The conversation was wide ranging, but here are some of the things that I noted to be sure to cover in the conversation:

When we talk about online instruction today, what are we talking about?

Instruction covers a broad spectrum of issues: training, library instruction/one-shots, workshops, courses (either those we teach or those we support), and MOOCs. As John pointed out in the session, even meetings can fall into the domain of online learning.

There are three main models of instruction:

1. Synchronous, which instruction conducted in which participants engage at the same time, is conducted using web conferencing software like WebEx, or Adobe Connect, or even Google Hangout. 
2. Asynchronous, which is instruction conducted in such a way that participants do not have to login or participate at a specific time. Learning Management Systems, blogs or wikis, or any interactive website can enable these learning environments.
3. And, finally, hybrid or blended, environments which combine the two.

And finally, when talking about online instruction today, I think you also have to talk about the methods of online learning, which I’m not sure I had time to bring up today, which I was thinking of in terms of the learning theory and/or pedagogies to support good learning, the technology tools you use to create the learning environment, and the literacies your audience has (for example, how much do they know about how to use the various tools you plan to use in your instruction).

What are the similarities and differences between in person and online learning? How might they work together?

Fundamentally, I believe in person instruction and online instruction are more similar than different. Both are about attaining learning outcomes. In both you want to get the attention of your students. Both are about the people in your class and being really good at communication.

That being said, the main difference from my view is that in an online environment you have a lot more variables to consider when designing instruction than you do in a traditional face-to-face environment. And the decisions you have to make depend on your knowledge of tools that are ever-changing as well as other variables such as whether you need to design instruction for a synchronous environment.

But most interestingly to me is that online instruction can inform face-to-face instruction. Designing online instruction takes intention in a way that face-to-face doesn’t always require. With more variables and more tools, you have to think more carefully about what you’re doing and why. This reflection and intention can transfer back to traditional teaching. Further, gaining familiarity with online tools can provide tools that can be useful in hybrid settings or even as supplementary activities in face-to-face environments. And finally, if you create content for online instruction, you now have content that you can reuse in other ways: in tutorials, in virtual chat sessions for reference, in flipped classrooms, etc.

What are the opportunities and costs associated with online learning?

Some of the most often discussed opportunities are around issues like the ability to fit courses into difficult schedules, freeing up classroom space, reaching students you might not be able to reach otherwise, and sometimes that online learning can be a more authentic learning experience for some courses (for example, a class about online learning should probably be taught online).

Specifically, what’s gained and lost depends on the structure and purpose of the course. For example: if the course is designed to maximize the number of students, you lose the personal connection. If you design online instruction to maintain or improve personal connections, you cannot scale to massive numbers. To know what’s gained or lost, you have to think about what you’re designing and why. And, in the end, you should be able to design something that that is better for what you’re trying to do, and what you lose in the tradeoff should hopefully be something that wasn’t critical to your instruction in the first place.

How do you keep students engaged online?

I really do feel that it’s the same as in face-to-face instruction:

1. Make the content interesting and useful
2. Provide opportunities for interaction: with you, with classmates, and/or with the content itself
3. Tie the instruction to a real world need: whether it’s a graded assignment, a need the community has, etc.

As John pointed out, thinking carefully as you plan activities, such as chat, polling, etc, allows you to engage people with content as you work through it. And providing those activities to students allow them to actually do something rather than just hear it.

What are good assessment strategies?

It’s pretty clear that in the field, we often use “assessment” to mean a wide umbrella of things, most of which falls into one of these categories:

1. Evaluating affective aspects of the class
2. (Formative) assessment to test how the instruction is going to allow you to pivot or shift instructional strategies if the audience needs it
3. Assessing whether the class’s designated learning outcomes have been met

You’d do this in any class–hopefully–but in an online class it will often look different. For example, talking to a room full of people, you can see when people get bored or when they look engaged. That’s formative assessment data that tells you whether you need to speak more casually, do more demos, or keep up the good work you’re doing. In most cases, you don’t have that same head-nodding feedback online, so you have to create opportunities to get that feedback as part of your instruction.

And, as John so correctly pointed out, you can easily design the instruction to include feedback in any activity you have students do, and in that case you are able to assess any time students are actively participating (whether polling, working in small groups, doing an assignment, etc.).

