some insights with everyone today okay so just real quick the objectives here um these are the things we're hoping to cover today so recognize critical design considerations when shifting learning experiences from face face to online applying best practices for engagement and identifying some technology tools to enhance engagement in online learning and to start things off i always like to have a poll question so i have a poll question that hopefully um sandy's going to bring up here so what are your primary methods of teaching so that you can select more than one and so these are the options here synchronous face-to-face synchronous entirely online so you're online but you're doing live sessions or asynchronous where it's online so you're online but you're not doing synchronous learning it's just like almost like a online course through an lms or are you doing a hybrid where you do some face-to-face but you have some synchronous parts or hybrid where you're online mostly synchronous and asynchronous so just just to get an idea of where everybody's coming from david let me know when you want to end i'm not i can't see how many responses we're let's say getting got 23 out of uh 34 responses it looks like it's not moving i'm going to go ahead let's take a look okay so we've got about 50 percent of you are doing face-to-face still synchronous 20 synchronous online so that's interesting hybrid so we have we have a lot of hybrids so it is spread around pretty good so that's good hopefully at least everybody's doing some form of online either synchronous or asynchronous okay thanks sandy so just a brief overview of of where we're at here so at the start of the pandemics i'm coming from ruc we had to switch to fully online learning right off the bat so there was a big we had about a week big massive shift to online learning and some faculty weren't ready for that some had never even used zoom and some had never given an online test and suddenly they were being asked to to do all these things um and so i they were pretty much pushed i always say pushed into the deep end but i like this little graph where it says some folks just need a pat on the back that's basically what they got they got a pat on the back into the deep end of online learning um and as we shifted online because of the pandemic and because of the social distancing some of our classes had to utilize what they called high flex learning which is where you have half the students in class face to face and half in another class or online i mean at home but having to come in through online through zoom and this was extremely difficult for faculty to manage particularly ones who weren't comfortable with technology to start with it limited their mobility around the room there was confusion when there was when they tried to generate interaction between their students because some were online some were face to face how do you get them to interact together sometimes there's audio problems so we had to slowly increase the quality of the microphones in the room face-to-face students felt like they're losing out because they didn't have undivided attention online students were losing out because sometimes you forget about them and sometimes they have trouble hearing or seeing there's connectivity issues with people being online we have a lot of students that don't have broadband internet access at their home so we had students sitting in the parking garage using the wi-fi here to to go into their classes so cause all kinds of issues but as we near the end of the pandemic i don't know for an at the end the general consensus seems like there's this feeling like we're moving towards the end um it's interesting a lot of students who did not like online learning suddenly decided they do like online learning they like the benefits and some of the instructors have decided they like online teaching because they can do it from their from their home they don't have to come to school but what we have to do is figure out how to have people leverage these tools and and best practices more because if you're going to keep doing it you need to to kind of know how to do it and it's particularly difficult in medical education because there's a lot of things that you think about are just really difficult to do online like clinical types of experiences and i'll pass over to rona to kind of ask how how you all handled that transition over at carillion thanks david um for us it was a little bit of a different world because of course being a part of the organization we're working with those members of staff that are employed so they're not students they are employees that we need to educate whether it be through their orientation coming on board or continuing to educate due to process and policy changes new equipment you know those types of things that were happening regularly throughout the beginning of the pandemic and still continue initially from the start just like you we were all moved to a virtual world very quickly where academically you're using tools like zoom and other um of the available options we were we had to look at it from a perspective of what works with our learning management system because we are having people register for classes not just um give them a link to a class we were registering we were monitoring attendance we were you know making sure people were where they needed to be when they needed to be there some of the challenges that we faced with that though we use the webex virtual trading center for our classes and we still use that for our virtual sessions but we've encountered the same things that you did from the perspective of someone being at home not having the internet connectivity that's needed to really focus on some of the instructional things that we were using whether it be video demonstrations that we were using as a part of that virtual platform or simulating a software or some of those things that were really important to the learning environment so we did face that we had people who were using their phone which really did not help provide a good learning experience we found out early on that the use of a mac presented many problems so we really needed people to be on a windows-based pc so we encountered much of that and we over time developed strong communications and we outlined what was expected clearly for people in the virtual world it's still somewhat of a struggle but it has gotten better and gets better each time we are now transitioning back of course to more virtual with the omicron variant and things