2020 Year in Review: The Best Articles on Learning, Higher Education, and Technology

by | Jan 6, 2021 | Digital Literacy, Higher Education, Online Learning, Pedagogy | 0 comments

A pair of mourning doves nest with sparse branches on the eaves of an apartment.

A family of mourning doves nested outside of my apartment during the spring of 2020. I found it cathartic to watch them grow and to see the babies fly the nest while sheltering in place.

To look ahead, we must always look back. Year-end review posts and compilations are always among my favorite things to write because they are an opportunity to reflect and consider what kinds of articles, ideas, and questions influenced and drove my work. In a year as historic and as momentous as 2020, the act of taking a pause and considering exactly which ideas sparked hope and creativity, which arguments drove action and awareness, and which insights offered catharsis and understanding seems all the more important.

It will be impossible for me (and perhaps you?) to remember 2020 as anything but the Year of the Pandemic. I’ll never forget the first Friday in March when my phone blew up with text messages from my colleagues at Stanford, asking if I’d seen the announcement the provost had e-mailed about moving all classes to remote instruction by the following Monday. I’ll never forget the months that followed with workshops, consultations, endless documentation, and Google Docs with tips (including the viral Teaching Effectively During Times of Disruption document that my fabulous colleague and friend, Beth Seltzer, and I whipped up in a span of roughly 72 hours). I’ll never forget the rapid networking and collaboration across institutions to develop teaching resources in some truly awe-inspiring ways (see: Pedagogies of Care: Open Resources for Student-Centered and Adaptive Learning in the New Higher Ed Landscape, an effort lovingly spear-headed by Victoria Mondelli and Tom Tobin) I’ll never forget this year as the year I took on a promotional opportunity to become the Director of Academic Technology at Sacramento State University in… the middle of a pandemic.

As an educational developer, a technologist, and an instructor, this has been one of the busiest, most rewarding, most draining, and most overwhelming years of my professional life. And I know I’m not alone. As early as January (yes, before the pandemic), I’ve appreciated work from Dr. Patrice Prusko and Dr. Whitney Kilgore about burnout in educational design professionals and compassion fatigue among instructional designers and technologists. Dr. Lee Skallerup Bessette has also been masterfully chronicling the work of higher education staff through her column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, my favorite of which is beautifully titled, “The Staff Are Not OK.”

These kinds of narratives underscore the vital importance of recognizing just how much work it is to design thoughtful, compassionate, and engaging educational experiences online for students in higher education. I hope that a take-away key stakeholders in higher education consider beyond 2020 is that the labor of teaching is not just about content delivery. It’s about creating and recognizing students’ humanity and supporting the intense and vital work of designing teaching and learning infrastructure with technology that sustains, supports, and includes all students in higher education.

I’ve been compiling year-end lists of some of my favorite reads about learning, higher education, and technology since 2018 (see my 2018 and 2019 entries), and in this year, more than any year prior, I’m in awe of my colleagues in teaching and learning roles who continue to share their inspiring ideas for making higher education a better place even through the most challenging of times and circumstances. As I’ve written in this blog before, we must continue writing to make the labor of our teaching and design work visible. Admittedly, this blog has been rather quiet for me this year given, well… Imagine me gesturing wildly at my blocked calendar for the past nine months. But I’m proud to be part of conversations about the work of teaching and learning with technology in years to come, as we continue to navigate whatever the ramifications of our past year’s nearly-ubiquitous engagement with remote instruction may be.

Here are ten reads that I found noteworthy this past year (listed in no particular order). I hope you’ll enjoy checking these articles out, bookmarking them, and applying them in ways that continue to support your work in 2021:

I deeply appreciate how clearly and thoughtfully “The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning” articulates clear principles for effective online instruction, while also clarifying how we can understand, assess, and reflect upon the teaching and learning experiences that happened in a crisis moment as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors warn,

“Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody making the transition to online teaching under these circumstances will truly be designing to take full advantage of the affordances and possibilities of the online format.”

They go on to detail exactly what good online learning looks like from a research-grounded perspective and offer concrete suggestions for what kinds of evaluative questions universities can ask to understand what actually, you know, happened, this past year. I found myself forwarding this article constantly, offering it as a much-needed corrective to the temptation to compare “face-to-face instruction” with the “remote instruction” that happened during 2020. There are wise, thoughtful, and clear ways to develop equitable, inclusive and responsive online instruction. While our experiences teaching online can inform our understandings of what it might mean to teach online, truly effective online education requires much deeper engagement and more thoughtful planning in the long-run. Hopefully, some institutions are ready to make that commitment.

Dr. Maha Bali is deeply respected and beloved in the teaching and learning community, and this particular piece really encapsulates what I think so many find so refreshing about Maha’s work: she thinks deeply and critically about educational values while offering concrete suggestions for putting those values into action. In this particular piece, I found myself constantly returning to Maha’s unpacking of how instructors show care in their teaching: through their course design, through individual interactions, and through creating what she refers to as “habitual” practices that show engagement with student feelings and experiences. Invoking Nel Noddings, Maha offers ideas from creating communities on chat networks, like Slack, to making spaces for students to share their personal experiences and reflections.

With the move to rapid remote instruction came an equally as rapid rise in the use of remote test proctoring solutions. Remote test proctoring typically involves the use of a surveillance-based technology to record students’ movements while taking a test. Monitoring students’ every movement to catch them “cheating” is problematic in all kinds of ways: creating algorithms that assume certain movements are “suspicious” is going to inherently operate in ableist ways (since not all people sit and behave in the same ways) and surveillance technology is often designed largely for white and male bodies. Shea’s piece for Hybrid Pedagogy establishes in clear and uncompromising terms just how dangerous algorithmic test proctoring is and I’ll just cut to his killer ending here in case you weren’t already convinced that this piece is a must-read:

Algorithmic test proctoring, and many technologies like it, sacrifice student agency in favor of discriminatory exclusion, the pedagogy of punishment, surveillance capitalism, technological solutionism, and the Eugenic Gaze.