One of the questions raised was about assessing behavioral changes vs. learning skills. That’s hard whether it’s in person or not. And like in person, if you have a really good relationship with the faculty member, in a college setting at least, you might be able to see final projects or get some indication through that lens. I always hype the friendly librarian and how to get in touch, and then focus on transferable skills. I’m more interested in can an undergraduate student think through choosing a good topic and generally evaluating resources rather than which of our proprietary databases to use and how to make use of advanced searching within it. The more transferable skills will be used again and again by the student, giving them opportunities to reinforce the lesson, and is a technique that is grounded in brain-based learning.

Thoughts for the future

In the immediate future, I’m following: MOOCs and Open Educational Resources, as well as the related competency based education discussions. Though not new news, I pay a lot of attention to Personal Learning Networks as another piece of the “informal” learning environment.

In the longer term, I’m thinking about learner analytics. The systems we use for instruction, in many cases Learning Management Systems, can provide amazing data to let us know how learners are interacting with content, how long they’re staying on the site, and who isn’t engaged at all. That data is powerful, both in terms of helping the instructor know what’s really going on in the classroom as well as as another data point in designing the next go round of instruction. However, I’m watching with a tentative eye, because I worry a bit about the potential dystopian future  that it points to, removing some of the humanity from education and possibly the creativity of both the students and the teachers.

One more thing

After the talk, a colleague asked for a few Instructional Design related book recommendations, so here are some I particularly like:

• Designing Effective Instruction by Gary R. Morrison, Steven M. Ross, Jerrold E. Kemp, Howard Kalman
• The Systematic Design of Instruction by Walter Dick, Lou Carey, James O. Carey
• Academic Librarianship by Design: A Blended Librarian’s Guide to the Tools and Techniques by Steven J. Bell and John D. Shank

I had a great time in the conversation, and really appreciated reading the twitter conversations later. Thanks to Dan for inviting me, Sarah for the excellent moderation, John for the great conversation, and the American Libraries Live crew for the opportunity to participate in the event!

 Access

Clearly, and for a long time, libraries were about acquiring information, preserving it, organizing it, and making it accessible. Information was scarce, and it was a difficult endeavor to make sense of the pile of information an organization could acquire. The environment is one of information scarcity. Clearly we no longer live in this world, but it’s a difficult thing to fully recognize, even to those of us who barely remember a scarce information world. Professional worldviews that you spend years building are hard to change. One of my favorite slidedecks I’ve used was built around explaining this transition to a group of faculty:

Production & Scholarly Channels

So once it was clear we were in a world of information abundance, the next question was what do libraries do? Someone recently pointed to one of my old posts considering if librarians should be content creators.

how does content creation fit in with the future of libraries? laurenpressley.com/library/2007/1… great postby @laurenpressley

— Vincent Harris (@coloredopinions) April 10, 2013

(Interestingly, I don’t agree with the entire post as written, but I do think there’s space to adapt our role to be more in the vein of capture or creation regarding learning objects and/or collaborating with others who are creating… so maybe it was on to something, if not quite a bulls eye.)

Anyway, around that point in time I thought one of the library’s functions could be helping patrons think about where to put the message or object they’re creating. Maybe it’s open access. Maybe it’s a self-published book. Maybe this message could be more effectively conveyed in video. Maybe that video would have more weight on vimeo than youtube. You know, that type of thing.

And that’s clearly not us. A few folks in some libraries have expertise in this vein, but it’s not a core competency of the field, and isn’t necessarily something that the field would embrace. (That’s not to say individual libraries wouldn’t… just that this is one of those ideas that would be specific to local community needs.)

Creating

So now, at this point, the theme seems to be creation. I like that a lot. I think that’s a good fit. We provide many of the tools people need to create. We also provide physical, and in some cases virtual, space to collaborate. Many academic libraries have technology and people who can at least provide basic technology support for the tools we offer. And if this is our focus, perhaps we should have more discussions about what it is we need to do to do this well. Should we be thinking more about collaborative space and furniture? The tools we provide (from whiteboards to computers)? The role of librarians in a collaborative environment? Researching the types of collaboration going on in the university? (Disclosure: I’m very fortunate to be in an environment that is considering this line of thinking.)

