A class is a meeting

Though I don’t teach college anymore, I’m interested in educational class design because a class is a meeting. And much of what we can do to design great meetings is applicable to college classes too.

So I had high hopes for a September 7, 2022, City University of New York webinar introducing Cathy Davidson‘s and Christina Katopodis’ book The New College Classroom, which is “about inspiring, effective, and inclusive teaching at the college level.”

Sadly, I was disappointed. Not so much by the information presented but more by the way it was done. Talking about incorporating active learning, interaction, and participation into college classes is great. But talking does little to change the behavior of those listening. The speakers didn’t model what they were preaching during their talk!

The webinar platform and opening

The two-hour webinar was hosted on Zoom. It used a hybrid format with about 100 people present in person and eight hundred online. Chat was disabled, so online attendees could only interact via Zoom’s Q&A function. The presenters used Mentimeter for (two, I think) online polls.

Two hours of 900 people’s time adds up to 1,800 person-hours allotted to this webinar. Here’s a summary of my observations, plus suggestions on how the organizers could have improved the experience.

The webinar started 6 minutes late

Starting late is disrespectful, and provides a poor model for what the “new college classroom” should be like. 90 attendee hours wasted! The meeting stakeholders could have done two small things to make it far more likely that the webinar started on time:

1. Include two times in the meeting invitation. The time when the meeting will open, and the time when the meeting will start.

For example: “We’ll open the room and the Zoom meeting at 14:45 EDT, and start promptly at 15:00 EDT.”

2. To improve the meeting start experience further, let people know what (if anything) will be happening between the open and start time of the meeting.

For example: “Arrive a little early, and chat with our presenters before the meeting starts!”

See this article for more information about starting meetings on time.

Aaagh: The webinar began with 25 minutes of broadcast information!

First up was the Executive Director of the Futures Initiative who thanked the sponsors and introduced the Chancellor and Provost of CUNY. She didn’t take too long, but the Chancellor and Provost were a different story.  In total, attendees sat through twenty-five minutes of thank-yous, congratulations, and enthusiasm about the book and presenters that added nothing of value to the webinar. During this segment, I tweeted:

And a little later:


Introductions and thanks can be shared effectively in a few sentences. If attendees want to know more, they can easily find it on the web. The entire introduction could have easily been covered in five minutes at the most.

At this point, a quarter of the allocated webinar time had passed and the presenters hadn’t even appeared yet! 450 attendee hours wasted.

Finally, the presenters appeared!

a class is a meeting: photograph of #newcollegeclassroom presenters from @FuturesED tweet https://twitter.com/FuturesED/status/1567609717299597312?
#newcollegeclassroom presenters from @FuturesED tweet https://twitter.com/FuturesED/status/1567609717299597312?

The book authors and webinar presenters Christina Katopodis and Cathy N. Davidson began well with the classic participative active learning exercise (think-)pair-share. This was fine for the in-person audience, but not made available to the online audience. You can easily run pair (or preferably trio) share in small Zoom meetings using (up to 50) breakouts, but Zoom webinars don’t include this functionality. Still, even an online poll provides some activity for remote audiences.

I always found it difficult to get participants’ attention when closing a pair share, and this happened during the webinar too. As the presenters noted, that’s a good thing! For the in-person audience, this was the moment when they were most engaged during the entire session.

But inadequate regular interactive processes followed

Unfortunately, subsequent interactive components were sorely lacking. National Teacher of the Year Professor John Medina, whom I interviewed in front of a live audience in 2015, and Professor Donald Bligh, author of What’s The Use Of Lectures? both explain how presenters need to change their presentation process every ten minutes or less before attention flags.

At the 70-minute mark, I tweeted:


The subsequent webinar content was good, but there was only one more interactive exercise (a poll about what people disliked about teaching). Christina and Cathy switched often—a good thing to do—and told a few stories during the remainder of the webinar. But the rest of the webinar used a lecture format.

And the seminar ended really early for the online audience!

To my surprise, the “presentation” portion of the putative two-hour session ended twenty minutes early, after the presenters had answered some audience questions. The in-person audience could get up and chat with each other, get copies of their books signed, etc. The online audience (the vast majority of those attending) had nothing to do!

The online audience, who had scheduled two hours out of their day to attend the seminar, only received seventy minutes of (potentially) useful content!

This was really unfortunate. I can think of a number of ways that the online audience could have been part of an active learning experience. Instead, I and the other 800 online attendees were dismissed from class early.