This is another piece I kept forwarding to anyone who asked me what my thoughts were on remote proctoring solutions.

I found myself returning to this piece to find language for understanding just what often felt off about a lot of the documentation produced rapidly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Charles does a great job here of explaining how so much of our responses to the pandemic focused solely on what teachers could do rather than on how students were impacted. I know why this happened: people in support roles (like me) were trying to help operationalize teaching to help faculty feel less overwhelmed. But in the process, I think student experiences were often elided at best and, at worst, completely dehumanized.

I LOVE the recommendation that Charles makes in the middle here for staff and faculty to form authentic partnerships in the work of selecting, engaging with, and using educational technology. In so doing, as Charles writes, “a critical approach to educational technology and an explicit care for students can be established as a core mission, a set of founding principles to guide course design conversations between staff and faculty.”

Yes! Let’s strive for this in 2021!

I cannot tell you how many muddled conversations I’ve had over the past 9 months about the differences between hybrid, HyFlex, blended, online learning, synchronous, asynchronous instruction (I even went so far as to make an infographic to explain the differences). Then, Dr. Irvin published this fabulous piece on “The Landscape of Merging Modalities” and created an incredibly thoughtful breakdown of why educators and administrators are so confused about the terminology around course modalities and makes a call for us to adopt shared language to describe what it is we want to do in our classrooms accurately. We will need to continue offering reminders of this shared language so that as staff and faculty work together to imagine a shared vision for the future of higher education, we can all be clear about what we’re thinking of and referring to.

Dr. Rachael Mahmood’s piece is written for a K-12 audience, but the concepts here are quite helpful for educators in higher ed as it offers several clear reminders: that we can be responsive to students from different cultures and backgrounds with some small, and extremely important, interventions. From activities like “showing and telling” on video calls parts of a student’s home life, to requesting ongoing feedback about the types of activities students like to do online, to using chat features to solicit ideas and create dialogue, there are lots of concrete ideas here for instructors to explore when teaching synchronously or asynchronously.

Dr. Robin DeRosa’s ACE framework for instructional planning is one I kept returning to and referring to over the course of the year. ACE – Adaptability, Connection, and Equity – offers three principles that can and should guide decision-making in ways that center student experiences while also considering the needs of learners across multiple class modalities and environments. What’s extra brilliant about the ACE framework is the way that Robin describes how it can be deployed from the micro-level of a class assignment, to the mezzo level of a course, all the way to the macro-level of an institution. Thinking about values that scale up, down, and across the educational experience is vital ideological thinking to help us move forward beyond an emergency remote moment and into a moment of deliberate planning and re-thinking.

The title says it all here: if there was ever a time to consider how our classes can be accessible on mobile, it’s now. Knowing that so many of our students struggle with consistent Wi-Fi access, fast enough broadband speeds, and reliable laptops, we need to consider the ways in which our learning might scale within and across mobile environments. While I didn’t learn on a mobile phone (and it can be hard for me to imagine how easy it would be to learn on a mobile phone), it’s worth imagining what designing for multiple devices might look like and how that can foster more inclusive experiences for our students who may only have access to reliable Internet connections on mobile. I appreciate how well Dr. Christina Moore makes these claims and offers concrete suggestions for considering the power of mobile learning.

Dr. Flower Darby has basically been crushing it in every way this year, so it was hard for me to pick just one article from Flower to include here! But of the many pieces she has published in The Chronicle and elsewhere about effective online instruction, this piece on ways to be inclusive in an online class is the one I probably sent out to instructors and administrators the most. The suggestions here are thoughtful, humanizing, and engaging. Best of all, these tips really are “quick” to implement and “low-tech” enough for adopters of multiple technical skill levels to implement.

Debates abounded this year about where and how online learning can occur, and I appreciate that Dr. Alexandra Mihai wrote this thoughtful blog post about all of the ways in which asynchronous learning (or learning outside of real time) can still promote student engagement and inquiry. In a year when many instructors have worried about visibility into their classroom and control over the classroom experiences, Alexandra reassures us that learning can happen if we make those spaces available and make those spaces inclusive. She has a lot of great tips here to help ground that perspective and make these ideas seem accessible.

So I couldn’t help but include a couple of other bonus resources that are not *technically* articles, but rather, are compilations of online teaching resources:

“Feminist Pedagogy and Teaching Online: A Curated Digital Resource:” Clare Daniel, Jacquelyne Thoni Howard, and Niya Bond (for an independent blog built in Adobe Spark)

This page offers an amazing collection of ideas, resources, and inspirations for centering feminist approaches to teaching online. There is a wealth of ideas here to explore about disrupting hierarchical classrooms and promoting equity-minded instruction that centers student perspective.

“Community Building Resources:” Mia Zamora, Maha Bali, and Autumm Caines (for Equity Unbound)

These Community Building Resources from Equity Unbound offer a true treasure trove of ideas for creating equitable online activities. You can explore a collection of great resources and activity ideas here that can be implemented across a variety of online classes. These are all wroth spending time investigating.

I’m deeply grateful to my peer learning networks and communities this year, and know that I will continue learning from other wonderful educators, technologists, and designers in the year ahead… Whatever that may look like.

 

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *