I have had a few students, over the years, who expressed an interest in pursuing strictly teaching careers at an university. Of course, my advice to them was to focus on their research during their Ph.D. as even small departments with typically large teaching loads, expect some research from their tenure-track faculty and largely make their hiring decisions placing a greater emphasis on research. Historically, teaching only positions, such as adjuncts and instructors, tend to be ad hoc and not permanent.
Teaching, research and service has traditionally been the three requirements of tenure-track full-time faculty positions in the US. However, I have been seeing quite a few teaching only positions being advertised in recent times. While many still tend to be non-tenure track, these positions increasingly appear to have some form of permanency that is not common with adjunct or instructor appointments. Our university recently approved a long-term contract for lecturers who have been with the university for more than six years. They also created a pathway for them to get promoted to senior lecturers. Talks are also underway of “gateway faculty” or tenure-track positions whose primary mission is teaching. Is this emphasis on teaching track faculty the new reality of pandemic or is there a growing recognition that “research” and “teaching” are two distinct endeavors that need people with different skills?
Teaching faculty are being viewed as being at a higher level than an ‘adjunct’ or an ‘instructor’ whose sole purpose is to teach courses which are already designed and well established. “Gateway Teaching Faculty” are expected to bring teaching innovations into their departments, teach other faculty – how to teach effectively and help with academic administrative tasks such as ABET accreditation. In addition, there is also an expectation that these faculty will conduct pedagogical research’ and establish an active research program focused on engineering education. In other words, these faculty will still be evaluated for contributions to teaching, research and service, albeit in a different ratio.
While the idea of having a separate teaching-oriented track may bring in much needed attention to undergraduate instruction at many research-oriented schools, there are many issues that need to be addressed. Who is there to mentor these teaching faculty in traditional engineering programs that mostly have faculty who have moved up the ranks by largely demonstrating engineering research productivity? Will faculty and administrators view engineering education research on the same footing as making discipline specific advancements? Engineering research may yield much better grants (at least in terms of $$) then educational research which tends to rely on more competitive federal funding from a few agencies. How will the likely disparity in funded research affect promotion and tenure decisions? In a similar vein, engineering education research publications tend to have lower impact factors than most top-tier engineering journals. This again might work against a faculty taking the teaching route.
There is also a very high risk that these gateway faculty may be viewed as glorified adjuncts and given a larger than normal share of courses to teach or asked to take on courses that entail a higher workload (e.g., capstone or large introductory classes). This load distribution may affect the research and service components of these faculty. Finally, will dissertations with an engineering education focus be treated on par with traditional discipline specific contributions? If not, recruitment and retention of high-quality students would be a major challenge for these gateway faculty.
The hiring of ‘gateway’ faculty is also another challenging topic. Traditional engineering programs do not provide much in terms of pedagogical training. While some engineering education programs exist, they tend to focus more heavily on pedagogical aspects and students in these programs might not have advanced training or specialization often necessary to teach in engineering programs. It is important that those hired in this track not be viewed as ‘second-class’ in any way nor should the ‘teaching track’ become the pathway for tenure of the ‘regular faculty’ who have a reasonable teaching evaluations but could not build a research program. Doing so, would be a clear indication that the department and college does not value pedagogical research. Therefore, there is no need to create a pathway that not viewed as being valuable.
Many of the challenges identified above are fixable. However, it requires creating an environment where pedagogy as a whole (and not simply teaching classes) is viewed as a worthy endeavor. It will require clear guidelines from the college and department administration on what is expected from these ‘gateway faculty’. There should be a commitment to provide these faculty with startup funds and other resources to succeed. In particular, create an environment where ‘gateway faculty’ can take risks and try out new pedagogical innovations. This will require a general change in the mindset where pedagogical contributions are valued as much as research contributions by all faculty in the department.
Innovative models for dissertation, wherein a student can publish both in ‘engineering’ and ‘engineering education’ fields to meet the requirements of the degree is necessary to support research endeavors of ‘gateway faculty’. This is also necessary to train the future ‘teaching track’ faculty who can play in both engineering and education sandboxes and better integrate the two. There is definitely merit in creating future ‘pedagogically-oriented’ academic leaders. However, in the absence of total commitment to this cause, maintaining status-quo is perhaps a better choice.