This experience indicates to me that the presenters hadn’t thought enough about the online audience experience. You need to put yourself in the place of an online attendee and design an experience that is as good for them as possible, rather than relegating them to second-class status. Especially when they comprise the vast majority of your audience!

Content notes

Opening pair share

The presenters started with a pair share on what people liked most about teaching. In-person participants did a pair share, while the online audience took a poll. A majority of the latter said they liked hearing what students had to say and helping them with life skills.

From English research: college teachers talk 87% of the time even in seminar classes.

One of the presenters uses pair share to start every class (as do I).

The presenters summarized the value of active learning. Pair share allows every student to contribute, by sharing their ideas with another student. “You have energy and you have engagement and involvement and you have commitment and participation. We know and have metrics on all of this. You learn better. Retain better.”

Thoughts about teaching

They mentioned research that found 20% of students graduate from college without ever having spoken in class unless they were directly called on. “That is a tragedy.”

“Part of what we are doing in this book is finding methods to allow every student to contribute what they have to say. The fancy word for this is metacognition; you think about the course contact and why you are learning and how you are learning what you are doing and that is the lesson that lasts a lifetime.”

“What do our students need from our teaching?”

“We have this idea that higher education hasn’t changed since Socrates and Plato walked around the lyceum. Not true, we saw enormous changes two years ago. In 1 week 18 million students went online during the pandemic. It’s hard to remember we brought higher ed online in a matter of weeks. That was a tremendous accomplishment.”

Active learning

The presenters shared resources on the value of active learning. (There are more in my book, The Power of Participation.)

a class is a meeting
[Click to see full size.]
“[The] study by Scott Freeman is a metastudy of 250 separate studies of active learning and traditional learning using every imaginable metric including standardized testing retention application, et cetera. At the end of the study, Freeman says if this was a pharmaceutical study [traditional lecturing] would be taken off the market. [Active learning] is not radical pedagogy … but the best, most practical way to learn.”

Answering questions

An interesting idea shared by science fiction writer and polymath Samuel Delany.

a class is a meeting
“[We] need to teach people they are important enough to say what they have to say.”
And here he is saying it (starts at 2:42.)

The Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman from Fred Barney Taylor on Vimeo.

To which I responded…


“On average, kids ask [around] twenty questions per hour. When they get to school, they ask three questions per hour. That is staggering. When they come to higher ed, there is all that unlearning that we have to do.”

Other session themes

As you’d expect, the presenters advocated using a flipped classroom model.

And they talked about:

  • Starting a course by asking students how the course will change their life.
  • The value of having students reflect on something they got wrong in class. “[Mistakes] shouldn’t be a source of shame.
  • Providing co-designed options for student assignments and evaluations.
  • Having students write a question they want to ask toward the end of the class. (I prefer to do this at the start!)

I like to use a closing “exit ticket activity” pair-share on lessons learned during the session.

The session closed with the presenters answering some questions about approaches to grading. (Grading was the least favorite aspect of teaching reported in the session’s second poll!) It’s a tricky topic, and I give thanks that I no longer teach college and have to deal with the difficult balancing act between my assessment of student learning and what organizations and society want to hear.

Kudos

This webinar did some things very well. Kudos for including ASL interpretation, real-time captioning, and a slightly delayed (but very usable), real-time, human-provided transcript.

Conclusion

A class is a meeting. This webinar was a meeting. It could have far more effectively demonstrated by example the power and value of the active learning that occurs with participant-driven and participation-rich education. The workshops I run put this into practice. Here’s an example. During them, I talk for less than ten minutes at a time.

Opening with formats like Post It! allows us to focus on what participants want to learn. Using fishbowl sandwiches for discussions ensures fluid wide-ranging conversations. Many other formats are in my toolbox, ready to be pulled out and used when the need arises. I hope to see many of these valuable, tested approaches adopted widely by college teachers. Our students and our society will be better for it.

Pecha Kucha, not Ashton Kutcher

Include Pecha Kucha, not Ashton Kutcher, at your next conference!Photograph of a Pecha Kucha audience enjoying a talk

Instead of going after celebrities to present at your next conference, highlight some stars amongst your attendees with a Pecha Kucha session.

