Louise Creechan (GTA English Literature and Widening Participation, University of Glasgow)
Remote learning? Online delivery? Blended learning? F2F small group learning? Zoom? While universities are developing their own institutional policies with regard to socially-distant classroom spaces, it remains highly unlikely that we will be filling lecture theatres with 200+ students any time soon.
Deconstructing and Remodelling the Lecture
We are all familiar with the traditional lecture/seminar course model: several lectures (one or sometimes two hours long) presented to the full cohort of students registered on a particular course each week, supplemented by a small-group seminar of an hour or so per week. The essential component of this model – the lecture – has been the object of scrutiny for a long time in studies of HE pedagogy.
Since the 1980s, researchers have cast doubt on the extent that lectures promote deeper learning, arguing that the lecture is a mode of pedagogical practice that privileges certain types of learners, is too lengthy, unengaging, and stifles the development of autonomous thought. There are also accessibility issues that the traditional lecture format can struggle to accommodate. For example: fast-paced speech can make it more difficult for students with slower writing or processing speeds to take adequate notes and the focus on the voice of the lecturer over visual aids can make this medium more difficult for deaf students to follow.
As we move to remote learning, some of the deficiencies of the lecture model are exacerbated. Conducting synchronous live lectures over video conferencing software, such as Zoom or MS Teams, is problematic for the following reasons:
High bandwidth required
Difficult to provide real-time captions
Requires high level of concentration over a sustained time period which is fatiguing
These are all significant access issues which need to be addressed from the outset of our course redesigns. The pandemic offers an opportunity to try out some new approaches.
So, what can we do to offer our students an accessible alternative?
Divide your lecture into several smaller chunks – there is a long-standing consensus that attention tends to wander after around 10-15 minutes. While there is some debate about this, students will always appreciate having each sub-topic presented in a separate unit so they can find it more easily for review and revision.
Pre-record small chunks and invite comments from students by posing a question at the end or asking them to look further into topic X and discuss their findings (e.g. on a discussion board). QUB has produced this useful guide to making accessible videos. (Remember that audio recordings, like podcasts, are another viable option.)
Boost engagement with your materials through quizzes and discussion forums.
Ask yourself whether you need to relay information to your students for them to achieve their intended learning outcomes. Could they learn by searching for information by themselves? This video from Dr Steven Mintz of the American Historical Association argues that ‘history is not a spectator sport’ and that the best way to learn history is to do history via source gathering ‘scavenger hunts’.
What alternatives can we offer our students? Is the pandemic an opportunity to rethink existing pedagogical models? Are lectures useful for remote learning?
We would love to hear your thoughts on how we remodel our lectures to take advantage of remote learning strategies. Please do get in touch with us on Twitter @history_uk to share your experiences.
Kate Cooper (Professor of History, Royal Holloway, University of London)
One of the problems worrying wise heads as they think ahead to the autumn involves the instructional quantum formerly known as contact hours. Once we are no longer meeting in timetabled classrooms, how will we know when we have done enough? It’s a question that has a philosophical dimension, but it’s also tremendously practical. On the one hand, digital teaching requires thinking ahead to solve as many problems as possible ahead of time. On the other hand, students navigating in an unfamiliar digital environment might reasonably need more support than ever.
In a piece entitled The need for Presence not ‘Contact Hours’, David White, who is Head of Digital Learning for the University of the Arts London, addresses the problem head-on. Part of the problem, White suggests, is that our way of thinking about what we owe our students has been rooted in a not-particularly-well-thought-through emotion: the attachment we all feel to ‘the University as a set of buildings.’ Partly out of habit and partly because emotional attachment makes us irrational, he says, ‘The narrow definition of Contact Hours in the UK basically boils down to “time spent in the same room together”.’ This means we have failed to think as carefully as we might about what our students need from their interactions with teachers, and the resulting muddled thinking can have spectacularly bad results.
So in the move to online teaching our initial instinct is to preserve Contact Hours by mirroring what would have been face-to-face sessions with webinar style sessions. What this looks like [in some contexts] is exhausting 3-4 hour online sessions which must be almost impossible to stay engaged with. Not only is this unsustainable, it is also damaging to the learning process.