Sharing

And at this point it’s the general line of thinking you’ve seen here before, and in a dozen other library blogs. The thing that Gardner brought up that turned this from a general thought to a blog post was that he’s been affiliated with a library that actively worked to raise the visibility of scholarship on campus. And I think any academic librarian has to some extent through lectures, posters, or faculty book displays. But what about a more radical approach? What if we, as Gardner pointed out, had displays all over campus showing the work that was actively done in the library? What if we made it easy to show others what people are working on in the library? In their offices using library materials? Or, as Brian pointed out, how do we help students show others what they’re working on when they want to let others know. You know: see and be seen, alerting others that there is a study group for a big class they can join in, or calling for someone to help if they have experience in the subject. And, interesting to me, how do we help people share in this way that doesn’t just contribute to the overall feeling of noise in the information environment? While preserving privacy? How do we structure it so that the people who need it can see it?

More questions to come in coming days, I’m sure.

With that being the case, I still wanted to take a second to share some of the things that I participated in and found useful.

For one, I was on two panels. One was on “personas” in libraries, or how strengths and personalities can best be used to meet an organizations’ goals. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work on this with former down-the-road colleagues Lynda Kellam and Jenny Dale. If you’re interested in the general gist of the message, here are the slides:

We’re exploring next steps with that idea. The other panel I was on was Hacking the Learner Experience. This panel was organized by Brian Mathews and was a chance to get to collaborate with Andy Burkhardt. We talked about how understanding the learner experience can help inform library instruction and the library’s role at the institution. Slides are here:

So instead of the post that would take an hour or so to map out, you’re getting the short post of what’s been rolling around in my mind lately.

I come at most things as an educator, at this point at least. That’s because I’ve spent nearly two years managing an instruction program and four years as an instructional designer, constantly thinking about how to best design education and communication opportunities to help people learn. And I’ve always interpreted what “education” is in its broadest sense: not just how to teach or design learning objects, but how can the website be intuitive enough for students to learn how to use it by using it? How can I manage people in a way to allow them to have full ownership of the potential of their position without micromanaging them? What learning objects should be in place so that a student can get the help they need at 3am? Where should signage be so that people have the information they need rather than have to find someone to ask questions?

For a long time I thought of education as a type of applied communication. If you’re good at crafting a message, understanding various modalities and channels, reading your audience, etc, you should be pretty good at designing instruction and actually teaching. And that still seems right to me. I love my degree in philosophy for the sheer fun-ness of it*, but communication is the degree that’s actually given me concrete skills that I use every day.

And over time that feeling that communication is a cornerstone skill that can help people be good at lots of things (instruction, teamwork, meetings, collaborating, management, etc) has just become part of the way I view the world. I don’t even think that often about how important that skill is because I take for granted that it is.

Over time the skill I started paying more attention to is the subset of communication that is education. I’ve started to think about how education skills, particularly instructional design, are useful far beyond traditional teaching. I’ve even given a few talks about how the basic instructional design model can be applied to all kinds of projects. I’ve really come to see education/instruction/instructional design as a skill that is useful in all kinds of aspects of work, from teaching to communicating, to space planning, to meetings, to management to whatever thing I have on my calendar in a given day. So, for a long time now I’ve thought of a solid grounding in education, and instructional design in particular, as a cornerstone skill that would enable someone to be good at lots of different things.

More recently, I’ve been coming across things in design where I think “oh, yeah, instruction people know this.” And then I realize that it’s not necessarily instructors. It’s instructional designers. It’s design**. You can learn it in all kinds of different places. A lot of the designers I am friendly with learned it because of instruction. So I’ve started to wonder about the distinction. Maybe it’s just that design thinking is the cornerstone skill.

And with that, the little one is probably asleep, so I’m off to get some dinner. Here’s hoping the snow melts tonight!

*Philosophy students: I also find the analytical thinking useful, I just already was that way before the degree.
**h/t to Rebecca Miller for the design/instructional design conversation the other day.

This post is part six of a fourteen part series, Teaching Strategies, that is based on a series of education workshops. I’m documenting the content for myself, but hopefully it will also be useful to (1) librarians looking for more theoretical background for their own teaching and (2) for librarians looking to better understand education models as they look for new ways to support and participate in the educational missions of their institutions.

It seems like a natural pairing for the topic of learning styles is that of teaching styles. I’ve always thought that the nature of higher education instruction is cyclical; that those who do the best in college and graduate school are most likely to go on and join the professoriate. And then they will want to teach as their best teachers did, leading to a new crop of people who do well in that environment going on to teach in similar ways. And thus the archetype of a large lecture room with a professor speaking for 50 minutes at the front.

