More thoughts on HyFlex
Also, of course, available as a podcast.
I’m reading the note-taking book (Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes) which I like very much. It has become the go-to book for most of the current podcasters and YouTubers talking about productivity and effective note-taking. My goal in reading it is to incorporate parts of the techniques he discusses into my writing handbook (which already begins with a chapter on reading and taking notes, but could be more explicit) and into the Historical Methods class we’re designing for the BSU history program. I’ll have more to say about the book when I’ve finished it and about that process as I implement it.
The author mentions that a lot of students “shy away” from using an “external memory” technique like the slip-box. Well, duh! They’re trained to prepare for closed-book quizzes and tests. So in order to help them make this change to beginning to create a scaffolding for understanding complex issues, I should stop giving quizzes?
Since we’re going HyFlex, the idea of enforcing “closed” assessments is pretty much off the table anyway. And with data sources always a couple of seconds away on phones, maybe there’s less point assessing “knowledge”. I do believe people should know something about the past. But maybe that means something different from what I thought. Maybe it’s less (for people who don’t want to be professional historians) about knowing the names and dates. More about understanding the contours of history, turning points, interpretations of what the important changes over time were, etc. Looking at mainstream textbooks, I don’t get the idea that many are fully there. Lots of ink seems to be spent, still, on the names, dates, and stories of the past. Maybe a theme is explicit (like in Eric Foner’s textbook about Freedom) or implicit (like some efforts to set the record straight about things we don’t like to look at in our nations’ pasts)
The idea of requiring discussion participation is pretty much off the table too, I think. If the pure form of HyFlex is a range of options from traditional in-class learning to completely asynchronous online, then discussion participation really can’t be part of a grade. I’m not entirely pleased with the levels of participation I’m getting in my Zoom discussions. The same people talk in the surveys. I wonder if these would be the people who would come to an in-person class?
Part of the difficulty with the surveys is there’s a wide range of different types of students in them, with different types of goals. A quarter to half in any given class might be History Majors (or potential majors) or Social Studies Ed. These students are generally paying close attention and interested in the content. Then there’s an additional group of students who are taking the class to fill a Lib Ed requirement. They have a much different engagement profile, but they’re a crucial demographic in terms of both increasing our enrollment and fulfilling our mission of making history relevant in the lives of people, fostering empathy, and developing critical thinking, study, and communication skills.
Another thing that came up in a conversation we had in my OER Learning Circle yesterday is the 7-minute rule for instructional videos. There seems to be a strong belief that all lectures ought to be cut into chunks with “formative assessment” after every couple of minutes. I’m not sure I agree. I think I’ve been trying to get some of my pods down to History in 7 format. But I’m not convinced every single one needs to be that short. I do think I’m already writing my chapters in a way that has breaks (marked by the “Questions for Discussion” sections) every five minutes or so of reading. Five minutes of reading is about seven to ten minutes of narration, depending on people’s reading speeds.
Maybe the way to go about this is to produce the videos in bite-sized chunks, with reaction opportunities (Questions for Discussion) after each one. This would make them more accessible to YouTube viewers and podcast listeners. Then I could run this together into a longer lecture for students who like that format, with breaks for brief discussion or surveys using Mentimeter.
I think I have a lot of thinking to do, about the Student Learning Objectives I want to focus on and how to teach to those goals in this new format, as well as how to assess them. More to come on that front, as I work through it!