Another useful approach comes from Colorado, where Sean Michael Morris is Senior Instructor in Learning, Design, and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver and Director of the online learning community known as Digital Pedagogy Lab. In a recent post Morris suggests that the answer to the problem rests on an idea we can all agree on: the best pedagogy is rooted in human relationships. “My expertise is digital pedagogy—specifically critical digital pedagogy—which resides more in the relationships between teachers and students than it does the delivery of instruction.” In facing up to the digital challenge, he says, colleagues can become so worried about managing the technology that they need to be reminded of the human element.
So as I’m approached with questions about what technologies might help build community online, what platform I might recommend for ensuring students don’t cheat, or what digital solution I know of that will enable meaningful discussion, I’ve found myself answering: teach through the screen, not to the screen. Find out where your students are, and make your classroom there, in a multiplicity of places.
How we make this happen, of course, is the question. What does it mean to be ‘present’ in a space that doesn’t actually exist?
Another important aspect of the problem involves not only space, but time. To what extent is a ‘scheduled hour’ a meaningful measure? Far less than we are used to, perhaps: to students (and staff) who are living in a state of perpetual disruption, freedom from set schedules can offer a much-valued silver lining, and is sometimes an absolute necessity.
My colleague Martin King at Royal Holloway makes an important distinction here. Even though being ‘present’ to our students is something that we are used to doing in real-time, sometimes the acts of ‘presence’ we can offer asynchronously are just as valuable. To illustrate the point, Martin kindly gave me permission to share a graphic analysis he made of the possibilities for ‘presence’ that can be offered to students through the Moodle/Replay learning tools we use in our own institution.
Martin places strong emphasis on something that is sometimes forgotten in discussions of ‘contact’, which is interactivity. Sometimes, when we are sailing along in our habitual way of teaching and learning together, we forget that what makes contact ‘contact’ is the fact of being able to interact. Often, interaction is the element that lights up the learning experience for students.
Once we’ve turned our focus to interactivity, we can see that though we’re used to thinking of synchronous activity as conveying a strong sense of presence, when interactivity is present asynchronous activity can do so as well. And colleagues are already reporting that new forms of engagement such as discussion lists can elicit higher involvement from students who would hesitate to contribute in face-to-face discussion.
Another point to remember is that sometimes the ‘presence’ our students find most valuable and rewarding is that of their peers. Taking Martin’s analysis as a starting point, I made my own visual analysis, this time looking at how the social and interactive aspect of learning can work both synchronously and asynchronously, sometimes through engagement between students and staff, and at other times through engagement among students themselves. (The ‘asynchronous-social’ column in the centre offers particularly useful food for thought.)
How can we translate these insights into strategies for supporting students? David White suggests that if we move our thinking away from counting contact hours to planning for meaningful acts of presence, we may discover that the new landscape offers surprising possibilities.
Here is the list White offers at the close of his post:
A fairly quick, reliable, turnaround to emailed questions
Being active ‘live’ in forums or text chats (an ‘office hours’ approach to asynchronous presence)
Lively synchronous sessions – such as, webinars with plenty of Q&A
Artfully ‘flipped’ use of pre-recorded teaching videos
Audio, video or text summative feedback (if it’s been created just for you then it’s always a moment of presence)
…and of course face-to-face sessions in various forms.
It’s not hard to imagine a student being happy with this approach to presence. It’s perhaps an idealized list – notice all those adjectives and adverbs. (‘Reliable’, ‘lively’, ‘artfully’.) So, the proof will be in the design (how do they all fit together? do they add up to more than the sum of the parts?) and in the delivery. But that is true for every type of teaching, so at least here we are on familiar territory.
“It’s important to note the relatively high numbers who do not feel supported in independent study … we know that the skills developed through independent study are important to employers and to lifelong learning. Providing guidance and structure outside timetabled sessions is key here.”
So there is potentially much to be gained from shifting our focus from measuring staff input to considering how best to offer our students what they need.
For department chairs and administrators, there remains a thorny administrative problem: it’s far more difficult to assess whether a multi-strand ‘presence’ strategy has been executed successfully than it is to count timetabled contact hours. But from the student perspective, if the present disruption forces us to focus on the fundamentals, this can only be a good thing.
Louise Creechan (GTA English Literature and Widening Participation, University of Glasgow)
This week the Pandemic Pedagogy team at History UK have been thinking about accessibility.We believe that accessibility needs to be our first consideration when we begin to plan for remote delivery. Thinking about accessibility issues from the outset ensures that we avoid making compromises or adjustments further down the line. It should go without saying that it is extremely demoralising for a student to feel like their needs were an afterthought.