Of course, that’s a gross over-generalization. Many people in higher education may or may not prefer that method of teaching, and have succeeded anyway. I’ve known many faculty who are trying to teach in ways that they never experienced, either with joy that these new models are more comfortable to them or with a bit of wistfulness for a good lecture, while challenging their preferences based on what they see in their students.

I bring up all of that just to frame the teaching styles section of this series of posts.

Just as you might not tailor everything to all the various learning styles in a class, knowing your teaching style doesn’t necessarily mean you should change everything you’re doing. It just allows you to be more aware of your bias in preference, and allows you to make slight shifts as you feel it makes sense. You might find yourself lecturing if you enjoyed learning that way, and you might find a class of students who seem to be daydreaming or more focused on Facebook. That is an opportunity to look for other models that might have a few useful tools to shift your approach.

For example, my personal preference is to use a very systematic approach to share information. When studying information literacy instruction in grad school, my professor regularly commented on how logically I presented information. And that’s very useful a lot of the time. However, I found in teaching that it didn’t necessarily engage students, and over time I built more flexibility into my teaching until I got quite comfortable with open group discussions, where I’d make sure to bring up the relevant points, but only in the context of a free flowing conversation. (And I do this regularly–but only when it makes sense based on the audience and the content.)

So what might that mean for library instruction? And what did we talk about in the workshops this blog post series is based on? This was the one session that was designed and run by someone else in the library, Rosalind Tedford. At that point in time, Roz had come back from the ACRL Intentional Teacher Immersion program, and gave an overview of the two books they had read as part of the program:  Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher by Stephen Brookfield and The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. I’d recommend Brookfield and Palmer to anyone interested in teaching.

She picked out a free test online, and just as we had in learning styles, everyone took it ahead of time. It’s a pretty quick tool to use, and gives easy to understand feedback. Again, everyone mapped their score on a chart as we had done with learning styles. In this case, the five measures of the Teaching Perspectives Inventory are:

• Transmission: Teaching requires a content expert. You might think of an outstanding lecturer in your past when trying to think of an example of this.
• Apprenticeship: Teaching is a process of socializing students into new ways of working. I always think of graduate programs when I think of this: how they’re structured to help students become members of a field.
• Developmental: Teaching is designed and carried out “from the learners point of view.” I think of this, actually, when I think of a lot of current educational research.
• Nurturing: Teaching assumes that the heart is what enables the (sometimes intense) effort to learn. You might think of a coaching model when you consider this approach to teaching.
• Social Reform: Teaching is an approach to changing society, and class interactions are an opportunity to create social change. For me, it’s easiest to think of my Women’s Studies classes when I think about this, though I know I’ve practiced it when I’ve talked about publishing models or how the internet is evolving.

Readers of this series will recognize themes. For example, the Kolb model is apparent in apprenticeship, Vygotsky is evident in the developmental approach. There is research to support each of these perspectives, and if you find yourself clearly dominant in one, it’s probably worth investigating what has been said, if only to allow you to maximize your teaching preference. You know, the whole StrengthsFinder approach.

So what does this mean for library instruction? First off, knowing your preference will help you think about the design of your teaching. Are you giving transmission like lectures? Are you giving students lots of time to work in class, with points in time where you can guide them as might be more prominent in apprenticeship? Are you focusing on helping students see The Librarian as a friendly and supportive person as in the nurturing perspective? Are there ways to combine several of these for a given class? Indeed they are, and in some ways more easily so in a one-shot, I believe. You might spend a few minutes in a transmission based lecture, followed by a period of time for apprenticeship based guided work. You might do all of this, building on an existing body of knowledge the students have, while exemplifying the supportive and friendly librarian. And in the course of all of this you might mention any number of information issues that are broader than just how to navigate library resources.

In terms of the larger university, there’s so much to be said for trying to know the faculty you’re working with. That’s not to say that you’d ever request someone take a test and discuss their results. Only that many people make clear their approach when talking about their teaching. For example, if you know someone is very focused on social reform, they might be more interested in having a librarian also talk about the journal crisis or privacy issues with websites as part of their class. If they’re lecturing, their students have an expectation of a lecture-based learning environment for the class, and might be more receptive to that format.

I think the most interesting thing about teaching styles, for me at least, is when thinking about it in the context of your own teaching or how it fits with others it forces a more reflective approach to teaching. It calls to question what someone is really trying to do with their class, and forces the design of instruction to start there. And that is a large part of instructional design to begin with.