Online Learning in the Second Half

In EP 35, John and Jason kick off fall 2025 with a conversation on how AI has been added to Grammarly and Canvas (whether we like it or not) and if the future of online learning will be formed by Cyborg pedagogy (and what that means).  See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Guest Bios: John Nash, PhD, is an associate professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Kentucky. Jason Johnston, PhD, is the Executive Director of Online Learning and Course Production at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Resources: Canvas and OpenAI Partnership Press Release Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript: We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections! EP 35 - Educators with or versus AI? Grammarly, Canvas AI, and Cyborg Pedagogy Jason: But I'm looking forward to the, great list of potential guests that we have. I don't want to say any names yet 'cause nobody said yes yet. John: No. Jason: We don't have any yeses yet, John: Yeah. Everybody's just Jason: on the calendar yet John: our list is amazing, Jason: Yeah, we've got a great list. John: no one's, we haven't sent them invitations yet. Jason: Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess there's that too. So we haven't gotten any nos. That's a good part John: No. No. Jason: Yeah. John: No. Yes. I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. Jason: Hey, John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half, the Online Learning podcast. John: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for now our third season kicking off about online education. I know. And so, hey, newsflash, online learning is still trying to be great. Some of it is, a lot of it still isn't quite there, Jason. We're gonna keep talking about how to get it to the next stage. How are we gonna do that? Jason: That is a great question. How about we talk about today, what we're thinking about this fall as we head into this new school year and new season? John: Yeah, absolutely. It's been an interesting summer. Little things popping up here and there. I notice Grammarly's doing some interesting things. Looks like Canvas is doing some things. A lot of stuff on the horizon. Jason: . Yeah. And I would love to get into those, but I wanted to just kind of on the front end as we're kind of restarting the season, just even talk a little bit about, just a overall standpoint just for a moment here to talk about why we are doing this podcast. What do you think, John? Why are we doing this podcast again? John: I think we're doing this podcast for a couple of reasons. I'll throw out the very selfish reason why I'm doing this podcast. This is my professional development activity. This keeps me honest in terms of thinking about what I believe is important about teaching and learning online. It also gives me a chance to hear what you're thinking and I value your opinion and your philosophies a lot. And I think it also lets us share some ideas with like-minded people who are really interested in trying to make online teaching and learning better. Jason: Yeah. That's good. I've got a check mark beside all those. Always enjoy the conversation with you, John. This is a big part of wanting to do these. I always look forward to them and And we realized when we started adding guests to our podcast, although we really enjoy our conversations, but it just adds another element of another voice. And that's one thing I really value about bringing different guests with different viewpoints in. As we get started this year, I hope to bring in some different viewpoints, not just people that would just agree with everything that we have to say, but people that maybe would challenge us and challenge some of our approaches to online learning and integrating technology and trying to humanize online learning, all of those things. I would love to get into conversations with people who really push us to think more deeply and more concretely as well. Like, how is this really gonna play out? John: Yeah, I want to keep talking about that. I want to keep talking about as we're gonna probably chat about today as we think about the topics that I wanted to bring up things are getting a little more automated. The prevalence of AI across platforms is increasing and it's going to be a slippery slope, I think, for keeping humans in the loop. I think even the, sort of the sales scripts that are coming out are saying, it's almost as if it's saying, " you don't need as much humanity in the loop; we got this now." And I don't think that's the case. And I think I want to, I want to be a part of the band that's playing the song set that says, Hey folks, we need to stick together on this. We need to be humans in this loop and keep it all human centered. Jason: Yeah, I agree. Yep. Well, those seem like perfect themes to keep going on here in our podcast. And as part of that you were talking a little bit to me the other day about these kind of new features that Grammarly is rolling out. And a lot of people, I use Grammarly. I used it on my I use it often. Sometimes it's a little frustrating 'cause it just pops up everywhere it seems like now that I have it, installed on my computer, but I find it very helpful. I don't pay for it right now. I'm not being paid by them, but I find it very helpful to just have this grammar help. But it feels like they're moving into a new kind of AI era. John: Yeah. And what's interesting is here, in my department we have a doctoral program. We have an online curriculum. We held the first meeting of the new cohort of doctoral students and we talked about, tools that they might find useful in their doctoral journey. And we had some currently enrolled doctoral students, a couple of other professors. And Grammarly came up. And one of the new students asked " if I use Grammarly for like, changing my phrasing or things like that, is that gonna be considered cheating when in my new program with you?" And and I said, and my colleague, professor, colleague also concurred that I asked students to use Grammarly before they turn in their material. Because, as a mentor in a scholarly process, I want to be able to think about the ideas that they are bringing forth, and not necessarily the mechanics and correcting the copy. I want to jump right into the thinking. And so by running the typical Grammarly checker on subject verb agreement and clearing up things, that's fine. I like doing that. Now , I'm jumping into Grammarly and I'm seeing new features are popping up. And so it's interesting to think about what are these new AI agents that they're sticking in there that go beyond just checking your grammar as the name of the app says it's "Grammarly," right? We want, " please turn in your stuff having been checked for grammar." We like that 'cause we can get to the ideas. But what do we think about these new agents? I'm not so sure yet because they're, it's kind of interesting. Jason: yeah. And it's a good question by the student. I'm glad you're having the conversation. Right. It was like, it was just over a year ago, there was a university of North Georgia student who was placed on academic probation, accused of using AI for for creating a paper. Whereas she said that she just used Grammarly for fixing and getting feedback on some of the grammar, right? I think that we need to be thinking about what the features are as well as how we're having these conversations with students and where, where our limits are. So, what all did you find out about Grammarly as you were digging into it? Some of your thoughts. John: So Grammarly has all these agents now and stuff we knew about before, a plagiarism checker and some, but they have a paraphraser now, a reader reactions agent, A proof reader. Duh. That's why we use it. Jason: Yes. John: And AI grader. And so the AI grader. " Revise. Revise your writing with purpose and see your score improve, get feedback based on your assignment rubric and instructor expectations so you can make changes that count." " Estimate your grade, get early feedback. Revise with intention and submit confidently." So it's an agent that "estimates your score based on your assignment rubric and your instructor's grading style." Oh boy. It "provides personalized feedback, allowing you to see how your writing aligns with the assignment requirements and make adjustments to improve your grade. Ideal for all types of written assignments." " It's designed for students who want to predict how their work will land with their instructor and take control of their grades." I mean, I guess, well, I mean, wouldn't it be nice if you just had a good relationship with your instructor? Jason: That does feel ideal. But at the same time, I mean, we've always . Encourage students to use like a tutor of some sort if they're struggling, right. To be John: Yeah, Jason: able to understand assignments and to help them achieve higher levels of learning and achievements in the classroom. John: They've also thrown in an AI detector. So how ironic with the University of North Georgia student: will Grammarly detect itself being used and therefore go into some kind of a death loop? I don't know. I mean, Jason: Or, like, when somebody is like supplying weapons to two sides of a war or something like that, right? So, John: yes. Jason: it kind of feels a little bit like they're work in both sides of the equation here. John: I may have to experiment with this 'cause I wonder how it gets the student to... Look, i'll be honest. I mean, I do the best I can. You do too. We all have colleagues that aren't champions at being clear about what their standards are for assign

In EP 34, John and Jason discuss with Dr. Judith Boettcher the evolution of online learning, the importance of instructional design, and the centrality of student engagement. The conversation also touches on project-based learning, AI's impact on education, and the critical role of teacher-as-mentor. Tune in for an insightful discussion on making online learning more effective, human, and future-ready. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Learn more about Dr. Judith Boettcher on her website: http://designingforlearning.info/about-dr-boettcher/ Resources: PLATO Computer System Judith’s Website Judith’s book: Online Teaching Survival Guide (2021) Jason’s other top Online Teaching Books Michelle Miller “Minds Online” Flower Darby - “Small Teaching Online” Catherine Denial “Pedagogy of kindness” Judith’s article: Student-Centered Learning in Dewey’s Holodeck – It Doesn’t Get Any Better than This—Now! IHE article - The Absurdity of Asynchrony Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections! [00:00:00] Jason: Today is a fulfillment of a little bit of a dream of mine. Do you know this? So thank you for helping me fulfill one of my dreams. [00:00:06] Judith: Wow. Sounds like excellent planning, Jason! [Intro Music] [00:00:10] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:13] Jason: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the online learning podcast. [00:00:19] John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the past. Wow. Are we going to start our third year of this soon? Yeah. [00:00:28] Jason: I guess so. [00:00:30] John Nash: About online education, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but still a lot of it isn't. So how are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? [00:00:39] Jason: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:00:44] John Nash: I'd love to do that. What do you want to talk about today? [00:00:47] Jason: Well, I'm very excited today, John, because we have a very special guest with us. Somebody that I've been reading her work now for a while and it is Judith Betcher. Judith, welcome. [00:01:00] Judith: Well, thank you very much for being here. I'm delighted to be part of your series. [00:01:04] Jason: Yeah, well, it's so great to have you. Judith, why don't you tell us just a little bit about kind of your your background? What have you been up to for the last little while? I know that a big part of your life is online learning and you've done it both in various capacities. So just tell us a little bit. [00:01:19] Judith: well, actually, getting ready for this podcast, I started going back and thinking, and when you're as old as I am, that's kind of dangerous, you realize, and I thought, Oh my God, my first experience with anything approaching online learning was when I was working for a computer company and we were building and designing. What was called at that time computer based instruction. So, as man, as we've moved along here, over these years, I was thinking it's actually online learning has become it actually is a merging of the computer based instruction movement with the traditional distance learning, in the old distance learning correspondence learning. So what we have Today in 2025 is really elements of all of these different movements, starting back with the like I said, the computer based instruction movement. [00:02:11] Jason: Yeah, that's great. And do you mind me asking what year that might have been with a computer based instruction? I just think it's interesting to think about historically our, trajectory with online learning. [00:02:24] Judith: Yes, actually, I will confess that was the decade of the 80s and it was with control data corporation in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And at that time we built computer based instruction and it was designed. For the Plato system, which was a mainframe computer application. And so then I'm afraid I have lived through moving from the mainframe application to the microcomputers, to the now, of course, to the powerful computers that we Carry in our pockets and our watches on our arms, it's been quite a journey to be honest, but after I finished that work at Control Data, that was when I went to Penn State and at that time for a few years there at Penn State. I Managed a group very similar to what it sounds like you do, Jason. I had a group at that time, the folks at Penn State were very innovative and forward thinking, in that we, I had a group of instructional designers and video folks, and, programming folks, and we. Assisted faculty in, we actually would load up a van and put, computers, these huge computers, and take them around campus and set them up and say, wow, look what you could, Mr. Faculty Member, what can, what, see what you can do with these computers. It was quite, it was, it's been quite an adventure to be honest. [00:03:47] John Nash: You bring back memories, Judith, because my dissertation at the University of Wisconsin contained the word microcomputer in the title. Um, that's what the desktop computers were. They were like, just, yeah, it's funny. We still don't use that term because basically we're just all running microcomputer, microcomputers on our desks, but we don't use that anymore. The Apple IIe days. Yes. Right. Yeah. [00:04:10] Judith: Yes. Yes, exactly. But anyway, and to finish up a little bit after Penn State, I moved down here to Tallahassee, to Florida State, and in, in part of this time period, I did start consulting with with faculty who were teaching online at Duquesne University. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And as I, start was consulting and meeting with them, I started developing these tips and ideas and best practices. And as you can anticipate, it was all of that work, the tips and the practices. When I found myself repeating myself over and over again, that was when I decided, well, maybe a book would be a good idea. So that was kind of the genesis of the survival guide for teaching online. [00:04:58] Jason: And that's really how I came to know you, Judith. and I was talking to John about this. Today is a fulfillment of a little bit of a dream of mine. Do you know this? Of being able to have you on the podcast. A little bit of a goal. So, [00:05:09] Judith: No [00:05:10] Jason: yeah, because these are the four books, and I'm being honest about this. Well, three, these are the three books, actually, over a long time I've I have recommended to people. And then I've added one, in the fall Michelle Miller's "Minds Online." Flower Darby's Small Teaching Online, and then your book, the Online, Teaching Survival Guide. And then recently added, because it just came out in the fall, Catherine Denial's Pedagogy of Kindness, which is not an online book, but is such an important book, I think, particularly for this day and age. So those are my four book recommendations for people that want to get going online with practical tips and not so much from a development standpoint, more from a teaching standpoint. So first year we had Michelle Miller on the show, and then last year we had Flower Darby and Catherine Denial on the show, and now you are joining us today. So thank you for helping me fulfill one of my dreams. [00:06:08] Judith: Wow. Sounds like excellent. [00:06:15] Jason: Well, and it wasn't actually too calculated, except that, as John and I are talking just about what kinds of, people and conversations we want to have on this show, we realized we started almost two years ago. And, we realized we kind of just jumped into things. We started talking about making your online courses more human and creating student agency. And we talked a lot about AI and about some of the risks and challenges and opportunities around that. And we haven't really gone back to talk about more foundational teaching online. Because it's online learning in the second half, we're kind of positioning it as looking back on the first half of online learning. Now, , we know how to dump information on people now online, right? We can do it. What do we hope for in our second half of online learning? And as John and I are peering into our second halves of life and well into our second halves of lives, we're thinking about that in terms of online learning. So , that's a long introduction to say this is one of the reasons why we have you on today. So, [00:07:19] Judith: Well, let me just mention, I did start listening to the podcast on the Pedagogy of Kindness, and I didn't get very far because I ran out of time this morning, but I look forward to going back. It sounds like a great, perspective to add to our designing. And in fact, then, to add to that. The whole reason my website is called Designing for Learning is that's my passion Whenever I started working with faculty, trying to ask them the question is what is it, what are the outcomes, the takeaways that you really want your students to take away from a course I'll see if I can remember this. Remember there's that five minute short video of the person, who tried to summarize the college education in five minutes, and he said, okay, here's what I learned from Spanish, como esta, and that was it, that was the total impact, from the whole Spanish, sequence. And similarly, so just when we have our wonderful students, who'd commit to time and energy and focus. What, in fact, and how will they change as a result of those experiences? And I think if we really want to service our students and serve them well, we have to be ready to ans

In EP 33, John and Jason talk to Flower Darby about small steps for inclusive, equitable, and humanized online learning, and explore the transformative power of community, connection, and compassion in digital classrooms while tackling the future of AI’s role in education. Join Our LinkedIn Group - Online Learning Podcast Resources: Flower Darby Website Small Teaching Online (book) The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching Request a free copy: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/equityguide Karen Costa’s 99 Tips For Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos(book) Steven Covey - Circle of Control - Circle of Influence Flower’s Recent article in the Chronicle: https://www.chronicle.com/article/5-small-steps-for-ai-skeptics I’m a Doctor. ChatGPT’s Bedside Manner Is Better Than Mine.  Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections! False Start [00:00:00] Flower Darby: It's always fun to talk to interesting, intelligent people who care deeply about our work. So I've, enjoyed our conversation. [00:00:11] Jason:. So that's our,that's a lot of our main goal here, really, John, is to get to that point. Where people say nice things about us. And to know it's coming from a real person. I mean, ChatGPT loves everything I say, NotebookLM. Absolutely adores every article I've ever written and every line, but to know this is coming from a real person makes a difference for me. So thank you. Real Start [00:00:34] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:37] Jason: John. Hey, everyone. And this is online learning in the second half, the online learning podcast. [00:00:42] John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great and some of it is, but there's still some that isn't. So can we get to the next stage? [00:00:56] Jason: That's a great question, John. How about we do a podcast to talk about it? [00:01:00] John Nash: I think that's a great idea. What do you want to talk about today? [00:01:04] Jason: Well, you know, one of the great things about being able to do a podcast is meeting cool people and people that can help us answer this question about, you know, what are we going to do in the second half of life as it comes to theonline podcast? And maybe the second half of our lives too. I don't know, John. We could, I guess we could that into some of our podcast, actually get some, get some life coaching or something from the, from the guests as they come in. [00:01:32] John Nash: if that involves me divulging my age. I'll, I'm not doing that yet. [00:01:36] Jason: Okay. All right. Well, I think I just did a little bit, so, in just in a general sense. So that's good. Well, we have Flower Darby with us as a guest. And so I'm really excited to talk to Flower. Hi Flower. How are you? [00:01:51] Flower Darby: Hi, Jason. I'm so good. Hi, John. Thank you so much for inviting me onto your podcast. It is always a pleasure and a privilege. I don't take that for granted at all, but anybody cares what I think about anything. So thanks for having me. [00:02:05] Jason: Yeah, well, thank you so much. Yeah. How would you like to introduce yourself, Flower? I mean, we could read some of the things off your bio, but what would you like our audience to know about you that might be helpful for them to understand our conversation today? [00:02:21] Flower Darby: Sure, let me just quickly and conversationally sum up my background I don't, I'm not a fan of reading a bio, people can look that up themselves if they would like to get more information, right, But I have been teaching in higher education for coming up on 29 years, this January, it'll make 29 years, I have taught lots of different things, including English, dance, Pilates, and I've been teaching for over 30 years. Leadership technology, educational technology. And as we were chatting about a few minutes ago, now I'm teaching social psychology because I just like to keep it interesting. But most of that teaching, there's two other things that I would quickly add. Most of that teaching has been as a part time instructor on top of the rest of my life, right? That's just how we do. And that's how a lot of online instructors do. And the other thing I would add is that I've been teaching online for 16 years or so and have had the amazing opportunity to. Co author a couple of books on that topic. So, that's the perspective that I'm bringing here today. [00:03:18] Jason: That's great. Yeah. And really the first time I saw your name that a little bit about who you were, through some of your writing and specifically book, Small Teaching Online. This was a resource in my work that I both valued and learned from, but also have recommended to a lot of people over the years. and I think it's a really brilliant book and brilliant approach, which of course is a book, Small Teaching. You give people a synopsis of the approach of the book, if they're not familiar?  [00:03:59] Flower Darby: All credit to James Lang for the concept in general. Small teaching is about how we can make little changes in our teaching practices that are based in the science of how people learn. And because they're based on such strong evidence, and such a strong research base, they actually have an outsized impact on student learning, student engagement, student memory and recall of information. And, but the point is that these things are not overwhelming. They don't create a large grading burden. They don't take a lot of time to execute in a class or in a module. They're little things, little changes that have that outsized impact. And so, his book, Small Teaching, has been extremely impactful for many faculty because it is so doable. And so in around 2018 or so I met him and asked if he would be interested in working on a project together. Because I know that for online instructors, sometimes at heart, it can feel overwhelming. So that's what this book does, is it takes his very practical idea and just applies it very directly to specifically asynchronous online classes. Synchronous classes were not As much of a thing when we wrote that book as they became during COVID-19. So that's the idea. Little things that online instructors can do that are not overwhelming that really help online students to persist, to learn to thrive in these spaces. [00:05:20] Jason: Yeah, and I think that that's a great synopsis. I love that. And I think I would just like to say to people, if you haven't read this book, and if you teach online, whether it's asynchronous or, or synchronous, I just go grab the book. It'll be really helpful. And I'm not saying this just because Flower is here, but it truly is is one of those books when people have asked me over the years. and I'm kind of glad we're coming back to this a little bit, John, too, because we've talked about the fact that, you know, we started this podcast to talk about online learning, and we just kind of dived right into talking about some of the almost 10, 000 foot kind of level stuff, right? And we've talked a lot about AI and about overall theoretical kind of things. I'm not sure we've really gotten into kind of the smaller day to day practices. So this is just a good, maybe call it for that [00:06:11] John Nash: Yeah, not so much. I think that's right. Yeah, [00:06:14] Flower Darby: And thank you for your kind words about the book. [00:06:18] Jason: Yeah. Well, it's true. You wrote that, it was published at least in 2019. A couple things have happened since then. I don't need to remind everybody of all the things, but one being COVID that you mentioned, of course. Hearing you describe it today, Got me thinking about , , some of the mental health crisis, both in students, but also the fact that teachers are feeling overwhelmed and how helpful it is to think about these small iterative improvements that we can make that don't feel overwhelming when we feel so overwhelmed about teaching and all the things that we're being expected to do on campus. Do you think, so there's, I think there's. it was pre-COVID doesn't mean there's not a lot of value there, because I think that there is, and I think a lot of it continues to translate. But is there anything in this book that you would change, or update, or a new chapter that you would tag on if you were to write it today? [00:07:18] Flower Darby: Yeah, good question. And I, one that I've thought a lot about, of course, and it may happen. There may be a second edition. I'm not going to commit to that right this minute, but I think there would be interest if capacity, becomes open enough to take that on. For right now, hypothetically, one of The things that I would do would be to foreground the importance of community. So right now, building community is chapter four in the book, and honestly, I think I would make it chapter one instead. I just really feel like all the logistics and everything that goes into creating inclusive online courses and applying universal design for learning and bringing in the community of inquiry framework, I feel like all of that. This might sound like heresy, but I feel like all of that is actually secondary to the importance of relationships. And that's really how my thinking has evolved, and it was shaped by our experience during lockdown, when we sorely felt the lack of social contact and, whether at a personal level with family members who were remote from us, with our students really struggling to connect. There's lots of stuff in the book I agree with you and I thank you I think there's still lots that's relevant. But one of the big changes that I would make would be to foreground

