S1:E6 Dr. Stephen Taysom – Remote and online classes are not the same thing

Tyler Jacobson  0:01

Welcome to LabChats, a podcast from the team at LabStats. I’m Tyler Jacobson, your host for today’s episode. Each week, we’ll sit down with technology leaders in higher education to get the latest buzz and insights while we discuss current events, trends, problems and solutions. Now, let’s get into it. 

Joining with us today we have Dr. Stephen Taysom, who is a Professor of History at Cleveland State. You’ve been there for nearly 12 years, give me a little bit of your background and how you got into education. And then we could talk about online versus on site education and how important it is to get students back on campus.

Stephen Taysom  0:39

Yeah, so thanks for having me. My journey to this started, I was intentionally going after a law degree was my original intent. When I started college. And after I was on campus, for about 10 minutes, I decided I wanted to be a professor because I just thought college is awesome. What I didn’t realize was that being 18 on a college campus is not quite the same as being 45 on a college campus. But anyway, so, that’s what started it. And then I was a history major, decided I wanted to go to graduate school and got a PhD in a very specialized type of history. So the history of religion at Indiana University, and then I was good at it and got lucky, got a job, [which are] not easy to get. And like you said, I’ve been doing it now at Cleveland State for…it’ll be 13 years.

Tyler Jacobson  1:29

How much experience do you have in teaching in class? And then how much have you had for the online format?

Stephen Taysom  1:38

So in a classroom setting, I mean, going all the way back to 2001, so almost 20 years. When I was in graduate school, you would work for professors. They would teach the main lecture sections, and then they would have discussion sections. So the graduate student assistants would run those. So that was my first real college classroom experience, [that] was 20 years ago. And pretty much from then on…with [the exception of] one or two years after I got my PhD, where I didn’t have a job yet. I’ve taught a lot in the classroom. So 20 years worth. Online, basically none until last year. So I mean, I think I took a course once, like a professional development class at CSU, teaching us how to design online classes. And that was the only kind of online stuff I had done until last March.

Tyler Jacobson  2:36

So last March, what happened? And because I know that I’ve had a lot of feedback from the IT side of people that were very abruptly having to train instructors on surviving in an online environment. What resources were given to you, and what was the timeframe that you needed to make that transition?

Stephen Taysom  2:55

What resources were given to us? No…I was gonna say none, [but] that isn’t strictly true. So what happened was…this thing emerged early in the year and just happened that our spring break was in March. And going into spring break, there was some discussion about what was going to happen. Over spring break, the university decided that we were going to go fully remote except for…some classes that required people to actually be there, like some lab classes, etc. And then they send us on spring break for a week to let us get ready for that. It basically all it meant for us was we had to figure out a way to do what we would do in the classroom, but now do it remotely. And that’s and that might sound obvious. But that isn’t the same thing as an online class. So you know, online courses, and we can maybe talk about this a little bit later with online courses are different from just a class taught remotely. So all I did was get on Blackboard, which I was familiar with that platform, record the lectures using this technology, you could either do live classes with Zoom, or you could use Tegrity, which was what I started using to record the lectures and then upload them. And then once I learned that on my own, and they came back and said, “Oh, we’re not using that anymore our license is expiring.” So I had to switch everything to this other system called PanOpto, just basically the same thing. [Our IT team was] responsive to questions, but there was no positive control of training. So it wasn’t like they taught us how to do it. If we had questions we could ask the IT people. They were actually really good about responding, trying to help us get through it.

Tyler Jacobson  4:41

And that’s that’s the feedback that we get over and over again, your situation was actually very typical. Spring Break got extended, and they were trying to figure out how to make that transition. But it was so abrupt and so many schools started announcing that they were going to be going online, which put more pressure on other schools to go online. And a lot of the schools, the people that do online primarily taught online, and the instructors that taught on site primarily taught on site, so there was very little overlap there for opportunities for shared experience in training. And so that’s pretty typical. From what we hear, it was very abrupt. Some instructors did okay. Some struggle to the point of major problems. That’s pretty typical. So how’s it working? And what are the shortfalls? And what are the advantages?