The inability to engage in discussions and limited student participation is often cited as a major concern by professors who have traditionally taught face-to-face (F2F) classes but had to switch over to online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty have historically relied on verbal and non-verbal clues to adapt their classroom instruction. Even in synchronous online classes, many faculty have wondered if the students are actually present on the other end and if they are – are they in the right mental state and in a conducive learning environment to assimilate the material being presented via zoom or other similar platforms? Traditionally, class participation is viewed as an important component of learning and a strong measure of student engagement. There is however a growing body of evidence that oral participation in the classroom is a weak indicator of student engagement at best and most likely provides no appreciable evidence of how well a student is engaged with the subject matter [1]. Student engagement is multifaceted and comprises of cognitive, emotional and behavioral components that class participation does not fully measure [2].
Student Engagement in Online Settings
If nonverbal communication is a better indicator of student engagement in classes, then are we out of luck in the online modality? Even is fairly small synchronous online classes, it is often not possible to see every student even when they all have their cameras on. There might be really genuine reasons (e.g., bandwidth constraints) why a student might want their cameras off [4]. Doing so might actually help them engage better. When I first started teaching online classes, I insisted students to un-mute their mic and answer questions. As with my F2F lectures, I saw it was the same set of students who took that bait over and over again. I also noticed that some students would send me a “private chat message” rather than answer verbally. Clearly, these were students with “communication apprehension”. They wanted to engage in the class but just not orally.
Education researchers use the word ‘communication apprehension’ to mean students not wanting participate orally in the classroom. The online modality allows for non-oral communication (e.g., private chat) that students find less apprehensive. It took me a little while to find the best way to keep the chat box open and consciously look at it. Yes, it would have been lot easier for me if the students un-muted and spoke, instead of sending private chat messages. But I realized there are greater gains to student engagement if I exploited the technology better rather than have the students confirm to my archaic norms. Private chat helped overcome the “oral communication apprehension” and lead to greater participation and engagement albeit privately and non-orally. I could maintain the anonymity of the student but tell the class what their answer or perspective was to foster additional discussion.
As a “GenXer” I had a late exposure to emoticons in life. Over the years, I have actually started using some common ones in informal communications :-). However, Millennials and Gen Z grew up with emoticons as part of their day-to-day vocabulary (especially in online communications such as texts and emails). Video Conferencing platforms (e.g., Teams and Zoom) provide a set of emoticons in their chat feature. These can be used to obtain nonverbal feedback from students (Thumbs up, clapping, sad, frown, etc.). However, there is an apprehension among students that this might be viewed as ‘unacademic’ and as such there is a reluctance to use them to provide feedback in classes [5]. I encourage faculty to check out the range of emoticons available and if you are comfortable, tell your students to post them (or send them privately to you) in chats as a way to provide feedback. Quizzes and surveys can also be easily conducted using video-conferencing platforms. You can use a post-lecture survey to see what concepts were clearer to the students which weren’t. I always put a “You Should Know” slide at the end of my lecture which highlights the main topics I covered and concepts/skills that students should know or take-away. This can easily be turned into a survey to get some feedback. If the vast majority felt the topic was unclear you could add additional material (asynchronously), give them more practice exercises or provide additional reinforcement in the next class. Online technologies not only help overcome what is lost from the classroom setting but also provide new avenues for improving student engagement.
Student engagement in asynchronous online classes is far more challenging than in synchronous settings. Student engagement in this case tends to be heterogeneous and individualized. Therefore faculty must periodically aggregate individual engagement to evaluate overall class-level engagement. Again, it is important to understand that participation and engagement are not necessarily the same and communication apprehension is a real factor that affects participation level even in asynchronous settings. Therefore, participation metrics such as number of discussion posts and length of discussion posts may not be useful indicators. Use of surveys, quizzes and other feedback mechanisms that allow anonymity are useful. An assessment of whether course objectives are being met throughout the semester (rather than in the very end) could be useful to evaluate the nature and extent of engagement and make mid-course corrections as appropriate. Needless to say, student engagement is directly proportional to the faculty engagement and particularly so in asynchronous settings. So faculty should think of ways to stay engaged with the class. Some useful suggestions that I have gleaned and implemented are weekly emails, sending notifications and reminders to the classes on deadlines and due dates. Posting tips and hints to assignments based on questions I got from some students in the class (this way the larger class benefits and has the same information and it might just help an apprehensive student solve that problem).
