“Quality Education” Episode 5: A Guide to Administering Distance Learning, with Dr. Lauren Cifuentes

Hello, thank you for joining us. We are proud to welcome you to our special series, Quality Education, brought to you by Brill, where we talk about improving our current education systems for the radically changing 21st century global society. I'm your host, Lee Jung-Greco. [MUSIC] Today, we're speaking with Lauren Cifuenteis. She is a PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is directed distance learning at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, for seven years. She has published over 100 research articles in distance learning, and her new book is A Guide to Administering Distance Learning. Lauren, thank you so much for sitting down with us. Thank you for having me. So first of all, what sort of barriers in online education have teachers encountered, and what are some of the strategies to solve them? Well, thank you for asking. That's a great question, because barriers have to be addressed by distance learning administrators. There are so many barriers to adoption, and they just simply have to be addressed. The barriers are at the administration level, for instance, provosts and presidents. Sometimes are not behind the movement to adopt distance learning. Then there are barriers to instructors, and of course, there are barriers to students as well. In my book, we talk about different barriers as being institutional barriers, pedagogical barriers, technical barriers, and interpersonal barriers. And from an institutional perspective, oftentimes, distance learning administrators lack administrative support. So that has to be addressed. Also, we made lack resources. We address faculty who are overloaded and feel that this is more work for them. And then there's the absence of policy and standards that have to be addressed by administration. The most important barrier is lack of infrastructure. That's something that has to be addressed right away. For anything to work in distance learning, there has to be a strong infrastructure behind that. And then there are pedagogical barriers that faculty have to know how to design and develop and deliver distance learning, and taking a quality approach. They have to support learning. They have to know how to support learning using distance learning technologies, which leads us to technical barriers. The technology has to be in place. There has to be an LMS in place, good hardware, could solid software. So for instance, a barrier that I encountered was their faculty at our campus that said they simply would not adopt because they knew that students could cheat on tests. And so right away I had to scramble and arrange for online test proctoring, which is a software hardware solution that can be put in place. So you just have to look at what's going on on your campus. You have to analyze your campus and determine what are those barriers and address them as best you can. Well, strategies for overcoming the barriers include really inclusive strategic planning. So when an administrator of distance learning creates a strategic plan and makes some decisions about what needs to be done, it needs to be done with representatives from major units on campus, including the librarian, the registrar's office, IT, of course, etc. Advising, all of these aspects of the campus need to be built to support that infrastructure. Then there are the interpersonal barriers that is to say people feel a loss of interpersonal connection faculty do with their students and students with each other. So a lot of time needs to be spent as an administrator in helping people build community in their online degree programs and even within their online classes. Students need to know how to interact with one another. The technology has to be in place to allow that and teachers need to be able to interact with students. So that's a good lead into my next question when we talk about building community. What specific skills do you e-learning administrators need for faculty engagement? Yeah, that's a great question. The big thing is students need to know how to interact with one another and how to interact with their teacher and they need to feel very comfortable with that. Right now because of the COVID pandemic people are undergoing tremendous stress and they need to know that the faculty empathizes with that even though they're at a distance, somehow they need to, the instructor needs to communicate that to the students that they are supporting them all the way and the institution needs to support faculty. They're their social and emotional stress that they're also undergoing. An important aspect of instructional support is that faculty need a lot of social emotional support in order to adopt at this point because they don't want necessarily want to and but COVID is forcing them to and so if they are given the support they need in order to adopt they're going to be successful and they're going to be satisfied and they need that that confidence that they can do that. A very important aspect of the administrative role in distance learning is to listen well to instructor concerns and make efforts to address those concerns, empathize with those concerns and make efforts to address them and you can do that by doing both formal and informal needs and context analyses and those are skills that a distance learning administrator need to look into. They need to make sure that they know how to conduct a needs assessment and both formally and informally lots of listening. To motivate faculty to create community in their classes, I follow the arcs model, it's a motivational model that calls for gaining attention to the value of online instruction and then assuring faculty and helping them to realize the relevance of online instruction and give them the confidence that they can do it and that they can do it well and then allow them to experience that satisfaction of having run a class really well, gained an interpersonal relationship with their students, facilitated student to student collaboration so that the students feel that they are part of the field that they're studying that they're starting to gain an identity as, you know, in my case I teach educational technology and that they're gaining a identity as educational technologists. Yeah, so there are good strategies for encouraging instructors to overcome their barriers. You need to provide for them professional development opportunities that prepare them technically and in the design delivery distance learning. And speaking of some of these barriers, I think what folks don't think about is how distance learning has impacted some of the other staff at these universities and schools. Specifically library staff, what sorts of challenges has distance learning posed to them and what kind of training are they undertaken right now? Oh, that's a great question because the library is part of the infrastructure that needs to be built to support distance learning and since digital technologies came to be so accessible, libraries have been undergoing a pretty dramatic shift from offering resources, physical resources to organizing and providing digital resources and services. So as a distance learning administrator, you really have to have a strong relationship with the campus librarian to help them know what is needed for online learning support. And, you know, one of the easiest solutions is those digital materials that the library provides that they be connected directly to the learning management system that the university adopts. And, you know, that's a number one first step, I think, is to make sure that library resources are in that distance learning course template and access to digital database searches are also in that template. So, you know, the library needs to increase its digital resources. There's a tool called LibGuides that many universities use now before COVID and to