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Cate Denial, author of “Pedagogy of Kindness” about kindness to self and students in the online classroom. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Guest Bio: Cate Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Her new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, is now available from the University of Oklahoma Press. Her historical research has examined the early nineteenth-century experience of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing in Upper Midwestern Ojibwe and missionary cultures, research that grew from Cate’s previous book, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country (2013). From July 2022 to December 2023, Cate was the PI on a $150,000 Mellon-funded grant bringing together thirty-six participants from across higher education in the United States to explore “Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care in the Academy After COVID-19.” Cate consults on teaching in higher education with individuals, departments, and institutions in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. Connecting with Cate: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-denial-8869a115b/ https://bsky.app/profile/cjdenial.bsky.social https://catherinedenial.org/ Links and Resources: Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection (free access) A Pedagogy of Kindness (book) Michelle Miller’s post on Same Side Pedagogy Rethinking Rigor (Kevin Gannon) Annotate Your Syllabus (Remi Kalir) Digital Pedagogy Lab 2025 Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections! False Start [00:00:00] Jason: good Well, thank you. Yeah, that was a great conversation [00:00:02] Cate Denial: Yeah. Let me know, you know, if you need anything from me and otherwise I'll look forward to listening in when you get it all done. [00:00:10] Jason: Okay, our our timeline is usually somewhere between two weeks and six months [00:00:18] Cate Denial: Okay. Start [00:00:19] John Nash: I'm John nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:22] Jason: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning, the second half, the Online Learning Podcast. [00:00:28] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but. A lot of it still isn't. So how are we going to get to the next stage? [00:00:43] Jason: That's a great question. How about we do a podcast, John, and talk about it? [00:00:48] John Nash: I think that's a perfect idea. What do you want to talk about today? [00:00:51] Jason: Well, today we have a special guest with us. With us is Catherine Denial. Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Welcome, Cate. [00:01:07] Cate Denial: Thanks for having me. [00:01:09] Jason: Can we call you Cate? [00:01:10] Cate Denial: Of course. [00:01:12] Jason: Sometimes I take that liberty when people have that on their little thing in the video screen. I say, well, if it's there, then I guess we can call them that. [00:01:20] Cate Denial: Yeah, absolutely. [00:01:22] Jason: Yeah. Well, good. Well, it's so great to have you here. One of the reasons why we reached out to you is because of your book, which we'll get to. But even before that , in the spring of this last year, so I've got a digital critical pedagogy book club that we started in the spring. So. There's a great anthology that you're part of that talks about the pedagogy of kindness as part of that anthology the Critical digital pedagogy anthology. We'll put the link in our notes. I got to know you're writing there and then of course connected through LinkedIn and Always great to see your posts. I feel like they are kind of North Star-ish posts and I and I like following people who who helped to kind of bring me You bring me back and keep me pointed in the right direction with all of this because you can get really, really in the weeds and also caught up with all the new technologies and everything like that and what we're doing. So anyways, that was kind of my background of connecting with you. And so thank you so much for coming on to the, into the show. I just really look forward to having this conversation and have been looking forward to it ever since we set it up. We're going to get into your first chapter here in a second, but I would like to talk to you a little bit. We would like to talk to you a little bit about just kind of how you got to the place that you are today as as a professor and maybe a little bit about what, It kind of drew you to, to write this book and to kind of take this kind of trajectory, I think, in terms of, of your focus in this direction. [00:03:06] Cate Denial: So it has been 30 years. I am from England originally. And so I showed up in America to go to graduate school and was put in front of a classroom. And I had graduated exactly 1 month before that because the British system goes longer into the year than the American system. was terrified. I didn't know what I was doing. So I projected Dana Scully every time I walked into the classroom from the X Files to try and make sure that I was someone who could actually command some kind of presence in that room. I was taught as a graduate instructor to think of students as antagonists, to suspect them of cheating, to watch out for their plagiarism, to think about the way that they would try and change their grades, to anticipate they wouldn't do the reading. People are very familiar with these sorts of things. And it quickly became clear to me that this wasn't working for me. And it wasn't working for my students either. Setting up that kind of antagonism in the classroom just put us all on edge. So little bit by little bit, I tried things to change. try and change that relationship. I was really flying blind for a great deal of time. I did not know there was such a thing as pedagogy scholarship. I had no idea about the scholarship of teaching and learning. I was just experimenting in my classroom. And then when I became a professor. I was a much better than I had been in 1994. Thank goodness. And that trajectory continued and To conduct myself in a classroom. I was trained in intergroup dialogue as of 2013 from the University of Michigan and intergroup dialogue is a really structured way of talking across big differences around issues like race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability. I have colleagues at Knott's College who were part of my journey alongside me, my colleague, Gabriel Raley Carlin, my colleagues, Hilary Lehrman and Deidre Doherty in particular. And then I went to the Digital Pedagogy Lab in 2017, and that was really where I had this aha moment where the people in charge of my stream asked us to look at our syllabus and to identify who we were writing it to, to literally describe them with a bunch of adjectives. And I realized, despite all the changes that I had made in my teaching, that syllabus communicated that I was a distant authoritarian figure just waiting for people to mess up. that was a shock to me. So I set about completely changing that, right? Going into the granular detail of my syllabus, changing the way that I expressed myself and the things that I asked students to do with the goal of making the self that I presented to them the same self that I am. Right. And so that was really how I got to distilling a pedagogy of kindness. It came very, very directly out of that digital pedagogy lab experience. [00:06:13] John Nash: I'd like to build on that. Cate, I was I, I don't know where this is written somewhere, but it's about the, about the hook. And when you start a book or anything, it's like, you need to capture the reader in the first place. sentence or paragraph and yours did just that. I even texted Jason when I started reading your book saying, I'm on the Kindle version, "I'm 4 percent in and I'm enthralled." And so um, Um, You to get towards kindness. And it's what struck me was also, we talk a lot about, in this podcast with others, about building capacity amongst the ranks of our faculty colleagues to be better teachers the centers for teaching and learning that try to do this. it struck me that this, description you make, which I think is true is a challenge to those that are trying to do the capacity building towards kindness, good pedagogy, is that your take? [00:07:30] Cate Denial: Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think that the culture of higher ed is sort of more than the sum of its parts, right? It's not just the distillation of everybody's individual values and goals. It sort of has a life of its own uh, a culture of its own. And I think that culture is very highly individualistic. I think that it is very, very competitive. I mean, for some of us, it's competitive from the moment we decide we want to go to college, right? and I think that it is antithetical to so many things that are so important for teachers, like community. Right? Like, knowing who you can count on and who's going to be able to assist you in moments where, I don't know, you've run out of chalk, or something terrible just happened in class, or you have too much homework to grade, like, all kinds of things, right? But you need community, and I think that higher ed is actually really bad at building that community in general. [00:08:34] John Nash: Your, your take also reminds me of someone we've spoken to here before Dr. Michelle Miller,

In this episode, John and Jason react to the new button in Google’s Notebook LM that allows users to make an instant podcast. Will it be a threat to educators' voices and hard-working podcasters everywhere? See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: NotebookLM Jason’s article “Better Definitions of Distance Education” The AI Deep Dive Podcast based on the article. Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections! [00:00:00] Jason: That's onlinelearningpodcast.com. [00:00:03] John: Perfect. And that was a real human doing that. [00:00:06] Jason: That was a real human, even though I sounded a little more. I leaned into the mic to make it sound a little more podcasty. [00:00:12] John: Good. Well, we'll have to work on our upbeat banter between [00:00:16] Jason: guess so. [00:00:16] John: too. [00:00:17] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:20] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the Online Learning Podcast. [00:00:25] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. How are we going to get there, Jason? [00:00:40] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:00:45] John Nash: That's a great idea. What do you want to talk about today? [00:00:48] Jason: Nice to see you. How's Sweden? [00:00:50] John: Sweden is good. It's a little rainy here, but now the sun is coming out. It looks like we'll have a nice weekend here. So, it's [00:00:57] Jason: Yeah. Good. [00:00:59] John: So, Jason, what do you think about Google's notebook the LM and what it's doing in particular with these that we'll make from content? Yeah. [00:01:12] Jason: was wild, we've been at this at least a couple of years talking about, at least between you and I, and then like a year and a half here in the podcast, talking about AI and some of its effects on education primarily, but also just on a lot of the creative work that you and I do in different ways. Right. And I joked with somebody that, was fine when AI came for the graphic designers because, I'm not a graphic designer and, when it came for the writers and because I've never been that enthralled with the five paragraph essay anyways, [00:01:45] John: yeah. [00:01:45] Jason: the, the podcasting [00:01:47] John: it's fine that AI put the writers and the graphic designers out of business, but this part about podcasters, that's just too far, That's right. Exactly. [00:01:55] Jason: Notebook LM has been at it for about a year. I believe is the first time that I used it. And it had some nice features of pulling in different content and so on, but they just popped out this podcasting feature and I was blown away by how natural it sounded and then how like up and positive and excited the podcast hosts were about everything that it talked about. John maybe we can listen to a couple of clips that we made. Here's one that I made actually out of a 2020 article that I had published around creating new definitions of distance education. And so, yeah, anyways, let's listen to a little bit and, and see what you think. [00:02:44] John: Yeah, let's do that, because I think that'll show the banter and the give and take. [00:02:48] Notebook 2: Totally. Technically, both are distance learning, but they're totally different experiences. Night and day. And I think that's why you started seeing researchers like Simonson and Seeprasad trying to add more to the definition. [00:03:01] Notebook 1: They were really emphasizing things like two way communication, individualized instruction, that kind of thing. [00:03:06] Notebook 2: They knew those old definitions were too simple for this new world of online learning. It wasn't just, are the teacher and student in the same room anymore. [00:03:14] Notebook 1: But even with those additions, finding one definition everyone agrees on. Still tough. [00:03:20] Notebook 2: Moving target for sure. And it matters. It's not just a theoretical debate. [00:03:24] Notebook 1: Right. This whole definition dilemma has real consequences. [00:03:28] Notebook 2: Big time. [00:03:29] Notebook 1: Like that whole thing with Western Governors University WGU. [00:03:32] Notebook 2: Oh yeah, the WGU case is a perfect example of why this matters. So you've got this university, huge online enrollment, all about competency based learning, really innovative stuff. [00:03:43] Notebook 1: And then they got in trouble with the U. S. Department of Education, I vaguely remember this. [00:03:47] Notebook 2: Yeah, big audit back in 2017, and suddenly they're being accused of basically running a glorified correspondence course. [00:03:53] Notebook 1: Seriously, what was the problem? Did they just forget to file some paperwork or something? [00:03:58] Notebook 2: It was more about how they were defining, or not defining, distance education. See, the Department of Education was about ready to pull their Title IV funding, make them pay back a ton of money. [00:04:10] Notebook 1: Whoa. All over a definition. All because the auditors , [00:04:13] John: yeah, that was really interesting. Was also a little blown away by the attempt at sort of natural banter between two people in English what's available now is English only. I can put it to you this way. The people that we're working with here at Kristianstad University in Sweden we met them actually our, they came back from a flight from Madrid, and we landed from Atlanta, or no, well, actually from Amsterdam in Copenhagen, and we were on the same plane to Copenhagen. We got on the train together to come to Kristianstad. So, we were sitting there and they're talking about how they're using 11 labs. And they're really happy with them to do some, some capturing lecture and just some presentation. And I said, well, let me just show you. And so, off my phone, while we're going 70 miles an hour on the train, I played a little bit of a piece of a podcast, just 15 seconds, but they put their ears down to it and they both looked up and said, that's pretty amazing. They think it's better than 11 labs. I do too. Then of course they're first to say, and that's very Americanized banter and really just only centered on that. And so, it'll be interesting to see.. That's my first thing. I think the other thing is that the there's too much banter. It's almost trying too hard to make it seem like the the hosts, and there's a male and a female co host on these podcasts, that they're just really into whatever it is they're talking about. And it's, I'm not sure how you tone that down or you can the LLM in brackets or something, [00:05:47] Jason: Right. [00:05:48] John: prompt, because it's all based on a piece of content that you give the notebook. So that's a little concerning. And then there may be some, as we're learning, talking to colleagues, you shared an email with me from someone, you know, that, you know, there's an article that was posted or a blog post about the, it's a little bit gendered and sort of the male host may be talking more than the female host. That's not great. It doesn't have the ability to critically look at stuff. I don't know how you program that into the prompt, but those are things that I've been thinking about since you raised them with me before we got on the line today. Yeah. [00:06:21] Jason: And cause we, we know that AI [00:06:24] John: so upbeat. They're so upbeat. [00:06:27] Jason: is mean centric. Like it gives us the average of things most often. And I wonder if that's some of what is playing out as well. It's interesting? The people you're traveling with to get their impression to them, that just sounded like typified American kind of podcasting because I think that there's a way in which that is true. And so, I wonder about how. How much of an average the notebook LM responses to pod like this is the absolute most average podcasting feel that you could get a man and a woman and some of these, perhaps some of these gendered kind of responses and ways in which they response. Yeah. And yeah, [00:07:12] John: It's almost like you could give it any content. Content that's even mediocre or bad ideas and it would be like putting lipstick on a pig. They're, they're [00:07:20] Jason: going to just [00:07:20] John: say, Oh, this great y'know [00:07:22] Jason: right. Yeah, I noticed that too. If one of my, one of my concerns about it in that way is that any paper that I wrote that I, I These co hosts loved it. They loved everything about it. They, they loved me. They thought it was amazing research. Wow, so cool that there was no disagreement whatsoever. They just went with everything and just thought it was wonderful. And when one person just gushed about it, then the other person would be like, [00:07:51] John: that's right. [00:07:53] Jason: Exactly That is right. You are so right. [00:07:56] John: In fact, I think I want to test it now and maybe I'll just put something in about how pollution is awesome and then see if they say, because they'll start up like, "Hey everybody, welcome back to the Deep Dive. We're going to talk about something that's important to everybody. Pollution. Oh yeah, pollution. It's a big deal. Yeah I know So we're gonna talk to about how to make more of it. More of it? That's wonderful. Yeah, tell me more I'm going to test that hypothesis and we'll [00:08:18] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. It'll be inter

