Focus on Teaching: Fostering Connections
Throughout the last month, we’ve been looking back at the Fall Teaching Recommendations that were released in the fall of 2020 after the Fall Experience Survey.
This has been a challenging year, professionally and personally, for students, instructors and staff at the University. Everyone has had to adapt to uncertainty and changes that have come with remote learning and all of the associated technologies. We are looking back at the Teaching Recommendations to see what they look like in practice and what potential improvements have been possible since the fall.
One of the teaching recommendations was centered around ‘Fostering Connections’. These tips focused on providing synchronous and/or asynchronous avenues for building a sense of community in online teaching and learning. (Find the original recommendations here).
We interviewed several instructors to understand their approaches to connecting with students.
Melanie Bedore, an instructor in the Faculty of Science, who took a low-stakes optional approach to meetings and tutorials, which helped her foster connections amongst her students.
How did you approach fostering connections in an online learning space?
Melanie: I typically run my classes in an active learning style that includes some amount of lecturing as it’s very important to me that we use that in-class time for collaboration. When we moved to online teaching, I chose asynchronous learning so that things like internet issues and student schedules wouldn’t be creating chaos and anxiety in our lives. The emphasis on pre-recorded lectures takes away that active learning that I’m used to, so I’ve done some things to try to mitigate that.
What sorts of things did you do to foster student connection in online learning spaces?
Melanie: My most successful effort to engage with students happened this past winter for my 4th year course Sustainable Cities (45 students). I run lots of office hours every semester and schedule them during the daytime and some over evenings to work around student schedules. The students in that course were under-utilizing my office hours, so I had to change my approach to get the students to engage with me so that I could help them with their projects. I did the simplest thing; I made up consultation meetings through a Google Doc where students could register for exactly 14 minutes of conversation between them and myself. I told students the types of questions I might ask ahead of time. It was optional and voluntary, but students could talk about the project if they wanted to as we approached deadlines. I think 18 out of 45 students participated. It was such a nice way to hear ideas about their projects and for me to give feedback. It was great to connect with students who I already know and also meeting students who I haven’t met yet. There was no dead air space and they turned on their cameras. I had the biggest smile on my face afterwards and I feel like both sides got so much out of those meetings.
Did you give participation marks for engaging with these opportunities?
Melanie: My overall philosophy is that I don’t want to force students to be doing stuff right now. Online learning is tough enough. So, I have not done things like assign marks to discussion boards or these meetings. I have heard from too many students that doing little discussion points every week for a mark makes them just go through the motions. They’re just jumping through hoops, and they’re not really engaging substantively with anything. I stayed away from the little things and let these engagement opportunities be optional, and I think it let me engage really amazingly with students who decided to participate.
Has focusing on connections in this way added significantly to your workload?
Melanie: In addition to the meetings I mentioned, I would record a video announcement of myself every week that was posted on Avenue to Learn. Sometimes I would get my dog in there and I would just try to be silly and personable. I would use those videos to say a nice warm hello and to remind students about assignments. I would say that it is lots of extra work. Even with these three-minute announcements I just always knew it was going to be a half hour long process on the weekend. So, there is an additional burden, but I do think it’s worth it. I also tried some things that didn’t work as well and would require more effort from me. All of this takes time, even though it’s worth it, but it is something to be accounted for in faculty work hours.
Did you work with TAs in any of these courses?
Melanie: The online version of our big first year course offered students a choice with tutorials. They could choose a virtual live tutorial, or what we called a ‘self-directed learning pathway’ where you would choose from prompts and write written reflection every week instead of going to tutorial. We hired undergraduate TAs for that course. The number of comments in my evaluations championing the TAs and how amazing they are is so inspiring. I have had TAs in my other courses, as well, and they’ve also been great. They were there in the background sometimes keeping the conversation going, or helping create breakout rooms and handling the administrative stuff while I’m teaching. TAs deserve a huge shout out for all that they have done in such a difficult scenario.
