Education – Page 7

Pandemic Pedagogy – Accessibility in Remote Learning, why does it matter?

June 24, 2020June 24, 2020access, accessibility, Digital History, e-learning, Education, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Teaching, Technology

Louise Creechan (GTA English Literature and Widening Participation, University of Glasgow)

This week the Pandemic Pedagogy team at History UK have been thinking about accessibility.We believe that accessibility needs to be our first consideration when we begin to plan for remote delivery. Thinking about accessibility issues from the outset ensures that we avoid making compromises or adjustments further down the line. It should go without saying that it is extremely demoralising for a student to feel like their needs were an afterthought.

Professor Chrsitine Hockings of Evidencenet offers the following definition of ‘inclusive learning’ that positions accessibility as a part of a wider pedagogical strategy, one which also includes learning design and community building as key elements for inclusivity:

‘Inclusive learning and teaching in higher education refers to the ways in which pedagogy, curricula and assessment are designed and delivered to engage students in learning that is meaningful, relevant and accessible to all. It embraces a view of the individual and individual difference as the source of diversity that can enrich the lives and learning of others.’

The Pandemic Pedagogy project is concerned about the impact of the pandemic on these essential areas of inclusive teaching practice: accessibility, learning design, and community building. Through our blog posts and Twitter interactions, we aim to collate resources and useful case studies that can help our community of historians to deliver courses remotely without compromising on inclusive learning practices.

To return to accessibility, it might seem elementary, but if teaching is inaccessible then it is ineffective. Prioritising accessibility means students do not necessarily have to go through the trauma of disclosing disabilities or life situations. Many arrangements will also in turn benefit all, including abled and neurotypical students and staff.

What arrangements are you making for accessible learning? Do you have any concerns?

What do we mean by ‘accessibility’?

Under the 2010 Equality Act, we are legally required to ‘make reasonable adjustments’ to enable our students to access their studies. This legislation applies to all protected characteristics, such as age, disability, race/ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or gender, but it also extends to adjustments that the institution must make to ensure no student is disadvantaged. Remote learning can exacerbate many additional barriers for students that may have been hidden in the classroom, such as caring responsibilities, the lack of a quiet place to work, access to suitable equipment, or an unreliable internet connection. Accessibility is about inclusion and making sure that all learners feel valued and supported.

We’ve identified three starting points for thinking about accessible remote course design: Bandwidth and Workplace Circumstances, Fatigue and Concentration Difficulties, and the Loss/Lack of Support Systems This is by no means an exhaustive list and there will be specific issues that will require additional support. In the meantime, we’ve included some points of reflection with each example. We’d like to invite you to join us on Twitter on Thursday 25th June from 2pm to share experiences, reflections, and resources, and help us develop an accessible approach to remote learning. Use #PandemicPedagogy and/or #InclusiveHUK.

image of someone typing into a keyboard with laptop screen — Photo by zizzy0104 from FreeImages

Key Accessibility Issues

Bandwidth and Workplace Circumstances

Synchronous video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom or MS Teams, require significantly higher bandwidths to function effectively. These high-bandwidth technologies rely on newer computers and operating systems, fast broadband connections, or significant data allowances on mobile devices. Participation in real-time, face-to-face contact via video software can marginalise students from rural communities (or abroad) with poor signal or those who cannot afford the significant financial burden of high-end technologies.

We must also respect that finding a quiet place to work may not be possible for many students for a multitude of reasons, including caring responsibilities, financial circumstances, and changed familial dynamic as a result of COVID-19. In these cases, ensuring access to recorded material, collaborative writing tasks, or discussion forums can enable students to remain engaged with the course, but at a time that is convenient for them.

What has been your experience with asynchronous resources? What did you use? How have students responded?

See this article from DePaul University for a breakdown of low-bandwidth and asynchronous approaches.

Fatigue and Concentration Difficulties

No matter how driven we are, there will be times when our concentration is severely affected by external factors. The pandemic is a cause for concern for many of us and our students are no different.

In a survey conducted by Disabled Students UK, increased levels of fatigue were commonly mentioned by respondents. It is important to note that, while respondents self-identified as disabled, the fatigue reported was not solely related to their disabilities, but the result of the changing study arrangements and the emotional toll of ensuring that their support remained in place. Ensuring that course design is informed by accessible pedagogical practices is a way of mitigating some of the stresses felt by students with additional needs.

Of course, we can all feel fatigued when we have dramatically altered our routines and working conditions. It’s been fairly well documented that the online platforms that we’ve been using to support remote learning can cause ‘Zoom fatigue’. Psychologists have determined that video platforms impair our ability to process non-verbal cues which forces the brain to focus harder on verbal dialogue and, in turn, tires us out.

To counteract fatigue and concentration issues, we should really be asking ourselves: ‘does this interaction/pre-recording need to be any longer than twenty minutes?’ If so, it may be worth rethinking your strategy: Can you plan a comfort break? Can you set students an off-screen activity for 10/15 minutes? Could this be covered by setting reading and encouraging responses on a forum?

What tactics have you employed to manage fatigue? How can course design be implemented to avoid burnout?