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Dr. Omid Fotuhi, a research associate at the University of Pittsburgh and the Director of Learning Innovation at WGU Labs, about the notion of belonging in the evolving landscape of online learning. They discuss the WGU model and how it breaks traditional barriers through competency-based, self-paced education, the critical role of fostering a sense of belonging for student success, the need for institutions to move beyond temporary interventions to address deeper structural issues, and the future of education where learning becomes more independent. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com   Join Our LinkedIn Group - Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)   Links and Resources: Inscribe - Community-based educational software application "Where and with whom does a brief social-belonging intervention promote progress in college?” Article https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade4420 Dr. Omid Fotuhi Contact Information LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omidfotuhi/   Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!       [00:00:00] Omid Fotuhi: The notion and the assumption that learning happens best, as measured by seat time, the number of hours you spend.   <Phone goes off>   [00:00:07] Omid Fotuhi: Ha.   [00:00:08] John Nash: So   [00:00:09] Jason Johnston: rookie mistake, John. Come on. We haven't quite been at this a year yet, Omid. so…   [00:00:15] John Nash: My phone is off, but my Macintosh rang   [00:00:18] Omid Fotuhi: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.   <Theme Music>   [00:00:21] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.   [00:00:25] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey everyone. And this is online learning in the second half, the online learning podcast.   [00:00:31] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but still, a lot of it really isn't. And so Jason, how are we going to get to the next stage?   [00:00:47] Jason Johnston: That's a great question, John. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?   [00:00:51] John Nash: I think that's a great idea. What do you want to talk about today?   [00:00:55] Jason Johnston: Today we are joined by Dr. Omid Fatouhi. Omid, welcome to the podcast.   [00:01:01] Omid Fotuhi: Thank you. It's great to be here.   [00:01:03] Jason Johnston: Can we call you Omid?   [00:01:05] Omid Fotuhi: That sounds great.   [00:01:06] Jason Johnston: Okay. Omid is a research associate at the University of Pittsburgh and director of learning innovation at WGU labs. So great to have you here to talk with us today.   [00:01:17] Omid Fotuhi: I look forward to it.   [00:01:19] Jason Johnston: You and I, we met over dinner through the company Inscribe at a conference. And one of the things that, of course, immediately, just made me realize that you were just a great guy is our common love of Canada We talked about living in Canada and talked a little bit about longing to live in Canada again.   And so I appreciated that. And then we connected, of course, over the topic of online and the panel that this company Inscribe, which I can put a link in, great people, cool product. Not paid by them. But I'll put a link to our show notes. But they connected us over this idea of belonging, student belonging online, which is a huge topic.   And we'll get into that because you've done some research. in this area. But first, we wanted to get to know you a little bit and just to chat about that. Tell us a little bit about your current roles and where you are living right now.   [00:02:17] Omid Fotuhi: Yeah, I think the best way to describe my current role is as a fish trying to climb a tree. If you've heard the expression that you shouldn't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, nonetheless, that's what I am. It's akin to what's also known as the Peter Principle, which is to say that if you're trying skilled and competent, you'll eventually be promoted into incompetence, often into management.   And that's not too far from the truth with where I am, except that I've been able to create a pretty unique situation for myself. So I am a trained social psychologist by training. That's where a lot of my thinking and a lot of the way that I look at things comes from. And currently, I'm working for WG Labs which is a R& D arm of Western Governors University, which does focus on how it is that we can create the technological tools and the research base to understand how to optimize learning for students, both in traditional but also online student populations. So that's what I'm doing right now. And the great thing is that throughout my position with WGU labs, I've still been able to engage in conversations like this And invest in ongoing research on the topic of belonging and our conversations with inscribers, just an example of that.   [00:03:35] Jason Johnston: Yeah. And for those listening, you may or may not know WGU huge university, interesting backstory, some interesting Even in the news the last few years in terms of its funding from the government and the back and forth on that, which sparked a huge conversation about regular and substantive interaction.   And anyway, we could go into so many directions with one of the unique things I think about WGU is that it's competency-based. If I understand this, basically, every course that they put out is more competency-based. Talk to us a little bit about that. And like, how do you intersect with that kind of way to deliver online content?   [00:04:19] Omid Fotuhi: mean, I think what I'll mention is the fact that WGU offers an alternative to the traditional design of education. And it's one in which the WGU is able to challenge the prescriptive norms and standards of how it is that learning and assessment take place. And back in 1995, they said, hey, let's do this crazy thing of putting learning online and see what happens.   Fast forward to today, with over 150,000 currently enrolled and over 300, 000 graduates, there is something to that recipe that seems to be successful, that resonates and offers a value proposition to individuals who may not have seen themselves as being viable into the pathway of the traditional online or the traditional higher educational opportunities that many other students would themselves into. Now, when you look at some of the components of WGU, it is a competency-based, fully online, and self-paced learning model, which means that it challenges some of the common barriers to accessing higher education. Those include things like a model of learning that challenges the standard assumptions of what learning ought to be, one of which is that this moderated learning, which is measured by seat time, the number of hours a student spends in the classroom, is the primary metric of how it is that learning should be captured.   And instead, it offers some freedom to some of those constraints. Specifically, it challenges the time-paced, place-based, and standardized testing approach to learning by having this online where you can learn at your own pace, it is competency-based, which importantly is able to capture learning in a way that's much more dynamic.   It allows the inclusion of experiences and learning that you may have acquired in other domains so that testing is a better reflection of the learning in itself as such, as I mentioned, with over 300, 000 graduates and over 150,000 currently enrolled, many of whom are seen as the non-traditional student populations it, it's a strong testament that this model, which is an alternative to the traditional higher educational model, seems to be resonating and working for many students.   [00:06:50] Jason Johnston: Could I ask one more question about WGU? Are you so far down the road now that like you're not even talking about Carnegie hours or about time in your seat or about those kinds of things or how it works there?   [00:07:02] Omid Fotuhi: What I'll say is it's important to unpack what we mean when we talk about students. For me, what comes to mind is a recognition that students are not a monolith group, that they are comprised of many diverse individuals with diverse characteristics diverse needs, and diverse preferences for learning. And if you take that insight and combine it with the understanding that we've all been exposed to recently, given the disruptions of the pandemic, given the advent of AI, given some of the increasing Awareness of the conditions of the more traditional higher ed institutions with their legacy admissions and other admission criteria that, that do selectively benefit some groups over others, but there is this, appetite in this atmosphere of exploring alternative models.   And so I think having schools like WGU that have an alternative model which appeals to a group of individuals who again, in the traditional view would not have seen themselves as being part of the educational process now becomes a reality. And I think As we're at this precipice of the, at this nexus of technology having a greater and greater role on how it is that we take, think about learning that more and more of these alternative models will have value for different subgroups of individuals.   So I think that's the way to think of it. And I also would maybe mention that being on the ins

In this episode, John and Jason talk to Ericka Hollis, PhD, about silence as liberatory practice, student backchannels, belonging in the online classroom, and leadership challenges with professional development. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: Great list of foundational articles on the Community of Inquiry ACUE's Effective Teaching Framework for Higher Education John’s paper on online discussions: “A Tale of Two Forums: One Professor's Path to Improve Learning through a Common Online Teaching Tool” Dr. Ericka Hollis Contact Information ACUE Page Email: ehollis@acue.org LinkedIn Twiiter / X Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections! Mic Check [00:00:00] Jason Johnston: Hey, John, could I ask you will you tilt your mic back a little bit? I'm sorry to be so mic-picky these days. [00:00:09] John Nash: Should I talk while I do that? Here's where it was and now I'm still talking and here's where it's going and now it's here. [00:00:17] Jason Johnston: Yeah, that's pretty good. [00:00:19] John Nash: I do appreciate your pickiness. I do. Silence as Liberatory Practice [00:00:21] Jason Johnston: All right. As you can see, this is pretty pretty tight operation we run here. The Online Learning Podcast. Heh. We basically When we started it, we decided that we would just do what we could do. You know what I mean? And we're having a good time. And I think that, I, we're getting some good responses from it. I think people that listen and we produce it up to the level that we can manage. And yeah. And this is it. [00:00:50] John Nash: I especially like the silences. It's a solace, not soul less. It's a SOLACE. [00:00:57] Jason Johnston: Solace. The silences. Yeah. [00:01:00] John Nash: Yes. [00:01:00] Ericka Hollis: One of the effective teaching practices is wait time. Most of the time in education, we don't wait long enough. So for someone to actually think and respond, right? There's research behind that when you jump right in. And so I love awkward silence. I'm really an introvert. Although most of my career, I do things that are very extroverted. So I'm okay with the pause and the solace, if you will, John. Yeah, [00:01:30] John Nash: we'll just do Erica Hollis episode and we'll just have it be 40 minutes of no talking. [00:01:36] Jason Johnston: Yeah. Like John Cage, if you're familiar with his pieces. He sits at the piano and he's got sheet music and it's all blank. After four minutes and thirty three seconds, packs up the sheet music and then goes. But I feel you on that. I'm an introvert as well. And I'm also, I feel like I'm slower, sometimes slower to respond, especially in a classroom where I'm taking in a lot of stimulus. And so I always found in the face to face classrooms, I would think of really like good things to say, like later two hours later, or good questions to ask, but it was rarely like right in the moment. It was like, it was always later which is one of the things I liked about online learning is that it was the asynchronous gave some simmer time for me and some time to think about things and to be able to respond some. [00:02:29] Ericka Hollis: I think that's a fair point. That's one of the reasons I have one of my youngest sister is she has extreme social anxiety, and she has just done so much better in asynchronous online courses, even as an undergraduate student. Just because that works better for her, instead of being like called on in the class, like cold calling, we cold call on people. And some people are like, yeah, they jump right in. And some people you can see like terror in their face when you call on them. And so I think it's a very good point in thinking about who's in your classroom and what actually works for them. And are you giving everyone like the same level playing field where I feel like in a face to face class, even in a synchronous Zoom class, it favors an extrovert, right? One that wants to put their hand up. It doesn't really favor those who are still thinking, still processing, in that kind of way. So that's one of the things I do enjoy about it the most from a like, pedagogical, andragogical standpoint, like the process time, the wait time. [00:03:36] Jason Johnston: So like silence as a liberatory practice. [00:03:42] John Nash: Oh, I like that. [00:03:44] Jason Johnston: I think that makes a lot of sense, and even the way that Zoom is made, those , that feel comfortable being seen, and they have their video on, are going to pop to the top, right? [00:03:57] Ericka Hollis: Yeah, [00:03:57] Jason Johnston: So those that don't say as much, and don't feel comfortable having the video on, they're going to be at the bottom, or even on the second page, if you have a very large class, or [00:04:07] John Nash: Or the third page or the fourth page, I've noticed that. Yeah. You have to go way in to find all the students. [00:04:14] Ericka Hollis: exactly. [00:04:15] Jason Johnston: That's good. So, we've started already. Thank you. That's a good conversation. Intro [00:04:22] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:04:26] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the Online Learning Podcast. [00:04:31] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. How are we going to get there, Jason? [00:04:45] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:04:50] John Nash: That's a great idea. What do you want to talk about today? Start [00:04:53] Jason Johnston: In addition to that, how about we do a podcast and invite really cool, wonderful people from our past to talk to as well. Wouldn't that be cool [00:05:02] John Nash: That would be cool. Let's get some good old friends on here and have a good yarn about. "What is up in online?" [00:05:09] Jason Johnston: That sounds good. Today we have with us Dr. Erica Hollis, a good friend of ours from way back at the University of Kentucky. I can say that you're still there, John, but the rest of us have moved on, no, I'm just joking. Erica, welcome. [00:05:25] Ericka Hollis: Thank you so much. I'm enjoying this already. [00:05:28] John Nash: it's so wonderful to have you here. It feels like old home week. [00:05:32] Ericka Hollis: It does. It feels very, I feel very comfortable, and I can't wait to have this conversation with you both. I haven't seen either of you in probably a decade. So, I'm really happy to catch up. [00:05:46] Jason Johnston: Yeah, all of a sudden, we start talking in decades. This is what happened. Now you're younger than both of us, Erica, but this is what happens as you start to, get up there. You start talking and measure your years and in decades. Online PhD Backchannels and Support [00:05:57] John Nash: Yeah, so, Erica, it's wonderful to have you here and we do have a bit of a backstory. We first met when you were a doctoral student at the University of Kentucky. Was that 2012, 2013? [00:06:12] Ericka Hollis: That was 2012, my friend. [00:06:15] John Nash: Yeah. And I, among all the things I remember from your time in the program I I recall that because we were the first online PhD at the University of Kentucky, we hoped that the students would start a back channel and you all were inside of Google chat. I think subsequent cohorts have chosen everything from Voxer to Signal. And But you and Todd Hurst, I think, wrote a paper, did an analysis of all the chat that went on in the back channel and what makes community in an online, and I thought, we're onto something now here. I think that was, but I remember that from your time in the program, and now you've gone on to apply that in so many new ways. It's cool. I can't wait to talk about that, but that, that sticks out. [00:06:59] Ericka Hollis: I definitely remember that. Our backchannel came, you should both know this, came out of necessity. We were in a synchronous class and one of our professors, who I will not name, was talking and someone started the backchannel and said, what is he talking about? Does anyone know what he's talking about? And people started laughing on screen, right? And then everyone started chiming in the professor is talking about this is what we're doing. And the back channel stayed, it's still intact. Like years later, we've graduated, we still use that back channel. I'm not kidding. Like when someone gets promoted or someone has a question or you want someone to look at something, we still use that back channel. And it was Google Hangouts now I think it's called Google Meet or whatever Google has changed to. But yeah, it the back channel was amazing. Um, I have four life colleagues I believe. And I would say the community that we built is, it was just so special. Like I haven't seen. anything like that. And I've tried to figure out how to recreate that in other avenues. And sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn't. But giving people the opportunity to figure out how they want to connect and not tell them how to do it, I think is the most important thing, but suggesting that they do. [00:08:23] John Nash: Yeah, that's carried on. And so in the program, we've done just that. We said, we don't care what you create here or how you create it. Just make one and pick a platform. And then, yeah, it's stuck. It's become a necessity. I think. Yeah. [00:08:38] Ericka Hollis: Yeah, I would say what's also intere

In this Spring 2024 check-in, John and Jason talk about AI-created voices, the importance of human presence in online education, the challenges of AI detection like Turnitin, and insights from their spring conferences and presentations. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: Eleven labs AI voice generation (on OpenAI) John's deck from his presentation at ASBMB - AI as an instructional designer and a tutor. The Ezra Klein Show - Interviewing Dario Amodei Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections! False Start: John Nash: Okay, we'll get AI to fix that. Jason Johnston: You can maybe get AI to fix that. Intro: AI Speaker 1: Hi, I’m not John Nash and I’m not here with Jason Johnston. AI Speaker 2: Hey, not-John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the online learning podcast. AI Speaker 1: Yeah, and we are doing this podcast to let you all in on a conversation we’ve been having about online education for the last few years. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but some of it isn’t. What are we going to do to get to the next stage, not-Jason? AI Speaker 2: That’s a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? AI Speaker 1: That sounds great. What do you want to talk about today? AI Speaker 2: I’ve got a big question for you not-John. Are you ready? AI Speaker 1: Okay, shoot. AI Speaker 2: If we carefully and lovingly create a script for an online learning video (or podcast) but then have AI-created voices read that script. Are we humanizing or de-humanizing online learning? AI Speaker 1: I’m just a text-based large language model chat-bot and I don’t think I’m equipped to answer that question. Maybe we should bring in the real John and Jason? John? Jason? What do you think? John Nash: I think it's a great question, real Jason. Jason Johnston: Yeah, real John. It's it's good to see you in real Zoom. and that is a great question that this our chatbots pose for us today. And I think that yeah, I'm not, what do you have any initial responses to the question if we use AI tools to lovingly create our scripts for online videos or for podcasts, are we dehumanizing or are we, humanizing these experiences John Nash: Well, it's a classic academic answer, isn't it? It depends. Jason Johnston: Depends. John Nash: But I think used exclusively, I think it does dehumanize. I think used judiciously and with an agenda to humanize, I think they could be helpful, but the jury's probably out because it's all context, isn't it? Jason Johnston: Yeah, definitely context and it gets into some philosophical questions as well, when we talk about humanizing. There is the act, there is the perception, right? And so, this goes back to some of the things that are going on even with AI telehealth, and so on. Or AI therapy. If the people don't know, does it matter? Does it feel human? Have they had the experience of being with a human, even though it wasn't a human? And then does it matter? I guess there's a ethical question about, It matters because we want to be transparent and we want to be honest with people and so on. But if at the end of the day they feel like that they've been in a humanized situation and it gives them maybe a positive outcome for them. John Nash: Yes. Yes. Yes. I think we discussed that last year a little bit. Yes. So essentially what we're saying is that if we fake them into feeling belonging, then that's okay. Jason Johnston: yeah. As long as maybe we're not being dishonest with them. Or maybe not, I shouldn't say maybe. As long as we're not being dishonest with them. I think that would be the cutoff for me. If people knew what was going on. John Nash: Okay. Fair. I think so. You say you're about to engage in a scenario that we've created that is designed to help you feel more belonging with regard to the activities we're doing as a group, maybe in our class. We used artificial intelligence, generative AI to create some of that, and we'd like you to engage in it, and then let us know. I think that would, Jason: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So, we started with this. This was a, there was a moment which you could invoke Eleven Labs this company through Chat GPT, you could invoke their GPT to create voices for you. And I was just playing around with it and came up with these, this intro script because I thought it would be fun just Jason Johnston: to, Just to Jason: start off, I'm not planning to replace you, John, just so you know. There's, I have no intention on replacing you. I'm, I enjoy our conversation too much to and respect you too much as a scholar and as a friend to replace you with just so you know, in case any concern or question. John Nash: I have been trying to get fired from this podcast and I thought this was my chance, but labeled redundant. Isn't that what they say? Jason Johnston: Well, I know you wanted to take the summer off, so maybe, maybe it could be just be like a, maybe a temporary replacement. We could get your voice. Yeah. Summer John, we could do summer John with yeah, that'd be all right. Yeah. John Nash: Well, your new dog, Kevin could take over the podcast for the summer. Yes. Jason Johnston: Yeah. Yeah. He would have some great things to add. I'm sure. The the really interesting thing about this, I'm not saying that this intro is perfect by any means, but, and we've talked about this a couple times, but just how quickly things are moving right now with AI and how even a year ago, that the emotions maybe weren't there with a AI created voices that are starting to come into itself. I think some of the early pushback for AI voices that I have found from an education standpoint is like, well, students aren't going to like it. It sounds too fake. And and so in that way, it's just not going to be a great experience for them. Well, we may be moving past that now in terms of those kind of arguments against AI voices in, in online education. But now we're moving towards, well, maybe it's fine for things. It doesn't matter. Like with, obviously we need to think about teaching presence, right? Community of inquiry. creating a great educational experience for students, having a teaching presence within the online class is super important, makes a difference for students and for teachers. I'm in a hundred percent on all of that. However, still within that, we pay voiceover people to do some slides that are going to be evergreen for us that maybe last beyond a teacher, or maybe are shared among a number of teachers teaching different sections or whatever. And so I think that we're probably just moving to a place where we're going to see more and more of this and online teaching. And I think maybe it's going to be okay. What do you think? John Nash: It reminds me of our conversation in the middle or end of our ethics episode this calendar year where we were discussing I'll call it scope creep or it will job creep. Jason Johnston: Yeah John Nash: I think it depends. Is this going to be a replacement technology, or If there are professionals in your circles who are already doing this work and then a new person comes along who's not it's not their station to do that work, but the technology will allow them to do it. Will they be stepping on toes? That's what the first thing that comes to mind. Yeah, I think there's questions to be answered at every level, as we've talked about before in terms of contextual ethics on this within your departments. And I was thinking about that this last week. I have the advantage at University of Tennessee of having people, we have humans that can do these things, right? Jason Johnston: So it is more of that kind of question about, well, I shouldn't be using AI when we already have humans to do things. But this last week I was at a conference and talked to a lot of people that are a team of one, right? They're expected to produce multiple courses and expected to be high quality. And they're maybe working at a community college or other colleges that are just not as well funded. And I think it maybe is another different answer to the question, maybe in some of those areas. What do you think? John Nash: do. And I think you're right. I think and again, we're in that world where we say it depends. Many professors are teams of one who are managing course loads. they don't have ready access to a center for teaching and learning or a set of instructional designers or production level tools. And so they want to create some evergreen material. Maybe they think their voice isn't up to lecturing for 15 minutes on video and staying stable. So these tools could be useful. Jason Johnston: Yeah. You have a hard time saying completely no across the board for everybody in every place on these kind of things. However, that being said, I think that I'm feeling more confidence, saying no in my particular context on a lot of these things where I prefer for humans to do the human things when it comes to graphics and music and voice and so on. And certainly We don't want to replace professors and have no intention on that, because I do think that those connections, I do believe that you there needs to be trust in a in a real teaching relationship, and I think you build that through that teaching presence and connection with the students, so. John Nash: Yes. And so I think that's probably the framework that we should be talking about all the time is connection and presence. And then if the affordances of these tools, let us advance that. I think we're in a better place. Jason Johnston: Yeah, that's

