Impacts Experienced by Faculty Stemming from the Intersection of the Covid-19 Pandemic and Racial Tensions

On September 15, 2021

The Journal of Interactive Media in Education published a special issue entitled Learning from Lockdown: challenges and benefits. Colleagues and I contributed a paper on the Professional and Personal Impacts Experienced by Faculty Stemming from the Intersection of the Covid-19 Pandemic and Racial Tensions. Our abstract appears below:

The disruption that resulted from COVID-19 in 2020 impacted the ways in which higher education faculty lived and worked. Earlier literature describes how faculty members’ experiences during the early months of the pandemic included emotional impacts such as stress and anxiety, with little support to manage these impacts. In this paper we report on a thematic analysis of interviews with Canadian faculty members which revealed that the sources of impacts on Canadian faculty were both the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as racial tensions. These impacts revealed themselves in both the personal and professional lives of participants. With regard to their professional role, participants reported that the additional time and care that they put towards learning new technologies, implementation of new teaching practices, support of students, and efforts to sustain their perceived obligations as a scholar carried an emotional burden. With respect to their personal lives, participants noted that emotional impacts emanated from increased caring responsibilities for family and friends, reduced in-person connections, and news reports and social media. We conclude by presenting support recommendations for individual faculty members, teaching and learning centres, and university administrators.

Belikov, O., VanLeeuwen, C., Veletsianos, G., Johnson, N., Torcivia, P. (2021). Professional and personal impacts experienced by faculty stemming from the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial tensions. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1, p. 8. http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.647

One highlight of this paper that isn’t visible in the final product: Being able to support and mentor Olga, Charlene, and Nicole in publishing. Also: finally being able to identify an opportunity to work with Patrice on a paper!

You may also be interested in the rest of the papers in this issue:

The online course marketplace and online courses as side hustle

By George Veletsianos

On August 11, 2021

In online course marketplace

This post is a rough patchwork of resources and notes. It’s aiming to explore the intersection of online learning, online course marketplaces, education entrepreneurship, course creator economies/economics, side hustling, digital products, education-as-commodity, and digital learning platforms.

In describing education/learning models other than MOOCs, in 2014 Tannis Morgan identifies 3 models:

Affinity Group Learning: MOOC-like without the course
Subscription-based learning sites
Micro-content affinity sites

(Aside: These could be mapped to the social learning typology of groups, networks, sets, and collectives described by Dron and Anderson, as well as the dimensions of formal-informal learning they identify here)

In 2019, Tannis re-examines these models and brings them together under the umbrella of “course content marketplace.” The focus is pretty much learning experience platforms (LXPs).

What I’d like to specifically focus on here is the online course marketplace and course creators (outside of higher ed).

Focusing on the LXPs, Tannis writes that back in 2014 course creators were (mostly) using “WordPress and Woo commerce, and it took some determination and persistence to get things going for the average non expert.” Fast forward to 2019: “So no surprise that a new marketplace for Online Course Platforms (different from the LMS) has sprung up, with affordable subscription models to get the side hustler with no instructional design skills and few multimedia skills up and running in a few days with their online course.”

What’s it like in 2021?

DIY-solutions using WordPress, or outsourcing the WordPress-based design and development is still going strong.

Examples: LearnPress, LearnDash.

Platforms that make it easy to quickly set up and sell asynchronous courses

Examples: Podia, Teachery, Thinkific, Teachable, MightyNetworks

Some of these include memberships and communities.

Examples: some of the platforms above, plus Kajabi

And, most-recently, cohort-based course-selling platforms a la Section4:

Examples: Maven, Jiruto, lu.ma, Disco

The products developed from these are often called courses, but they’re also described as institutes or academies.

Right now these platforms seem to be selling tools to course creators to launch their courses, and aren’t quite marketplaces just yet, i.e. spaces where users can browse and buy courses from various providers a la Udemy.

Most of these platforms

create groups (rather than networks or collectives, per Dron & Anderson),
are a radical departure from the ethos and aspirations of the open learning community,

I’ll pause here. More connecting threads hopefully soon. If you’ve come this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these.

Recent talks on returning back to “normal”

By George Veletsianos

On June 28, 2021

In E-learning, flexible learning, future education, my research, online learning, scholarship

Institutions, institutional leaders, faculty, and students face very many challenges in “returning back to normal.”

In our ongoing research – which we are furiously trying to make available as soon as possible – students and faculty in particular tell us that they hope institutions “carry forward” what was learned during the pandemic, while they hope to avoid a return back to “normal.” There’s an important distinction here. Hopes for a “return to normalcy,” aren’t hopes for a return to the pre-pandemic status quo. They want better futures, different futures, futures that are more accommodating, supportive, equitable, and stable, and see this as an appropriate and opportune time for making long-awaited changes.

I gave two talks recently focused on these ideas. Below is the abstract from my keynote at Simon Fraser University’s Symposium on Teaching and Learning. My keynote for the Faculty Summer Institute at Texas State focused on this topic as well, but from the perspective of student voice and resilience, drawing on earlier research.

Online and blended learning in post-pandemic settings
Much of the conversation in higher education at this particular point in time focuses on “building back better.” To engage in such rebuilding means to recognize that various pre-pandemic teaching, learning, and institutional practices were problematic. “Building back better” invites us to ask: What do future online and blended learning environments look like, who do they serve, what are they for, and how do we justly make them available to everyone? How do we make our learning environments more equitable, flexible, accessible, enriching, sustainable, decolonial, and responsive? As we are invited to return back to campus, what aspects of pre-pandemic teaching and learning should we strive to avoid returning back to? In this talk, I draw from a series pan-Canadian studies conducted over the last year with students, faculty, staff, and administrators, and share findings that inform our collective efforts for creating effective, but also engaging and equitable, learning environments.

OTESSA 2021 (Congress) Keynote – effectiveness, efficiency, engagement. Where’s equity?

By George Veletsianos

On May 31, 2021

In instructional design, scholarship, sharing

At this year’s Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, I gave a keynote talk as part of a keynote panel for the Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association, with Dr. Valerie Irvine and Dr. Bonnie Stewart. Below is a draft transcript of my comments.

Good morning everyone. Thank you to Michele Jacobsen (U of Calgary) and Anne-Marie Scott (Athabasca U) for putting together the excellent OTESSA program, and thank you to you all for joining us in our inaugural OTESSA conference. Today I’ll be talking about 4 e’s: effectiveness, efficiency, engagement, and equity.

I was going to talk about a paper that my colleagues and I wrote where we examined Canadian faculty experiences during the pandemic, but I changed my mind last night. I couldn’t sleep and I thought that there are more important and more urgent things to talk about. If you’re interested in that paper, you can read about it in the link that I put in the chat: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13065

But, what might you say can be more important, more urgent, that the painful, anxiety-ridden, and inequitable experiences that faculty have gone through the pandemic?

As you have heard in the introduction of this session, a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children has been found in Tekamploos te sech-ewpmech, at the site of a residential school to what is now known as Kamloops, BC.

So, I would like to begin by acknowledging that the neighborhood where I live, Royal Roads University, are on the territory of the Lekwungen peoples, the Xwsepsum, and the Esquimalt Nations. As a guest, I am grateful to live and work on these lands. I want to take this opportunity to give you a good sense of my positionality so as to set the context for my talk :

I was born and raised in Cyprus. Up until 1960, Cyprus was a colony, and it is still rife with colonial structures. The war of 1974 which divided Cyprus in half was partly a result of colonialism, animosity, and fascism. My parents were in their late teens in 1974. My father was imprisoned and my mother fled her home. When we were allowed to visit the North part of the country, where my mother grew up, we drove by the fields that my grandfather used to plow. These fields are now plowed by settlers.

Territorial acknowledgements should remind us of colonial structures. Importantly, for the topics we are discussing today, they should remind us that colonial structures impact our universities, and our teaching and learning practices, as faculty, as researchers, as students. In our efforts towards online and blended learning therefore, we need to keep decolonization and equity at the front and centre of it.

Much of the literature around the evaluation of the use of technology in education centers around three outcomes:

Is it effective? Meaning: Do students meet established learning goals and objectives;?

Is it efficient? Meaning, does instruction meet learning goals with minimal expenditure of resources, such as money and time?

And finally, is it engaging? Does instruction draw the sustained attention and positive response of learners?

Amongst the many frameworks available to evaluate instruction, this is the simplest, and focuses on core components. It’s often referred to as e to the power of 3. Charles Reigeluth and Dave Merrill both contributed to the development of this framework.

This simple framework has proven resilient and valuable. Some faculty teach it explicitly. Others use it explicitly in their research. For yet others, it is implicit in their research, in their dissertations, in their scholarship.

This framework is missing a 4th e: equity.

Equity refers to “freedom from bias or assumptions that negatively impact individual’s motivations, opportunities, or accomplishments.”

In other words, what I am coming around to say here is that a good course, a good university education, a good use of technology in education, a good implementation of online and blended learning, a good open education strategy, should not only be effective and engaging, but needs to be equitable.

I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable being in a field in which equity isn’t explicitly centered and visible. I think you should be too. If the pandemic taught us anything, it should be to ask the question: In what kind of world do we live in that we value efficiency more than equity?

Our colleague Brent Wilson asks pointedly: what is the value of a module, instructional interventions, technology and so on, that is engaging but sexist? Or racist? Or implicitly leaves some people behind?

What does this mean in practice? I’m not at a place to be as eloquent to numberous colleagues that have written about this (including many of you here and many of our colleagues who advocate for feminist praxis in our scholarship), but I’ll try: In practice this may mean a diverse and intersectional reading list. Or, it may mean that audiovisual materials used don’t (accidentally or otherwise) stereotype, shame, or degrade people. Or, it may mean that open educational resources are used instead of expensive textbooks. Or it may mean examining those OER to ensure that they don’t homogenize people or don’t privilege western viewpoints.

And that’s not all – we should examine the roots of our field: much of it is grounded in the military, in war, in colonialism, and so today, in addition to thinking about colonialism broadly, I want to ask you to reflect on the ways that our field is complicit with violence and colonialism.

Post-talk note #1: Bonnie highlighted ethics and their importance as a 5th e. That’s an important point. I was grouping ethics and equity together. In continuing to develop this framework, it would be worthwhile to explicitly acknowledge ethics rather than treat them as embedded within equity.

Post-talk note #2: For my US-based instructional design colleagues, I recommend this: Designed for Destruction: The Carlisle Design Model and the Effort to Assimilate American Indian Children (1887-1928) – chapter 4 here.

Resisting remote proctoring software – an imaginary assignment

By George Veletsianos

On May 25, 2021

In sharing

Below is an imaginary assignment that may be used in a course, workshop, or speaking context aimed at resisting the use of remote proctoring software. This assignment aims to support participants in reflecting on ethics, advocacy, and resistance in the context of educational technology. Feel free to use/reuse.

Laura Czerniewicz argues that one way to respond to the “new normal” of higher education is through resistance. Such resistance, for example, may involve individual faculty members avoiding remote proctoring and surveillance software in particular; students petitioning the institution to stop using such tools or requesting alternative assessments; and institutions abandoning these tools or letting such contracts end.

But what are some good alternatives to remote proctored exams and how do institutions implement them? How would “resisting” remote proctoring work at an institution? The case study describing the decision to avoid remote proctoring at the University of Michigan–Dearborn ends with the following quote: “We invite further writing and discussion of strategies for limiting the use of remote proctoring in different contexts with the goal of developing a robust, people-centered toolkit for supporting remote assessment in a diversity of campus contexts.” In response to this call, your task is to create a persuasive artifact aimed at encouraging faculty or administrators to avoid using remote proctoring tools. Your persuasive artifact may take many forms. It can be in the form of an email directed at the Center for Teaching and Learning or administrators at your institution encouraging rethinking decisions to adopt these tools; or it can be an infographic for social media distribution; or a leaflet for posting on campus; or a video that you create to raise awareness amongst a specific group of stakeholder; or a petition distributed to the faculty association or faculty council.

Digital education in post-secondary institutions in Canada 2017-2019

By George Veletsianos

On May 21, 2021

In sharing

While the use of digital technology is education is pervasive in post-secondary contexts in Canada, pan-Canadian data on digital education are relatively scarce. To address this challenge the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association/Association Canadienne de Recherche sur la Formation en Ligne conducts pan-Canadian surveys of higher education institutions, collecting data on the digital education landscape and publishing annual reports of its results. Previous analyses of the data gathered in 2017, 2018, and 2019 have used quantitative approaches. However, the surveys also collected responses to open-ended questions.

Responses to the CDLRA National Survey 2017-2019

Year	n of HEIs invited to participate	Response rate		% of the Canadian student population base represented by responding institutions
Year	n of HEIs invited to participate	n	%
2017	203	140	69	78
2018	234	187	80	92
2019	234	164	70	90

Note. HEI = higher education institution.