Taking Online Teaching Lessons into Face-to-Face Instruction
The COVID-19 pandemic gave a lot of faculty to dabble in online instruction. As universities transition from online/hybrid modes of instruction back to the traditional F2F modality, what lessons that we learned from online experimentation are worth carrying forward? In terms of student engagement, online mode offers several nifty widgets to increase engagement, especially from ‘communication apprehensive’ students. I think having a Teams/Zoom chat open during traditional F2F classroom could help students engagement/participation, especially from communication apprehensive students. The quiz/poll features in these video-conferencing services, can replace or serve as a substitute to options such as ‘poll everywhere’ or clickers that many faculty use to get student feedback in class. Chats can be saved and made available to students via LMS to document discussion. Some moderation and setting of ground rules may be necessary prior to their use. Use of standard emojis as a form of communication may help Gen Y and Gen Z students be more open in their online communication but might need some getting used to by faculty who did not grow up with them. It is important to communicate the limits of such usage so students know what is acceptable and what could be considered ‘unacademic’.
Student engagement is key to overall academic success, whether it is traditional classroom instruction or online teaching. Student verbal participation is not the same as student engagement. Interestingly online modality offers some tools and methods to reduce communication apprehension and improve student engagement. It might serve us best to incorporate them even when we transition back to face to face teaching.
References:
[1] Frymier, A.B. and Houser, M.L., 2016. The role of oral participation in student engagement. Communication Education, 65(1), pp.83-104.
[2] Fredricks, J. A., Blumenfeld, P. C., & Paris, A. H. (2004). School engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74(1), 59–109.
[4] Castelli, F.R. and Sarvary, M.A., 2021. Why students do not turn on their video cameras during online classes and an equitable and inclusive plan to encourage them to do so. Ecology and Evolution, 11(8), pp.3565-3576.
[5] Phirangee, K. and Hewitt, J., 2016. Loving this dialogue!!!!: Expressing emotion through the strategic manipulation of limited non-verbal cues in online learning environments. In Emotions, technology, and learning (pp. 69-85). Academic Press.
The Spring of 2020 started off with with the news of a new strain of virus that was wreaking havoc in Wuhan, China. As the semester progressed, the virus quickly spread across the world and led to the declaration of a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. Universities across the US quickly responded and told students not to return after the spring break and changed to the online instruction modality. My university was no exception and the university community had about 10 days or so to make this switch. While continuing to be hopeful that things could be back to normal by Fall 2020, many knew, the pandemic had changed the face of higher education forever. While some progress was made towards getting back to the normal in Spring 2021 and we have greater hope of returning back to traditional face-to-face instruction in Fall 2021 (thanks to the vaccines) the indelible scar of the pandemic will continue to linger on at least in the near future.
There is a saying in Texas that one should never let a disaster go to a waste. Therefore, every effort is being made towards understanding the lessons pandemic taught those in higher education. Our dean has created a COVID-19 task force to see how our response to pandemic and lessons learned can improve our service to our students. After a year of pandemic teaching, some reflection on what I learned is indeed appropriate and timely. This blog documents what I had to learn to make my classes accessible and hopefully interesting to my students.
At the undergraduate level, I teach the Mechanics of Fluids laboratory. In the Spring of 2020, I had to move a few labs online and I taught the lab entirely in the online mode during Fall 2020. My TA and another graduate student helped me shoot some excellent videos of the experiments and spruced it with nifty transitions and slow motions shots to make it interesting and cool. The students really liked these online labs and they nicely complemented the online lectures that I already had in place before the pandemic. In Spring 2021 we brought students into the lab, but due to social distancing requirements, we could only bring 1 group of 4 students at each time (We have 60+ students in total). This made it very difficult to get all the data that had to be collected within the lab and we still had to rely on old datasets for analysis, the labs were more a demo of the instruments and their workings. The jury is still out if this experiment was worth the effort in Spring 2021. The students saw the instruments first hand and actually interacted with their group members face-to-face. However, they did not complete the full experiment as the class was not in all together to collect multiple sets of data. They had access to the videos we used in Spring and Fall 2020. It appeared like most students were happy to be back, but there were cases of COVID and sickness which made things difficult at times. I added some post-lab simulations using R Shiny and this was a good opportunity to set up a Linux server on the cloud and provide exposure to some additional concepts that build on the laboratory experiments (Our college being a Microsoft shop could not offer much support and I had to get a cloud account and set it on my own dime (well I did give up going to Dunkin Donuts during the pandemic so had some change to spare for this!!).