In this episode, John and Jason talk to Christelle Daceus of Johns Hopkins University chats about digital neo-colonialism and efforts to humanize online learning through training about AI and promoting inclusive practices. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: Christelle Daceus, M.Ed., is a Course Support Specialists at the Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, and the Founder and CEO of Excellence Within Reach  Watch for Christelle’s book chapter - Coming late 2024 on Springer Nature Press “Using Global Learning through the Collaborative Online International Learning Model to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals by Building Intercultural Competency Skills” coedited by Kelly Tzoumis and Elena Douvlou with a chapter titled “Combatting Virtual Exchange’s Predisposition to Digital Colonialism: Culturally Informed Digital Accessibility as a Tool for Achieving the UN SDGs” Johns Hopkins Excellence in Online Teaching Symposium John & Jason’s 6 Guideposts - Slide Deck (via Gamma.app) Christelle’s symposium video Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections! [00:00:00] Jason Johnston: What'd you have for breakfast? [00:00:01] Christelle Daceus: I did not have breakfast. I was thinking here that I have two dogs, so that my mornings consist of a lot of making sure they get their walk in and getting my nice kind of walk in the morning and things like that. It helps me start my day. And I spend a lot of time just hydrating, tea, I like, because I think I have a full plate, I would call it. I like to have a really quiet morning, just like the simplest morning that I can have, depending on what my first thing is to do that day. This is my first meeting today, I was like, okay, I'm just gonna chill with the dogs, get into my emails and things like that. [00:00:40] John Nash: Nice. We've been getting more into tea lately. There's wonderful woman-owned emporium near our house called White Willow and they've got a new herbalist and, we picked up a lavender earl gray tea there last night. [00:00:53] Christelle Daceus: Ooh, that sounds good. [00:00:54] John Nash: The little things. I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:01:00] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the online learning podcast. [00:01:05] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but there's still quite a bit that isn't. And Jason, how are we going to get to the next stage? [00:01:20] Jason Johnston: That's a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:01:24] John Nash: That's perfect. What do you want to talk about today? [00:01:27] Jason Johnston: Well, today we're probably going to hit some pretty big themes, John, and it's partly because we have connected with somebody that we first connected with at the Johns Hopkins Online Teaching Excellence Symposium. So we have with us today, Christelle Dacius. Thank you so much for joining us. And we're really just looking forward to talking to you today. [00:01:51] Christelle Daceus: too. Thank you so much. [00:01:54] Jason Johnston: Well, we wanted to get started by just talking a little bit about what is it you do currently? You're connected in with JHU maybe talk about that first, but I also know that you're an entrepreneur. They have other pursuits outside of JHU as well. [00:02:07] Christelle Daceus: Yeah, I am a long time educator. I've had my hands in all things education at various levels. And yeah, now I'm at J. H. U. Working for the School of Engineering, working for the Center for Learning Design and Technology. I work as a course support specialist with the instructional designers and technologists, creating Materials for courses at the School of Engineering at Helmwood making sure that they're accessible and those materials are accessible, like videos have captions and are able to be, process and materials are able to be read by screen readers. And then we also have the faculty forward Academy where we provide professional development for faculty and I have some awesome opportunities to collaborate with the school of education in their international student work group and I'll be working in some workshops for them in April, providing some work with the faculty on AI and different tools and AI and how they can incorporate into learning and a no fear approach to AI because there's a lot of anxiety there. I think for faculty. And that's my goal with that workshop is to meet them in the middle and show them that AI is here. We can't quite get rid of it, but. We can, elevate our learning and how we, work with students. And so I'm super excited for that. I also work in some research with Global Learning, so I have some international partners I'm doing like exciting things with. And we have a book coming out in May or June with Springer Nature Press. And so that book is about global learning and how sustainability in education can be affected by the United Nations sustainable development goals. And so we just launched our book recently again at the world environmental education Congress in Abu Dhabi, just a few weeks ago, and we talked about our book and had a panel there and that was super exciting. Very excited for that work. Obviously it was again like that natural opportunity. I was talking about earlier where it's just I'm meeting good people talking about the good work. And then we started creating some great work together, I'm really excited about that. And then, yeah, like I said, I'm an entrepreneur. So I have a business in Baltimore City, which is an academic center that's really starting to really connect with the community and start starting to grow into a very. Well rounded program which is exciting because I'm just in maybe a few months. But, it's one of those moments where hard work is paying off even in the new pursuit, where a lot of the relationships that I've valued and forged within Baltimore and within education systems and Baltimore City schools are starting to just grow and I'm able to like really reach students. Because just moving here, I'm actually from New Jersey, and I moved here maybe five years ago, and I've had an opportunity to contract in schools and things like that. And, Baltimore City Schools is constantly in the news for their educational needs and things like that. And because my career started in K 12, I really wanted to connect kind of the work that I do at this higher level, right? Accessibility, advocacy, inclusive education, but bring it to a community level. And I think one of the things you guys asked me was about affecting the individual, like, how can we do that work and reach the individual and not just put out the research and all these kinds of things, which is amazing and important to have those conversations and keep pushing forward with. Workshops and conferences and getting those ideas out there. But then I have an opportunity to not only give opportunities to other educators to bring those opportunities to students, but also really, impact the community, a community that needs it, Yeah. I also am a mom and I have a son he's four. His name is Malcolm. He's the greatest. And yeah, I'm just a busy bee. I'm all over the place. But I love everything I do. And I think I have a good balance right now. So I'm lucky to do the things that I love. [00:06:16] Jason Johnston: so we sent you some questions, but like you just. You just landed us with four pretty big things that you do. We could probably spend the entire time talking about any one of those things. So I'm going to have to show some restraint, because there's some things we would like to get to, and why we connected over this, that I think are really important. I don't want to derail anything here, but I was really curious, and I'm sorry to our listeners, because we keep saying that we're going to stop talking about AI, and then it just keeps coming back. [00:06:44] Christelle Daceus: You can, that's what I'm saying. That's the workshop. You cannot run away from AI. I'm so sorry. [00:06:51] Jason Johnston: And we love it. We like, it's really interesting to us. And all the time are like texting each other things. I actually texted my wife yesterday by accident, something I meant to text to John, and it made no sense to her whatsoever. [00:07:05] John Nash: Does that make us work spouses right? [00:07:08] Jason Johnston: I I think so or at least AI spouses. but because every time something comes up, I'm like, Oh, John, did you see this? Did you see that? And he's like sending me stuff back as well. Anyways, tell us a little bit about your approach with the "no fear AI." Cause I really, I haven't heard that particular kind of phrase, but I'm interested because I think we're all in the same space in, in education. [00:07:32] Christelle Daceus: Like I said, with the School of Education, they have a work group that works towards just how do we work with international students and within their own faculty groups they make sure that their programming and professional development includes that kind of work, and so they approached me because, a lot of faculty just don't know what to do. Right? The biggest issue is the plagiarism. Like, how do we keep up with this? How do we know that students are submitting authentic work? And that's the idea behind how , I'm planning for the workshop is, that we're talking about first, what re

In this episode, John and Jason talk IN PERSON, reflecting on year one of their podcast. Keeping with the theme, they also find a few rabbit holes to chase, consider developments in AI, and talk about educational and ethical considerations around AI-generated music and video. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: Hard Fork Podcast SORA OpenAI Video Alibaba EMO Video Demo (Jason’s LinkedIn post) Suno.ai Support Human Artists! Gangstagrass Mr. Beast on Youtube (not that he needs any more clicks) The makeup brush holder John keeps his pens in Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! 1 Year Anniversary Special [00:00:00] Jason: Would you happen to have a pen I could borrow? Yeah. [00:00:02] John: Felt blue, black. [00:00:04] Jason: That is amazing. I've just this moment, I just noticed your incredible, your - you've got like a pen store. [00:00:10] John: These are makeup brush holders. [00:00:12] Jason: Oh really? Okay. Black, please. [00:00:15] John: ballpoint, flare [00:00:17] Jason: pen, Flare. Perfect. [00:00:19] John: yeah [00:00:19] Jason: And would you happen to have any sticky notes? That's incredible. You are really set up here. That is something else. [00:00:24] John: I dream that someone, no one visits me. I'm set up for a full-on brainstorming session with a gigantic. Five feet by three-foot whiteboard and 500 colored sticky notes. [00:00:34] Jason: Sticky notes galore. [00:00:35] John: Yeah, I'm ready to change things if anybody wants to come over. [00:00:38] John: I'm John Nash here in the same room with Jason Johnston. [00:00:43] Jason: Hey John, hey everyone, and this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the Online Learning Podcast. [00:00:48] John: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but there's still a lot that quite isn't there. How are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? [00:01:02] Jason: How about we create a podcast and talk about it? [00:01:06] John: How about we do that? How about we create a podcast, do it for a year, and then talk about what that year was like? [00:01:11] Jason: that sounds great! Happy anniversary, John! [00:01:13] John: Happy anniversary, Jason. [00:01:15] Jason: I should have brought you something. I didn't. I'm sorry. How about we go out to lunch and we and we celebrate? [00:01:20] John: yeah, and maybe we can get a demo of the Apple Vision. [00:01:23] Jason: Oh, that'd be cool. Yeah. There's a little place right there where we can grab some lunch and maybe go over to the Apple store. See what's going on. [00:01:30] John: Yeah, [00:01:31] Jason: That would be thematic. A lot of this podcast has been a number of things. One, talking about online learning, but also talking about the new tech and how it might affect online learning in the last year. [00:01:41] John: Yeah. We are EdTech nerds also. [00:01:43] Jason: We are, we tend to nerd out on a few of these things. Today on my way over here, because I had to drive to this podcast today. I didn't do this podcast in my pajamas. [00:01:54] John: Horrors. And you drove yourself. You had to operate a machine to get here. [00:01:59] Jason: But it gave me, afforded me a little bit of time in the car to listen to a podcast. I listened to our first episode. It was kind of nostalgic, [00:02:06] John: you weren't tuning in to our first episode just out of some kind of vanity thing Oh, I love listening to me. [00:02:12] Jason: No, it was not because I like the sound of my own voice. Although after doing a podcast for a year, you get used to it. [00:02:18] John: you don't even know what you sound like. You're just like, [00:02:20] Jason: I listened in because I was curious about what we talked about in our first podcast. Whether or not, what we talked about then rang true in our first year of podcasting and maybe looking ahead to see what's going to be different. And what I found was, we basically talked about. What we were going to talk about, which was online learning, the second half, check. We've been talking about this last year. How technology affects online learning, check. We've definitely had a lot of that. We also had thought our big theme was going to be humanizing online learning. Check. We've had a bunch of that. And also, however, one thing we had slightly wrong. What our topic of the month was, which was AI. [00:03:03] John: Yes. [00:03:04] Jason: It's become the topic of the year, probably. [00:03:07] John: The topic of the Year .5 Yeah. So [00:03:12] Jason: that's the one thing that we probably got wrong. The other thing that I would say that we didn't know about, as we couldn't quite see into the future with this, but one of the big things that you and I have talked about is how much we've enjoyed having guests. We started this as a conversation between you and me. But how great it's been to bring other voices in this year. [00:03:34] John: It has been remarkable to have other voices in. It's been amazing having guests because I feel as though it's a privilege that we get to have this kind of professional development that we create, I guess is how I look at it. And I think we do something for our guests too. They feel good about being able to talk about their work, but the breadth and depth of the things we've talked about with some amazingly smart people has been just a privilege from me. [00:04:01] Jason: Yeah, a privilege. That is a great way to put it. And just to be able to talk with some of these experts the last year to get a completely different for some of them anyways take on the things that we've been talking about has been challenging, informing, guiding for me so that we're not just talking in a vacuum here. Really, our first guest was when we did the podcast Super Friends episode a little less than a year ago at OLC and we did another one just a few episodes ago to wrap up the year and then we had some amazing guests Dr. Michelle Miller Dr. Enilda Romero Hall. Then we were able to talk to Dr Kristen DeCerbo from Khan Academy. And that continues to be a big thing out there. We made a great connection to OLC keynote speaker, Dr. Brandeis Marshall. Michelle Ament, Dr. Alicia Magruder at Johns Hopkins, which actually then led into a podcast recording at their symposium, which was so much fun as [00:05:01] John: That was so fun and so innovative to be able to have a, almost a simulcast of the podcast as the concluding session of an online teaching symposium. It has been good in that regard. And also, a chance to connect these ideas over time with of other things that come across our desk as it were. So, I think about Michelle Miller, and we keep talking about same side pedagogy. that keeps coming up as a relevant thing. Brandeis Marshall's notions of what's un AIable. I continue to talk about that even this morning with a provost from a two-year college in Texas was talking about this. [00:05:41] Jason: You know what's cool? I was talking to somebody at UT the other day who has been listening to our podcast and he quoted Brandeis Marshall from our podcast about [00:05:51] John: that That's fabulous. Yeah. And then. You know what I think surprised me the most over time is how certain things are emerging now, I think that are more important than anything else that's happened with AI in the last 12, 13 months, which is still the topic of ethics. And it's not about the technology. It's not about the advancements. We're coming up in March of 2024. So, it's one year into the old March madness when GPT 4 came out and then I guess Anthropic came out, BARD, all of them were releasing and it was an arms race in March of 2023 to see what these models would look like. And now. We haven't seen in the last 12 months a massive boost in the model capabilities and a bigger discussion, I think that's happened over ethical use and the creation of guidelines, particularly in the education space. [00:06:46] Jason: Yeah. When we recorded, we didn't even know of the existence of chat GPT four at that point when we recorded our first episode a year. [00:06:54] John: ago. No, we did not. [00:06:56] Jason: And so that just started that whole year of recognizing first that AI is a thing. And then all of a sudden people realize, oh, wait, it's actually pretty significant thing. When that next model came out and realized that the real capabilities of AI were Much deeper, much better than what we expected, even on the front. end. [00:07:18] John: but the two guys that run the hard fork. podcast, were talking about how Sidney at the time, now all these name changes, but Sidney was Bing chat, which was Microsoft thing. It, it had told, it was a Kevin Roos or was it Kevin Roos was advised by Sidney to break up with his wife and start dating Sidney. You, similarly, dad your heart broken by Bing. [00:07:43] Jason: Right. I'm being chat and had some very strange conversations with Sidney right in that same time. So, it was just the wild west in some ways that some of the initial concerns of AI kind of were tamed, I would say about those chatbots. [00:08:00] John: Yeah. Yeah, they were. But we were so amazed by the Model 3. 5 we couldn't stop talking about it. We thought we'd be done in a month. [00:08:08] Jason: I would agree After that initial surge I think what we seen is a lot of third-party companies starting to leverage this power and I would say as we predicted A lot of edtech companies that were starting to add to it. And so, we talked about that. We predicted that back last year in March. And then as we were walking the floor and if you lo