happening within our organization and facilities yeah really interesting i remember some of that stuff when when i was a korean employee the particularly the pc focus they're definitely not ones to want to support max and we have the same issues with mac students we still have those issues you know there's just weird things that happen sometimes that you have to kind of track down to help people out so let's talk about some critical design considerations when you are shifting to online learning and even and all of these considerations are relevant to face-to-face learning but these are ones that are particularly important for online experiences and the thing to keep in mind that i always tell people is that when you're moving a course online it's not going to be equal to what you've done face-to-face and you can't try to make it the equal experience but what you want you want it to be equivalent and so i make that distinction between equal versus equivalent you want students to have the same learning experiences and achieve the same outcomes but it won't be it won't be equal and identical so it's important to keep that in mind because that that affects how you approach it and also one other thing i always like to think about particularly as we've moved online i feel like um being an online instructor particularly if you're doing it synchronously or if you're having to do a high flex thing i i feel like it's an orchestra conductor i called the instructor conductor because there's so much you have to do when you're online you have to bring the content to life you have to adjust the tempo of how you're how you're teaching it you have to focus students attention which is really difficult online you have to add your own interpretation you have to make sure you're providing authentic learning experiences you have to make sure they're receiving your messages all while managing this technology and if you're not comfortable with technology that just makes it so much more difficult and ultimately you are the conduit through which that content is delivered so every conductor may conduct the same symphony but it's going to sound a lot different depending on who's conducting it so that's that's where your job comes in so one of the first oh yeah you bring up a great point one of the things that we quickly um found out in our transition over to virtual is that instructor conductor really means that that instructor needs to be able to focus on their key roles and responsibilities during that virtual session so we created what we called as a producer role much like the behind the scenes role that we have even going on today that helped to facilitate some of those things for the instructor so they didn't have all the pressures of trying to do everything so that producer role is crucial to the success of those virtual sessions to be able to monitor chat rooms and you know chat um chat conversations using some of the tools and things and interactions that are part of the virtual world yeah that's a great point where that makes me remember we had some faculty who would um when possible bring in their colleagues to help run some of these bigger online courses to help them manage the technology in the chat and making sure that everybody was getting getting the attention that they needed you know that's a great point so one of the other key factors to keep in mind as you're as you're moving online is to keep your eyes on the objectives for your course and objectives also um deal with alignment and so when you're designing courses they talk about backward design nowadays that seems to be a buzzword to me that's just instructional design but now they want to use the buzz term backward design and what that means is you start with your objectives what you want students to learn when they're done and you create your assessments and then you build backwards from that to to fill in your activities and so alignment means all of those things need to line up so the activities and the assessments that you're providing need to line up with the objectives and if they're not in alignment then your students are going to struggle and so you have to keep that in mind it's even more important in an online environment and when you have those things lined up your students are going to have a much easier time going through the instructional experience and so a concept in alignment with that is um i read somewhere that a course is not a mystery novel that needs a big reveal at the end so it's better to to they call it front loading front load relevance where you outline your objectives right off the bat for the students and give them a reason to pay attention and another concept related to that is the big picture you want to present to your students the big picture what is the big picture what are we learning here what is what they're doing how is that going to tie back into for example the tree that is going to bloom from their education so they need to see what you're doing and how that fits into the to the big picture in the course that you're doing it's like working a jigsaw puzzle you have that box you see the big picture but each piece you can't tell what it is or what it's going to be when you're done but you see that big picture you know what it's going to be when you're done so that's what drives you on that's what's going to drive your students on when they see that big picture and along with that they have to know what's in it for them and students nowadays they want to know that but it's different from students you know 10 or 20 years ago they want to know the relevance and they want to know that it's relevant and so you have to provide that rationale for your course and all of the activities that you're asking them to participate in and so you have to reinforce that um throughout and david um i think that you bring up a really great point here when you're looking at what's in it for me from the organizational standpoint and when we're looking at educating for staff we're taking an entirely different approach in some regards to really what we're calling what we call performance consulting so not just looking at what it is we want someone to learn but really focusing on performance and what it is we want someone to be able to do so whether it be a skill that we need them to perform you know whatever what that looks like and what's the organizational outcome for that so we're we're looking at a broader perspective like yes we want you to learn information but we want to kind of step away from just telling people