Cacti in the Cholla Cactus Garden at Joshua Tree National Park (my own photo, taken on December 28, 2021)
In 2021, we talked a lot about being “resilient” and “flexible.” We lived through yet another Pandemic Year, this one somehow full of more turbulence than the Pandemic Year that came before. If 2020 was the year of the Emergency Remote Pivot, then 2021 was the year of the Emergency Remote See-Saw. We’re returning to campus! Now we’re remote! Wait, sorry, we’re up again and on-campus! Down again: remote! 2021 was what felt like another year of seemingly endless crisis because there was no end to the potential changes in sight. The only strategy we (I?) had at our disposal was immediate response. A constant red alarm blared from end-to-end. It was, in a word, exhausting.
As evidenced by the fact that I haven’t written a single entry in this blog since my year in review entry last year, 2021 was not a reflective year for me. To be perfectly frank, that lack of space to reflect and to be proactive threw me completely off kilter. It’s not that I didn’t write much last year. In fact, I wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education (see my piece on faculty and staff collaboration, who chooses what ed tech to buy, and how to prepare for the next phase of hybrid teaching), EDUCAUSE Review (with the wonderful Courtney Plotts on encouraging equitable decision-making in ed tech), and contributed to the wonderful Resilient Pedagogy collection, edited by Travis Thurston, Kacy Lundstrom, and Christopher González. Oh, and my book, Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading was published and released into the wild, thanks to West Virginia University Press! But in many ways (with the exception of Skim, Dive, Surface, a book that is a reflection of nearly 10 years’ worth of thinking), these pieces were all urgent reactions in their own ways. They were pieces born out of burning need, a compulsion to share. In other words, my writing itself was a kind of reaction to the simply overwhelming amount of problems to be solved, gaps to be closed, and discussions to be had.
I wrote last year that as an educational developer, a technologist, and an instructor, I experienced one of the most overwhelming years of my career. I stand corrected: 2021 was the most overwhelming year of my career. And I know I’m not alone. Cate Denial wrote in December 2021 that “we have given ourselves over to lifeboat learning, and it’s time to reimagine the voyage.” That’s exactly it: we can’t keep twisting our pedagogical practices around like a thin piece of plastic until it breaks. Flexibility has its limits. Now is the time that we desperately, urgently need a more imaginative approach to teaching, learning, and technology in higher education. In 2022, it’ll be a question of how and whether institutions are ready for or are willing to listen to a vision for teaching and learning that’s inclusive, accessible, and responsive to the massive changes we experienced over the past two years.
Yet even with these challenges, even with the lack of space to do much but get through each day and cling on to our life boats, I’ve seen tremendous (dare I call them “herculean?”) efforts to explore how we can make higher education a better place. I still believe we can — and will! — make change through writing. And that kind of thinking in the spirit of change-making is exactly what I hope to highlight in this past year’s round-up of ten noteworthy reads from this past year:
This is not an ordered list, but I’ve got this list (mostly) sorted chronologically with articles from the start of 2021 listed first, and articles from the end of 2021 coming towards the end. Happy reading!
Laura published this piece on January 4, 2021, and she called out what remains true over a year later: “the hearts and minds of many institutions, faculty, and students are not ready for flexible instruction.” Flexible instruction requires transformative thinking about where, how, and when learning happens. In a year where everyone – faculty, students, and staff – were still just trying to get out from under a wave of stressful experiences, the time to reflect and plan to enable this sort of transformative teaching and learning simply couldn’t be actualized. Unfortunately, the belief that “hybrid” (which, largely, was understood as beaming students into on-campus classrooms via Zoom or other video-conferencing tools) would be a “new normal” drove a lot of hasty decision-making, which led to some unsatisfying classroom experiences. If we’re going to have a transformative future for hybrid learning, it’ll mean taking “baby steps,” as Laura writes, to design these experiences in ways that work (though I’d argue that first “baby step” involves accepting that the online classroom space is what primarily needs to be the focus of pedagogical design moving forward, though that’s a longer conversation!). The rest of her predictions are spot-on too and point out some lessons that have been powerful this past year bout the benefits of flipped learning and the potential for digital learning environments to make experiences more accessible.
In early 2021, there were a lot of really fruitful conversations about some surprising consequences of ubiquitous remote instruction. One of these was the widespread student perception that faculty were assigning more work when they were learning online. This perception and the subsequent conversation were fascinating because they spoke to a number of issues that are core to instructional design: how do we communicate course expectations to students? To what extent are those course expectations aligned with assumptions about course modality? What is the cognitive load required for students to engage when instruction is delivered online? How can instructors reduce that cognitive load? Betsy walks through lots of interesting hypotheses here and offers several thoughtful solutions.
I had LOTS of conversations with faculty this past year about concerns with student cheating in online learning environments. But one article I kept thinking back to was Michael’s because he nailed the questions undergirding the crux of the problem with online apps where students can “cheat” by accessing course materials and answers to homework/exams (e.g. Chegg, Coursehero, etc.):
“These companies have unlocked literally billions of dollars’ worth of services that academics tend to view as problematic at best and illicit at worst. What are the conditions that encourage the widespread and highly monetizable temptation for students to slide from seeking help into cheating? Who, exactly, is outsourcing what to whom? And what are the knock-on consequences?”
