Notes on Online Teaching, Part 1
March 18
Like teachers at every level, I'm being asked to transition my class online to reflect the new realities of social distancing and shelter-in-place.
Like a lot of teachers, I'm also bumping up against the limits of Blackboard as a course website system. There's a lot to write and learn about Blackboard and the broader 'learning management system' [say, the fact that a cursory search suggests that the private equity firm Providence Equity Partners has owned a stake in it], but I've been thinking this morning about its design.
Blackboard's Google info box tells me that it was founded in 1997:
That would make the platform older than many of my students in this large lecture course - and I think it helps to explain why the design of the platform is so frustrating. The basic structure seems to be 'menus' on the left and then 'content' on the right. In my case, I've added a series of menu items on the left that I think take students to what they'll need to find, but I don't know how to parse the line between too few menus [where you end up with too much content] and too many menus [where students are left clicking through different menus to find the content they need]. And then there's the structure of the content panel in the first place, one that seems to be mostly limited to a sort of sequential structure in which items sit on top of each other.
It's a challenge, I think, because so much interactive and responsive website design seems to have gone a different direction. It's striking to me that in almost all of the advice that various university channels have delivered, there's never been any conversation about how our students are actually using Blackboard. As faculty members, we're thus stuck in this position where we put up material and assignments with one assumption about how our students will be accessing that material and then find ourselves frustrated when "they don't do what we want." I've been thinking about this in relation to the mid-semester survey I sent to them in which I asked about how much of the reading they were doing. For those who said they weren't doing all of the reading, their answers were really revealing and eye-opening for me. Students spoke of taking 18 units (the equivalent of 6 courses) or being pulled between a myriad of different activities and responsibilities. I hadn't always done a good job of making the reading accessible, either, and this is what brings me back to this platform.
We're told, 'Use Blackboard,' but there doesn't seem to be a lot of explanation of how students are actually using Blackboard. Because of that, there seem to be all of these missed opportunities - which isn't necessarily about my failings as a teacher nor about my students' 'laziness' as much as it might be a problem of design.
I'm in the process of reading User Friendly right now, and it's filled with all of these interesting observations about the histories and debates and accidents that have shaped the field of design. They close a chapter on empathy with this:
Like teachers at every level, I'm being asked to transition my class online to reflect the new realities of social distancing and shelter-in-place.
 |
| Screenshot of the Student Preview of my Blackboard course website, March 18, 2020 |
Blackboard's Google info box tells me that it was founded in 1997:
 |
| Screenshot, March 18, 2020 |
It's a challenge, I think, because so much interactive and responsive website design seems to have gone a different direction. It's striking to me that in almost all of the advice that various university channels have delivered, there's never been any conversation about how our students are actually using Blackboard. As faculty members, we're thus stuck in this position where we put up material and assignments with one assumption about how our students will be accessing that material and then find ourselves frustrated when "they don't do what we want." I've been thinking about this in relation to the mid-semester survey I sent to them in which I asked about how much of the reading they were doing. For those who said they weren't doing all of the reading, their answers were really revealing and eye-opening for me. Students spoke of taking 18 units (the equivalent of 6 courses) or being pulled between a myriad of different activities and responsibilities. I hadn't always done a good job of making the reading accessible, either, and this is what brings me back to this platform.
We're told, 'Use Blackboard,' but there doesn't seem to be a lot of explanation of how students are actually using Blackboard. Because of that, there seem to be all of these missed opportunities - which isn't necessarily about my failings as a teacher nor about my students' 'laziness' as much as it might be a problem of design.
I'm in the process of reading User Friendly right now, and it's filled with all of these interesting observations about the histories and debates and accidents that have shaped the field of design. They close a chapter on empathy with this:
The gospel of innovation, and the imperative to innovate or be washed away by the rising tide of competition, rings hollow unless you have some mechanism for finding new ideas. The beauty of the design process as articulated at the dawn of the computer age was that we could all innovate, if only we knew how to empathize. Industrial empathy arose precisely when a new wave of technology arrived that few people understood, and that almost no one had ever bought for themselves. But when empathy becomes an imperative, then the question becomes: With whom should you empathize? [Note: The geographer in me wants to add, With where should you empathize?] Is the average user idealized in a template, like Joe and Josephine? Or is there something to be found in the lives of people at the edges, whose very difference might allow them to sense something that the rest of us cannot? (p. 184-85)One challenge for my own teaching in this current situation is to try to be empathetic - not just with the 'normal' or 'typical' students but with those who are exist at the margins for all sorts of reasons. Building more inclusive and universal designs - and not this current Blackboard system - might be better for us all.
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