Professor Chrsitine Hockings of Evidencenet offers the following definition of ‘inclusive learning’ that positions accessibility as a part of a wider pedagogical strategy, one which also includes learning design and community building as key elements for inclusivity:
‘Inclusive learning and teaching in higher education refers to the ways in which pedagogy, curricula and assessment are designed and delivered to engage students in learning that is meaningful, relevant and accessible to all. It embraces a view of the individual and individual difference as the source of diversity that can enrich the lives and learning of others.’
The Pandemic Pedagogy project is concerned about the impact of the pandemic on these essential areas of inclusive teaching practice: accessibility, learning design, and community building. Through our blog posts and Twitter interactions, we aim to collate resources and useful case studies that can help our community of historians to deliver courses remotely without compromising on inclusive learning practices.
To return to accessibility, it might seem elementary, but if teaching is inaccessible then it is ineffective. Prioritising accessibility means students do not necessarily have to go through the trauma of disclosing disabilities or life situations. Many arrangements will also in turn benefit all, including abled and neurotypical students and staff.
What arrangements are you making for accessible learning? Do you have any concerns?
What do we mean by ‘accessibility’?
Under the 2010 Equality Act, we are legally required to ‘make reasonable adjustments’ to enable our students to access their studies. This legislation applies to all protected characteristics, such as age, disability, race/ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or gender, but it also extends to adjustments that the institution must make to ensure no student is disadvantaged. Remote learning can exacerbate many additional barriers for students that may have been hidden in the classroom, such as caring responsibilities, the lack of a quiet place to work, access to suitable equipment, or an unreliable internet connection. Accessibility is about inclusion and making sure that all learners feel valued and supported.
We’ve identified three starting points for thinking about accessible remote course design: Bandwidth and Workplace Circumstances, Fatigue and Concentration Difficulties, and the Loss/Lack of Support Systems This is by no means an exhaustive list and there will be specific issues that will require additional support. In the meantime, we’ve included some points of reflection with each example. We’d like to invite you to join us on Twitter on Thursday 25th June from 2pm to share experiences, reflections, and resources, and help us develop an accessible approach to remote learning. Use #PandemicPedagogy and/or #InclusiveHUK.
Synchronous video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom or MS Teams, require significantly higher bandwidths to function effectively. These high-bandwidth technologies rely on newer computers and operating systems, fast broadband connections, or significant data allowances on mobile devices. Participation in real-time, face-to-face contact via video software can marginalise students from rural communities (or abroad) with poor signal or those who cannot afford the significant financial burden of high-end technologies.
We must also respect that finding a quiet place to work may not be possible for many students for a multitude of reasons, including caring responsibilities, financial circumstances, and changed familial dynamic as a result of COVID-19. In these cases, ensuring access to recorded material, collaborative writing tasks, or discussion forums can enable students to remain engaged with the course, but at a time that is convenient for them.
What has been your experience with asynchronous resources? What did you use? How have students responded?
See this article from DePaul University for a breakdown of low-bandwidth and asynchronous approaches.
Fatigue and Concentration Difficulties
No matter how driven we are, there will be times when our concentration is severely affected by external factors. The pandemic is a cause for concern for many of us and our students are no different.
In a survey conducted by Disabled Students UK, increased levels of fatigue were commonly mentioned by respondents. It is important to note that, while respondents self-identified as disabled, the fatigue reported was not solely related to their disabilities, but the result of the changing study arrangements and the emotional toll of ensuring that their support remained in place. Ensuring that course design is informed by accessible pedagogical practices is a way of mitigating some of the stresses felt by students with additional needs.
Of course, we can all feel fatigued when we have dramatically altered our routines and working conditions. It’s been fairly well documented that the online platforms that we’ve been using to support remote learning can cause ‘Zoom fatigue’. Psychologists have determined that video platforms impair our ability to process non-verbal cues which forces the brain to focus harder on verbal dialogue and, in turn, tires us out.
To counteract fatigue and concentration issues, we should really be asking ourselves: ‘does this interaction/pre-recording need to be any longer than twenty minutes?’ If so, it may be worth rethinking your strategy: Can you plan a comfort break? Can you set students an off-screen activity for 10/15 minutes? Could this be covered by setting reading and encouraging responses on a forum?
What tactics have you employed to manage fatigue? How can course design be implemented to avoid burnout?