How have you approached fostering the connection between yourself, as the instructor, and the students?
Melanie: I find that typically first year students are leaving their cameras off even when I warmly invite them to turn their cameras on. It can feel like an uneven relationship sometimes. I use learning portfolios as a good way to combat that, and I ask students to provide introductory entries in which they tell me about themselves and their hobbies. I need students to be real people for me and if I don’t have a learning portfolio element, a person can literally just be a name on a test or a name on a cover page of an assignment and then I never get to appreciate them for a whole complicated human being. I have a lot of compassion for my students and I know they are having a hard time this year.
Sandra VanderKaay is an instructor in the School of Rehabilitation Sciences and has used informal meeting time with her students to cultivate deeper connections. Through an optional block of time at the end of her weekly Zoom classes, Sandra facilitated a variety of connection opportunities that ranged from hosting special guests from the community, to ice-breaker style informal games.
How did you approach fostering connections in an online learning space?
Sandra: I used to drive in from Niagara-on-the-lake so I would arrive really early to miss traffic. What that did for me was it put me in the classroom before any of the students started to arrive. As students would come in, it would give me an opportunity just to connect with them informally to ask how they were doing in their studies and in their lives. Those were the kinds of things that I was concerned that we might be missing out on in an online environment. I didn’t want to lose all of the informal discussion that allowed for social connections and support that happens during those times.
What sorts of things did you do to foster student connection in online learning spaces?
Sandra: The course is twice a week for three hours, but we reduced it to twice a week for basically 2 1/2 hours; one hour asynchronous and 1.5 hours synchronous. I had this idea about reserving some time in an effort to allow unstructured discussion time. I set aside 1/2 an hour on Fridays at the end of class and I explained that we had this informal time and that I had some topics that I thought we could discuss. I related some of it back to pediatric occupational therapy but not necessarily course content that students had to learn. Some of the topics were just very social and informal and were designed for students to get to know each other. I sent out a SurveyMonkey with some pre-existing ideas, and also with space for suggestions, and then came up with a topic for every week. For example, we did things like ‘2 truths and a lie’ as a way to connect. Another week, I had a mom with two children with autism come so the students could learn about her parenting experience. I had former students from the program come and answer any questions about what it was like to get a job in pediatric OT. So, there was a really wide variety of topics. These sessions weren’t mandatory, and we had attendance anywhere from 15 students to 50 students (there was a total of 60 students in the class), depending on the topics.
Why is connecting with students like this important to you?
Sandra: There have been so many benefits to online learning, and I don’t want to minimize those benefits, but I think there are some nuanced parts of in-person learning that we could easily miss unless we actually make a conscious effort to think about them. It has always been important to me in my teaching for students to feel like I understand them. Because this is a professional program, I see myself as a colleague of theirs that is just further on in my career. It’s always important to me to foster this kind of culture where we are colleagues and I’m here to support you in your learning journey. That’s just my approach to teaching in general. Like, it’s not ‘teacher versus student’. I always want to set a tone that I hear you, I’m concerned about you, I want to collaborate with you, I’m interested in your well-being and I’m one of you.
Student Perspective: (Monica Ganhadeiro, Student Occupational Therapist)
I really enjoyed my experience in this course, especially because we’ve spent half of our program online and I feel like one thing that has been largely missing is getting to connect with and know my peers outside of the classroom. Having that designated time like was really nice because it is a time where I don’t have to be thinking about schoolwork. I liked that there was no burden to participate – it didn’t add more to our workloads. If you want to stay connected with somebody, you have to put in a lot more effort than you had before, because naturally you be crossing paths with people you be having those informal conversations. But because those little things aren’t happening, it requires you to go out of your way to plan time to have those interactions. I liked that this was optional and easy to access.
