Tag Archives: Online Learning

New learning paradigm

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I heard something in a meeting recently that I haven’t heard in a while. It was in a meeting with some online educational leaders across the province and the topic of Chat GPT and AI came up. It’s really challenging in an online course, with limited opportunities for supervised work or tests, to know if a student is doing the work, or a parent or tutor, or Artificial Intelligence tools. That’s when a conversation came up that I’ve heard before. It was a bit of a stand on a soapbox diatribe, “If an assignment can be done by Chat GPT, then maybe the problem is in the assignment.”

That’s almost the exact line we started to hear about 15 years ago about Google… I might even have said it, “If you can just Google the answer to the question, then how good is the question?” Back then, this prompted some good discussions about assessment and what we valued in learning. But this is far more relevant to Google than it is to AI.

I can easily create a question that would be hard to Google. It is significantly harder to do the same with LLM’s – Large Language Models like Chat GPT. If I do a Google search I can’t find critical thinking challenges not already shared by someone else. However, I can ask Chat GPT to create answers to almost anything. Furthermore, I can ask it to create things like pro’s & con’s lists, then put those in point form, then do a rough draft of an essay, then improve on the essay. I can even ask it to use the vocabulary of a Grade 9 student. I can also give it a writing sample and ask it to write the essay in the same style.

LLM’s are not just a better Google, they are a paradigm shift. If we are trying to have conversations about how to catch cheaters, students using Chat GPT to do their work, we are stuck in the old paradigm. That said, I openly admit this is a much bigger problem in online learning where we don’t see and work closely with students in front of us. And we are heading into an era where there will be no way to verify what’s student work and what’s not, so it’s time to recognize the paradigm shift and start asking ourselves new questions…

The biggest questions we need to ask ourselves are how can we teach students to effectively use AI to help them learn, and what assignments can we create that ask them to use AI effectively to help them develop and share ideas and new learning?

Back when some teachers were saying, “Wikipedia is not a valid website to use as research and to cite.” Many more progressive educators were saying, “Wikipedia is a great place to start your research,” and, “Make sure you include the date you quoted the Wikipedia page because the page changes over time.” The new paradigm will see some teachers making students write essays in class on paper or on wifi-less internet-less computers, and other teachers will be sending students to Chat GPT and helping them understand how to write better prompts.

That’s the difference between old and new paradigm thinking and learning. The transition is going to be messy. Mistakes are going to be made, both by students and teachers. Where I’m excited is in thinking about how learning experiences are going to change. The thing about a paradigm shift is that it’s not just a slow transition but a leap into new territory. The learning experiences of the future will not be the same, and we can either try to hold on to the past, or we can get excited about the possibilities of the future.

Culture of change

Connecting with colleagues in the world of online learning, I realize that we live in a unique world of change. If I ask most school principals that work in traditional schools about student funding, and funding policy, few would know much in this area. If I followed up with audit questions, many would know even less. But in over a decade of working in online learning. I’ve dealt with audits and funding policy changes, and constant shifting of expectations and goal posts… and so have my online colleagues in different districts.

Many of them wear several hats (I’ve run 2 schools for years, and 3 schools for a year and a half.) Some are Vice Principals, some are district principals. Some are responsible for alternate students, others adults, still others both. Many got a good dose of ‘other duties as assigned’ especially during the pandemic. Most saw dramatic increases in students because of the pandemic.

Change, change, change.

When I’m around this group, I’m connected to people that know my job better than almost every principal in my district. I hear about the challenges they face and I totally get it. And more than anything I see dedicated educators who face constant changes and are always thinking about the impact of those changes on kids.

It’s really special to spend time with people who understand how to not just cope with change but to strive in it.

Conferences 2020-21

I love going to conferences, but I end up valuing the time between sessions, when I talk or interview smart – people I know, or reflect on what I saw with friends and colleagues. Essentially, I try to tap into the wisdom of the room, and not just at the front of the room presenting.

As conferences move online, I’m not interested in hopping into a virtual room to watch a presentation, and then repeat this again and again… I want time to debrief, to connect and have conversations, to discuss ideas in pairs and small groups. I’m not just talking about a 5-10 minute breakout session in an hour long presentation, I’m talking about scheduled time to ponder, discuss, and apply what I’m learning to my context, with people I work with.

The way I see it, digital conferences need dedicated collaboration, discussion, and reflection time built right into the schedule… Digital meeting spaces scheduled into the day. There needs to be opportunities for conversation, serendipity, and reflection.

