Category: Online Learning

  • ai-powered-teaching-personalizing-online-courses The Cengage Blog

    ai-powered-teaching-personalizing-online-courses The Cengage Blog

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    Let’s face it: education is changing with technology. But hasn’t it always? Imagine the calligraphy teacher’s grimace at the typewriter. Math teachers and calculators, English teachers and spellcheck, history teachers and Google — instructors quickly adopted all of these tools for their own usage. The same opportunity arises with the explosion of artificial intelligence.

    Personalizing asynchronous courses

    Having been an online student and now leading online courses, I empathize with both sets of stakeholders. Online courses have grown with the availability of the internet and lowered home computer costs. The flexibility asynchronous courses offer is what makes them desirable. Neither party must be in a specific classroom at a particular time. This allows both to work a more convenient schedule.

    The most obvious challenge for instructors is bringing value to the students in a format that lacks the personalization of the classroom setting. Emails and discussion boards don’t communicate with the same personal touch. Recording classroom lectures for a face-to-face class certainly has some merit. The online student gets to hear and watch lectures and discussions. Yet, this might not be a foreseeable solution for instructors without in-person and online sections of the same subject. Also, recorded lectures may give the online sections less time to consume the content than their in-person peers.

    Recorded lecture: the challenges

    Until recently, my modus operandi was recording lectures for online students. I did this in order to replicate what they would get in the classroom, albeit passively devoid of discussion. Unless these videos are reused for different semesters and classes, it still seems inefficient and strangely impersonal. The inefficiency comes from mistakes that I would have laughed off in a live course. However, they certainly became points of frustration when watching myself stumble through a word or phrase that rolled off the tongue effortlessly during the dry run. Sometimes, I didn’t realize my mic was not toggled on. This resulted in a very uneventful silent film. Or someone would interrupt. I don’t think I’ve scratched the surface of all the things that disrupted my attempts. So, I looked for alternative sources for help.

    The power of AI avatars for lecture delivery

    I spent some time dabbling with AI avatars and seeing the potential to adopt the technology. The avatars cross the personalization hurdle by offering lifelike renditions with mannerisms and voice. While the technology is not quite as precise as recorded video, it’s good and getting better. The students have given it positive reviews. It is undoubtedly better than some of the textbook videos I had the unfortunate task of watching in a couple of my online courses as a student.

    Avatars also clear the hurdle of efficiency and frustration. Using an avatar, I no longer have to fret over interruptions or mistakes. The editing is all done in its script. I load what I want it to say, and the avatar says it. No “ums.” No coughs or sneezes to apologize for. No triple takes on the word, “anthropomorphic.” If I’m interrupted, I can save it and return to it later. This enables me to scale my efforts.

    Using Google’s NotebookLM to create AI-generated podcasts

    Depending on your social media algorithm, you were probably privy to people’s Spotify top stats or other creative memes of the phenomenon in early December 2024. Spotify created personal “Wrapped AI podcasts” based on AI’s interpretation of users’ listening habits throughout the year. From a marketing perspective, this is great cobranding for both Google and Spotify, but the instructor’s perspective is why I’m writing. I learned about NotebookLM at a recent conference. The real beauty is that, currently, it’s free with a Google account.

    Evaluating anecdotal evidence from my courses again, the students enjoyed the podcast version of the content. Instructors can add content that they have created and own the rights to, like lecture notes, and two AI “podcasters” will discuss it.

    Because it’s only audio content, students can listen to it anywhere they are with their phones. Some comments that I noted were, “Listening to it felt less like studying” and “It was easy to listen to driving in my car.” This adds another layer of content consumption for students.

    Balancing AI and instructor presence

    Though I offered two technologies to deliver content to students, I do so as supplements to recorded lectures and web meetings. Indeed, in this era of AI, it is easy to become enamored with or apprehensive of this technology. Our students live very digitalized lives. Versing yourself in emerging technologies while still interacting with online students in more “traditional” formats can help you keep up with the times. You can still lean on  tried-and-true education delivery. I think the key is to be willing to try a new technology and ask the students what they think of it. So many educators are worried about replacement, but at this stage in technology, we need to use AI as enhancements. So many digital platforms are using it. Why not use it in online classes responsibly?