In this episode, John and Jason talk to Karen Watté, the Senior Director of Course Development and Training at Oregon State University’s Ecampus about their free tools for AI guidance in higher education and how to humanize online education. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: Oregon State University - eCampus AI Tools: https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/faculty/artificial-intelligence-tools/ ) Michelle Miller’s Newsletter: Teaching from the Same Side https://michellemillerphd.substack.com/p/r3-117-september-15-2023-reflection OSU eCampus Readiness Playbook https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/faculty/artificial-intelligence-tools/readiness-playbook/ Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions!   [00:00:01] Jason Johnston: I picture everyone in Oregon in Log cabins and so on. Is that correct? [00:00:04] Karen Watté: no, not at all. [00:00:06] Jason Johnston: What? [00:00:07] Karen Watté: I always say tell our candidates who are coming, I say, we have the best of both worlds. You're an hour from some beautiful ski areas, you're an hour from the coast. And boy, if you wanna see the desert, you just head on a little bit further. And we've got the high desert. So, we've got something of every, for everyone here. I've lived other places too and I come back, and I say, oh, this is, this has got it all. [00:00:31] Jason Johnston: I grew up in Canada, and sometimes we would talk to people about the igloos that we lived in and having to check our dog sleds at the border and those kinds of things. Sometimes they believed us, sometimes they didn't. [00:00:44] Karen Watté: Yeah. [00:00:45] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:48] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the online learning podcast. [00:00:53] John Nash: we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation that we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great and some of it is, but there's still a lot that really isn't. So, Jason, how are we going to get to the next stage? [00:01:08] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:01:13] John Nash: I love that idea. What do you want to talk about today? [00:01:16] Jason Johnston: I am really excited to be talking today with Karen Watté. She's the Senior Director of Course Development and Training at the Ecampus Oregon State University. Welcome, Karen. How are you? [00:01:28] Karen Watté: I'm good. Thank you. [00:01:29] Jason Johnston: We, connected at OLC, Online Learning Consortium conference as part of their leadership day that they do ahead of time, and it was very fortuitous, I think, because we had just come through this summer where everybody was scrambling around AI, trying to figure out what to do, and while we were, trying to come up with some ideas and so on all of a sudden Oregon State had a full-fledged website built out with resources and stuff like that. And we're like, this is amazing. Over here at University of Tennessee and it was really well done. So, we got chatting about that at OLC and then we got chatting about being on the podcast. So, thanks for joining us. Cause I'm really excited about talking with you today. [00:02:10] Karen Watté: Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here. [00:02:12] Jason Johnston: Tell us a little bit about what you do at Oregon State and your role there. [00:02:17] Karen Watté: Yeah, as you mentioned, I'm the Senior Director of Course Development and Training with eCampus, and at Oregon State, eCampus is a centralized distance education unit, so we're serving all of the colleges within OSU. We have about 13,000 fully online students that we serve, and that's about one third of all the students enrolled at Oregon State are fully distanced. [00:02:42] John Nash: Wow, a third of them. Do you know what history is of deciding to do a centralized distance learning unit? I know some campuses do that, some campuses don't, and I'm curious a little bit about that. [00:02:54] Karen Watté: We've been in online for quite a long time, 20 plus years, and we are, the Oregon State is the land grant institution in Oregon, and maybe 25 plus years ago, we were doing the television based learning, and sending it out to everyone in the state, and that unit, of course, was extremely small, and as online learning developed, it changed and morphed into what it is today. And it, so it's always been that central support unit and the way that the funding was established at OSU to support that unit encouraged it to remain a centralized space. [00:03:33] John Nash: I see. [00:03:34] Karen Watté: It's been a really a nice advantage, I think, for OSU to have that, that centralized. [00:03:38] John Nash: Yeah, I get the sense that there are advantages to it. my institution isn't so centralized. It still has a unit supports that, but it's not connected to tight instructional design support I'm sure that there's disadvantages to what you said, something that was interesting, which is, I think, we're the land grant institution here at the University of Kentucky, but it's something about funding from 50 years ago that seems to set these things in motion. And so, it sounds like, yeah, that was a centralized sort of ITV unit and sort of things like that. And then it moved into that. Yeah. It's interesting. More decentralized here. [00:04:13] Jason Johnston: Yeah, and we're, we are also the land grant here in Tennessee, so I think that we've got a common thread here. And I think as we've talked about, becoming really a modern land grant some of it is strategically thinking about how are we going to continue to serve everyone in Tennessee, right? And in the olden days, it was setting up their outposts in every county. We've got 95 counties, I think, in Tennessee and setting up Outposts there. And in these days, we're talking a lot more about online learning and about trying to connect there's almost a million Tennesseans who started their undergrad degree and didn't finish it. And how do we serve those students in 2024 to help them move forward? So that's good. I knew there was something else that probably connected us on a deeper level and it's that land grant, I think. And you direct the course development and training. So, does that mean both like from a production standpoint developing the courses and then also professional development for teachers? [00:05:16] Karen Watté: Yes. Yeah. So, my particular team, we have about 45 professionals. We're about half instructional designers, and then the other half is a media development unit. And we have a handful of folks that also focus just on faculty development. But our media unit does videography, animation. We have Quite a number of programmers. And so, we do a lot of work. We're basically the faculty facing side of our, of Ecampus. [00:05:43] Jason Johnston: And so how many are dedicated then within your 40 some odd with professional development? [00:05:49] Karen Watté: In terms of just doing faculty development and training, I would say we have about 3 individuals that really focus on that, but all of our instructional design staff as part of their duties, they also provide training, and support that could be one on one, but it could also be in assisting with specialized trainings that we're putting together for faculty as well. [00:06:13] Jason Johnston: So, did you get to this role like through like a faculty pathway or instructional design or media or how'd you get here? [00:06:21] Karen Watté: I have a unique background. Years ago in the early 2000s, I was actually, after I got my MBA, I was working in private industry as an operations manager for FedEx Logistics, which was embedded into Hewlett Packard, which If you are aware, we have a huge Hewlett Packard facility here in Corvallis, Oregon. And then prior to coming to OSU for about seven years or so, I was actually faculty at a local community college in their business technology and computer systems department. And then I went to OSU about 15 years, and I started in faculty development and training with eCampus and really establishing the foundational trainings that we base a lot of our course developments on today. And then I just moved up as eCampus has grown, because eCampus has grown quite dramatically, and I would say in the last 10 years especially. [00:07:17] John Nash: What infrastructure was in place for you to come into your role at OSU and start to do that training? Or did you bring your experience from your past positions in and start to develop that? [00:07:28] Karen Watté: Well, I brought in a lot of my previous experience, and then, when I started, my unit had, I was the fourth person to be hired into this unit. And so, then we hired on an instructional designer who actually is our, is my supervisor right now, Shannon Riggs, and she and I together crafted the foundational trainings that go into what we provide for faculty today. And of course, there's been many improvements since we've brought on, very skilled people, and then they've added to this suite of trainings, but we started it about 15 years ago when we came in. She had come from a Quality Matters institution. I, of course, had, background in, in training, both in private industry and then at the community college as well. And together we put this program in place. [00:08:20] John Nash: Yeah. And then together you've grown it. What did you say? 40 folks? [00:08:25] Karen Watté: We have on in our team, I have about 45 folks all Ecampus as a whole is about a slightly over 100 staff. [00:08:35] Jason Johnston: And what'

In this episode, John and Jason talk about the ethics of AI, including how ethics are formed and a few scenarios like if it’s ethical to use Midjourney. Listen in to find out who says no! See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: Article: Harvard Business Review Ethics in the Age of AI Series: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 Article: It's Not Like a Calculator, so What Is the Relationship between Learners and Generative Artificial Intelligence? Jason’s FAFSA Assistant GPT ”Right Choices: Ethics of AI in Education” - John hosts Jason in an episode of the School Leadership + Generative AI series John’s School Leader AI Bootcamp Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! Podcast Episode on AI Ethics - January 29, 2024 False Start [00:00:00] John Nash: Should we do the intro? [00:00:01] Jason Johnston: Yeah, let's do the intro. [00:00:03] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:06] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning Podcast. The Online Learning Podcast. Let's try it again. [00:00:12] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:14] Jason Johnston: That reminded me of do you ever watch The Office? My name is Kevin, because that's my name. My name is Kevin, because that's my name. So this is the Online Learning Podcast, the Online Learning Podcast. Episode [00:00:30] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:32] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the Online Learning Podcast. [00:00:38] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but still a lot of it isn't. How are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? [00:00:52] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. Why don't we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:00:56] John Nash: That's perfect. What do you want to talk about today? [00:00:59] Jason Johnston: John, I've got some ethical questions for you. [00:01:02] John Nash: You do? [00:01:03] Jason Johnston: I've been wondering about the ethics of using AI for certain tasks. And maybe we'll get back to some specifics later on. But how do we form our ethics to begin with when it comes to AI and using AI these days when we think about education? [00:01:19] John Nash: I'm stealing your line from the intro. That is a great question. How do we form our ethics? I think they're formed by the values and the beliefs we bring to anything we do. You've had a longer background and thinking and considering about ethics, both in your professional life and your education life. What do you think about in terms of what sensibilities people bring to any task? [00:01:45] Jason Johnston: Yeah, I think so. I like where you started there because sometimes people start externally. They think ethics are clear, right? We're not supposed to steal people's cars and we're not supposed to, kill people when we walk in front of them or whatever. And, but it's not that clear when it comes to certain things. Certainly we can follow the ethics of a country or a city or institution, AI is something new. We haven't dealt with some of these questions before. And because of that, it does take some ethical reasoning. I happened to talk to a number of PhD students taking an instructional systems design course. I was asked to come in by one of our previous guests, Dr. Anilda Romero Hall, and to talk about ethics in instructional design. And where I started with that was this question of what do we bring to the table? If we can understand what forms our ethics, our beliefs, our positionality to begin with, then we can start to understand why we might have some knee jerk reactions to certain things. [00:02:49] Jason Johnston: And we might be more willing to concede on some things for the sake of the common good. And as we talk about ethics within a context or within a a group of people or a community or what have you. [00:03:02] John Nash: Do you think the ethics of the companies that are creating these models drive how people feel ethically about using them, or is it the other way around? Did the companies decide they needed to sound ethical because they knew people were going to clamor about whether these models might be used in unethical ways? [00:03:26] Jason Johnston: Yeah, this is a great question. Yeah, it feels like, to me they're aspects, if I'm reading down, like, and they've all got them, right? So you can look these up OpenAI, IBM, Anthropic. If you start to read down those ethics, typically you re, resonate with a lot of those ethics. They're good things, typically, about security And inclusivity and being non biased and private and so on, but then you've got to ask yourself what is really driving these companies to do what they do and what is not being said, right? What's between the lines here and what are missing? And this is where I think we need to go beyond what the companies are saying and think ethically about our own context. As educational institutions, I don't think we can just rely on these, do you think we can rely on these ethics to help guide our use of AI? Are they good enough, John? [00:04:19] John Nash: we rely on them? [00:04:21] Jason Johnston: Yes. [00:04:22] John Nash: To what extent? I think, of course, they're a good start. They're a start. I think maybe even good gets left off of that last statement. They're a start. They're certainly not unethical, what's been put out there. I don't think that, But the companies are no fools. They know that they're for profit companies and if they were to put out statements around ethics that didn't seem to meet with what general morally accepted principles look like, they would be derided in the marketplace. [00:04:50] Jason Johnston: So do you think these ethical guidelines are crafted by philosophers within their midst or marketing people within their midst? [00:04:58] John Nash: Certainly, I think it's more of the latter than the former. Many of them are Bay Area companies and there's ethos of the Bay Area and these guys and how they think. I think they probably want to be ethical. Google once infamously now said, "do no evil." And then of course later got into many different kinds of arrangements that were not unevil. [00:05:19] Jason Johnston: Yeah, you'd sent me an article a little while ago in the Harvard Business Review. They had a AI ethics series that I can put the links into the show notes here and where they looked at avoiding the ethical nightmares of emerging technology and questions about AI responsibility. And one of the questions was, what does the tech industry value? And it looked at some of the ideologies around the culture of speed. And so I think my question with some of these, if you look at it, any of these big companies, Google, IBM, Anthropic with Claude, OpenAI, they have a list of ethics, but I think we always have to ask the question, what's not there, that's driving them. And I think this is one of those, is this culture of speed and the fact that it almost seems like their guiding point is that we need to do this as quickly as possible and get out there in front of other people. And, and that guides them ethically in terms of the choices that they make. [00:06:22] John Nash: I agree with you. I think that they have two books of ethics, maybe, almost as though like a business that's got a second set of books. And so they've got the public ethics around keeping people safe and data safe and responses of our machines, that are very human like in their responses, the responses are safe. And then the other set of ethical books say we need to move on this like our board members want because shareholder value. [00:06:52] Jason Johnston: Yeah. Yeah. And because of that, they may be willing to let some of those guardrails down a little bit to allow for the speed. And some of these post humanists or transhumanists kind of people that are running a lot of these companies think about the, from an ethical standpoint, , they're taking a more of a teleological approach, which is just looking at this ends justify the means. If in my mind, this is going to improve society so radically that we're willing to let a few things slide here along the way. And I think that's where the speed comes in, is that if we can get there quicker, and we can improve society sooner, then we're willing to let a few, little ethical oversights go by while we're building whatever it is we're building. [00:07:42] John Nash: Yes, because if you take what Mark Andreessen recently said, there is a belief amongst some of these founders that they are actually saving the world, that these are technologies that are going to save humans. [00:07:56] Jason Johnston: I resonate with that idea of there being two books and we got to ask what the closed book, the secret book of ethics is, and what the open book of ethics is. The open book of ethics is almost always now talks about safety and inclusivity and privacy and these kind of things, whereas the closed book probably more things like like speed about having a perception of what the public needs in order to adopt it versus it actually being there. So, managing basically your market and managing what the market perception is of a particular thing is more important in these cases than the actual thing itself. [00:08:44] John Nash: Yeah, or what problem the thing is solving. We've not been privy to the real internal discussions at say Open AI when they said we will publicly release 3.5. I don't know what the problem was that they saw was being solved

In this episode, John and Jason close off the 2023 Johns Hopkins University Excellence in Online Teaching Symposium with a live podcast recording, summarizing the day’s sessions and interacting with the audience around 6 Pillars of Humanizing Online Learning in the Second Half. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: 6 Guideposts - Slide Deck (via Gamma.app) Johns Hopkins Excellence in Online Teaching Symposium Jana Lay-Hwa Bowden, Leonie Tickle & Kay Naumann (2021) The four pillars of tertiary student engagement and success: a holistic measurement approach, Studies in Higher Education, 46:6, 1207-1224, DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2019.1672647 Peabody Institute and their “Path to Funding” guide Advancing Diversity in AI Education and Research Symposium - Stanford Dr. Michelle Miller Substack - Teaching from the Same Side and the idea of “same-side pedagogy” Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! [00:00:00] Introducer: Welcome everyone. It's been a great day and we have. A very fun way that we're going to be ending today. So this is our final session. I appreciate everyone greatly for attending our inaugural excellence and online teaching symposium and we're going to be ending our session with a live recorded podcast. We have Jason Johnston and John Nash, go ahead and take it away whenever you are ready. [00:00:33] John Nash: Hi, I'm John Nash and I'm here with Jason Johnston [00:00:36] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the online learning podcast. [00:00:44] John Nash: Yeah, and we are doing this podcast to let you all in on a conversation we've been having and to let you be part of the conversation that we are having about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but there's still quite a ways to go. What are we going to do to get to the next stage, Jason? [00:01:05] Jason Johnston: That's a great question. How about we make a podcast and talk about it? [00:01:10] John Nash: That sounds great. What do you want to talk about? [00:01:13] Jason Johnston: Today I think it'd be great to continue our theme of how to humanize online learning in the second half and to do it with a number of our friends here. So today we want to not only do a podcast, but do a session here at the Johns Hopkins Excellence in Online Teaching Symposium, the first ever. Is this right, Olysha? We're on the first ever. [00:01:36] Olysha Magruder: That's correct. This is the inaugural symposium. So you're a part of the new wave. [00:01:43] Jason Johnston: We're so glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation. And this is exciting that we're here and we're doing a live session where we are recording. And we had the auspicious and difficult task of trying to bring a little summary to this day. It's been a good day, hasn't it, John? [00:02:01] John Nash: Yeah, it's been amazing. We've been in every session that we could attend. We split up and took some notes along the way about what the overarching themes were and where we see some opportunity, but we're so excited to see what you all think as well and what you took away. [00:02:17] Jason Johnston: Yeah, so here's how we are planning to proceed in the next little bit here. Our ideal as we were looking at the day is to try to give us some guidelines to talk about. We tried to pull a few quotes. We have a A little bit of an outline that will guide us, but first we thought we should probably introduce ourselves. John, you wanna go first? [00:02:41] John Nash: Yeah, sure. I'm John Nash. I am an associate professor at the University of Kentucky in the Department of Educational Leadership Studies, where I'm also the Director of graduate studies. We are an all online. Department and a graduate program offering master's and the doctorate at the EDD and PhD level, and I'm also the director of the laboratory on design thinking at the University of Kentucky, where we look at human centered design and its application in organizations and leadership in schools. [00:03:11] Jason Johnston: And I am Jason Johnston. I'm at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I'm the executive director of online learning and course production. So, my big thing here is helping to stand up online programs, and I do it with a fabulous team of instructional designers, some of which are here. That's not the only reason why I said that, but some of them. And media personnel who help to stand up online learning here at the University of Tennessee and do an amazing job of that. That's who we are. We also would like to just keep in mind that this is a recorded session. We would like to, as we go along, talk to all of you and hear from you as we proceed. Please feel free to, unmute your mic as you have something to say or questions. And to quote Dr. Olysha Magruder I'm not sure what's gonna happen. And this is this was her, this is her plug for our session today was that I'm not sure what's going to happen in that one. [00:04:13] Jason Johnston: We're not either, because part of this session is actually hearing from all of you, but we do have a few guiding ideas and guideposts that will help guide our discussion. John, you want to show our slides? [00:04:29] Jason: And those who want to follow along at home can find these slides in the show notes. [00:04:32] John Nash: And if the link that you got in the chat should track with what we're doing here today. And this document is made with the gamma. app. And so this document is a presentation deck. It's also a living document. It's a webpage and it's a handout. And so it's the new shimmer, if you will, of media. And if you get that, then I love you. So browse through it before and after the session, as we. grow in our conversation in this hour. Some of that material may show up in here and please reuse and remix because we want you to do that. And so yeah, we're not sure what's going to happen in this one, but I think it's going to go well. And we want to start to talk about being human to each other. The focus of our, podcast is to think about the second half of life for online learning. And we know it probably has much more life than we have in ourselves. But as we noted in the beginning, we think it's had its chance to be good, but we think that there's another chance here to be even better. This whole day has really been about that. And so as we go forward, we want to talk about what we picked up on today and also really hear from what you picked up on. So Jason, do you want to say a little bit about where to find our podcast after this is done and people can listen to this? [00:05:52] Jason Johnston: Yeah, onlinelearningpodcast. com. That URL actually will take you to our entire podcast. Not only is this session going to be edited and probably put out there, Maybe January, John but we just released on Monday, hot off the digital press a conversation with Dr. Olysha Magruder. And so you can go check it out and listen to that podcast. Had a great conversation. One of the reasons why we're here today is that connection. Please listen in, let us know what you want to hear about. Like this session, we want this podcast to be a conversation and to be talking with all of you. Yeah. And around the topics and subjects that you are interested in. And without further ado John and I were trying to think of some larger themes. We guessed at a number of them before this day begun by, by looking at some of the session titles, by thinking about some of the ways in which we're thinking about humanizing online learning. But we have these six guideposts, if you would, and I think I was thinking about guideposts because my home here in Knoxville. Pretty much every side of the driveway is a drop off and so there's a little turnaround that you know if you're somebody like me that drives a really cool car like a long, minivan There's a fair bit there's a fair bit of maneuvering to be done where I have to go into this turnaround And move forward what I did when I first got this place is to put in guide posts for myself so that I did not want to end up with a minivan in the ditch. My own ditch. of my own making and and so putting in guideposts, especially at these kind of key spots as I'm coming up over the top, coming onto the driveway and as I'm doing into this turnaround putting some that were lit, other ones that were just like those reflectors others that actually are barriers that don't permit me to go over some of the spots. And so today, if you, will walk with us, these six guideposts for humanizing online learning. Some of what was drawn from today, some from our podcast of this year and our own thinking. And how we're going to proceed in these is that we're going to talk about the guideposts, give a, maybe a little summary. Couple quotes that we found from today and then open it up for you for any other things that you heard, maybe particularly from today. So maybe a little bit of a focus on on today's session. My one request would be that we're now down to less than 10 minutes for each one of these guideposts. And just try to keep the comments fairly quick if you can, as we get there. Shall we go on to guidepost number one, John? Yeah, let's go [00:08:33] John Nash: to guidepost number one. And that would be this notion of being human to your students and yourself. And the two gems that I picked up on. from this came from Flower Darby, and it was this idea of sharing a little of yourself. And this idea of connection doesn't happen by accident. This, what did you think of these And particularly,

