Curating New ways of Achieving Close Colloquy in a Digitally Networked Era

Concurrent Session 5

Session Materials

Brief Abstract

New digital affordances during the pandemic brought about a paradigm shift in the design and delivery of asynchronous and synchronous interactions within a liberal arts curriculum. We will present the outcomes from a two-year digital pedagogy curation project to demonstrate a shifting institutional identity.

Presenters

Extended Abstract

Overview

The remote experience brought on by the pandemic has taught small liberal arts education institutions new ways to achieve close colloquy through the creative integration of digital learning environments. Instead of clashing with the traditional notions of liberal arts, new digital affordances during the pandemic brought about a paradigm shift in the design and delivery of asynchronous and synchronous interactions, and have helped build meaningful links between the two modalities for better student engagement. This discovery shows how the future of teaching and learning in a digitally networked environment can strengthen the value of residential education. 

This presentation is a case study of a two-year digital pedagogy curation and showcase project, which consists of a series of articles featuring digital innovations by our faculty. Each article illustrates how residential education at our institution was enhanced by the integration of digital tools – the developmental process, challenges encountered, and evidence-based emerging results.

Structure of the Session:

One half of the session will be a presentation, which will be divided into 3 sections:

  • The first section will provide an overarching framework.

  • The second section will present a case study to illustrate three key factors in the digital pedagogy project – innovation, iteration, and inclusion.

  • The third section will present emerging outcomes with concrete examples, such as embracing a shifting identity, encouraging pedagogical transformation, and fostering a faculty community of practice. 

The second half of the session will be an interactive discussion, in which attendees will be encouraged to reflect on and share their own similar institutional experiences.

 

Case Studies - Evidence of Digitally Networked Learning

The case study will describe a comprehensive faculty development initiative, highlighting three interconnected aspects: innovation, iteration, and inclusion.

  • Innovation - At our institution, we have many faculty members using cutting-edge technology and innovative pedagogical methodologies. We have compiled their digital pedagogy practices in a series of articles as part of an “Academic Technology in Action” website project.

    • Example: One of our recent articles presents several different ways our faculty used video-based learning in both synchronous and asynchronous contexts. The examples span a wide range of academic disciplines. One example features how an experiment in relativity was demonstrated for a HyFlex physics classroom. Another example describes a reimagined approach to remotely teaching Art History by virtually providing access to museum objects. The multiple faculty featured in the article had worked in isolation from one another, and the creation of this article brought them together as a cohesive peer learning group.

  • Iteration - To promote a culture of innovation, we need to create a healthy space to develop through iteration. Changes to pedagogical design happen organically as faculty receive feedback from students and reflect on their own experiences. We create a culture of risk-taking through iteration, which is necessary for creative thinking. 

    • Example: An example of iteration can be found in our collection of articles focused on course blogs. These blogs are great examples of public scholarship. They often exist over multiple semesters, so students from more than one semester are building upon the work of those who have taken the course before. We showcase examples from many disciplines, including mathematics, Spanish, Black Studies/English, and Music. The blog for the latter course consists of a collection of documentary video and audio essays created by students to highlight local musicians and musical communities. 

  • Inclusion - Innovation is great, but new digital platforms do not always have highly developed digital accessibility features for all users, including students with disabilities. While faculty are committed to and care deeply about designing spaces based upon the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), how to apply the principles is not always clear. One section of our project, called “Inclusive Practices with Technology,” features great examples of technology used expressly for supporting inclusivity. By curating these examples, we were presenting examples of inclusive practices and generating evidence that faculty are achieving UDL, often when they don’t even realize they are doing so.

    • Example: One article from this collection demonstrates how an instructor might seek a way to ensure accessibility in a mathematics course. It featured a course using RStudio, which presented a barrier to access for a blind student using a screen reader. The article explains how that barrier was overcome by the instructor and class assistants using creative methodologies. We will showcase how an Equally Effective Alternate Access Plan (EEAAP) allowed the student to fully participate in the course.