I will continue to refine these simulations and make them available to the students. If the pandemic lingers or rears its ugly head we are prepared. But I sure hope we will be back in the lab like we were pre-pandemic doing things hands-on like a good lab experience should be. But we might limp there over the next year. I will be cautious to minimize exposure, continue to sanitize the work stations and continue to think of ways to minimize human contact with instruments while trying as best to be hands-on as one can be in this altered “virus informed” world that we live in now.
At the graduate level, I teach a sequence of computational courses in civil engineering these classes include Probabilistic Methods for Civil Engineers (a course that uses R extensively) and Machine Learning for Civil Engineers (which is Python based). I had to move these classes online during pandemic. As luck would have it, I had secured funding to develop an online graduate certificate titled “Data and Informatics for Civil Engineers” (DICE) and was planning to develop online counterparts to these classes anyways. The pandemic both hampered and accelerated this process. The biggest learning to me came in understanding the differences in curriculum design for an online and face-to-face instruction. I did a lot of reading to understand these differences. There is a lot of good information out there on chunking, pacing, maintaining a two way dialogue virtually, providing support on both academic and non-academic issues and the big role of constant communication in ensuring academic success in online settings.
Interestingly I had a lot more interaction with students then I did when I taught these classes in the traditional mode. This change was likely due to students working individually more so than in groups. I learned that flexibility is a double edge sword. The availability of the materials online ensured the students did not have to rush through them. However, I found students often think online courses as being ‘self-paced’ and as such were slower to start on their assignments (causing last minute rush or requests for extensions). Sending reminder emails, boldly stating the need to start early in course LMS did help alleviate the process some.
The computational classes in civil engineering often have a significant cognitive load. Students in general are not comfortable with scripting and programming and there is considerable reticence and inertia towards learning by failing (an essential part of learning computer programming). In addition, students are also asked to think how new computational tools help with civil engineering practice, especially open-ended problems. This is also new to early graduate students who take these classes. I have made use of video tutorials for many years to reduce or minimize this cognitive stress associated with scripting and programming. The pandemic put these efforts on steroids. I spent a lot of time watching videos and reading on content delivery in online environments and continue to learn more about these topics on a regular basis. I used to teach classes in the evenings and tell students that I would stay back for an hour or so to help them with programming. I could walk from student to student and help them, see common threads of errors and address them to the larger class. This had to be done online. An hour video will cause students to scroll and miss out on some things. So adaptation was necessary, information now had to be fed in a ‘byte-size’ portions!!
I also made considerable investments in technology and practically turned the study in my house into a recording studio replete with green screens, multiple high end microphones, multiple 4K webcams to shoot from different angles, a document cam and a writing tablet along with several high-end laptops (mostly running Linux and one running Windows for completeness). I also learned a lot about video recording software (OBS), editing software (kdenlive, camtesia) and even dabbled with animation software (Pencil 2D, tupitube, etc). I now know where to look for royalty-free music, videos and pictures, new templates for office software (to avoid the monotony of Power Point layouts and designs). Understanding the importance of proper lighting and sound dampeners in generating high quality video lectures. I had to train myself to look at the camera and not at pictures of students in Zoom. As I do not like to read off a script, video recordings often take a few takes. If anything I have great appreciation for actors now and do not wonder as much as to why they are so highly paid!! It is important to communicate to students the time needed to make good videos. In the past I have shared videos of my in-class lectures and lectures I shot at home. Hands down students like the later. If we value our students, we need to move away from the notion of what is easy for us to what is best for them!!