    Written by Britton Legget, Assistant Professor of Marketing at McNeese State University and Cengage Faculty Partner.

    Want to learn about Professor Leggett’s unique journey into his current role?

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  • ‘It’s different when they’re in their office’: the disconnect in student perceptions of academic meetings

    ‘It’s different when they’re in their office’: the disconnect in student perceptions of academic meetings

    by Stacey Mottershaw and Anna Viragos

    As we approach the five-year anniversary of the closure of UK university campuses for the Covid-19 pandemic, we thought it might be interesting and timely to reflect on the way that the sector adapted to educational delivery, and which innovations remain as part of our new normal.

    One key aspect of educational delivery which has remained to varying extents across the sector is the move to online student meetings. This includes meetings for academic personal tutorials, dissertation supervisions and other one-to-one meetings between students and staff. The Covid-19 lockdowns necessitated the use of online meetings as the only available option during this time. However, even post-lockdown, students and staff have continued to request online meetings, for reasons such as flexibility, privacy and sustainability.

    To explore this further, we conducted a small mixed-methods study with students from Leeds University Business School to consider their preferences for online or in-person meetings, utilising a faculty-wide survey for breadth and short semi-structured interviews for depth.

    We designed a questionnaire including questions on demographic (eg gender, home/international, whether they have caring responsibilities) and situational questions regarding their preference for face-to-face only, hybrid, or online meetings. We also included some questions around the ‘Big Five’ personality traits, to better understand factors that influence preferences.  We then distributed this online questionnaire, using the Qualtrics questionnaire software.

    Based on our findings, 15% of respondents preferred face-to-face only, 31% online only, with the remaining 54% preferring to have the option of either face-to-face or online.

    We also found that international students had a stronger preference for online meetings compared to non-international students. Whilst we had a relatively small sample of students on the Plus Programme (our institutional programme targeted to under-represented students); they had a stronger preference for in-person meetings. In terms of the Big Five traits, this student sample was highest on agreeableness and conscientiousness, and lowest on extroversion.

    In addition to the questionnaire, we ran seven one-to-one interviews with students from a mix of second year, the year in industry and final year, who had all experienced a mix of both online and face-to-face meetings throughout their studies.

    In reviewing the data, we identified five core themes of student preferences around meeting modes:

    • Connection and communication: Participants felt that the type of meeting affected connection and communication, with in-person meetings feeling more authentic.
    • Privacy/space: Participants felt that the type of meeting was influenced by factors including their access to private space, either at home or on campus.
    • Confidence: Some participants felt that the type of meeting could affect how confident they would feel in interactions with staff, with online meetings in their own environment feeling more comfortable than in spaces on campus.
    • Time: Participants discussed the amount of time that they had for each type of meeting, with online meetings deemed to be more efficient, due to the absence of travel time.
    • Flexibility: Participants demonstrated a strong preference for flexibility, in that they value having a choice over how to meet, rather than a meeting mode being imposed upon them.

    Through cross-examination of the core themes, we also identified something akin to a meta-theme, that is a ‘theme which acquire[s] meaning through the systematic co-occurrence of two or more other themes’ (Armborst, 2017 p1). We termed this meta-theme ‘The Disconnect’, as across each of the core themes there seemed to be a disconnect between student expectations of APT and what is typically provided, which ties in with existing literature (Calabrese et al, 2022).

    For example, one participant suggested that:

    It’s different when they’re in their office like popping there and asking a question for the lecture or even like the tutorials rather than having to e-mail or like go on a call [which] feels more formal.