provide access integration of digital resources in the learning management system. Libraries have to provide a virtual help desk so that distant students can access the library, get help when they need it and get answers to their questions as to how to locate the best resources. One of the steps that libraries are currently taking are developing a materials to support students and instructors, digital materials and access to modules, for instance, on information literacy or how to find specific credible resources, how to find evidence of a particular argument finding targeted information to the teachers can embed in courses. I work closely with our library and for identifying materials that I just include directly in my courses, plagiarism materials that teach students and that faculty can include in their courses that tell them how to address plagiarism and how to avoid plagiarism and what happens if we plagiarize. Also copyright fair use law. So how to cite, how to reference materials in the style of your particular discipline. One of the common tasks that librarians fulfill is to create access to open educational resources that teachers can include in their courses or that students can access in order to learn something that the library provides. So in there are thousands of open educational resources, maybe millions now. It's been a very long time since I've required my students to purchase a text, for instance, because there are so many great open free resources for them. I wanted to ask a follow-up you talked about some of those resources on plagiarism, for example. That's been something that, like you said, librarians have always helped with or had a site. But I'm wondering if, because of some of those issues you cited earlier on cheating on tests, for example, if librarians and other teachers have had to intervene when it comes to plagiarism, because students are disinflerning now. Oh absolutely. And there are now plagiarism detection tools that we can use in our online classes. I'm not going to name them because I don't want to promote a particular tool, but there are these tools that teachers can use that will scan a document that a student turns in. And if it has plagiarism, it will oftentimes detect that plagiarism. And these tools are smart tools. So they're gaining more and more knowledge as to what is out there that a student might copy. When they first came on the market, they weren't as powerful as they are now. But they're quite powerful now at detecting plagiarism. I remember even in my day when I was at university, teachers were already starting to use those, but I imagine they're using them quite a bit more now. Oh goodness, yes. And most campuses have purchased plagiarism tools. So you mentioned really interesting example here. You looked at New Mexico State University, they got to jump on the shift to online learning because they had this academic technology team that was already observing the progress of COVID-19 in other states in February and early March of 2020. So what did that team find and how did that help New Mexico State's transition? Yeah, I want to back up a little bit from that question. I love that question. When I was at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, we were right there on the Corpus Christi Bay, which is right on the Atlantic Ocean, and we were vulnerable to hurricanes. And in fact, Harvey Hitt right at the end of my tenure at that campus. And I was tasked with by the president and provost as one of my four main missions was to prepare that campus for a hurricane and for campus closure in the event of a hurricane. So that was what I spent the seven years doing was really preparing, building the infrastructure and preparing the faculty for this eventuality. Our team here similarly had that mission. And I think it's fairly common now for campuses to have the mission of preparing for either a pandemic or a climate crisis. Our team is amazing. They're very small, as they say in the book. It's a small group of very powerful people who just know how to get work done. They prepared by building that infrastructure and thinking of what needed to be done. They began by conducting a needs assessment and a context analysis as we recommended in the book so that they knew what was needed to make it work. And then they set to addressing all of the issues, all of those barriers that we talked about earlier and one by one, making it possible for us to survive a pandemic. And they have done a fabulous job. They built that infrastructure. They created systems for providing very high quality technical and pedagogical support for us for the instructors and the students. I'm an instructor now. All courses have canvas shells and most faculty on campus know how to use them. And now because of COVID, you know, we might even be able to say all faculty know how to use them. You know, what they did was remarkable. And they shared in the book some of the things that they did to prepare. They had to everything that was in place they had to ramp up. So for instance, they had developed a wonderful series that helped faculty know how to use the tools to teach online. They before COVID, they had 15 people in each course. They kept it at 15. And you know, now and since COVID, they allow for 80 people so that they could get everybody online. They created a system to assure that if there was a technical problem, they themselves were backed up so that they could support us 24/7. And they did back each other up. There's, you know, no time on the clock that a faculty member can't now call in to get help and and receive that help very quickly. I would say within a half hour to an hour, that faculty members issue is going to be addressed. They sped up the purchase and contract with Zoom. So prior to COVID, our campus used a different product. And then we went to Zoom and right away they ramped up all the training for Zoom and got us all on board with Zoom. They created a live support desk that that again addresses issues very quickly. They adopted a proctor, they did not have a proctoring software. And so they realized, oh, that's going to have to happen. So they did get a proctoring software. And they rapidly developed a fully online course evaluation system as well. Course evaluations were done on paper prior to COVID. And now that is all online. So, you know, they worked hard. They captured all those face-to-face workshops that they had developed and put them online. Well, that's really interesting background on how essentially one natural disaster prepared you for another natural disaster that you didn't really see coming at all. Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. And I kind of, this is funny, but in my position, I see COVID as a bit of a silver lining because I was preparing people before the disaster. And now because of COVID, everybody understands the value and beauty of online learning. And once they experience it as, you know, as thousands and thousands of people around the world have now, very many are excited by it. and see they see that it's It can work. If it's well designed, it can work as well. And even sometimes better and face-to-face instruction. And no one believes that before they do it. It's hard to believe that the online environment can be actually better than the face-to-face environment until you've experienced that. And those of us who have taught online a lot know that. And love to get that reward of student success, student satisfaction, students renewed confidence, and sense of identity with the content that you're teaching. So yeah, there's the silver lining in the COVID experience. We have more people on board now and more people embracing this very powerful way of learning. Well, that's Lauren Cifuentes. Her new book is a guide to administering distance learning. Lauren, thank you again so much. Lee, thank you. You were listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.