I had a hearing impaired student in my class in Fall 2020 which meant that every video that I posted had to have closed captioning to comply with American Disabilities Act (ADA). The eLearning and Instructional Technology team at TTU offered help. However, it took 4 – 6 days to get captioning done. Captioning engineering courses is also tough as equations are part of the vocabulary and captioners are usually not familiar with the engineering lingo. The file with captions therefore had to be synchronized with the video and re-edited. This added further delays not to mention an additional 3 – 4 hours of captioning corrections each week.
I explored sites that used machine learning for captioning and was pleasantly surprised at the results from otter.ai. It was not perfect, but comparable to human translations and importantly the turn-around time was less than an hour. Again, while I had to pay for this out of my pocket (several cups of coffees from Dunkin Donuts had to be sacrificed in this process), the students appreciated the quicker turn around times. I also learned that you could only burn-in captions with MP4 (not an ADA recommended practice) and one had to use a video player like VLC which added the caption track separately. Care is also necessary to ensure the captions sync well (or at least lead and not lag) and are limited to 32 characters and no more than 3 lines. Getting help from graduate students was great albeit imperfect at times. Assuming students will figure out how to add captioning while watching videos was not a good idea and things went smoothly when I showed what had to be done.
Like many universities in the US, our university also uses Mediasite for hosting video content. Both my experiences as well as those of my students with this service have been bad. Upload times are too slow and the system is subject to frequent crashes. I had to wait for 10+ hours at times only to find that the upload did not go through. The system was down many times when the students wanted to access it leading to significant frustration all around. The tech support for Mediasite at the university left much to be desired. It was puzzling as to why I could not use a ftp server to upload content and had to go through multiple layers of bloatware and one video upload at a time? Fortunately, the university does provide 1TB of storage space on One-Drive which came to my rescue when sharing videos and other content with my students. Again, not optimal (nothing from Microsoft generally is), especially students stuck in other countries had a tough time accessing content on time due to bandwidth limitations.
There are several differences in teaching face to face versus online even in synchronous settings. It is important to walk in with a positive mindset and constantly seek feedback from students. Murphy’s law will prove right time and again and will test your preparedness. However, the greatest lesson I have learned is that the resilience of our students is at an all time high. They are, by and large, a committed bunch who are adapting to the new realities just the way we faculty are. It is important that we recognize that and work towards creating content that keeps them motivated and keep going. We simply cannot continue business as usual and it is important to constantly evaluate whether what has worked in the past will continue to do so in the future.
The situation during the pandemic was fluid, there was a lot of reactionary decisions being made, especially with regards to instructional technologies. Therefore it is unwise and even unreasonable to expect that the university or the college has it all figured out. If one is committed to student success, a lot of that can be overcome, but it will likely require faculty to spend some $$ from their own pocket, as equipment will be used in their homes!! I use to hear horror stories of how elementary and high school teachers were having to buy their own supplies and not even getting any tax breaks on their teaching related purchases. They do make lot less then us poor university faculty – something to keep in mind as you pay that Amazon charge on your credit card for purchases you made to enhance online instruction!!
Of course as we slowly inch back towards normalcy, the big question is how to best use the lessons learned during the pandemic. The university has invested into online modality (some good, some bad). Many faculty, I am sure, have compensated for the shortcomings by finding the proverbial coffee cans as necessary. Everyone, has undoubtedly learned a lot. Yes online instruction and face-to-face instruction have many differences, but marrying the two (even if it is a shotgun wedding) can lead to some fantastic pedagogic innovations. For example, blending online elements (e.g., asynchronous learning to scaffold and spread out cognitive loads) with traditional classroom instructions (higher levels of interactivity) is one idea. Virtual office hours may lead to better efficiencies in meeting with large number of students and avoid redundant or repetition of information by faculty.
Some seemingly good ideas can have unintended consequences. Capturing the classroom lecture and making it available to the students is one such idea. Yes, students can go back and watch what they did not understand, but it also takes away note-taking skills of students, makes them less inclined to read the textbook or even do independent thinking to learn the material. Self-reflection exercises in my classes have increasingly shown that students increasingly limit their study to classroom experiences and self-study and independent explorations have become greatly diminished in the last few years. The trade-offs must be carefully weighed but that said not carrying the lessons learned from the pandemic into the future is letting a good disaster go to a waste and that is definitely anti-Texan at its very core!!