In this episode, John and Jason have a “year in review” conversation with their podcast superfriends about why they podcast, the impact of artificial intelligence on education, the importance of human interaction in learning, and their collective efforts in forming a community of education podcasters. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too) Links and Resources: Amanda Bickerstaff AI In Education Year 1 Timeline (on LinkedIn) Course Stories, Season 4, Episode 2: The AI Whisperer: Faculty and Students on ChatGPT Dialogues Planet Money Podcast: Can ChatGPT write a podcast episode? Can AI take our jobs? Book Recommendation: A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas Request to join the Network of Education Podcasters on LinkedIn (active education podcasters only please!) ASU Academic Dishonesty Risk Reduction Guide ASU Online Eventbrite Webinars Here’s a link to our original Superfriends episode: https://www.onlinelearningpodcast.com/e/ep-10-podcast-super-friends-crossover-episode-at-olc-innovate-23/ Our Podcast Superfriends: Josh Reppun What School Could be https://whatschoolcouldbe.org/ Bio: ormer chef, hotel manager and history teacher, Josh Reppun is the founder of Plexus Education, LLC, dba as Most Likely to Succeed in Hawai’i, a “movement” founded by extraordinary people dedicated to developing global public, private and charter school conversations around Ted Dintersmith’s film, Most Likely to Succeed and his book, What School Could Be. Josh is also the founder of Josh Reppun Productions. He is the host of the What School Could Be Podcast and the producer of two films: Ka Helena Aʻo: The Learning Walk and The Innovation Playlist, both about creative, imaginative and innovative educators and education leaders. Josh’s podcast, edited by the talented Evan Kurohara, with music by Michael Sloan, has now reached nearly 80,000 downloads in over 100 countries. Course Stories (from EdPlus at ASU) https://teachonline.asu.edu/podcast/course-stories/ Mary Loder Mary Loder is an Online Learning Manager at EdPlus, supporting Faculty professional development and training along with managing special projects in a variety of disciplines. She is also co-creator and co-host of Course Stories, a podcast where an array of course design stories are told alongside other designers and faculty from Arizona State University. Ricardo Leon Ricardo Leon is a Media Developer Sr for EdPlus and is a co-creator and co-host of Course Stories. He has developed a number of other podcasts and various other forms of instructional media. Tom Pantazes ODLI On Air Tom Pantazes, Ed.D. is an Instructional Designer with the Teaching & Learning Center at West Chester University who loves helping instructors integrate technology and robust learning pedagogy. His research interests include digital instructional video, extended reality, content interactivity, and simulations. If he is not cheering on Philly sports teams, camping or building Legos, you can catch him as a cohost of the ODLI on Air podcast. Specific Episodes: Generative AI in teaching Ram Poll gauging student opinions Lee Skallerup Bessette on LinkedIn All the Things ADHD Podcast https://allthethingsadhd.com/ Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! EP 22 - Podcast Super Friends II Intro [00:00:00] Jason Johnston: Questions? Anyone? [00:00:02] John Nash: They're podcasters. They don't talk. [00:00:06] Ricardo Leon: We listen. [00:00:07] Mary Loder: That's right, intently. [00:00:09] Jason Johnston: That's right. It's going to be all questions, actually. The whole podcast is people asking each other questions. Start of Episode [00:00:15] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:18] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And when I say everyone, everyone that I'm looking at as well. This is online learning in the second half, the online learning podcast. [00:00:26] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you all in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but there's still a lot that isn't. So how are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? [00:00:42] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:00:46] John Nash: That sounds perfect. podcast and talk with a bunch of people about it? [00:00:50] Jason Johnston: That sounds amazing. We're so excited today to have our next episode, our super friends, podcast, Super Friends II episode with a bunch of our friends. So, Let's get into it and meet some of our friends. How does that sound? [00:01:04] John Nash: Yeah, let's do it. [00:01:06] Jason Johnston: All right. Let's have each one of you introduce yourself and the podcast that you represent, and maybe just a little something about where, maybe where you're located, your podcast, what you currently do. Starting with Josh. [00:01:21] Josh Reppun: Good morning, everybody. It's a little after 7 a. m. in Honolulu, where we are experiencing torrential rains here in at the end of November, the beginning of December. My name is Josh Rapun, and I'm the host of the What School Could Be podcast. And it's just an absolute blast to be on this episode today and to be with other podcasters as part of this conversation. So glad to be here [00:01:44] Jason Johnston: thank you. Lee? [00:01:47] Lee Skallerup Bessette: Hey I am Leigh Skallerup Bessette. I'm coming at you just outside of D. C. I work at Georgetown University where I'm the Assistant Director for Digital Learning at our Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, also known as CANDLES. And I have a little podcast with a colleague of mine, Amy Morrison, up in Canada, and it is called "All the Things ADHD" it's called All the Things ADHD. Where we talk about neurodivergence in generally, but since we're both in higher education, more specifically in higher education. [00:02:20] Jason Johnston: Amazing. [00:02:22] Tom Pantazes: Hi everybody, I'm Tom Pantazis. Really excited to be here on the sequel of Super Friends and I am one of four co hosts of the "Oddly On Air" podcast that runs out of the Westchester University Teaching and Learning Center. [00:02:36] Jason Johnston: Amazing. Ricardo. [00:02:38] Ricardo Leon: I am Ricardo Leon. I am one of the hosts and producers of the "Course Stories" Podcast, which is produced through EdPlus at ASU, Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, where I am currently at right now. It's a little drizzly. Looks like the sun's coming out though. So we're doing good. But also in addition to the podcast, we also I'm part of a studio that runs quite a few things, including something that will be coming out in January of 2024 called "Space for Humans" it's a YouTube program about how we design futures in space that are accessible and inclusive. [00:03:10] Jason Johnston: Amazing. And Mary. Mary. Mary. [00:03:12] Mary Loder: And I'm Mary Loader and I am with Ricardo on "Course Stories." We created this about two years ago. Is that right, Ricardo? I think so. [00:03:19] Ricardo Leon: I don't know. I have no idea. [00:03:21] Mary Loder: That is a weird concept. But yeah, we're excited to be here. I'm the manager of professional development and training for Arizona State University's department called EdPlus on the team that Ricardo and I are on called Instructional Design and New Media. So there's three layers to understanding where we are at our very large university, but we're really excited to have been invited back. Thanks guys. [00:03:41] John Nash: I get say it, "And you guys work together." [00:03:43] Mary Loder: to my gosh you said that perfect [00:03:44] Ricardo Leon: yeah, [00:03:46] Jason Johnston: That's good. That's great. And John, I guess maybe we should introduce ourselves in case this is the first podcast that people are listening to. I'm Jason Johnston . I'm the executive director of online learning and course production at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And this is our podcast, online learning podcast, "Online Learning in the Second Half." John? [00:04:06] John Nash: Yeah, I'm John Nash. I'm an associate professor of educational leadership studies at the University of Kentucky and the director of graduate studies in that department where 95 percent all online instruction department, and I'm also the director of the laboratory on design thinking at the University of Kentucky. Yeah, this is fun. [00:04:26] Jason Johnston: This is fun. I love the fact that we're spread all over the place and we're coming from different institutions. This is yeah, I'm just really excited about this conversation. Starting off, I'm just curious about other than the fame and the fortune and the notoriety of doing podcasts. We all know, we all share in that. We all understand how all that works. But other than those, aspects why did you either start the podcast or why do you continue the podcast? What is your why in this situation? And just a few sentences for each of you. [00:04:59] Lee Skallerup Bessette: I'll go first. My co host Amy and I, we, there wasn't a podcast like that out there, like what we were talking about. Particularly with our context of two middle aged women in academia who got late in life neurodivergence diagnoses. And we thought, surely we can't be the only ones, but even if we are, it gives us an excuse to talk to each other for an hour once every other week or month, depending on when we can get our act together. And we keep doing it because it has resonated with so many people. And it i

In this episode, John and Jason talk about dangers and opportunities in the second half of online life, from their Online Learning Consortium (OLC) 2023 presentation and “live off the OLC floor” interviews. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: See slides from the full presentation here More about OLC here Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! False Start [00:00:00] John Nash: I took a class from a professional in San Francisco for voice acting. I thought I wanted to be a voice actor. So yeah, that [00:00:07] Jason Johnston: and here you are doing a podcast. You basically are a voice actor, except you happen to be acting like John [00:00:13] John Nash: Like John Nash, not like Barney the dinosaur, or doing my Louis Armstrong imitation or something like that. Start of Episode [00:00:20] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:23] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is online learning in the second half, the online learning podcast. [00:00:28] John Nash: Yeah. And we are doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two and a half years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great. And some of it is, but, a lot still isn't. And so how are we going to get to the next stage? [00:00:43] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:00:47] John Nash: That's perfect. What do you want to talk about today? [00:00:50] Jason Johnston: So John, would you call yourself a techno? optimist or a techno pessimist? Do you think we're, all of this is winding up into a better world? Or is technology taking us down this path of doomsday and destruction? [00:01:06] John Nash: If the left side is doomsday and destruction and the right side is optimism and happiness, I'm a cautious optimist. I'm, I think I'm a little bit to the right of a cautious optimist. I'm no Mark Andreessen who's recently come out with a tech manifesto suggesting that anybody who doesn't believe the bros in Silicon Valley can fix everything is crazy. I'm not like that at all. I do worry about my own critical thinking around technology and how it may be exacerbating environmental problems and social problems. Because I love playing with these tools so much, I think I'm clouded a little at times, but I'm, yeah , I'm right of center on if being right is optimistic I'm over there. [00:01:55] Jason Johnston: Yeah, I think I'm, find myself in the same space, not because I necessarily have a lot of optimism around technology. I do think it's pretty consumer driven and profit driven. And so that doesn't build in me a lot of optimism for its final outcome. However, I have an optimistic view of humanity, one that we typically work together towards our own survival when it comes down to it, and that there are a lot more good people in this world than bad people. And I think that maybe I'm an idealist and that I think the good will win out over, but not because I believe technology is going to save us by any means, but because there are a Usually enough good people that are helping to drive technology that I think we'll get to a better place. [00:02:46] John Nash: Yes. Yes, I think that's well put. I think I'm in the same space you are because we're both educators and we surround ourselves with other educators who are interested in applying the use of technology to help learners achieve their goals. I'm not on the side of thinking "the technology we need to have in place to save the world is that which puts billionaires in space." I'm not thinking that's the way to go, but you're right. I think when we surround ourselves with people who are interested in applying technology, particularly the technology that allows us to have online learning, and create more equitable, lower cost, high impact activities, then I think we're in a good place. [00:03:29] Jason Johnston: Yeah, I agree. . So you don't think you're going to climb into the next Mars shuttle to help expand us into a multi planet species? [00:03:37] John Nash: Now, I'm not in line for that. I'll watch the rockets leave earth. [00:03:40] Jason Johnston: Oh yeah. I will too. I would love to watch the rockets leave, but I don't have any interest in doing it nor do I think it's the best place. I think we have enough issues and good things to put our money towards here on this planet with these people that we have in front of us that I'm not really in line with that. [00:03:57] John Nash: Yeah, I agree. So where does that put us? We're both on the optimistic side of center here. But that doesn't mean we're not without some dangers. [00:04:08] Jason Johnston: That's right. And so today I would love to talk about our last OLC presentation, but around the theme of turning dangers into opportunities in online learning. Online learning in the second half. looking at the dangers, turning them into opportunities. How does that sound? [00:04:26] John Nash: Yeah, that sounds really good. And let's remind our listeners what OLC is. That's the Online Learning Consortium and they hold two major conferences every year, and this fall conference was in Washington, DC [00:04:42] Jason Johnston: Fall of 2023. If you're listening to us in the future, it's fall 2023. And also we're sorry. That's the other part. If you're listening to us in the future we really are trying our best, but I know we could have done more. That's all. [00:04:55] John Nash: That's right. So we had a presentation where we were able to talk with participants at the conference about the potential challenges that we have in front of us with online learning and really disambiguating those from the dangers that we might face. Also have in front of us. Jason, I think the word danger might sound a little alarmist to some of our listeners. Maybe we ought to put that into context. Also, [00:05:22] Jason Johnston: Yeah, and we found that as we were talking to people, so we roamed the snack area, basically, and accosted people with our microphone, asking them this big question, and I think a lot of times, "dangers" took them back just a little bit and say, danger, could I talk about a concern or a problem? And it was said, yes, but we're really looking for dangers. We're thinking about the big threats here, the big kind of more existential threats to online learning. What are the big things that come to mind? But we did talk a little bit about what "challenges" were versus "dangers," which challenges are more like the obstacles or difficulties, things that you could overcome with some effort and creativity and so on dangers, really these bigger challenges that potentially could pose significant risks or threats and have some harmful consequences if they're not addressed. [00:06:13] John Nash: Let's also put some more context on the danger and the things that we're concerned about. The people that go to the Online Learning Consortium meetings, there are certainly some vendors who supply tools and packages and other technology for institutions of higher ed and P 12 to do online learning, but It's also significantly populated with instructional designers and people who are really interested in bringing about higher quality experiences for learners in online environments. And so when we talk about dangers, we're really talking about what may be in front of us that could really threaten quality of learning experience. Is that fair? [00:06:56] Jason Johnston: I think so. I think most of the people that we talked to are well versed in building online classes, not just from a theoretical stance, but a practical stance of getting in there and making them happen from a quality standpoint. And so that certainly puts a particular context on this. Nobody was talking to us about the enrollment cliff or things like that. They tended to be around more of the issues that are apparent within the course and programs that are being delivered online. [00:07:29] John Nash: Yeah. [00:07:31] Jason Johnston: Shall we listen to a few quotes from the OLC floor? [00:07:34] John Nash: Yeah, absolutely. Let's get on the floor interrupt some some snack time that people are having and hear what they were thinking was a potential danger to online learning in the future. OLC FLOOR INTERVIEWS Yeah. My name's John Ruzicka. I'm with learning Sandbox. I feel like the greatest danger to online learning is overreliance on what I would call the shiny new object. So a couple of years ago at this conference, you might've heard a lot of talk about the metaverse. Today, it's all about generative AI, open AI. And so what will it be in the next couple of two or three years? It depends. I mean, of course, these are topical things we need to all think about and know about and experiment with, but I think the over reliance and over indexing on that new technology could be a distraction. My name is Carrie Kennedy. I'm here with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and I would say the biggest danger or risk that I'd like to make sure that my university avoids is being too slow to consider workforce impact and mobile pathways between non credit to academic credit. I think we're already a little bit behind in doing that and I think to, you know, keep up with demands of employers and skill gaps that we need to have those pathways in place. I'm Ellen Rogers with Penn State University. Big concern might be, if the faculty get too good at all this online learning and instruction, what happens to the need for instructional designers? Bill Egan, instructional designer of Penn Sta