    Whilst this comment seems to lean more towards other types of academic teaching (eg module leadership, lecture delivery or seminar facilitation), it can also translate to availability of staff more broadly. The comment suggests that students might expect staff to be available to them, on site, as and when they are needed. Yet in reality, it is unlikely that outside of set office hours academic staff will be available to answer ad hoc questions given their other commitments and particularly given the increased proportion of staff regularly working from home since the pandemic. This perspective also seems to contradict the perception that staff are much more available now than ever before, due to the prevalence of communications administered via email and online chat and meeting tools such as MS Teams. Staff may feel that they are more available as online communication methods increase in availability and use, but if students do not want ‘formal’ online options or prefer ad hoc on-site provision, then there may be a disconnect between student expectations and delivery, with all stakeholders feeling short-changed by the reality.

    Another disconnect between expectations and reality became apparent when another participant commented:

    […] online it was more rushed because you have the 30 minutes and you see the time going down and in the Zoom you will see like you have 4 minutes left to talk and then you’re rushing it over to finish it.

    Whilst this clearly relates to the core theme of time, it also seemed to be correlated with participant understanding of staff roles. It is difficult to understand how the time limitation for online and in-person meetings is different when the meetings are of the same duration, except that in the case of in-person meetings the student may be less aware of timings, due to not having the time physically visible on the screen in front of them. This might be reflected in the student-staff dynamic, where managing online meetings might be seen to be a joint and equal endeavour, with the responsibility for managing in-person meetings being skewed towards the staff member. Whilst it can be argued that staff should take responsibility for managing the meeting, in a time of increased narratives around student-led tutoring, it may be worth exploring the possible knock-on effects of students passively allowing the meeting to happen, rather than actively owning the meeting.

    Final thoughts

    A limitation of this study was the low response rate. At the point of dissemination, there were approximately 2,000 students in our faculty. However, we received just 198 survey responses (9.9%), and only seven people took part in the interviews, despite repeated calls for participants and generous incentives. Although this was a smaller sample than we had hoped for, we are confident that our study makes a timely and relevant contribution to discussions around delivery of APT, both within our faculty and beyond.

    As a starting point, future research could seek to generate responses from a broader pool of participants, through both a quantitative survey and qualitative methods. Based on our findings, there may also be scope for further research exploring student expectations of staff roles, and how these match to institutional offerings across the sector. Ultimately, universities need to do more to investigate and understand student preferences for educational delivery, balancing this alongside pedagogical justifications and staff circumstances.

    Stacey Mottershaw is an Associate Professor (Teaching and Scholarship) at Leeds University Business School and an EdD candidate at the University of Sheffield. Her research predominantly seeks to understand the needs of marginalised groups in higher education, with a particular focus on equitable and socially just career development. 

    Dr Anna Viragos is an Associate Professor in Organizational Psychology at Leeds University Business School, and a Chartered Psychologist of the BPS. Her research focuses on a variety of topics such as stress and wellbeing, creativity, and job design.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • How online learning can help tackle global injustices

    How online learning can help tackle global injustices

    by Sam Spiegel

    How can online learning programmes help tackle systemic global injustices with creative pedagogies? How can universities build effective educational environments and pedagogies to support critical thinking and vigorously challenge contemporary forms of racism, colonialism and inequity?

    These are some of the questions I have reflected on over the past almost 14 years of teaching at the University of Edinburgh. In 2011, I embarked with colleagues at the School of Social and Political Science to develop our school’s first fully online distance learning MSc postgraduate programmes, partnering with an interdisciplinary team spanning the three Colleges  of the University to co-create and co-teach the MSc in Global Challenges. Addressing global development, health and environmental inequalities, with case studies spanning an array of countries, this programme had students from all over the world. The insights and trajectories of our students have been deeply inspirational – many of our students have gone on to do PhDs, work with United Nations organisations, embassies, non-governmental and humanitarian organisations and work in other kinds of practitioner and research careers. In this blog I reflect on the philosophy of the teaching and learning approach we have nurtured – and associated critical conversations about pedagogy.