things from the organizational perspective to really in on what it is that they need for them to be able to do that particular skill or function or you know process whatever that looks like and then how can we incorporate some of the information as they are learning what it is they need to do so we're stepping away from a lecture approach in a lot of things focusing on what it is they need to do and how to get them there well it's relevant to their role and responsibilities and providing them that that approach to where it's a holistic approach for example if it's a part of my job i'm a nurse and i need to you know check my patients fully if they're if they have a foley and part of that is not only do i need the skill in order to check it make sure i'm doing it properly i'm doing it you know so that it's clean and you know all of those things that go around the actual skill and patient care but i also have to document when i do that because documentation is very important in the world in which we live in so we're tying those things together no more are we separating things out to where i'm going to teach you the skill and then days later i'll teach you how to document that skill we're bringing it all together in a nice package to close all those gaps and hopefully measure that our performance is either increasing to what we need it to or if not if it's still decreasing what's causing that where's my gap is it really truly still education or is it something else yeah great points great points that um i think actually a couple of those points come up later and somebody in the chat said he's been treating online like a flipped classroom to increase engagement yeah that's also a good point which just goes to show that you do have to approach it differently when you're when you're going to be online and one of the ways to do that is there's a kind of a three-step process that i've come across and everybody has different processes but i like this kind of simplified process for creating activities for online learning and the first step is to let students know what are we learning today so you tell them here's what i want you to do and this this ties into the objectives you're explaining the objectives giving the big picture um what are we doing today second one is why why are we learning it so that again is big picture here's why i want you to do it how is this going to contribute to their success in the class and beyond and then finally is how here's how to do it so you tell them how to do what you want them to do and this is where you would have instructions rubrics checklists exemplars and these are the kind of things you would you would usually do verbally in a face-to-face class but sometimes they get overlooked online and that's the key thing to remember is a lot of things get dropped in an online environment because you're so focused on other things and so when you put the three together you can do every activity with these so here's what i want you to do and questions and problems can help out with the what to kind of get people's attention the why a lot of times why you can interject personal experiences here from your from your own experiences to to to kind of tie it into how you were doing things so that gives them a why and then how you know a lot of times scenarios and cases can help with that particularly when you're online which brings us to the next point so here's the next point is the number one most important thing you bring to your students and so i have two of these that i like to point out to people who teach because sometimes they don't realize this and we get a lot of new instructors here at ruc that have a lot of experience in clinical environments but maybe have never taught so i always want to point these things out to people so the number one most important thing that you bring to your students is you have to decide what's the best way for your students to receive the information they need to achieve your objectives seems pretty straightforward but that's where your knowledge and experiences come into play because you you may have a textbook but you're not necessarily going to follow that textbook if you're following the textbook exactly you may not be putting enough of yourself into your your lessons because a lot of concepts and best practices um come from your experiences they come from the real world and you can share that you've got that and that's what's unique about you and and another concept that ties into that is the is the concept of chunking your content and so your knowledge and experiences are going to help you figure out how to best chunk out the content for your learners and chunking means you just take the broad base of knowledge that you have to deliver to the to your students and you figure out how to break that up into pieces to present to them and then the second point is that you have to figure out how to sequence that content because a lot of times the way it sequence in a book it may not be the way that you think your students will best receive it because that book was just designed by another another person like you another subject matter expert that doesn't mean that's like the bible of how to present the content so you can rearrange it based on your students and this ties into the information processing model which i'm showing here now i could do a whole lesson on this but basically chunking is key to learning because it allows students to to kind of chew on bite-size nuggets of content and they have to process what goes into their sensory memory and and then gets into short-term memory which sometimes is called working memory where they have to they have to do something with it either some sort of encoding or rehearsal in order for that information to make it over into long-term memory which is where it's going to stay where they can retrieve it from in the future and so chunking is a key part of of that information processing now another activity that's very critical in virtual environments is self-reflection and so having students reflect on their experiences is very useful because it makes the learning more meaningful and durable and going back to the information processing model it also encourages retrieval elaboration generation of of new ideas which is where they take their new information and assimilate it into the schemas their cognitive schema in their brain and and having them reflect on their learning helps them do that and so it increases knowledge retention it increases students motivation it helps build confidence