What I’m reading…
In a webinar, The Human Element in Online Learning, that I watched earlier this week, the presenters shared two articles related to inclusive online teaching: 6 Quick Ways to Be More Inclusive in a Virtual Classroom (Flower Darby) and 8 Ways to Be More Inclusive in Your Zoom Teaching (Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy)
Ryan Boyd’s book review, The Syllabus Reads You: Our pedagogies cannot be divorced from our working conditions, of William Germano and Kit Nicholls’ book, Syllabus is both an interesting critique of the book and an excellent piece on its own. I was particularly struck by the clear explanation of a fundamental contradiction in what instructors are being asked to do:
Implicit in Germano and Nicholls’s work is the reality that ever-ballooning class sizes and teaching assignments are pedagogically disastrous, because the bigger a professor’s workload is, and the more unwieldy the conditions in which they have to conduct, the less the professor can actually connect with and nurture individuals. Indeed, I wish the authors were even more direct about this, because it is, in my view, the crux of everything.
All the technology advances - new student tracking systems, automated early interventions, LMS analytics, proctoring software - which mediate the instructor-student relationship will not achieve our goals if there is no time for human connection.
I heard from a colleague at the National University of Singapore, Kiruthika Ragupathi, about how her office is working to support faculty teaching hybrid/HyFlex this semester, and she shared this infographic she created that creatively captures the constellation of activities that fit into different delivery modes.
Happy reading!