The spaces between the sessions needs to be recreated in digital conferences so that conference goers can connect and share their thoughts and ideas outside of presentation sessions. We need public learning spaces, recreated hallways, coffee shops, and courtyards.

Do you know of any online conferences trying to do this?

Questions about September 2020

I was speaking to a friend that teaches at a university and she said about 30% of students that would normally come to her university next year are requesting a one year deferral, and taking a gap year. If that’s happening at universities across the province, and the country, that’s going to have a devastating impact on universities. Also, what are these students going to do next year? The two most productive things that students do in a gap year are work to save money, and travel (get some life experience). The job market is not going to bounce back quick enough, with unemployment at some of the highest levels in years, and most countries aren’t going to lift travel bans any time soon.

So what are all these gap year students going to do?

I wonder about the mental well-being of students who are not going to school, can’t get a job or travel, and are home and idle?

What can we do to support these students?

I also wonder if all of our colleges and universities will survive financially with such a decrease in students and revenue?

Will a percentage of high school students also stay home? Will there be a spike in high school students wanting to take online courses rather than try blended courses with teachers unfamiliar with this form of delivery?

Will private school students and their families decide that they should just go to public school rather than pay expensive tuition for an online experience?

We are headed into some very unknown territory and the impacts to what schooling might look like for September 2020 and beyond may not unfold in ways that we are expecting.

Missed opportunities

Here is a quick look at how we are doing with this thing called remote or distance learning. While things are good, I think we should have been more prepared for maximizing this ‘opportunity’, rather than just being more prepared to cope with it.

Background: Since returning from China in 2011, I’ve been a leader in Coquitlam Open Learning, the district’s ‘Distributed Learning’ (online) school. That year my Principal, Stephen Whiffin, pitched the idea for Inquiry Hub Secondary and I got to co-found and lead this innovative, blended learning school. I’ve been directly involved with integrating technology into learning as a leader for over a decade, and this has been an integral part of my role for 9 years now.

Current State: Over the past several weeks my staff of teachers have definitely struggled far less than most teachers.

For my online teachers very little has changed other than they are working from home, and assessment practices had to change in some courses. We have always provided testing and support blocks at our schools, and supervised assessments have been key to validating authenticity of work done at home.

For Inquiry Hub, every class was already on Microsoft Teams, and/or had a class OneNote, and/or had digital resources shared in Moodle. Classes moved digital, but there are still many opportunities for students to connect online, have meetings and discussions, and continue with lessons and assessments as if we were still in the building.

So, the transition to remote learning has been smooth. Great… But what are we missing?

The online school: We are continual entry, and so my teachers, at any moment, have students starting the course, doing their final assessment, and everything in between. As a result, they almost never run synchronous lessons. So while I previously mentioned two great ‘Learning Experiences‘ my teachers did with students, these are exceptions rather than the norm. And as I mentioned above, assessment changes needed to be made, but I’d say the changes we made were not really groundbreaking or norm-changing. We are doing a good job, but we aren’t pushing any boundaries.

For Inquiry Hub: We’ve really had a smooth transition, kids are still getting a lot of support, and we have, as a staff, had daily meetings that always touch on two things: How are kids doing/who needs support? And on professional development and planning for some great integration of courses working in edu-scrums for next year. This is exciting work, and it happens in the background while teachers are working smoothly to maintain a continuity of learning for students.

So what’s missing? Where are the missed opportunities?

  • Relevance: what have we done to connect and relate the global experience to what we are learning in class?
  • Service: What could our students be doing to support their community?
  • Assessment: What a great opportunity we have to rethink our online testing and personalizing it for our online learners?
  • Community: What more could we do to build community ‘in’ our schools, both for students, and for families?
  • Well being: How could we better support the kids we know are struggling, and also identify and support the kids who are struggling that we don’t know about?
  • Course delivery: What opportunities do we have for students to learn in different ways?
  • Inquiry learning: How could we leverage support for students inquiries when there are so many homebound experts in different fields that would love to help students out?
  • Supporting colleagues: How have we shared what we know and do well with colleagues that are struggling with the transition?
  • I wonder if we wouldn’t have innovated more if the changes required were more drastic? Have we missed too many opportunities with a smooth transition? Will we be further ahead when things return to normal, or will things go further back to normal than they need to be?

    • Attention in online delivery of classes

    There are some pretty funny and creative ways that students are avoiding class now that it is online. Here are some fun examples:

    1. A video of a student using a video of himself on his phone, ‘paying attention’, set up with a tripod in front of his laptop’s camera.