in the material and it helps them regulate their learning as you see on this slide called metacognition which is thinking about your thinking and about your learning processes and if we can help our students get better at metacognition that will increase their success in learning and it will help make them lifelong learners so reflection is a key way to do that and some of the ways that that you can encourage reflection um is through journaling journaling's a good one i i've had instructors use before you just have your students keep a journal throughout the class and reflect on on what they're learning they can reflect on the learning objectives so you can ask them do you feel like you've met the objectives or what progress have you made towards them which allows you to tie back to those objectives at the at the beginning of the course because a lot of times students don't necessarily pay attention to them because they don't mean anything at that moment but if you have them reflect on them then they're tying it back in and they're seeing how what they're doing is is tying to it a three takeaways assignment which is where you say okay what are three takeaways you got out of this course or this lesson um what would they do differently if they went through this course again um how will they apply information in the future so that's something i do in my courses a lot is um students have a reflection paper they have to say okay how are you going to apply these skills when you're out there as a practicing nurse or a practicing pa or a practicing health care provider and that's key to tying it in to their future and these can be personal or shared so they can it can be a personal journal that only you read or they can share it with their peers and kind of learn from each other and the thing to keep in mind it does not have to be written a lot of days stu a lot of times today students are very receptive to more creative ways of expression so audio and video and things like that they really respond to that so um rona i don't know if you do you have any kind of reflection activities that that get built into the things that you do we don't do a lot with reflection activities i think it's a really neat approach for the student as they're in that you know academic world and then moving towards the business world so to speak we don't uh do that but we actually of course are going to be focusing more again on what it is someone needs to do to be successful in their role and how we gauge that or measure that is really through observation and through of course their competencies our goal too with a lot of our courses is to help them really have that confidence level when by the time they're ready to go do whatever that is so uh for example one of our recent course redesigns even in the virtual world was around our nursing assistants and we approached that very much with a hybrid blended approach where they are taught initial concepts and uh information that we want them to do from an organizational perspective you know how our policies work with that types of information then they get to go and actually practice in a safe environment some of the skills that they'll need to do but then we incorporated throughout their orientation experience not only giving them the information they need letting them practice in a safe environment but then they actually get to go to the the units they get to go to the floors that they're going to potentially be working on and actually do a clinical rotation as a part of the orientation experience to really help close some of the gaps we were hearing as far as this particular audience group really didn't have the confidence or competence once they hit the floor coming out orientation because a lot of these individuals have no health care background so this approach really helped us to close that gap and give them the confidence and the competence they needed to hit the floor running so to speak yeah great here's some good i see some good comments in the chat um coming through kelly whitmer talking about um assigning cases to students to then present so yeah that's a that's a great way to get students engaged is to assign cases to them and i like the idea they may not have the same cases every time so it's hard for students to to kind of prepare and cheat ahead of time so another important consideration in an online course is creating a sense of community with students in a face-to-face class a lot of times that the community comes from the students just being around each other but in an online course you you need to help create this community of practice and so a community of practice can be the course itself the class all the students in the class just in that community of learners or it can be something where you are assigning say group group activities so students have to break out so in my courses particularly in a professionalism students are in groups right at the beginning of the course and they have to build that community throughout the course and work together to solve problems and so you know the community of practice gives them a common theme and a purpose and they build trust and they're sharing their tacit knowledge and tacit knowledge is the knowledge and skills that you gain through experience so it's not necessarily something you learn in a kind of a didactic lecture and so being able to share that amongst the group is really useful for students particularly folks who don't have a lot of knowledge to start with and so they share that and they get this collective intelligence through that experience and so because you don't inherently have that community you have to you have to build that in um by using collaborative strategies and getting your students to kind of work together and perhaps setting time aside for collaborative work whereas in class you might have said okay i'm going to give you 15 minutes here to work in your groups well online you you can do that with breakout rooms and things like that and actually in a way it's better than face-to-face because in a breakout room in zoom you know you don't have the distractions that you'd have in a class where you have five groups all talking together so you know there's one one one check for for the online for the online tool where it might be a little bit better yeah but we utilize breakout rooms a lot yeah and it does it does give that sense of community and we've even done fun things where uh depending upon what the class is you know where you may break actually from the entire session and say