Student Perspective: (Alainna Crawford, Student Occupational Therapist)
I think the timing of it was really great and because it was kind of tacked on to class time I felt less guilty about doing something that wasn’t school based. I like that Sandra sent out the survey to get our suggestions and that there was a variety in topics – it showed that our input was valued and taken into consideration. Whether it was hearing from a mom with two kids who have a diagnosis of autism or that informal time to just laugh about “two truths and a lie”, it was just really great to have that time set aside and for Sandra to take the initiative to do that. We didn’t have to request this from her – it was already in place and we could decide if we wanted to participate or not. I really appreciated it because it is hard to find those opportunities to get to know your peers.
Has focusing on connections in this way added significantly to your workload?
Sandra: I didn’t find that it was a lot more work. There were some more emails back and forth to co-ordinate some of the guests and the topics and things like that. Those extra emails were a small price to pay to cultivate that kind of environment. The other thing that was really great about it was that the students from previous years loved the opportunity to come back and give to the program. As a result of that, I had several students commit to helping out in other aspects of the program as well. Those relationships, not just with the current students—but with the previous students, are really important as well.
Looking ahead – what might you keep or change?
I think if we’re in-person, I’ll probably do some kind of modified version of this and I think if we stay online then I’ll almost certainly do something very similar again.
Allan MacKenzie is an instructor in the W Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology and has experimented with smaller group meetings in an effort to better support projects and connect with individual students.
How did you approach the work around fostering student connections?
Allan: I redesigned my courses and I created a number of customized videos that students could watch in their own time, as long as they kept up with quiz dates and other assignments related to that. I divided up the three hours of lecture time into group meetings that I would have every week. I kept hearing that students are overwhelmed and I kind of took that and thought if I only met with them every two weeks for half an hour, they could use the other class time to go through the asynchronous material and/ or meet together as a group and that’s exactly what they ended up doing. They reported back that they spent less time working in the evenings or on weekends and sort of rushing through material that way.
The other thing I found, especially in my 4th year Strategic Management course, was that the small meetings were helpful with the 10-week simulation in the course. This helped to bring what seems to be a kind of an abstract concept alive and that worked out well for their teams because they’re each in their simulation team competing against each other within the classroom. I would meet with the groups every couple of weeks and they would have to update me on their decision making process. One thing that I found is I learned more about the simulation than I had over the last five years of teaching with it in the regular classroom.
Has focusing on connections in this way added significantly to your workload?
Allan: Teaching online is a lot more work because it involves so much more communication. You can do a lot in the classroom that you don’t have access to online. Knowing that it is mostly one way communication you really pour over your words because if something’s a little off or a date is wrong there is a domino effect of corrections.
Creating all of the video content was a lot of work. In the end, I created a total of 29 instructional videos across two different courses. The total video playtime was just over five hours. However, when you include the entire production process to complete these 29 videos (not including initial learning and practice time), it amounted to approximately 350 hours. I started my production process in August 2020.
How does the lack of face-to-face connection affect you as the instructor?
Allan: At the beginning, you kind of do that traditional lecture format and you’re really staring at a camera to look at the students and that can often just be black squares (camera off) on the other end. It’s a little funny, but I have a print out of a little classroom that I keep my eyes focused on sometimes so that I know that I am trying to talk to a group of students. I always feel kind of like a newscaster, you know you have to assume your audience is out there. In the smaller group meetings, I would stand up at my stand-up desk like I would normally lecture. The smaller groups usually leave their cameras on, too, and it just became more of a conversation back and forth. The other thing that happened was that the students started opening up more about what they were experiencing with other courses or Covid or anything else. Those are the magical moments that we wait for and I found in the sort of traditional larger format they were just too scared to have those conversations.
Looking ahead – what might you keep or change?
Allan: I will try to arrange the blocks of time to have more time for active learning. I may still record videos and I might try using some of the lecture time to keep the small group meetings going that worked so well during online learning. I am interested in experimenting with some sort of hybrid model like that.
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