Indeed, predatory edtech companies only exist because there’s a market looking for those products. As an industry, higher ed needs to look at its pedagogical practices and really think long and hard about how to create environments where students don’t feel the need to go out and find products that help them cheat. Cheating is precipitated by anxiety; there are lots of non-technology strategies we can use to reduce that anxiety, so that our online environments don’t become land mines for academic dishonesty.
David’s piece is, in many ways, an excellent response to Betsy’s on “The Workload Dilemma:” if there’s a corrective to the feeling of too much work packed into a class, it’s a matter of encouraging instructors to “slim down” what they’re trying to do in a single term. It’s long been a powerful adage of course design that “less is more” when it comes to content in a course. I recognize that instructors have a huge challenge in trying to “slim down” their pedagogy: some courses necessitate coverage of a certain amount of content. However, if we can keep the focus of future instructional design conversations on designing for deeper interventions into fewer pieces of content, I think we have a recipe for less stress in the long run. That’s David’s point here too, I think, and I found myself pointing to this piece often in design conversations this past year.
I appreciate that this articles moves conversations about online learning in an essential direction: that we have to discuss the real harms inherent in ignoring the need for liberatory, critically race conscious pedagogies in online learning environments. Specifically, David and Camea call out the fact that peer-reviewed scholarship from the past 11 years of online education rarely confront social and racial justice concerns. We cannot separate out technology from social contexts any longer, and I appreciate that this article uses the lens of Critical Black Theory to propose specific and concrete pedagogies for online learning that employ antiracist pedagogies. There’s a lot to appreciate here both in terms of theoretical grounding and in practical application, and this is the kind of scholarship that I’d love to see more as we continue to grapple with what it means to design a meaningful and inclusive future for online learning.
Lillian offers a thoughtful, well-stated case for practicing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) now more than ever. I appreciate how Lillian’s work makes UDL thinking clear and compelling (not to mention her podcast, Think UDL, offers a wealth of resources for how to implement UDL into course experiences), and she positions flexibility here in terms of giving students even just one additional choice for engaging with their learning. While this addition has some workload implications, Lillian offers good examples here of how an additional option for student learning can be something simple — and how that simple fix can make a world of difference at a time when students are needing a bit more grace and compassion in their work.
Asking for student perspective is always such a win! Soulaymane, Amanda, and Catherine share their findings from discussions with students at Columbia University about what it takes to build inclusive online classes, and the suggestions here are thoughtful, practical, and rich. Many of these principles apply for all instructional modalities, by the way, and the students totally get it: technologies must be deployed thoughtfully and in alignment with student needs before anything else. This is a helpful compendium of ideas that’s worth returning to even beyond the pandemic.
Accessibility of instructional material will continue to be one of the greatest needs moving into the coming year(s), but Ann nails a major roadblock to implementing accessibility in higher ed: the perception that making materials accessible is “too much work.” In this productive and punchy post, Ann offers 4 practical suggestions for making the work of doing accessibility legible and to help shift narratives away from accessibility as an “afterthought” to course design and more towards supporting instructors in designing experiences that are accessible from the get go. I especially appreciate the argument that if we make accessibility conversations into compliance conversations, we immediately de-center the ethical core of accessibility work in teaching and learning. It is work to make materials accessible, but it isn’t work that’s out of reach.
This may very well be the article I’ve shared the most frequently over the past year. When our instructional experiences are happening in spaces beyond the on-the-ground campus, we should be having conversations about what spaces mean to us. What do different spaces signify? Who has power in those spaces? Sabyn gets at all of this liberatory potential of online learning in this piece:
“Decolonization is not just about removing a few dead white men from our syllabi, or adding more women of color. It’s about making sure that everyone’s experience is represented. It’s about decentering the traditional power hierarchy in the classroom, so that the professor is not the sole transmitter of knowledge who imposes a singular (and often Western) view. It’s about ensuring equitable participation among students, so that they don’t remain silent and passive receivers whose varied life experiences are dismissed.”
There’s a lot for us to chew on and apply here: I hope that in 2022, we take up the call to do so.
Erin offers a research-informed and measured approach to the continued value of instructional video for student learning, even as video, by the end of 2021, earned (perhaps unfairly) a reputation for unsatisfying experiences. Amidst calls to get students back into on-campus classrooms, Erin offers an important reminder that use of instructional video can create authentic connections between students and instructors while also allowing students to learn and access material at their own pace. This is, in other words, a nice return to thinking about the value of flipped learning, and a call for intentional design intervention that centers student engagement.
There’s a lot more scholarship and many more resources I could have included here. It’s always tough to pick each year what to highlight! I appreciate the time, care, and thought that educators, designers, technologists, and developers have put into these reflections and ideas. And while this has been a challenging year, I remain an eternal optimist and look to 2022 as an opportunity for continued growth, reflection, and discovery.