Using the qualitative data gathered, colleagues and I completed a study exploring the digital education landscape in Canada and its changes over the 2017-2019 time period. Findings focus on five themes:

the growth of digital education,
the situated and multidimensional nature of digital education,
the adoption of openness,
quality and rigour, and
the development of alternative credentials.

The paper is available here: Veletsianos, G., VanLeeuwen, C.A., Belikov, O., & Johnson, N. (2021). An Analysis of Digital education in Canada 2017-2019. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. 22(2), 102-117. http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/5108/5501

Beyond this though, IRRODL’s latest issue includes many interesting papers. My weekend reading list is now packed!

Learning Design voices CFP

By George Veletsianos

On May 14, 2021

In cfp, instructional design

Below you can find a necessary and significant call for chapters from folks at the University of Cape Town. As “learning designers, academic developers, instructional designers, curriculum designers, learning experience designers, learning experience engineers” and Centers of Teaching and Learning more broadly have carried institutions through the pandemic, while also facing incredible personal and institutional challenges themselves, this book stands to make visible what this work looks like, how it varies across contexts, how it is implicated in issues of power, opportunity, commitment, resilience, hegemony… and how those issues intersect with educational technology and design. CFP follows, but you can also find it here.

Call for chapters

We’re looking for learning designers, academic developers, instructional designers, curriculum designers, learning experience designers, learning experience engineers… We don’t mind what you call yourself but if you create learning opportunities for students and staff in post-secondary institutions we want to hear from you! We’re keen to create a space for voices on learning design from a wide range of contexts. We invite you to share your practices and experiences, and to connect with a community of people across the globe who also do this work. We’re hoping that together we can create the kind of book that you reach for when you need a new idea or want to be inspired by the innovative and responsive work of colleagues in challenging and exciting environments.

Introduction

During the pandemic, the pivot to emergency remote teaching highlighted the depth and extent of inequalities facing communities, particularly in relation to access to resources and literacies for online learning in higher educational contexts. Imported solutions that failed to take into consideration the constraints and cultures of local contexts were less than successful. The paucity of practitioners with online learning design experience, training and education grounded in diverse contexts made local design for local contexts difficult to carry out.

Although there is substantial research and guidance on online learning design, there is an opportunity to create a text deliberately oriented to practice. Further, online learning design, as a field of practice and research, is strongly shaped by experiences and practices from the Global North. While many of the textbooks written from this perspective are theoretically useful as a starting point, the disjuncture between theory and practice for practitioners in less well-resourced contexts where local experiences are invisible, can be jarring.

#LDVoicesBook

Objective

The goal of this text is to offer a discussion of key themes shaping practice in online learning design, in the form of provocations by key voices in the field, and to offer chapters that illuminate or trouble these themes. Further, we seek to listen more closely to voices from the historical margins to understand better what learning design, as a practice, a field of research and process means in Africa, Asian and South America contexts. This is an opportunity to create a text deliberately oriented to practice, grounded in diverse contexts and showcasing a wide variety of learning design responses while remaining grounded in commitments to equitable access and success.

Target Audience

This book seeks to be useful for both staff and students in formal learning contexts such as diploma or certificate courses, we imagine that it will provide a useful handbook for those working in online learning design from learning designers to academic staff taking courses online to staff developers who support those processes.

Chapters

The book is structured around provocations, highlighting key concepts and debates related to that topic. We invite chapter submissions that respond to one of the provocations below. This is not another theory book. We’re looking primarily for empirical, place-based pieces, practical advice and experiences which are theoretically informed. Threaded through all the chapters, we expect border perspectives, peripheral views, equity considerations and the like to be incorporated. We would welcome interactive and multimodal components such as images, videos, reflective exercises and other multimedia elements in your chapter, that can be used by readers for reflection or as teaching exercises.

Provocation 1: Learning Design as field, praxis and identity

Learning design has emerged as an area of work or practice, a space for research, and a marker of professional identity. How do you see learning design? How is learning design viewed in your context? How do we, or should we, support the development of learning design? What models and assumptions underpin our work in learning design, and to what extent do these models support practice in your context? For this section, we are looking for chapters that offer insight into how learning design is located, functions and is valued in a variety of contexts.

Provocation 2: Humanising Learning Design

Online learning faces increasing calls to centre inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility. What inclusive, diverse and accessible online learning looks like is by no means universal. We invite for this section, chapters that demonstrate how the design and experience of critically grounded online learning can create opportunities for learning for a wide range of students, typically “othered”, marginalised, or excluded from online learning spaces.