    We had support from a Principal’s Teaching Award (PTAS) to explore student learning experiences and reflect on our teaching practices, and in 2016 we published an article: ‘Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections–a case study’. At the time, it was one of the few critical pedagogy studies to think through ‘international development’ teaching and the risks of replicating colonial logics in online learning modalities (and how to try to counter these). It proposed a critical framework for analysis that took into account barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme. It also considered debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacked tensions in tackling intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.

    Some years ago online learning initiatives were treated with suspicion as a technology craze that could not truly build effective communities of critical learners. This is no longer the case, generally speaking. Our online students have carved out sophisticated learning paths while interacting with ambitious courses – sometimes in live discussions and sometimes in asynchronous discussions that built incredible communities of practice. But there are important online learning-specific pedagogic points to keep in mind, as course instructors craft and adapt approaches to support individual and group learning.

    One is the risk of re-entrenching problematic dynamics of imperial knowledge production, even when intentions are to do exactly the opposite. There is a need to ensure that online learning platforms grapple with colonial legacies and tendencies – including biases that are easily replicable in virtual technology platforms. It is increasingly recognised that ‘decolonising’ is not simply a matter of ‘bringing in’ authors from Global South countries in reading lists. It is also a matter of ensuring that the underpinning pedagogies, assignments, and learning strategies themselves tackle systemic biases that have often shaped the field of ‘international development’ – and doing so from the outset. This may mean inviting students into at-times uncomfortable conversations about ways of understanding histories of dispossession, or ways of thinking about and governing societies; and ensuring that early course activities trouble assumptions – including about what ‘development’ is/means to different people and whose values are prioritised or overlooked. Some students might not normally read the writings of those who fought during liberation wars against colonialism, for example, but might find such readings different and transformative. There are a range of other possibilities, too, from changing the way that case studies are framed – for example, starting with stories of heavily oppressed peoples instead of starting with the technocratic logics of United Nations and government reports.

    Despite global talk of ‘decolonisation,’ there has been a tendency for globally renowned development academics from wealthy countries to dominate reading lists. We have tried in our courses to challenge this – and ensure that activity-focused coursework and online case studies challenge hegemonic assumptions in mainstream policy literature and development discourse. Some of the reflections on our pedagogy were also discussed in a wider influential review article by Shahjahan et al (2022) entitled ‘”Decolonizing” curriculum and pedagogy: A comparative review across disciplines and global higher education contexts’, which notes that ‘decolonization’ has been very differently treated by different educators. Our pedagogy work has also been part of a wider conversation in the scholarly literature on how “precautions need to be taken when incorporating non-Western knowledges into Western universities to avoid mishearing, misrepresenting, exploiting, and decontextualizing them” (Lau and Mendes, 2024; see also Spiegel et al, 2024).

    Relatedly, there is a need to be cautious of ideas about “transfer of knowledge” and instead to embrace values built on reciprocal sharing of knowledge in educational practices (see also Parmentier, 2023). Furthermore, attempts at decolonising development education requires attention to the link between learning strategy and wider institutional practices, including heeding inequities in admissions processes and language barriers in higher education. Our work in developing new online learning pedagogies is just part of the story; we have also been interacting closely with university admissions offices on strengthening approaches to make admissions more inclusive. This has included greater recognition of practitioner qualifications and also, significantly, some modifications in how English language testing requirements were addressed in some of the countries affected. This was especially important in contexts where applicants had demonstrable English language proof, from institutional and/or university experiences, but lived far from test centres and could not afford testing.

    Our article ‘Decolonising Online Development Studies?’ had a question mark in the title, alluding to the ambiguity of interpretation and the uncertainties that may play out over time. It was cited in other PTAS-awarded studies led by other staff members at UoE, supporting further analysis of specific techniques for building online learning communities (see Wood et al, 2021) How these ideas are to be taken forward is an ethically important conversation that relates to the very core of what education seeks to do, requiring ongoing attention to the interplay of values, philosophies, curricula and teaching techniques.