    2. This kid has different priorities:

    3. And Zach, who is known for his video magic, has fun with Wi-Fi challenges.

    All joking aside, it’s harder to hold a group’s attention for too long in an online setting, compared to having a ‘captive audience’ face to face. It becomes a matter of thinking this through thoughtfully, or literally ‘losing your audience’. Remember Bill Nye The Science Guy? I don’t think he ran any segment of his show for longer than 3 minutes. There were quick lessons interspersed with flashy examples and experiments. Compare that to a 40 minute lecture with a teacher, and compare that to a 40 minute lesson online?

    Here are two simple questions to ask:

    1. What is being done to engage the learner?

    2. What is the learner’s experience?

    I’m not saying we need to entertain like Bill Nye, but I am saying that if we don’t think of the end user’s experience, we are going to see our audience’s attention dwindle.

    Assessment vs Testing

    One of the interesting things that has arisen out of remote learning, due to the covid-19 pandemic, is that the idea of having supervised testing has become problematic.

    This isn’t just the case for teachers new to online learning, I run the district’s online school and until now we have relied on supervised tests to ensure there is some consistency in work handed in. For example, a student might only hand in high quality essays because of considerable tutor support, or even intervention, and that would show up when the student does a written test in a supervised environment. Note: this isn’t just an issue with online learning, anyone can have a tutor help them ‘too much’, but rather it’s something that any teacher might have to consider when they can’t see who is doing the work.

    Math is a challenge in the same way. Homework can come in that is 100% correct, but without help at home a student might only have enough understanding to achieve a 60% in a supervised test. But then again, maybe they can get over 75% based on understanding, but time limits and test anxiety make the test itself a less than ideal demonstration of understanding in a subject.

    I’m making two points here:

    1. Supervised tests have been used to ensure integrity of work.

    2. Supervised tests create a less than ideal environment for ensuring understanding of learning.

    So where does that leave teachers, teaching remotely, when it comes to assessment of learning, without opportunities for supervised testing?

    One suggestion is to focus more on competencies rather than content. My online math teacher would typically spend over 10 minutes marking a single test. What if, instead of marking this test, she watched a student video of that student teaching her how to solve a challenging question? What if an English teacher watched four or six students debate a topic, while other students followed along, note taking in a public, digital discussion forum? What if students did a timed problem solving challenge where they all got to collaborate, but they had to put their answers into their own words?

    What if we assume that students will get support, have access to their notes, and can’t be fully supervised, how does and should that affect our assessment practices?

    The tech won’t always work… and that’s ok.

    I’ve been ‘playing’ with digital learning and technology for a while now. My first blog post was in 2006 and my first podcast was in 2012. It’s Sunday night and I published a podcast over an hour ago. It usually takes a while to get onto iTunes, because first it has to go to a podcast hosting site called Blubrry. I did this a week and a half ago, and it went to Blubrry and then to iTunes pretty quickly. But tonight the new podcast won’t move to that first step, and I have no idea why? Even after I ‘ping‘ the website, (even though that should happen automatically), my post won’t go to Blubrry. That’s the frustrating thing, I don’t think I did anything different but somehow it won’t work. It might need time, and everything will be fine in the morning by the time this is published. It might not and I’ll have a whole lot of troubleshooting to do.

    I do podcasts for fun. I do podcasts to learn. I’ll learn from this, but right now it doesn’t feel like fun.

    Educators, as you head into the new world of ‘remote learning’, while we cope with social distancing, empty schools, and COVID-19 continuing to keep us physically separate, please realize that the technology doesn’t always work as planned. It doesn’t always work for the neophytes, and it doesn’t always work for the people like me that think they know what they are doing. When you get frustrated, and you will, remember this: Remember a time when you were really excited to teach a lesson. You stayed up late figuring things out and setting up the handouts for kids. Then you got to school and the photocopier jams horribly. You have no time to get your printing done. Dang! Your whole plan is done and needs reworking. At that point, you didn’t say to yourself, “That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again!” That would be silly.

    You’ll try using some technology for the first time and it won’t go as planned. You’ll try doing a video conferencing lesson and it will flop. You’ll have students doing things you didn’t expect them to do. And you’ll work it out. You’ll connect with your students. You’ll laugh at yourself and they’ll laugh too. You’ll get a lesson or two from a student that knows more than you. And soon, you’ll feel much better about the technology and the strategies you are using.

    Oh, and even then, there will be times when the technology doesn’t work… and that’s ok.