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Dr. Olysha Magruder about the future of online education, a three-pronged approach to faculty development including JHU’s Coursera MOOC Course, and time boxing to help achieve successful outcomes. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)* Links and Resources: Dr. Olysha Magruder is the Interim Assistant Dean in the Center for Learning Design at Johns Hopkins University and can be found here at LinkedIn Excellence in Online Teaching Coursera Course Johns Hopkins Excellence in Online Teaching Symposium Beth McMurtrie on Teaching: What happens to teaching after Covid? (Chronicle of Higher Ed Paywall) Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! False Start [00:00:00] Jason Johnston: Any other questions for us before we get rolling? We'll do our normal kind of intro here, and then we'll get into the conversation. [00:00:07] Olysha Magruder: No, no questions. I hope I don't sound too goofy, but... [00:00:10] John Nash: No, we like goofy. [00:00:11] Jason Johnston: Yeah, you'll fit right in! . We decided on the front end. We're just going to let it roll in that way. And I feel like john people have appreciated that [00:00:18] John Nash: I even laugh at our own dumb intros because it's just, but yeah, we're not too stiff about it, but we have a serious topic here, but yeah, we're still humans. Start of Episode [00:00:27] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:30] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is online learning in the second half, the online learning podcast. [00:00:35] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot still isn't. How are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? [00:00:49] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:00:54] John Nash: I agree. Let's do a podcast and talk about it right now. What do you want to talk about today? [00:01:00] Jason Johnston: Wait, we are doing a podcast to talk about it. That's the weird thing about our intro. We're already doing a podcast [00:01:05] John Nash: Yeah. It's very meta. [00:01:07] Jason Johnston: a little meta that way. Yeah. Yeah today we are going to talk with Alicia Magruder. Dr. Alicia Magruder from John Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. [00:01:22] Olysha Magruder: Hello, Alicia here. [00:01:25] Jason Johnston: Did I say all that right? [00:01:27] Olysha Magruder: tHere is one funny thing about the name of my university, which is it's named after somebody. who has a weird first name, and it's Johns. That was his name. It's very common to say John because it feels weird to say Johns, and in fact, when I originally applied for my position in my cover letter, I also said John. [00:01:47] Jason Johnston: Oh boy. [00:01:48] Olysha Magruder: I learned very quickly that, oops, it's a weird name, Johns Hopkins, but everything else, yes. [00:01:53] Jason Johnston: I'm glad you, you made it through that first that first test and they were kind to you, somebody not too long ago spelled Tennessee wrong on a cover letter, hard one to look over, easy to do though, easy to do, but also a little hard to look over sometimes. Yeah nice to have you here. So Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. [00:02:14] Olysha Magruder: Yes, that's right. Whiting School of Engineering. [00:02:17] Jason Johnston: Yeah. And tell us about what you do there. [00:02:21] Olysha Magruder: So I am the interim assistant dean of learning design and innovation, which is a somewhat new position not on the team, but for me, but I lead the learning design team of instructional designers and course support specialists. And we work collaboratively with our multimedia and instructional technology team to create online courses. So we have our main program that we I guess we could say service is a engineering for professionals program and there are 22 online master's degrees that we help support. So we run hundreds of courses at any given time. We have right now we have about 130 plus courses in development with our instructional designers and yeah, that's what we do. [00:03:09] Jason Johnston: Yeah. That's exciting. You've got a lot going on there though with with a hundred plus [00:03:15] Olysha Magruder: Yeah, [00:03:15] Jason Johnston: Does it feel like a lot? [00:03:18] Olysha Magruder: it does, but we've structured our team so that it's very collaborative amongst our instructional designers, faculty, the multimedia folks, the course support specialists. So we have what we call pods of team members and they work together for certain programs. And that way they can. Discuss the program specific needs, but because of that, we have a very nice workflow that we've created. So it is a lot, but it's manageable. So far. I haven't had any anybody tell me that they're ready to put their hands up in frustration. That happens occasionally, we get through it. [00:03:53] Jason Johnston: Yeah. [00:03:55] John Nash: Alicia, does every program that you just mentioned receive the benefits of your services or do some just still go on their own? [00:04:02] Olysha Magruder: They all go through us to create their courses. There are some, a couple of programs that have a slightly different approach that we accommodate, but eventually they end up with us. So everything that goes online through those master's programs through that one engineering for professionals is all the courses go through us at some point and we have a the course support specialists. We also have a quality assurance manager. They make sure everything is like accessible and, we have all these quality checks throughout the process. So that's by design. So all of those courses are vetted, reviewed, et cetera. [00:04:41] John Nash: That's wonderful. I know at my institution, there are online programs that do the best they can, and we have folks that can help us, but it's not as systematic as that. [00:04:52] Olysha Magruder: Yeah, we are somewhat unique and a part of that is because these big online programs, most of the faculty are by design people in the field. So they're super busy people and they're incredible people. It's pretty cool working with people who work at NASA or worked on the, asteroid destruction mission or are doing biomedical engineering things that you see on LinkedIn . And I don't even know half the time what they're working on, but then I see these posts and I'm like, whoa, they're like revolutionizing the medical field and. So they're super busy people, and so we've designed this to work with that particular type of person, and it's a longer, it's a very, it's a committed process, and it's a longer term process, but it works, mostly. [00:05:39] John Nash: Nice. [00:05:40] Jason Johnston: If we ever wondered whether or not online learning was important we now know that it is because we're training up the next people that will actually stop that asteroid from hitting the earth, right? The current people that know how to save us aren't going to be alive when the asteroids hit. So we're online learning is essential for training up the next generation. [00:06:02] Olysha Magruder: We actually had , one of the mission coordinator for the DART mission speak at it at a recent event, I don't think she teaches for us, but she's affiliated with one of our units. Anyways, she gave the whole awesome session on the DART mission, which was the asteroid deflection mission. She reassured everyone that it's very rare that's going to happen, that we have an asteroid that will hit that, We'll destroy the earth or what have you, but some of the statistics you put up there, she seemed reassured by, but I was like, oh my gosh, I don't feel good about these numbers. I know she does, but they still as any number seems a little bit, [00:06:38] Jason Johnston: right? If it's not zero, it still feels like something that could happen. [00:06:42] Olysha Magruder: Exactly, [00:06:43] Jason Johnston: Willis When you need them too, right? Because I, he's not going to be saving us. That's an Armageddon reference. I don't know if you've seen it. Have you seen that one, John [00:06:50] John Nash: I have years ago, 80s or 90s, I think. Yeah, but yeah, [00:06:55] Olysha Magruder: I'll have to look for it. I don't think I've seen it. [00:06:58] Jason Johnston: Yeah. It's an action movie where they're the ones that are skilled and determined to, to take care of this asteroid before it hits the earth. So I won't tell you how it ends. [00:07:09] Olysha Magruder: The good news is with the real life dart mission, they managed to hit not the big, I guess there are two, a big asteroid and small asteroid. This is all layman terms because [00:07:19] Jason Johnston: I don't know. [00:07:21] Olysha Magruder: but they managed to hit the small asteroid that was orbiting the larger one and they managed to change the time of it by 30 minutes. So it would, the orbit would take 15 hours and I don't know, I'm just gonna make this up, 50 minutes. But after they hit it, it's now orbiting at 15 hours and 20 minutes. And her point was like, this was just an experiment to see if we could, and we can, and so we can change the sort of, I don't know. It's wild. You can change space. We can change space. [00:07:54] John Nash: it is wild. It's as if they're playing a game of galactic billiards. [00:07:58] Olysha Magruder: Yeah. So all that to say, I get to work with cool people like that. We get to work with cool people l

In this episode, John and Jason engage in a discussion with Dr. Michelle Ament about the impact of AI on education, its role in reducing transactional tasks for educators, the significance of human intelligence and soft skills in an AI-driven world, how AI can be leveraged in professional development, and the potential future of AI-integrated, relationship-based classroom environments tailored to individual student needs. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com  Join Our LinkedIn Group - Online Learning Podcast Links and Resources: Dr. Michelle Ament is the Cheif Academic Officer at ProSolve Michelle Ament on LinkedIn Jason's AI 4 Language Translation Video An intro to the Zone of Proximal Development Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! False Start [00:00:00] Michelle Ament: Thank you for having me this morning. I'm so looking forward to this conversation.  [00:00:04] Jason Johnston: Yeah, and we just wanted to get started just to understand a little bit about you and your background, where you've come from. Currently, you're a chief academic officer. And John Deletes Jason's Notes [00:00:14] John Nash: Oh, I did that, didn't I? [00:00:16] Jason Johnston: John just deleted all my notes. [00:00:19] John Nash: No, I didn't. I moved my notes and put them below yours. [00:00:25] Jason Johnston: I'll try again. [00:00:28] John Nash: Podcasting at its best. [00:00:31] Michelle Ament: This is fun.  Start Intro [00:00:33] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:37] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the Online Learning Podcast. [00:00:42] John Nash: Yes, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation that we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, Online learning's had its chance to be great, and a lot of it is, but there's still a bit that isn't. And how are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? [00:00:58] Jason Johnston: And that's a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:01:03] John Nash: I love that. Perfect. What do you want to talk about today? [00:01:06] Jason Johnston: I would love to talk about online learning. How does that sound as a theme, overall theme, for our conversation today? But more specifically, I would love to talk with, we've got a guest with us, Dr. Michelle Ament. Welcome, Michelle. [00:01:21] Michelle Ament: Good morning. [00:01:23] Jason Johnston: How are you? [00:01:24] Michelle Ament: I'm doing great. Thank you for having me this morning. I'm so looking forward to this conversation. [00:01:30] Jason Johnston: We're really looking forward to having you with us. We just wanted to get started just to understand a little bit about you and your background, you're currently, the chief learning officer you've had a background in personalized learning technology and learning curriculum and design fifth grade teacher, one of my question for you today Michelle is how did you get to where you are today? [00:01:51] Michelle Ament: Great question. I think about why, where I, how I got to where I am today is I love the design of learning. So when I went into teaching, I was a classroom teacher. I've been in education 25 years. And like you said, I started in fifth grade and was an elementary teacher. And what I loved about teaching first was the daily interaction with kids, of course, but the design of learning. So it was all about, Yeah. learning, figuring out what learners needed, what were some of their strengths, what were some of their areas of growth, and then figuring out how to design really engaging learning. And so in the classroom, that's what fueled me every day. It was like a problem to solve. How could I design something that was really relevant, highly engaging? And authentic for kids. And then I went on to lead in that way and led in several different positions, like you mentioned, with technology and learning, with professional development, and a focus on personalized learning. And at that point, it really became what haven't I done? And the next step was really the superintendency. And I made a conscious decision to, at that point to think is this really where I want to go or do I want to look outside of the public education sector and decided to make the move to ProSolve, found this rapidly growing company who is really focused on learning design and focused on how do we create learning experiences that really are authentic for kids, relevant for kids. And so it fit with my background in design.  [00:03:27] Jason Johnston: And what do you do on a day to day basis? [00:03:30] Michelle Ament: What I do on a day to day basis is a whole lot of things. I don't know if either of you have ever worked for a rapidly growing company. When I started with ProSolve, there were eight team members, and now we have 35 over the year about 18 months. So that's rapid growth. I've done everything from design learning to lead customer success to run an amazing shipping department. Oh, there was a skill set I didn't know I had and really serving on our executive team and helping lead the company and and really have an impact on school districts across the country. And so I'm driven by impact. And I had an impact in my classroom and an impact in my school district, but now I get to have an impact nationwide on a whole lot of school districts and see learning really changing as a result of experiences that teachers are designing. [00:04:23] Jason Johnston: Great. And you're in ProSolve, just to understand it. It is really an organization that focuses on, is it mostly K 12? [00:04:33] Michelle Ament: Yes, we are focused K to 12. And what we're really all about is our we believe, and I think this will resonate with both of you, given what I know about your backgrounds. We believe that the education system has been really focused on knowledge dissemination. The educator, the professor, the instructor is just providing information to the learner. And so what we are really about is shifting that paradigm to more of an experiential based learning. an opportunity to create an experience that learners can reflect on and apply to their day to day world. And we just, we believe school isn't relevant for kids anymore. They, we've seen a decrease in attendance and enrollment, and now with the rise of artificial intelligence, they have all the knowledge at their fingertips, everything that they need to know they can find. They don't need the traditional classroom. So we believe it's we've got to change. We've got to figure out how to move more towards that experiential application based learning in our classrooms so that students find it relevant. But that's where learning sticks. It becomes sticky when you can apply it to something that's important to you. [00:05:46] Jason Johnston: Your engagement with school systems is on a, is it on a contract basis? Or do they buy, essentially, curriculum and packages from you to, to use? Or how does your engagement work with school systems and schools? [00:06:02] Michelle Ament: We have several different options. We do have a curriculum that we offer. We are focused on supporting schools with social emotional learning. And so one of the things with our social emotional learning curriculum is that it is hands on. students have an opportunity to be in a situation where I have to tell you about Quest. So Quest is this game that is part video game, part board game, part escape room. And so they are immersed in this experience where they all of the adults have vanished This from Sarabella Falls and they have to figure out what has happened to all of the adults and so they work as teams to solve challenges, collect food and collect reputation points and just move through this series of episodes in this experience and all the while doesn't that sound fun? Don't you two want to play right? [00:06:57] Jason Johnston: Yeah, for sure. And I was just thinking that's like you're starting with every kid's... Like fantasy that every adult has disappeared and we can just run run this place as we as we wanted to. [00:07:08] Michelle Ament: And they got to figure out why have the adults vanished, which yes, every child's dream, but also pretty like dystopian type genre, which is what kids are really interested in. And as they work in teams, they compete against each other and they have to collaborate. They have to make decisions together. They have to compromise. They have to communicate. They have to persevere. So all of those are real world skills, right? And they are developing them in an authentic context. And so that right there is different than any kind of social emotional curriculum in a K 12 market. Typically you are listening to the teacher tell about a scenario and you're Giving them the answers they want to hear and then nothing really changes and now our SEL time is done and we're moving on to math time and then we move on to reading time. So Quest, that's one of our services that we offer. We have a service learning solution where we help students That's where we leverage design thinking, which I'm really excited to talk to John about design thinking and how we bring that into the classroom. And then we have professional development. How do we make professional development look different? I'm sure you've all seen that meme where the teachers are falling asleep, falling out of their chairs with a traditional professional development. So we. We do things differently. We engage teachers in a, in fun experiences that really push their thinking and have them reflect on, okay, how do I do more of this in my classroom? How do I make learning different and more? I keep saying the word relevant on this podcast. You'll p

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Dr. Brandeis Marshall about making online assignments Un-AIable, understanding data science, concerns & opportunities of using AI in the classroom, and the new digital AI divide. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com  Join Our LinkedIn Group - Online Learning Podcast Dr. Brandeis Marshall Links and Resources: Dr. Brandeis Marshall’s Website and LinkedIn What’s Un-AIable by Dr. Brandeis Marshall on Medium (Paywall) Book by Dr. Marshall - Data Conscience: Algorithmic Siege on our Humanity WaPo article on Harriet Tubman and Khan Academy and Dr. Marshall’s article how not to use AI Rebel Tech Newsletter Other Reading / Resources: These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Dr. Brandeis Marshall Bio: Brandeis Marshall is Founder and CEO of DataedX Group, a data ethics learning and development agency for educators, scholars and practitioners to counteract automated oppression efforts with culturally-responsive instruction and strategies. Trained as a computer scientist and as a former college professor, Brandeis teaches, speaks and writes about the racial, gender, socioeconomic and socio-technical impact of data operations on technology and society. She wrote Data Conscience: Algorithmic Siege on our Humanity (Wiley, 2022) as a counter-argument reference for tech’s move fast and break things philosophy. She pinpoints, guides and recommends paths to moving slower and building more responsible human-centered AI approaches. Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! Intro [00:00:00] Jason: Some banter on the front end. [00:00:02] Brandeis: Oh, I'm great at banter. [00:00:03] Jason: Oh, good. [00:00:04] Brandeis: I've been teaching for 23 years, so you have to have that conversation with the students before classes begin. [00:00:13] Jason: If you like banter, then you've come to the right place because This podcast is mostly banter [00:00:18] John: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. [00:00:21] Jason: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the online learning podcast. [00:00:27] John: Yeah, and we are doing this podcast to let you all in on a conversation we've been having for the last two and a half years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. So how are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? [00:00:43] Jason: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? [00:00:47] John: I love that idea. What do you want to talk about today? [00:00:50] Jason: um, to talk with you, of like usual, [00:00:53] John: That's overrated, but that's [00:00:54] Jason: but I would also love to talk to you. a very special guest with us, Dr. Brandeis Marshall. Welcome. [00:01:01] Brandeis: Thank you both for having me. [00:01:03] Jason: And is it okay if we call you Brandeis? [00:01:05] Brandeis: Yes, feel free to [00:01:06] Jason: Okay. Thank you. It's so great to have you here. And Brandeis, I'd love for you to introduce yourself, but just in, in general she's the founder, CEO of Data edX Group, a data ethics learning and development for educators. scholars and practitioners to counteract automated oppression efforts with culturally responsive instruction and strategies. Not only that, but she has a background in education. And we'd love to talk to you a little bit about that. What would you like to say about yourself here today? [00:01:40] Brandeis: listen. I am an educator, a data person. Like I think everyone is at this point in this age of AI and whatnot what, and what it isn't and what it is. And yeah, I'm also just, I just lead black women in data as well, which is really focused on increasing the number of black women in the data industry. So that's all I want to say about myself. I have books and I write things and I talk to people, but. thOse are the main things about me. [00:02:07] Jason: You're humble. She writes books. She talks about some things. She has excellent posts. She is continues to be an educator for us and ways in which we have connected with some of her writings that we'll talk about. But yeah, thanks so much for. being with us. Un-AIable Assignments [00:02:23] John: I'm just going to get it out of the way. I'm gushing a little bit, but I'm very excited to get to talk to you today, Dr. Marshall. And so there, I just got it out of the way. But yeah, but mostly because, the number one. piece of reading that I've been telling everybody I know, particularly those who are in education circles and worrying about AI, is to read your Medium piece called "What's Un-AIable." [00:02:47] Brandeis: Yes. I keep telling people to just calm down, and I'm now seeing commercials that are like, we're going to be using AI basically as an assistant. I'm thinking I've been saying that since March, but yes. Thank you for sharing the piece and hopefully people get something good out of it. It seems as though it has been very well received and people are yeah, that's right. AI can't do context. AI cannot. AI cannot do conflict resolution. It cannot. What happens? AI will literally get to a place where it has a fork in the road. And then what does it do? Abort. It just aborts. You can't abort as a human. You gotta decide what you're gonna do. Doing nothing is still a decision. But AI will be like, it'll just end the program. And you'll be like, what the, what happened? It's like cyber, it's what is that, Cyber Monday? That happens, or, right after the holidays? It's start up, everything's just frozen. That's what it, and just abort. [00:04:00] John: I'm in the business of preparing P 12 school principals and superintendents. And so these are, my students are adult teachers who are going to be leaders of schools. And so that puts me in circles of people who are talking about. What are students going to do in my classrooms now, and what are they going to create, and what am I going to do to be able to thwart this? And my response was, perhaps don't try to thwart this, but how might you look at things that students can do that are un AIable? And then I share your piece on that. And you cover three big things, which is that AI does not have contextual awareness, it cannot do conflict resolution, and it cannot do critical thinking. And when I mentioned that, these two, the teachers just they like, lean back a little and their shoulders relax and they go, yeah, you're right. It can't. And we can still teach that. And we can ask students to demonstrate that to us. Talk a little bit about what drove you to write that piece and why we should always be thinking carefully about what's un AIable. [00:05:05] Brandeis: Yeah. So I wrote the piece because I was having similar conversations because I do teach adults as well. And some of them are instructors, right? Some of them are new instructors. Some of them have been in the education industry for a while at all levels. And I just one day in this conversation just sat back and was like, there are things that this AI cannot do. And I was in a room with people who were just so enamored with. all of the generative AI new tools that had just come out. Cause this was like April, May, but everything had hit the scene. And I was just like, y'all are excited for no reason. And so I sat down and I just thought about what can't AI do? And as with many people who are writing pieces, you get your best ideas when you're not trying to get the idea. So I think I was like in the shower or something. And I started just to list like these things in my head. And those, these were the three things that bubbled up. And then saying this needs to be front and center for a lot of instructors and just a lot of people in general, just everybody is trying to adopt AI without understanding its limitations. And so I wrote the piece as a way to provide like a grounding and a practicality on what you cannot make AI do, nor do we want to, which is the other part of the piece, which is we don't want AI to do any of this stuff. Understanding Data Science [00:06:34] Jason: Tell me, what does it really mean? I'm not a data scientist. I have a sense of what that means because, as an educator, of course, we work with data, but I realize that I'm not a data scientist. What does that really mean to be a data scientist? [00:06:49] Brandeis: Data scientist as a profession has changed over the last five years or so. Originally, a data scientist was just a big umbrella for anyone who worked in data. If you were working on an Excel spreadsheet, you were coding in a particular language, or you were a journalist talking about different types of visualizations and figures and charts and statistics. And a data scientist now has elevated to be someone who is more of like a data architect, really trying to deal with the strategy behind how data is modeled and organized, and then how is it interpreted by a team to help decision makers, help human and automated decision makers. And most times they tend to be managers, and They also can be more on the technical, statistical, and computer science side, where they're actually doing some coding and managing projects. So it really does depend on the organization of what a data scientist is. I call myself a data person because I think it's important to think about the full ramifications of data and how unifying and divisive it can be, right? Because data is everywhere. Every company is essentially a data company now, because they're trying to get your data. They're trying to understand it in ways in order to market better to you. Capitalistic society. So I call myself a data person that I, my real niche is in data engineering, which is all the data modeling side. So I'm that databa