Provocation 3: Learning activities, processes and materials

Much of the work around process and materials creation in relation to learning design assumes access to resources and skills that are limited in the developing world. We invite chapters that consider how context shapes choices in relation to learning activities, processes and materials. We hope for chapters that speak to, inter alia, issues of multilingualism, accessibility, universal design for learning, and racial and cultural representation.

Provocation 4: Assessment and evaluation online

The question of assessment and the purpose of higher education are unavoidably intertwined. As the shape of higher education and its relationship to society has shifted over time, the nature of assessment has shifted. Concerns about rigour and validity are joined by concerns about authenticity, relevance and transformation. How is online assessment creating opportunities for imagining and challenging the role of assessment? We welcome, for this section, chapters focusing on online assessment practices that offer improvements on well-established practices, or offer wholly innovative takes on the form of assessment in higher education.

Provocation 5: Policy and regulatory environment

Learning design, materials design and academic expertise all take place within existing institutional, national and international policy, funding and regulatory frameworks. Online learning is still captured by the imaginaries of traditional education. How does the policy and regulatory environment in your context shape the practice of learning design? Is open education enabled or constrained by the policy environment?

Submission Procedure and Due dates

Activity	Date
Share an idea	13 June 2021	Do you have an idea that you need to chat to someone about? Contact Shanali, Tasneem or Laura.
Proposal submission	14 June 2021	Your proposal should include an abstract of not more than 500 words, explaining how you bring a non-dominant perspective, and a one page outline of the chapter structure. Submit a proposal for a chapter.
Notification of acceptance	28 June 2021	You will be notified by 28 June 2021 about the status of your proposals and sent chapter guidelines.
Full Chapter submission	23 August 2021	Full chapters should be submitted by 23 August 2021. We expect chapters to be between 3000 – 5000 words but we are flexible about the length of chapters. Please follow APA 7th referencing.
Peer review process	20 September 2021	All submitted chapters will be reviewed by two peer reviewers, including other chapter authors and external reviewers. Please note, contributors will also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.
Author changes	End November 2021	Once authors have submitted their final changes to the editorial committee, the chapters will be uploaded to the platform. The formal launch for the book is planned for March 2022.

For queries, please contact: tasneem.jaffer@uct.ac.za, shanali.govender@uct.ac.za or laura.czerniewicz@uct.ac.za

Dissemination and Publication

The book will be published under a creative commons licence, encouraging its dissemination and reuse in teaching and learning spaces. We are currently in the process of selecting an open textbook ebook platform. Key criteria for the platform include that it will offer multimodal digital formats, options to download copies, and options to order print copies at cost.

Editors

Tasneem Jaffer

(@tasneemjaffer) – Tasneem is a senior project coordinator and learning designer at University of Cape Town in South Africa. She has worked as a learning designer for the last seven years and has prior expertise in the field of user experience (UX). She has completed an MEd in Educational Technology and is currently an MBA candidate. Her work includes being involved in the development and research of MOOCs, the development of formal online courses. She has a passion for learning, specifically the intersection of learning design and UX.

Shanali Govender

(@GovenderShanali) – Shanali is a lecturer within the Academic Staff Development unit at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching. Her particular brief in the staff development team is to support part-time and non-permanent teaching staff. She currently teaches on the Postgraduate diploma in educational technologies, co-convening the Online Learning Design module. She has designed several online staff development short courses, and teaches two academic staff development online courses, Core Concepts in Learning and Teaching and An online introduction to Assessment. Shanali also has strong interests in relation to inclusivity and education, working largely in the practice space with colleagues to create more inclusive teaching and learning environments.

Laura Czerniewicz

(@Czernie) – Laura was the first director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT), at the University of Cape Town, (2014 to 2020) having previously led UCT’s Centre for Educational Technology, OpenUCT Initiative and Multimedia Education Group. Her many roles in education over the years include academic, researcher, strategist, advocate, teacher, teacher-trainer and educational publisher. Threaded through all her work has been a focus on equity and digital inequality. These have permeated her research interests which focus on the changing nature of higher education in a digitally-mediated society and new forms of teaching and learning provision. She plays a key strategic and scholarly role in the areas of blended /online learning as well as in open education institutionally, nationally and internationally. Check out Laura’s newish blogsite https://czernie.weebly.com/