    Dr Sam Spiegel is the director of the Global Challenges MSc programme at the University of Edinburgh, where he serves as the Deputy Director of Research for Knowledge Exchange and Impact at the School of Social and Political Science. He is also a senior lecturer at the Centre of African Studies and has published extensively with colleagues in Zimbabwe and in other regions of the world on migration, displacement, borders, critical pedagogy and social change.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • 10 Reasons to Go Digital with Your Course Materials – Eric Stoller

    10 Reasons to Go Digital with Your Course Materials – Eric Stoller






    When I was a college student, there were times when I skipped out on buying a required textbook for a course. Finances were always tight, so I tried to balance my checkbook with buying actual books. Even then, textbooks weren’t cheap. Today, students are paying more and more for their higher education experience. If a university can find ways to make attending college more affordable, accessible, and “high-tech/high-touch”, well, it’s not really an option, it’s a necessity.

    Today’s technology makes it easy to distill course materials into digital formats and enhances them as a result.  Colleges and universities are quickly shifting from books to bytes to improve the student experience and boost course outcomes.

    Here are 10 reasons why your university should go digital with its course materials:

    1. Affordability: This may seem like an obvious reason to move to digital delivery of course materials. Students will end up paying less for digital course materials. From production to shipping, textbooks require a lot of costly infrastructure. Digital materials eliminate these costs and pass the savings on to students.
    2. A better experience for students with disabilities. Unlike print books, modern eTextbooks can be accessible “out of the box.”  When eTextbooks include features such alternative text descriptions of visuals and content that can be used with assistive technology, students can start reading right away, without waiting for a disability services department to create a file.
    3. Learning Analytics and Digital Integration: Can you remember when a physical book connected to a digital learning system? It’s just not possible. However, with digital course materials, integration with the campus LMS/VLE is possible. Plus, with learning analytics built in, digital materials can help support at-risk learners who may need additional assistance.
    4. Recruitment: Digital course materials might not seem like they give universities a recruitment edge, but in an increasingly competitive enrollment landscape, everything helps. Students seek modern solutions for their educational experience. For bring-your-own-device (BYOD) campuses and institutions that provide technology platforms for students, digital course materials hit the sweet spot. They create more affordances for student success and showcase a university experience that is effectively using the latest technologies.
    5. Multi-Platform Capability: The ability to view course materials on a variety of devices represents a huge advantage for digital course materials. If a student needs to read a chapter while on the go, odds are, they will be able to access it on whichever device they have with them. Also, it’s a good bet that no one misses having a backpack filled with textbooks.
    6. Seamless Group Work: University campuses are filled with versatile seating and project workspaces. You can’t project a textbook onto a large screen, but you can with digital course content. It’s simply a matter of either plugging in or wirelessly beaming content to a screen. It makes group work and collaboration a much easier task. 
    7. Always Current: Have you ever tried to update a textbook? Editions come and go, each one costing more than the last. With digital course materials, content is as up to date as possible and it doesn’t cost students more for this “always current” content. Who wants a used book when you can have a new digital version? 
    8. Instant Access: No longer do students have to search for the lowest price option or wait until after term starts. Instant access to digital materials, through programs such as Pearson Inclusive Access and others, ensures all students are ready to learn on the first day of class, not the third week. It’s as easy as logging into the university system, selecting the appropriate course, and downloading the material to a compatible device.
    9. Interactivity: Textbooks have been surpassed in form, function, and capability. Digital course materials allow authors the opportunity to embed audio and video into their work. This makes for a much more interactive and “real” experience for students. 
    10. Retention: Anything that a college or university can do to assist students with their academic success is a good thing. Digital course materials aid and enhance an institution’s ability to improve their overall retention rates and bolster student success with all of the supportive elements in this list. 

    What would you add to this list?

    Digital course materials are not the future for higher education; they’re the present. It’s only a matter of time before your institution goes digital for student success.

     

    This post was sponsored by Pearson as part of a higher education influencers collaboration.





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