okay you need to go complete this activity and maybe just an example you know it's a scavenger hunt at your house so you have 10 minutes at your house to go collect whatever these items are because it might have relevancy to the topic or whatever and then come back and you of course you've got your camera you can share those things you can bring that sense of community in a lot of different ways yeah definitely the next thing that you need to do that is a concern in online learning is minimizing distractions and so obviously when we're online we have tons of potential distractions around us children and other devices and pets and you know the garbage man the ups driver just so many things and these are the same things that distract our students and they have less oversight you can be the most exciting and engaging presenter in the world when you're face to face where you can hold an audience in rapt attention for hours but when you get online it can change everything i mean i think martin luther king would probably struggle keeping people engaged online even sometimes and part of that is because of the field of vision now if you look on the right here when you're when you're instructing a class you are their whole world in that classroom there's not much else they can look at if you have windows they can look out the window they have their little phone maybe they get distracted but you're commanding their attention um whereas on the left on in an online course your the field of vision is is the little monitor um you can command their attention within the confines of that monitor and as rona said some people are taking classes on on a mobile device so that that may be your whole field of vision there for the students and there's so many other things that could be happening outside of that so you have to be aware of that you can't lecture for for hours at a time you you'll lose everyone and at a certain point you'll see cameras start turning off or people sleeping posing always always mortifies me when i'm in an online course and i see you know the eyes starting to droop over i'm like oh no i'm i'm being boring i i got to do something here yeah um david it's interesting because one of the things that webex training center does for us as a part of the data that we get after a class is it actually tells you how long that person was engaged in that class so meaning if i have multiple things pulled open like maybe i have the session going on but i also have my email open or something else on the side it can kind of track where else they may be putting their attention so it was always interesting to see some of those results what you would pull back up where someone may have been actively engaged in that session for 10 minutes out of the hour wow that's interesting yeah that's a great great tool to have to be able to look at that particularly if you're if you're an instructor that's giving credit for participation i mean then you want to know you know did they do more than just show up and turn on their camera right so some ways that now you can't control the student's environment at their house necessarily but some of the ways that you can try to minimize their distractions is again smaller chunks of learning so not lecturing for an hour lecturing for 10 or 15 minutes and then changing it up the more you can change things up when you're online the more that that gets students back you know if you're going to start doing something different then you know they're more focused at that moment um and you got to get them doing something quicker sooner rather than later yeah yeah i'm sorry david you may have this uh later on but one of the things that we did uh that people love for some reason is annotation tools yeah so to your point yes smaller lecture time and then definitely engagement and they love i mean you could have an image of a you know anatomy image and they have to circle the area on the anatomy that's being taught about or you know outline specifics and have a table and they need to write in a box specific information but it was amazing to me just that use of that annotation tool brought such engagement and enlightenment to that virtual learning experience yeah definitely there's there's so many ways to engage and it doesn't have to be complicated you know an annotation tool just writing on a board doesn't have to be complicated just to get them doing something else and you have to have shorter activities so even the activities that you're using to engage them shouldn't drag out too long because you put students in a breakout room for 30 40 minutes if if if they're not engaged they're just going to start talking about other stuff and then you've lost them again so shorter activities and good instructions yeah good instructions yes we learned very quickly that when you're going to go into a breakout room or put someone into another area so they can do maybe it's one of the reflection activities or just work through case scenarios or anything like that providing them great instructions before they go into that breakout room is really truly crucial because we had a lot of students come back afterwards in many instances when we would go to our debrief and they were like well i wasn't 100 sure on that activity because once they break out they are in their own environment so it's a little you have to really be aware of that before you send them out on their own so to speak yeah definitely um having students ask questions so i always like to have students particularly if you're and i see a couple people talk about flipped approach if you're doing a flipped approach i like to make sure that not only are students doing the pre-activities they're bringing something to the class and it can be as simple as you write down three questions that you're going to share with the class because that then you know that they've done the pre-work and that allows them to to kind of be a part of the course and actually you know share some knowledge making a schedule and sticking to it is is kind of important online and that's as simple as just laying out what you're going to be doing for students say in this class i'm going to present some information for 15 minutes then we're going to do an activity for 15 minutes then we're going to take a break at this time and and that helps students kind of pace themselves so if they start getting kind of distracted and tired they know that there's a break coming up so that that kind of encourages them to keep going but you have to stick with it because if you say