Pecha Kucha is a dynamic presentation format that has spread globally since its invention in Japan in 2003. Think of it as a haiku for presentations. Twenty slides automatically advance, each shown for twenty seconds, while the presenter shares their passion for a topic. Because each presentation lasts just 6 minutes and 40 seconds, presenters are challenged to be concise, targeted, and creative—and you can pack eight attendee presentations into an hour-long conference session.

Oh, you have a question. You want to know how to pronounce Pecha Kucha? Don’t be embarrassed, everybody asks. Just watch this short YouTube video:


O.K., glad to have cleared that up. You can also incorporate Pecha Kucha into a social event at your conference by scheduling your presentations during an evening social, with food and drink available while the presentations go on. This is the format used at Pecha Kucha Nights, held in hundreds of cities all over the world four or more times a year.

Pecha Kucha set up

It’s pretty easy to set up a Pecha Kucha session. Before the conference, you’ll need to:

  • Explain the format to your attendees;
  • Promote the session;
  • Solicit presenters; and
  • Send them a presentation template.

Have them send their presentations to you before the session. On the day, you’ll need an appropriately sized location with presentation-friendly lighting, a wireless mike and sound system, a schedule, and a screen, projector, and laptop running PowerPoint or Keynote. Add an MC and a staffer for the laptop and you’re ready to go!

I’m a big fan of Pecha Kucha as a way for people to connect and learn in a fun, fast-paced environment. I’ve just signed a contract to run Brattleboro Pecha Kucha Night, and we’re working on holding a Pecha Kucha session at Event Camp Twin Cities this fall.

Want to learn more? Check out the hundreds of presentations available on the official Pecha Kucha website. (I especially like this one by Daniel Pink on Emotionally Intelligent Signage.) I also recommend you attend a nearby Pecha Kucha Night to experience the format firsthand. You’ll see how Pecha Kucha can liven up any conference.

Have you used or experienced a Pecha Kucha session? How did it work out for you and/or the attendees?

Innovative participatory conference session: a case study using online tools

innovative participatory conference session: photograph of participants working on the edACCESS 2010 Web 2.0 case study

Interested in an innovative participatory conference session alternative to talk-at-the-audience formats? Then you’ll want to learn about a brilliant session format we used at the edACCESS 2010 Web 2.0 Collaborative Tools Workshop.

I’ve been running peer conferences for edACCESS, an association of information technology staff at small independent schools, since 1992. We just wrapped up our 19th annual conference, held this year at Williston Northampton School in Easthampton, Massachusetts. The four-day conference did not include a single traditional didactic session. We only scheduled two sessions in advance: a Demo Session in which attendees, scattered around the exhibit area, gave short presentations on cool technology and applications used at their school, and the case study described below. We crowdsourced all other topics and formats (33 in all!), using the Conferences That Work methodology, during the first few hours of the conference.

Before the conference

Joel Backon of Choate Rosemary School designed and facilitated the Web 2.0 Collaborative Tools Workshop session, with input from Bill Campbell and a dose of “inspiration from reading Adrian’s book“. Before the conference, Joel described some of his thoughts in an email to me:

“I will provide structure, but I don’t want to be too prescriptive or we won’t learn anything. For example, if there is disagreement about which tools will be best to use for the project, that is a message everybody should know about Web 2.0 tools. There are so many, it is difficult to obtain agreement regarding which to use, and that impacts the productivity of organizations. At this point, I’m looking for feedback because I am clearly taking a risk.”

I told Joel that I loved the idea of using a case study format for the session. I suggested he add a little more detail (about the IT operations at the school) to his case study. Here are the final case study materials that attendees received. We posted them on the conference wiki several days before the session took place. You may want to check out the link before reading further.

Setting the stage

As we listened in the school theater, Joel spent ten minutes introducing the case study materials. He gave us a list of tools, including a blog already set up on Cover It Live, projected on a large screen. Joel told us we had to collaboratively create a one-page report of recommendations on how to cut a (fictitious) $1,000,000 school information technology annual budget by 50%.

Oh, and we couldn’t talk to each other face-to-face! We could only communicate online.

Normally, a project of this type would take an experienced IT staff days to complete, requiring extensive discussion of every facet of the organization’s infrastructure, personnel, services, and budget.

Oh, and we had ninety minutes! In that time, we had to:

  • choose appropriate collaborative online tools;
  • divide up the work;
  • discuss options;
  • make decisions and recommendations;
  • and write the report.

Finally, Joel explained, after the exercise was complete, we’d have half an hour to debrief using good old-fashioned talking to one another, face-to-face.