Stephen Taysom  5:37

Well, so, to your point earlier about just really briefly about online classes versus these remote classes. When you design an online class, which I’ve never done, because it requires a whole specialized [approach]. You design your shell for the course. But then inside of that, there’s all kinds of discussion forums for the students to work with. And also the supplementary material [is a] completely different thing. So people who take an online class, it’s a totally different experience than taking this remote thing. There are no real advantages to a remote versus an in person style, pedagogically speaking. I mean, setting aside the health concerns, because I’m not addressing that, obviously. So there’s no advantage to me teaching it this way. Compared with the way that I would normally teach in the classroom, it doesn’t do anything better. If it were a true online course, then that may be different. But for me, there’s no advantage there. There are a number of disadvantages. Primarily just not being present in a classroom with those people makes the teaching less effective. It makes it harder for me to gauge whether or not they are understanding what I’m saying. I can’t pick up on the cues, of just watching them. Because even when we’re doing what I’m doing this semester, which is doing it, what they call synchronously, so you have options, to do it asynchronously, which is what I did last semester, which means that I taped the lecture, I put it up, they can watch it whenever they want. Synchronously means they are there at a specific time. And we when we do a Zoom class live, even then we’re not allowed to require them to have their cameras on. So I don’t know, I can’t see their face, I can’t see what’s going on. I don’t know if they’re even getting what I’m saying. The other thing that’s difficult about it is communication becomes very difficult, because instead of dealing with them face to face when they have a question, you’re dealing with emails. And so if you might have three or four students with questions in a class after class, they can [come] talk to you, that takes five or 10 minutes to deal with. But instead of that, I have emails coming in, and I have to respond to the emails, and maybe I missed them, maybe they get sent to my spam folder. So the time it takes to do everything gets expanded, because you don’t have any kind of face to face interactions with them. So there are no advantages to it. There are lots of disadvantages.

Tyler Jacobson  8:06

Well, and I can see that because in just general communication, not necessarily in an education environment, doing it through writing is infinitely less effective. So typing it out, you lose the tone, you lose the nonverbals. And also the way that it’s received and perceived is very, very different. I can see that providing a lot of challenges. As far as the resources [you] are using to teach with: have any of those changed? Have you been using the same texts? Are you sending them to different places to receive materials?

Stephen Taysom  8:45

Yeah, so this is one of the hardest [problems]. So, I’ve been using the same books. One of the classes I’ve taught while I was teaching before, so I’ve done it in person, and online. The other one I hadn’t done before. So I’m doing it online, or I’m doing it remotely, but yeah, I’ve used the same books that I normally would use, but I have added some stuff. So, sending them to see videos and stuff. Because normally I show films in class, I can’t do that. So some of the films that I normally show I don’t have access to because I can’t put, you know, there’s DVD players and stuff in the classroom [and I] don’t have access to that. So I have to find other things to substitute, which is not that hard, given the nature of the internet now, I mean, there’s most everything I can find a substitute for even on YouTube and…have them use that. I haven’t changed much as far as the design of the class is concerned. You know, they still take their exams, I just give it to them online. Which I had actually moved to anyway, even in person stuff. I’d have them just take their exams on their own time and upload them onto Blackboard. So that even that hasn’t changed that much.

Tyler Jacobson  10:00

You had brought up that when students have questions or things like that, in the past, you would do that or discuss it during class, or they would catch you for five minutes after class. Are you finding that students are more reluctant to seek help? How has that changed?

Stephen Taysom  10:17

So it’s interesting. When we first went to this, I got a lot of emails from students last year, around the time when we first made the switch. Since then, I’ve gotten a lot less so yeah, there, they are more reluctant. Because it just takes more effort. You know, when you’re actually talking to somebody…I explain every question and I answer it. They might not understand what I’ve said. And so they’ll say, “Oh, do you mean this?”, and then I can explain to them. In an email, if I send an email, they don’t understand that they have to then write me back and say, “I didn’t understand that”. They’re very, very unlikely to do something like that, even if they’ve reached out once. So they don’t even ask questions on the Zoom thing, because I think it’s just, they’re not comfortable with it. And so I think there’s a lot of things that are happening, there’s a lot of things going on in their heads that would have been verbalized, that aren’t now.

Tyler Jacobson  11:07

Well, I can see that whenever I have a meeting, if I’ve got more than three people in a