In this episode, John and Jason talk about current reading, recent seminars, and their upcoming OLC Accelerate Conference (2023) presentation in Washington, DC   Join Our LinkedIn Group - Online Learning Podcast Resources: John’s Book Recommendations:The Renée Ballard series by Michael Connely Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell The Whistler and The Judges List by John Grisham  How to Make Sense of Any Mess, by Abby Covert Jason’s Book Recommendation:Everything is Figureaboutable, by Marie Forleo John & Jason’s Slides from the University of Tennessee’s 1st AI Symposium “Reimagining online assignments with and because of AI” John’s Slides from Sweden where he talked about the promise of AI and whether it can democratize innovation or dilute quality.  OLC Session 1: EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF AI ON STUDENT CONNECTION AND BELONGING IN EDUCATION (Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 9:30 AM to 10:15 AM) OLC Session 2: ONLINE LEARNING IN THE SECOND HALF: TURNING DANGERS INTO OPPORTUNITIES (Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 1:15 PM to 2:00 PM) Contact John or Jason through LinkedIn if you are an educational podcaster and would like to join them in a recording session! Transcript  We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions!   
 [00:00:00] John Nash: Do you smile when you talk? Did you know when you smile while you talk, it actually makes you sound like you're like. 
 funny. It  
 works. 
 [00:00:06] Jason Johnston: that's what they, that's what they told us to do in telemarketing. 
 [00:00:09] John Nash: That's right. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. 
 [00:00:14] Jason Johnston: Now I'm laughing. I can't. Okay, I'll 
 try it again.  
 Intro 
 [00:00:19] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great and a lot of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. How are we going to get to the next stage, Jason? 
 [00:00:42] Jason Johnston: That's a great question. And I've got an idea. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? 
 [00:00:48] John Nash: I love that idea. Let's do it right now. 
 [00:00:50] Jason Johnston: good. Today, I wondered if we could talk just a little bit about the road behind, the road ahead, what we've been doing lately what we will be doing next, we've got some exciting events that we're doing together in the next little bit. 
 [00:01:03] John Nash: We do.  
 We do.  
 [00:01:04] Jason Johnston: First I was wondering about have you been reading anything these days, John? 
 [00:01:09] John Nash: I've been reading my usual kinds of journal articles and other things , but 2023 has been a little different for me in terms of the topic of reading because the funniest thing happened to me in January of this year. I started reading electively non academic. books, novels. And I don't know how it happened, but I just did. I was I was on a work trip to Honolulu and I found, I discovered that you can check out books from your public library and put them on your Kindle. 
 I didn't know about Libby, the app Libby. 
 [00:01:45] Jason Johnston: Libby's amazing. 
 [00:01:47] John Nash: Yeah, it's amazing. I'm running around my friend's house in Honolulu going, Hey, do you know you can do this? As if, just split the atom or something. And yeah. And so I've been reading I read a bunch of Michael Connolly novels. About a female detective in Los Angeles contemporary of Bosch's, and I liked those a lot, and now I'm on like book 12 of the novels about Kay Scarpetta, the fictional and famous Virginia chief medical examiner it's a longstanding series written by Patricia Cornwell.  
 [00:02:20] Jason Johnston: Is this like a secret desire to be a detective and solve crimes for a 
 [00:02:24] John Nash: Yeah, I don't know, but I do, I'm drawn to these novels because I don't know, I guess I like the technical aspects of these novels with Kay Scarpetta as the protagonist, because they do get pretty technical about some medical issues related to examining the dead and help having the dead speak. 
 Actually, there's a UT Knoxville tie in, they talk about the body farm a lot in these novels. Yeah. And for those who may not know the body farm is the outdoor laboratory outside University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where bodies decompose and they study them. 
 [00:02:57] Jason Johnston: And as part of that body farm as I understand they're actually buried under the field at Neyland Stadium. So if you watch a UT Vols football game the bodies are buried underneath that field. , last. Fall, my son and I were at a game just right around Halloween. 
 And the band at the halftime did thriller, and then they spelled out body farm. So it's all part of the lore there. That's great. 
 [00:03:22] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. 
 [00:03:23] Jason Johnston: You know what book I just started that was on your recommendation, is Everything is Figureoutable. 
 [00:03:31] John Nash: No, I don't remember recommending that to you. Yeah. That sounds like a great book. 
 [00:03:36] Jason Johnston: Yeah maybe. 
 [00:03:38] John Nash: I think you just recommended it to me. 
 [00:03:41] Jason Johnston: Oh, that's funny. It's so funny because I've all throughout this book, like I'm only, three or four chapters in, but I've been thinking this is such a John Nash book. I can totally see why he enjoys this, from a design thinking standpoint and the person is witty and pretty terse and just to the point so easy read, really easy  
 [00:04:00] John Nash: I'll check it out. 
 [00:04:01] Jason Johnston: Oh, good. I'm glad I could 
 [00:04:03] John Nash: hilarious. I might have recommended it to you. The older I get, the more I say stuff that I don't remember ever saying. 
 [00:04:09] Jason Johnston: But you haven't read it, right? Is that  
 [00:04:11] John Nash: No, I don't think I've ever read that book. 
 [00:04:14] Jason Johnston: That's funny. That's a great phrase, isn't it? Everything is figured out. 
 [00:04:18] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. I know. I'm just looking at, I just brought onto my desk here, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which is the one that I'm, I do recommend by Abby Covert. 
 [00:04:26] Jason Johnston: Oh, I bet you that was it. I think that was the one you recommended, and somehow I ended up on this book. Probably some sort of loop off of 
 [00:04:35] John Nash: It's got a similar cadence to the title. It's Oh, this must be the book you recommended. 
 [00:04:39] Jason Johnston: Yeah. But this last weekend, it was a great story. I served for a number of years at a small boarding school in Eastern Kentucky, called Oakdale Christian Academy great school. where people from all the world and from all sorts of different contexts, often students that are. Not making it in their current context and they needed a, another opportunity for them and lots of great students, lots of great staff. 
 So I was there for six years and this last weekend they were decommissioning a hundred year old chapel, just this kind of small chapel. It was like it was maybe 30, let's 30 by a hundred and something feet, right? There's this kind of one room. Chapel. They were decommissioning after about a hundred years. 
 Anyways, somebody got up and told the story who he was born in 1935 and he was a teacher there in the 50s, okay? And this relates back to the book, but also the kinds of things we talk about. There was a teacher there in the 50s, and so one summer, after, school was over, he and another teacher, their job was to move the chapel. The president came to them and said, we got to get this chapel moved, it's too close to the road, they're expanding the road, and we got to move it down here to the creek about, maybe 500, 600 feet or something like that. And just figured it out. They'd never done this before. 
 They had no engineering background, but this is just what you did in the 50s. It was like, okay, and so he told this story about using some old telephone poles. to put underneath the chapel and move inch by inch as they pulled it with the school bus down to where it currently sat for 70 years until now finally the whole thing is, it's a big wooden building, the whole thing is coming apart and so they were decommissioned. But I, but it's funny because I started this book like the day before and then heard the story. And then I was talking to the outgoing president of the school. And I was like, isn't it amazing what teachers can do and have done, Like when you don't realize, especially, and he was joking about the fact, yeah, they just, they didn't really even conceive of the fact that they'd never done this before. 
 Weren't asked whether or not they did this before and they just figured it out.  
 [00:07:04] John Nash: I love that. Yeah. I guess the, I'm already thinking like, what would I do? I don't have an engineering background, but we could probably figure that out. You just have to be careful that you lift at the same time everywhere at the right time, and everything's level and nothing's going. 
 Yeah, everything's battened down and then we go slowly and watch and tweak, right? 
 [00:07:25] Jason Johnston: Go slowly, take it easy and think about what you're doing. And but I also thought about the fact that I'm afraid right now, if somebody asked me to move that chapel. I would just say I, I can't do that. It's not within my scope of doing. Why don't we hire somebody now? 
 I could maybe, help you find somebody that could do it. We could hire. Maybe I could help you raise some money to get a proper moving company in to move it from here to there. But I'm just so inspired by their their tenacity just to take it on.  
 [00:07:58] John Nash: It reminds me of a show that my wife and I powered through seasons and seasons of it.

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Dr. Kristen DiCerbo about how Khamigo was born, how it works, and how it might help transform and humanize online learning.  Join Our LinkedIn Group - Online Learning Podcast Resources: Kristen DiCerbo Check out the Khanmigo page Khan Academy / Canvas Instructure Press Release where they announce their partnershipVideo from Instructurecon More information about the ICAP Framework Transcript We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions! 
 Pre-Banter 
 [00:00:00] Jason Johnston: Was Khanmigo able to join us on the call today? 
 [00:00:04] Kristen DiCerbo: Khanmigo right now does not have text to speech, so we'll not be on the podcast. 
 [00:00:09] Jason Johnston: All right, probably too busy. There's a lot of people to support out there. And they're a bit of a rock star. So they're probably at the White House or something  
 [00:00:17] Kristen DiCerbo: Most likely, yeah exactly. Some world leaders. Yes. 
 [00:00:20] Jason Johnston: Leaders guiding policy across G20 or something like that. 
 [00:00:25] Kristen DiCerbo: yeah, exactly. 
 Start 
 [00:00:26] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. 
 [00:00:29] Jason Johnston: Hey John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the Online Learning Podcast.  [00:00:34] John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two and a half years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. And so how are we going to get to the next stage?  
 [00:00:50] Jason Johnston: That's great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? 
 [00:00:54] John Nash: Perfect, what do you want to talk about today? 
 [00:00:58] Jason Johnston: Well, I'm very excited about our guest today. We're going to be talking with Dr. Kristin DeCerbo, the Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy. Welcome Dr. How are you? 
 [00:01:11] Kristen DiCerbo: Good, good. And please call me Kristen. It's great to be here today. 
 [00:01:14] Jason Johnston: Well, it is great to have you here. And we just wanted to start off by just getting to know you just a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your current role at Khan Academy. 
 [00:01:25] Kristen DiCerbo: Yeah, so a chief learning officer can mean lots of different things and lots of different organizations. So, At Khan Academy, I lead our content team, our product management team, our design team, and our community support team. So most of what you see, on the Khan Academy site is built and created by a lot of the folks that are on my team. 
 And I do not lead the engineers, they're a whole 
 [00:01:51] Jason Johnston: Okay. That's good. 
 [00:01:52] Kristen DiCerbo: group, not them. But I come from an educational psychology background. So my PhD is in educational psychology, and so I don't have the traditional kind of product background that some educational technology folks who lead those kinds of teams do. 
 And instead, I bring a lot of, you know, experience and insight about how people learn. And we try to build that into then the articles, the exercises, the videos, and all of the experiences students have on the site.  
 [00:02:24] Jason Johnston: And so, you mentioned about your education, you've got a PhD in educational psychology. Is that what you said? 
 [00:02:30] Kristen DiCerbo: Yes. I actually thought when I went to grad school that I was going to be a school psychologist. And so did a research practitioner program where I was doing. All of the work and training to be a school psychologist and doing all of the work on how you diagnose learning difficulties and all of that and did a whole bunch of research and kind of fell in love with that side of things too. 
 But then did end up being a school psychologist in a school in Arizona where I live. One of the schools I worked at had 1, 200 kindergarten through third graders, if you can imagine in a school, 
 [00:03:05] John Nash: No, I can't imagine. 
 [00:03:07] Kristen DiCerbo: And 80 percent of them had a home language that was not English which makes them figuring out why are kids struggling to learn quite a challenge , but also really drove home for me some of the Potential for education technology and could see, you know, there's, we have all of these kids who need extra support and extra help and all different levels in a classroom and how does a teacher help start to differentiate all of those. 
 So that was a bit of my first thinking about how do we, how could we use technology to help support these kids? 
 [00:03:44] Jason Johnston: So you got a lineup of kids waiting to see you at the school. And then did you just think one day, man, I'd like to learn more about doing this through a computer or through online or how did you get into Khan Academy? 
 [00:03:55] Kristen DiCerbo: Yeah, so it's a little bit of a winding road. So at first I was, after a couple of years, was thinking I was going to make a career change, thought I might go be a professor and did academic job applications. In that process, I got back in touch with someone who had been one of my statistics professors at Arizona State and he had gone to work for Cisco, the networking company, which sounds crazy, but Cisco has something they call the Networking Academy Program, where they create curriculum and assessments that they give away to high schools and community colleges for free to help students learn computer networking skills. 
 And so I got in touch with him to write me letters of recommendation for these academic jobs, and he said, of course, I'll write you those letters, but you should think about coming to work here. We're doing this online learning thing. And we have a whole lot of engineers that are starting to, you know, help us write this curriculum. 
 But we need some people who know about learning and assessment to think about this. And I was like, huh, that's kind of interesting. And the kind of the kicker is, and you could create these things that touch hundreds of thousands of learners every year, and really have that kind of impact on the world. 
 And so I was convinced and. So went to Cisco and spent a good amount of time doing some really interesting things around simulations and simulation based assessment, because it turns out that the high school students would practice on this expensive networking equipment, and they'd break it, and they didn't know how to fix it, so we said, well, let's create some simulation tools so they can configure this and try those crazy what if questions in a low risk environment and work through those. 
 And then we said, wait. We are, by doing this, we're capturing all of the information about how they're configuring these devices. Why are we giving them a multiple choice test about networking when we can actually see them doing the skills that we're trying to create? And so, got into performance based assessments and thinking about how we can use that digital data to understand what students know and can do. And from there, I was presenting on some of these ideas and some folks from Pearson approached both me and my mentor, who was the one who brought me and said, Hey, we're starting something called a Research and Innovation Network at Pearson. 
 And would you like to take some of these ideas you've been playing with and try them out in domains other than computer networking? And, you know, think about how this might fit across K 12. And that was pretty enticing. And obviously Pearson also has big reach and big opportunities. So went there and spent a good amount of time there in a research role. 
 And then gradually over time, as big companies do reorganizations and changes ended up leading a team of learning designers and researchers who were working closely with product teams to. building based on what we know from the learning sciences into some of the products and places things that offerings that were being released at Pearson. 
 And then about, oh, three and a half years ago or so, I was thinking about what my next step might be. And I was talking to some friends and said, I think I want something smaller. I think I want to go in the nonprofit space. And I think, you know, I was a VP at Pearson. I think I'm going to go like something like a chief academic officer, chief learning officer. 
 And three weeks later, this job that I have now was posted. And I said, this is what I was just describing and it all worked out. And so that's how I got to Khan Academy. 
 [00:07:36] John Nash: Did it feel, going back to your experience developing performance based assessments, and that was in an online environment, did that feel different and kind of exciting? Because that seems like that would have been a little cutting edge at the time. 
 [00:07:51] Kristen DiCerbo: it was. So yeah, we're talking like 2006, 2007 at this time to date myself. And it was, and it still feels like I still look back on some of that stuff we were doing and was like, this is still kind of cutting edge. And in terms of what's going on in the world. So it did feel that way at the time. And I still, You know, I'm still hoping there's a place for some of that. 
 And then at Pearson, I also was doing part of this group called Glass Lab that was a collaboration with EA, the makers of SimCity, the big gaming group. And EA gave us the code to SimCity and said, make a game based assessment. in SimCity, which was super fun. 
 [00:08:37] John Nash: I bet. 
 [00:08:38] Kristen DiCerbo: And we learned a lot and made, so we made SimCity EDU, which if you Google it, is no longer in existence and has some issues and never really got to large distribution, but was a lot of fun to make and a lot of fun to think about the issues around that. 
 [00:08:53] John Nash: Yeah