trust me in an online course if you say you're going to take a break at 10 15 at 10 16 students are like where is the break they're thinking you know you said 10 15 i'm ready for the break let's have the break and they're not going to be listening to you so just be aware of that um and and having timely assessments i think actually rona talked about this is assessing you know getting people to do activities soon sooner after the instruction as possible um instead of waiting too long and so really quick some questions to ask yourself as you're moving to an online course what factors do you have to consider in your course design and teaching [Music] that need to be changed and which elements from your classroom can you maintain there's some things you do in class that will work in an online environment and other things need to be changed you can't just move everything online are there any strengths related to the online environment that you can leverage for your subject matter and then also some limitations i had an instructor years ago that that had to teach an online an entirely online course in health assessment well that was she struggled with that because health assessment means you have to assess people you have to demonstrate that you can perform a health assessment on a patient and without being in person to see that it was it was a struggle but we we worked through and figured out how to make it work what changes to your assessments do you need to make this is critical because if you're used to giving paper tests you know that that doesn't work in an online environment so are you going to do online testing how are you going to protect the integrity of the test are you going to if you're doing you know a skills check off how are you going to do that in an online environment so you know you have to think about things like that the technologies you're going to use and how comfortable you are with them do students have limits to their access or the use of technology that may impact their learning and then how are you going to support your learners what support is available to online learners so you want to find out what kinds of support that you can provide and then your organization can provide also i know at ruc we have 24 7 support for d2l um and so you want to be aware of what what's out there for your students and then don't be boring i always throw that in don't be boring yeah um i was gonna say dave one of the things that i know that our epic trainers do when they are teaching some of the epic documentations virtually now they actually hand over controls to the student so instead of it being a situation where you know maybe they're potentially showing the epic uh area that for that needs to be documented in and saying instead of so you know okay pointing to this spot and saying okay you're going to put this here or you're going to type this there or they actually give control to the student and let them actually document so they're given a situation that needs to be documented and letting them document and as they do that the other students are there supporting um their call a friend so to speak so they can jump in and say no you put it here or so they're learning from each other in a in an environment where the instructor supports and encourages but they really have control yeah that's a great point i always encourage faculty to figure out how you can have your students teach basically bring them in let's give them some control over the class and you step aside and be the kind of they say the guide on the side to make sure you know that they're not saying things that are inaccurate right and we have a question about should students keep the camera on i have mixed opinions about that personally only because i know that sometimes it's nice to see faces but also sometimes technology is not your friend so if the bandwidth is not there to support camera usage and there's other things going on in your virtual class that are requiring a lot of bandwidth then i would say that maybe having cameras on is not a good thing but if that person wants to share an experience or has comments or that type of thing then yes turn your camera on in those moments maybe not have it on all the time yeah there's been some interesting discussion in higher education about that i used to be one who said yeah you got to turn on your camera because if you were in class i'd see you in class so you have to have your camera on but some people bring up points that you know some students may have technology limitations or they may you know their home environment may not be something they want to share necessarily so i guess there's issues there and it depends on the the type of learning that you're doing if it's a small group like my my tag groups at the medical school i feel like the students need to have their cameras on because it's a small group and the whole point is interaction between each other so it does a lot depending on the context i guess with that and there was actually another question um that came through from dr olendorf he asks are there any suggestions of how to best leverage technology and avoid gimmickry well that's a great that's a great question hopefully as people have gotten more comfortable using zoom they start realizing when it's a little too gimmicky but i i've i never tell people to use technology just because it's there like a breakout room as they i don't say just use breakout rooms for something it really needs to fit into what you're trying to teach students yeah and and it's got to have a purpose if it doesn't if the if it doesn't have a purpose to coincide with your objectives then it's probably not something that you need to do yeah i say go back to the objectives in your assessment and and really think about what it is you want your students to be able to do and which technology is going to help you get closest to that um and it's not always easy but if your objective well i guess i i use my my changing attire if your objective is for students to be able to change a flat tire taking a multiple choice test is probably not the best way to kind of engage them with that um really you'd want them to sit down and have a flat tire and change it in front of you now in an online environment how would you do that you know i don't know can you leverage is there some technology that would allow you to leverage that either you know live video or simulation of some sort so let the let the objectives kind of guide you i think is is the best way to do it and if you have access