My experience

Some participants had traveled thousands of miles to edACCESS 2010. Now here we were, sitting in a theater auditorium, silently working at our computers.

During the first twenty minutes of the session, I was highly skeptical that we would be able to accomplish anything meaningful. (In the debrief, it turned out that most people had had the same expectation.) To see what transpired you may want to check out the complete blog conversation transcript, which provides moment-by-moment documentation of our online conversation. Notice that tweets that included the conference hashtag, #edaccess10, were merged in real-time into the transcript.

At around 8:50 a.m., the group started to get organized. Communicating through the blog, people started to suggest online tools to work on specific projects. The tools mentioned were Google products: Wave, and Docs. Our sophisticated attendees knew that Google had upgraded Docs in April to support simultaneous editing by multiple (up to 50) users and they even knew that you had to choose the “new version” on the Editing Settings tab.

Up to this point, I had not been working on the project but was monitoring the blog conversation as a process observer. I asked to receive an invitation to the Google Wave, but a link never came. Eventually, I found out that only a few attendees had adopted the Wave.

Google Docs is adopted

But when I clicked on the link for a Google Docs spreadsheet that had been set up I was astounded. (Check it out!) Attendees had created a multitab spreadsheet with a summary page that showed the current savings in different budget areas that people were working on linked to separate detailed tabs for each area. I felt amazed at the work we had done. I immediately added a small contribution of my own—a column showing the percentage budget savings so we could tell when we’d reached our 50% goal. People used free cells to annotate their suggestions and decisions.

Bill Campbell, who was moderating the blog, used Cover It Live’s instant poll so we could discover the tools we were using. The poll showed that most of us were working on the spreadsheet.

Thirty minutes before the end of the exercise, I suggested someone set up a Google Doc for the report. (I didn’t know how to do this myself.) Within a few minutes someone created a report and people started writing. I added a starting introductory paragraph and corrected a few typos. It was truly remarkable to see the report evolve keystroke by keystroke in real time, being written by a ghostly crew of 30-40 people.

With fifteen minutes to go, it became clear we could reach the 50% reduction goal. The report would be ready on time! The release of tension led to an outbreak of silliness (starting around 10:00 a.m. in the blog transcript) to which I must confess I contributed.

Here is the Final Report.

Lessons learned

So what did we learn? Here are some of my thoughts. Feel free to add your own as a comment at the end of this post.

  • First of all, everyone was surprised by how successful our effort had been. I think all of us underestimated the advantages of working together online, where multiple channels of communication and collaboration can coexist simultaneously. This is so different from meeting face to face, where, in general, at any moment one person is monopolizing the conversation. I am pretty sure that if we had done the same exercise face to face, we would not have come up with such a high-quality solution!
  • I think the case study worked well because we trusted each other. The group members knew each other to varying degrees. We were prepared to accept individual judgments about self-selected areas where each of us chose to work. The exercise would not have gone well if we had been concerned about the abilities of some of the participants.
  • One interesting observation is that we were working collaboratively on publicly accessible documents. As a result, we don’t actually know how many people contributed to our work. (Or even if they were all at edACCESS 2010!) This made it very easy to add new workers. Anyone who had the link to a document could start editing it right away. A private workspace would have required some kind of registration process, which would have encumbered our ad hoc efforts.
  • One weakness in our approach is the lack of any formal checking mechanism for the report we generated. A few people went over the report during the last ten minutes and commented that it “looked good”. But if one of us had made a serious mistake there’s a good chance it would have been missed. This exercise was akin to what happens when a group of people responds to an emergency. Everyone does the best they can and is grateful for the contributions of others.
  • It surprised me that no obvious leaders emerged, although several people (including me) made group-directed suggestions that seemed to have been accepted and acted on.
  • A number of people commented early on that they couldn’t use their iPads effectively for the exercise. We needed multiple windows open to be able to work efficiently, and the Cover It Live transcript wouldn’t scroll in Safari on the iPad (though there appears to be a work-around).

Conclusion

It’s hard for me to think of a more innovative participatory conference session format. For two hours we were spellbound, working and playing hard on our laptops, and then excitedly discussing and debriefing. I wager that all the participants at the edACCESS 2010 Web 2.0 Collaborative Tools Workshop will remember this experience and their associated learning for a long time.

What other lessons can we learn from this experiment? Are there ways we could improve this participatory conference session?