Loss/Lack of Support Systems
Isolation from friends, families, or situations where the student is estranged from their families can make studying far more challenging. In order to create a truly inclusive environment, we need to treat isolation as an accessibility issue. We will return to community building and transitions to HE later in the Pandemic Pedagogy project, but it is worth noting that, through conscious efforts to encourage student interaction and by making the effort to design our courses with collaboration in mind, we can hope to replicate some of the support that may have been lost in the transition to remote learning.
We need to be aware that the non-medical assistants, such as BSL interpreters, that many disabled students require will not be able to work as they would have done before the pandemic. Remember that legally you must provide captioning or a transcript for any pre-recorded material and that synchronous video conferencing makes this far more difficult. A simple way of captioning pre-recorded resources is to upload content to YouTube and to review the automatic captioning. We will provide more specific strategies for developing disability-positive classrooms in the formal Pandemic Pedagogy report that will be produced in mid-July to mark the end of the project.
Are there any strategies that you have used to support isolated students? How do we make sure that students who have lost their support systems are able to continue their studies?
Please do get in touch to share your experiences of accessible remote learning. We are keen to create a sense of coming together with other historians to ensure that we use this pandemic as a means of evolving our pedagogy and maintaining our commitment to accessibility.
Kate Cooper (Professor of History, Royal Holloway, University of London)
The summer of 2020 is not what any of us expected: with libraries closed and summer holidays a matter of finding a new routine within the same four walls, the task that looms largest for many of us is the attempt to reinvent our teaching for next autumn.
Over the past few weeks, a small team has been working as part of History UK’s Pandemic Pedagogy project to find out how colleagues are approaching the challenges we face as teachers and mentors of university-level History students. Over the next 2-3 weeks, we’ll be posting resources and blog posts here on the History UK website to offer some insight into what colleagues around the Four Nations have learned – or are learning – about digitally-delivered teaching.
The first thing we’re learning will come as no surprise: just-moving-everything-onto-Zoom (or equivalent) isn’t an option. Zoom fatigue is real. Screen-to-screen interactions simply don’t work the same way as in-person conversations do. (Julia Sklar explains why in an excellent article: ‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here’s why that happens.)
Luckily, the lecture-plus-seminar system we all know and love isn’t the only way to do things – it’s a historical artefact. University Lectures came into being in medieval cities in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. Then as now, time-tabling was a matter of getting people who lived in sometimes distant lodgings into the same room at a time when the teacher could be there and the room was available.
And hour-long slots aren’t pedagogically ideal; in fact, research suggests that shorter periods fit the human ability to concentrate far better. In other words, what we’re used to isn’t the only way to deliver the experiences and challenges that make for great teaching – or even the best way. It is just the way we’re most familiar with. (For a research-based and often quite funny take-down of lectures and why we tend to over-rate them, see Graham Gibbs’s Twenty terrible reasons for lecturing.)
So it’s useful to think about what happens in the ‘classroom’ in new ways, and to try to get to the bottom of what’s really important. We’ve identified four central areas that we’ll be addressing:
Presence: In an environment where ‘contact hours’ and ‘office hours’ don’t work the way they used to (and, let’s face it, they were never perfect to begin with!), how can we create a sense of involvement and intellectual connection for our students – with their peers and with us, their teachers?
Community-building: How can we best offer our students a sense of belonging and engagement with one another? This is a challenge that reaches from the summer before first year to the summer after graduation, and happens at multiple levels, from the tutor group or seminar group all the way up to the year cohort and the wider departmental community.
Scaffolding: How can we create frameworks both to guide students in exploring material independently, and to make sure they have the right opportunities to gain feedback from peers and from the teacher/facilitator?
Reading together (and writing and thinking together): What opportunities does the digital landscape offer for creating ‘spaces’ where students can read together, share their insights, and challenge each other to create new understanding?
And, the all-important Accessibility: How do we make sure that each of our students, regardless of disability, background, living situation or internet speed, has full access to the learning opportunities they have signed up for?
One of the best things about the Pandemic Pedagogy project so far has been a new experience of the UK History community as a lively, wry collection of people who are largely up for making lemonade out of whatever lemons come their way. So many people I’ve spoken to are looking for silver linings – a chance to discover new ways of teaching, learning, and collaborating that will benefit our students long after this particular crisis is over. I’ve also encountered a really lovely sense that we are all in this together – a ‘we’ that with luck will grow even stronger as we work together over the coming weeks and into the future.