to instructional designers i would say engage those folks because they can help you think through that and we have i know at r you see we have instructional designers that love working with faculty to kind of solve problems like that so don't be boring and this all brings us to the number two most important thing you bring to your students so all the folks that have left early are going to miss out on this critical point the number two most important thing is that your lectures are unique to you and so what does that mean um again you have unique skills knowledge and experiences that you bring to each instructional experience and so you need to share that with your students bring that in let that seep into what you're doing because you have real world applications of what you're teaching them so you have anecdotes cases experiences that you can add to what you're teaching real life stories you can provide multiple examples and non-examples so non-examples are really critical for students learning because that helps again create those connections those cognitive connections in their schema for what doesn't work what's what's the wrong thing it's critical for learning to get those a lot of time a lot of instructors just focus on the positive you know here are the the good examples and more they say okay give them more examples and that will that will help them learn more but you also have to throw in the non-examples show your personality be enthusiastic so if you're enthusiastic your students are gonna are gonna pick up on that if you're a you know if you're the ferris bueller you know dealer bueller droning on the students are gonna feel that they're to feel like well he doesn't seem like he wants to be here you know why why should i pay attention um current events are are good that really engages students if you can bring in current events we've been in the middle of a current event for two years now called covid so that's obviously seeped its way into all of our learning but if there's other things that are happening that are related certainly bring those in students like it when you can use examples from movies that they're that they know current movies so that's useful also humor is also useful um to help the students i just have this quote the love of knowledge is is a kind of madness in and of itself um and so the second part of this is to talk about engagement strategies and i did a session previously on engagement so i want to approach this a little bit differently um my typical star trek reference i have to put in there engage thank you i've got my geek credentials now but engagement research has shown that it's a key predictor of student success and so high levels of engagement lead to higher levels of student achievement and deeper satisfaction and so you want to try to engage students in an online course every seven to ten minutes that's not a hard and fast rule but in general i saw a statistic and i don't know how valid it is that said the typical attention span now is eight minutes and it's down it used to be like 12 or 15 and now it's eight minutes um so you you have to try to engage um students as much as possible and then some of the so here's some things that learners pay attention to um that i've found and so solutions to their problems so if you know that students have certain problems and you can provide solutions to them through the the the content that you're presenting to them then that's going to help them engage more this is my my movie reference here to talk about metaphors and similes and comparisons of the sort are also useful so if you can compare new knowledge to previous knowledge or things in their life it's again going to help students engage with that and this picture is a comparison where forrest gump says life is like a box of chocolates so that's that's the metaphor or simile there visuals obviously get students attention so if you can replace long chunks of text with visuals relevant visuals that's going to engage the students more um questions i think we've had several mentions here from participants and from rona about having presenting questions or having students present questions to each other that engages them certainly more trying to encourage emotional responses in your learners is going to help them engage so if you can connect emotionally whether it's through shocking things or things that are impressive or surprising to grab their attention one way to encourage emotional response is through the use of stories and certainly in healthcare education we have lots of stories and cases and experiences we can we can draw from and in general research shows that stories are better remembered and better understood so if you if you can use a story to to get a point across that's really going to help your students learn it better and david we take a somewhat of a little bit of a different um approach to storytelling when we're looking at the organizational kind of online learning we love storytelling and it's so impactful but we use stories to let the learner make decisions because the learners need to be able to to decide you know okay what what what level of care should my patient get at this point and let them make that decision and let that decision lead to further learning did that you know are they going down the right path did they go off and steer into another direction but let them learn from the outcomes of those decisions in a safe environment yeah definitely excellent it takes me back when i was a kid and watched pbs there was a show on there i think it was called inside out and they they were short little shows and they they showed little kids in these situations and they always ended before when they were at the point where they had to make a decision like some sort of moral or ethical decision and it ended right then i remember and then the instructor would use that as an opportunity to begin a discussion with the students and that's similar to what we do in in medical education we we present these cases and then we say okay what would you do here it's also very interesting to start kind of going back to your earlier comment about starting at the end if you start your story where the decision had already been made and then back it up it's kind of like going you know backward in time that is impactful as well because had i made a different decision at this point would i have still reached that same outcome definitely it's a really neat approach and that can be part of your front loading in in your course or in your lesson is to