Digitally Networked Learning as a Catalyst for Institutional Change

This digital pedagogy curation and showcase project has led to emerging outcomes in three areas: institutional identity, pedagogical transformation, and faculty community of practice.

 

  • Embracing a Shifting Identity - We are embracing the idea of ourselves as providing high-quality, digitally-networked education without changing the essence of liberal arts. The institution now sees that residential education and digital learning need not be mutually exclusive. Although this may seem obvious, adopting digital technologies and methods more openly has required the institution to engage in a significant shift in thought and practice. 

  • Encouraging Networked Engagement - We are using new tools and methodologies to foster engagement without sacrificing the fundamentals of good teaching. This project has revealed substantial evidence that there are new ways to achieve close colloquy and foster intellectual communities using digital tools and methods that enable student agency. For example, we will present evidence that digital annotation tool applications have led to effective critical reading practices in Humanities and STEM fields. This evidence will illustrate how small changes in pedagogical design using digital tools can lead to big changes in achieving interdisciplinary approaches. 

  • Fostering a Faculty Community of Practice - A natural byproduct of this project has been the emergence of a faculty Community of Practice, exemplifying the power of peer learning among faculty. We discovered that other faculty had not heard about each other's work and benefited from reading about how their colleagues were applying new tools and approaches. We further strengthened this by facilitating faculty sharing sessions, which allow faculty who use tools to share their experiences in greater depth and answer questions from other interested faculty. Recent topics that brought faculty together on our campus have included “Podcast as Pedagogy”, “Digital Humanities Topics”, “AI in the Liberal Arts”, and “Being Human in STEM”.

The session will conclude with an interactive discussion about implications for the future -  How might institutions that privilege in-person interactions over online communication adapt to the changing landscape post-pandemic? Students coming into higher-ed are demanding more digitally networked environments for their academic work. How should institutions best position themselves to meet student expectations, be more inclusive, and develop flexible approaches to handle an unpredictable future ? 

Relevance to the higher-education community

  • Framework for institutional change: Discovering examples of transformational success requires – 1) identifying effective practices; 2) curating and describing the pedagogical design process; 3) acknowledging and eliminating roadblocks in applying the pedagogical design; and, 4) refining the process using learning analytics. This case-study presentation will address all of the above-mentioned critical steps and will arrive at a framework that is relevant to higher education today.

  • Replicability in other institutions: Our project will demonstrate how to create a living archive for continuous development to serve as a prototype for building discourse across different academic disciplines.

Takeaways

We expect attendees to consider and benefit from these faculty development ideas:

  • Alternate perspectives: 1) “learning design” teams need to be viewed more as strategic partners than in a support role; and 2) online and residential education are not dichotomies, and that a third way is to see that residential education can be greatly enhanced by effective integration of the digital environments.

  • Multi-pronged change strategy: a framework for institutional change requires that we bring together multiple strategies in synchronous and asynchronous settings, including website curation, faculty panels, online resources, consultations, departmental collaborative sessions, and student perspectives.

  • Concrete examples with how-to resources: examples of digital innovation projects that we present will include several open online resources on how to develop and sustain these digital innovation projects, e.g. “how-to” resources for using video annotations to achieve intellectual communities.

Interactivity

This will be an interactive presentation. We will encourage reflection from our audience, using three activities: 

  • Individual Feedback - At the start of the session, (using an online polling tool), we will elicit audience perspectives and individual perceptions of institutional change at their campuses. [Sample prompts: 1) What is your role in higher education? (e.g. faculty/administrator/education technology specialist), 2)  In your institution, which digital tools and methodologies have you retained in moving from the remote context to in-person education?]

  • Small-group discussion - After the framework is presented, the audience will engage briefly in small-group discussions and share how their experiences might relate to our case study. [Sample prompt: Identify specific areas of change in educational design and delivery at your institution].

  • Large-group discussion - The small groups will report back to the larger group and develop a collection of concrete takeaways for all of us to share and use. [Sample prompt: Institutional challenges relating to student engagement].