    Expecting appropriate student behavior online

    14 years ago was the first time that I tried blogging with students. Here is a quote from a blog post about the rules I created for this new online space:

    There is one thing above all others that significantly impressed me with this experience: Students owning the learning, asking the important questions, and helping each other to learn. They showed an incredible willingness to contribute/share their ideas. 

    I wasn’t sure what rules I should give around ‘Safe Blogging’ so I pared it down to some basics. In our school we have been slowly rolling out the ideas of Restitution and we have developed 4 basic beliefs: Respect, Safety, Inclusion, and Learning. So I thought why not use these beliefs as the guiding principles for the blogs and communities? 

    The idea was simple. What rules and expectations do we apply to our school community? Those also apply in our digital spaces.

    Now more than ever, we are going to see issues of behaviour in online learning spaces that are inappropriate? Why? Because we have students and educators who are new to these spaces who are learning as they go. It is important to talk about appropriate use and expectations, if you want to be proactive rather than reactive. But creating draconian rules and conditions won’t help. When I see this happening I always go back to a quote I first heard from my colleague, Dave Sands, “Laws create outlaws.”

    Instead, think about what the underlying behaviour expectations are in classrooms and in schools? Then ask, how do these same expectations look online? The idea here is that digital citizenship is just citizenship. Digital spaces might be new frontiers for some educators and students, but they are frontiers in classroom learning spaces that have been around for a very long time. If we know how we want students to act in our classrooms, we also know how we want them to act in their digital classrooms.

    When schools start in September, teachers create expectations for their class. Often this will involve conversations and even participation by students in determining what a good learning environment looks like. The same should apply to entering new online learning environments. The choice is simple, be proactive and explicit about expectations, or be reactive when things don’t go as expected… because the expectations aren’t clear.

    One final thought, even when you lay out all the expectations, students will make mistakes. At this point a decision needs to be made: will the response be punitive or will the response be a learning opportunity?

    Just shifting online or shifting the learning?

    Across the globe schools are closing due to Covid-19 and the learning is being moved online. I recently shared in my Daily-Ink post, ‘Novel ideas can spread from a novel virus‘:

    Discussion about the possibility of remote learning invites questions about blended learning where some of the work, both asynchronous and synchronous, is done remotely. It also invites conversations and questions about what we should be spending our time on when we do get together?

    …this virus is impacting the world the way it is might impact how we think about operating our schools and businesses in the future. What excites me isn’t the idea that more work might be done remotely, but rather the ideas behind what we do when we connect face-to-face, and how we use that time? Will we focus more on collaboration, team building, social skills, construction and creation of projects, and more personalized support? How will we engage students in learning when they might not be coming to school every day?

    With the shift of learning at school moving digital, the only thing that seems to be shared on my Twitter feed as much as Coronavirus updates are online resources. There are tons of free resources that you can use/share and teach with. But the idea that all we need to do is put work we are usually doing in a class online can lead to disengaged and overworked students.

    “In a world where information is abundant and easy to access, the real advantage is knowing where to focus.” ~ James Clear

    Here are a few things to think about as course content is moved online, and lessons are taught from a distance:

    What can you do synchronously? There are amazing tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom that allow you to meet with students. How will this time be used? Will you lecture or allow students to meet in groups? Will it be a Powerpoint presentation or a discussion? If you are giving a presentation that can be pre-recorded or viewed online asynchronously, then are you utilizing your synchronous time effectively?

    What can you edit out? Taking everything you do face-to-face and trying to put it online will be overwhelming, especially for students that already struggle in class. What are the essential things students need to learn? What skills and competencies do they need and how can you create a positive learning environment to learn these skills?

    What assignments can you create that engage the learner with questions that do not have a single correct answer? How can you make the assignments open ended? For instance, these video writing prompts invite students to personalize their writing, and can provide a variety of writing samples that can show you their writing competencies… while not being cookie-cutter assignments that box students in. The videos are easy to embed and share, and the answers can promote great discussions when you meet synchronously.

    To summarize, ask yourself a few questions when you are shifting from regularly meeting students to providing an online/digital program:

    1. What should you do to most effectively utilize synchronous time, when you have it scheduled?
    2. What can you take out of your course so that you are reducing the expectations of students working from home, with less support than they get at school?
    3. How can you make assignments engaging, interactive, and interesting?
    4. What kind of things will you assess and how can you ensure that assessment is something that authentically assesses the students skills and competencies?

    How can you shift the learning experience beyond just shifting everything online?

    Also shared on Pair-A-Dimes for Your Thoughts.