is to show the result say here's what happened and here's how we got to this point and that's almost like a movie where you see the ending and then the rest of the movie is about how you got there that can work in in learning also is to is to approach it like that and then the last tip here is um controversy if so if you bring in a controversial fact or a statement or something like that or a statistic that helps kind of engage your learners also and it doesn't have to be an extreme one but this is a good example a woman earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earned so that's that's the jumping off point to a an entire discussion right there on so many topics um and again like rona said you know start off with the conclusion and then the students are going to want to know how you got there so definitely and then so the last component we don't have a lot of time is technology tools for engagement and i always like to just throw up a list of some of the tools that our folks are using to engage with learners and i change this every time based on what i see our folks using so obviously we use our learning management systems um but things like kahoot i think a lot of us have used kahoot which is a it's kind of a it's like a polling quizzing tool but it's in the context of a game show so that really engages people because it's fun and kind of you know a little bit flashier and there's a little bit of a competition there involved but you can leverage that for real learning it doesn't just have to be a fun activity it can be leveraged for for true learning voicethread is a is an online discussion tool that's really engaging because it encourages students to use their voice and video to interact with other folks so it's a great way to build community online because students get to to kind of interact with each other and see each other and some of these other tools we don't really have a lot of time to go into all these tools um i think the key thing david is that um i think academically you guys probably use more of these tools than we do from the organization standpoint but whatever tool you're using whether it be with contained within your source that you're actually presenting from or going outside of that explanations in how you need people to interact during your virtual session are crucial so providing that up front like you'll need to be able to have this app or go to this website so that they know up front the expectations for the technologies they'll need to use is very very helpful it'll also help you from the standpoint of understanding what limitations you might have with your audience that some of these tools that are great and you want to use them you might need to think of a different approach just because of your technology limitations and what your audience is or isn't able to do yeah and i see a question should technology expectations be in a syllabus yes definitely as soon as possible let your students know what the requirements are so they have time to install whatever apps they need test it out make sure it works and i encourage you to if you're leveraging new technology to give students a testing period so they're not in a high stakes environment trying to figure out some new technology so yeah very good questions lots of good um questions in there and that's that's the end of our slide so we we came up right on the time so we have a few minutes for any other questions i haven't monitored the entire chat so i don't know if there's anything else out there so i think they're mostly comments um agreeing with engagement versus trying to assess that frequently and my kids love kahoot more for i think people find kahoot really helpful for that rope memorization um element which is it very effective in the k-12 environment but also in medicine and health professions there's a lot of just memorizing that we have to do you know uh of course there's a lot of integration within the clinical environment within the healthcare environment but it's um there's there's there's a certain level that you got to get to across the whole um continuum there is also um that rote memorization just stuff that you need to learn to understand yeah i see somebody agreeing with the non-examples um yeah and talking about the the kahoot and the quizzing and things like that it made me think that um and i do a whole session on writing good questions but when you're creating questions for students the the items that aren't the correct answer they should be realistic so that students think they could be an answer and those those other distractors i find a lot of times are good non-examples so if you make them good distractors you can then address them as a non-example when you after you've addressed the correct answer you can say okay why wasn't this the correct answer and that becomes a teaching moment for that ties into non-examples so that's made me think of that really good tip there uh kelly also asked about chat how do you deal with chat when you don't have a dr wicker to monitor during a session with a large group of learners we've heard lots of things uh dr halpen has mentioned this before too is um you you partner with somebody else so uh rona could have also been attacked to do this and i just sort of chose to to jump in and do it and i usually do with these sessions but also even if you um even if you tag a learner to do uh keep up with the chat for you it keeps them involved um on sort of a rotating basis you could do that too yeah you can identify and say okay i want you to monitor and let me know um when when something's out there or you build in stops in your lecture to check the chat so you say okay i'm going to pause here and i'm going to look at the chat and so if you do that often enough then you know you don't you don't want to let things hang out there too long if you're if you're lecturing um because you need that immediacy students want that all right it looks like we're at the um the top of the hour and if there are any other questions or concerns i'm sure rona and dr halpin are happy to answer any questions just email them let us know if you would like to get in contact with them we're happy to give you their contact information also this recording as well as their powerpoint presentation will both be posted online on the teach website so any more questions before we head out any quick questions thanks for everyone for attending yes thanks for having me i'm glad to be here today thank you all thank you both for facilitating have a wonderful healthy safe week.