Along with 47 other subject associations, History UK has just signed a letter to ministers with responsibility for higher education at Westminster and the devolved governments. It calls for a ‘new deal’ for higher education across the nations of the UK. You can read the full text of the letter below. Please share more widely on social media. A pdf of the full letter can be downloaded here.
Dear Ministers,
We are writing to you as officers of 48 professional associations representing diverse research fields to express our profound concern about the future of higher education in the UK. COVID-19 has simultaneously highlighted the huge importance of university research to tackling the virus and its social and economic implications as well as the unsustainability of the current funding model for tertiary education.
Higher education makes a fundamentally significant contribution to society. It expands our knowledge and understanding of the world through an array of research discoveries, improves the life chances of individuals by enhancing social mobility and opportunities, advances the economy by carrying out innovative research, and provides each new generation with cultural knowledge as well as cutting edge skills and expertise. Yet, currently, UK public spending on tertiary education amounts to only a quarter of university budgets, which is not only the lowest among OECD countries, but comprises considerably less than half of the average spending among the OECD’s other 34 countries. It is therefore not surprising that nearly 25 percent of all UK universities were in deficit even before the pandemic and that now, due to a dramatic drop in projected income, almost all higher education institutions in the country will face huge obstacles to carry out their mission and remain internationally competitive without government support.
A vibrant and robust higher education system is absolutely vital for the UK’s future. We believe that the current government funding model for higher education is inadequate for this task and we therefore call upon you to use the current crisis as an opportunity to create a new deal for higher education. Rather than providing a one-time bailout, it is paramount that the UK and devolved governments substantially increases public spending on tertiary education in line with the OECD average in order to ensure that our tertiary institutions remain at the forefront of global research, education and innovation.
Yours sincerely,
African Studies Association of the United Kingdom – Professor Ambreena Manji
Architectural Humanities Research Association — Professor Jonathan Hale
Arts and Humanities Alliance — Professor Susan Bruce
Association for Art History — Professor Frances Fowle
Association for German Studies — Professor Margaret Littler
Association for Welsh Writing in English — Professors Kirsti Bohata and Matthew Jarvis
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland — Dr John Miller
Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland — Professor Claire Taylor
Association of Programmes in Translation and Interpreting Studies — Dr JC Penet and Dr Olga Castro
Association for Publishing Education — Professor Claire Squires
Association of University Professors and Heads of French — Professor Marion Schmid
British Association for American Studies — Dr Cara Rodway
British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience — Professor Jamie Ward
British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies — Dr Matthias Neumann
British Association for South Asian Studies — Professor Patricia Jeffery
British Association for Study of Religions – Professor Bettina Schmidt
British Association for Victorian Studies — Professor Dinah Birch CBE
British Association of Academic Phoneticians – Professor Jane Stuart-Smith
British Association of Critical Legal Scholars — Professor Adam Gearey
British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies — Dr James Leggott
British Comparative Literature Association – Professor Susan Bassnett
British International Studies Association — Professor Mark Webber
British Philosophical Association — Professor Fiona Macpherson, FRSE, MAE
British Society for Middle Eastern Studies — Professor Haleh Afshar
British Society for the History of Science — Drr Tim Boon
British Sociological Association — Professor Susan Halford
British Universities Industrial Relations Association — Professor Tony Dobbins
Council of University Classical Departments — Professor Helen Lovatt
Economic History Society – Professor Catherine Schenk
English Association — Dr Rebecca Fisher
Feminist Studies Association — Dr Laura Clancy and Dr Sara De Benedictis,
History UK — Dr Lucinda Matthews-Jones, Dr Yolana Pringle and Dr Jamie Wood
Linguistics Association of Great Britain — Professor Caroline Heycock
Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association — Professor Anita Biressi
Modern Humanities Research Association – Dr Barbara Burns
Newcomen Society – Dr Jonathan Aylen
Oral History Society – Professor John Gabriel
Royal Musical Association – Professor Simon McVeigh
Royal Society of Literature — Professor Marina Warner, DBE, CBE, FBA
Socio-Legal Studies Association — Professor Rosie Harding
Society for French Studies — Professor Judith Still
Society for Latin American Studies — Professor Patience Schell
Society for Old Testament Study — Dr Walter Houston
Society for Renaissance Studies — Professor Richard Wistreich
Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry – Professor Frank James
Standing Conference of University Drama Departments – Professor Kate Newey
Theatre & Performance Research Association – Professor Roberta Mock
University Council of Modern Languages — Professor Claire Gorrara
You must be logged in to post a comment.