Loss/Lack of Support Systems

Isolation from friends, families, or situations where the student is estranged from their families can make studying far more challenging. In order to create a truly inclusive environment, we need to treat isolation as an accessibility issue. We will return to community building and transitions to HE later in the Pandemic Pedagogy project, but it is worth noting that, through conscious efforts to encourage student interaction and by making the effort to design our courses with collaboration in mind, we can hope to replicate some of the support that may have been lost in the transition to remote learning.

We need to be aware that the non-medical assistants, such as BSL interpreters, that many disabled students require will not be able to work as they would have done before the pandemic. Remember that legally you must provide captioning or a transcript for any pre-recorded material and that synchronous video conferencing makes this far more difficult. A simple way of captioning pre-recorded resources is to upload content to YouTube and to review the automatic captioning. We will provide more specific strategies for developing disability-positive classrooms in the formal Pandemic Pedagogy report that will be produced in mid-July to mark the end of the project.

Are there any strategies that you have used to support isolated students? How do we make sure that students who have lost their support systems are able to continue their studies?

Please do get in touch to share your experiences of accessible remote learning. We are keen to create a sense of coming together with other historians to ensure that we use this pandemic as a means of evolving our pedagogy and maintaining our commitment to accessibility.

Louise tweets @LouiseCreechan

Pandemic Pedagogy: Thinking about teaching at a time of uncertainty

June 23, 2020June 23, 2020access, accessibility, Digital History, e-learning, Education, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Teaching

Kate Cooper (Professor of History, Royal Holloway, University of London)

The summer of 2020 is not what any of us expected: with libraries closed and summer holidays a matter of finding a new routine within the same four walls, the task that looms largest for many of us is the attempt to reinvent our teaching for next autumn.

Over the past few weeks, a small team has been working as part of History UK’s Pandemic Pedagogy project to find out how colleagues are approaching the challenges we face as teachers and mentors of university-level History students. Over the next 2-3 weeks, we’ll be posting resources and blog posts here on the History UK website to offer some insight into what colleagues around the Four Nations have learned – or are learning – about digitally-delivered teaching.

image of an empty lecture theatre — Photo by Gözde Otman from FreeImages

The first thing we’re learning will come as no surprise: just-moving-everything-onto-Zoom (or equivalent) isn’t an option. Zoom fatigue is real. Screen-to-screen interactions simply don’t work the same way as in-person conversations do. (Julia Sklar explains why in an excellent article: ‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here’s why that happens.)

Luckily, the lecture-plus-seminar system we all know and love isn’t the only way to do things – it’s a historical artefact. University Lectures came into being in medieval cities in the late 11^th and early 12^th centuries. Then as now, time-tabling was a matter of getting people who lived in sometimes distant lodgings into the same room at a time when the teacher could be there and the room was available.

And hour-long slots aren’t pedagogically ideal; in fact, research suggests that shorter periods fit the human ability to concentrate far better. In other words, what we’re used to isn’t the only way to deliver the experiences and challenges that make for great teaching – or even the best way. It is just the way we’re most familiar with. (For a research-based and often quite funny take-down of lectures and why we tend to over-rate them, see Graham Gibbs’s Twenty terrible reasons for lecturing.)

So it’s useful to think about what happens in the ‘classroom’ in new ways, and to try to get to the bottom of what’s really important. We’ve identified four central areas that we’ll be addressing:

Presence: In an environment where ‘contact hours’ and ‘office hours’ don’t work the way they used to (and, let’s face it, they were never perfect to begin with!), how can we create a sense of involvement and intellectual connection for our students – with their peers and with us, their teachers?
Community-building: How can we best offer our students a sense of belonging and engagement with one another? This is a challenge that reaches from the summer before first year to the summer after graduation, and happens at multiple levels, from the tutor group or seminar group all the way up to the year cohort and the wider departmental community.
Scaffolding: How can we create frameworks both to guide students in exploring material independently, and to make sure they have the right opportunities to gain feedback from peers and from the teacher/facilitator?
Reading together (and writing and thinking together): What opportunities does the digital landscape offer for creating ‘spaces’ where students can read together, share their insights, and challenge each other to create new understanding?
And, the all-important Accessibility: How do we make sure that each of our students, regardless of disability, background, living situation or internet speed, has full access to the learning opportunities they have signed up for?

One of the best things about the Pandemic Pedagogy project so far has been a new experience of the UK History community as a lively, wry collection of people who are largely up for making lemonade out of whatever lemons come their way. So many people I’ve spoken to are looking for silver linings – a chance to discover new ways of teaching, learning, and collaborating that will benefit our students long after this particular crisis is over. I’ve also encountered a really lovely sense that we are all in this together – a ‘we’ that with luck will grow even stronger as we work together over the coming weeks and into the future.

Kate tweets as @kateantiquity: https://twitter.com/kateantiquity

Here’s Kate’s webpage at RHUL

History UK Pandemic Pedagogy fellowship

June 7, 2020June 9, 2021accessibility, Digital History, e-learning, Education, Fellowship, Funding, inclusivity, Jobs, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Projects, Report, Students, Teaching, Technology

At the beginning of June, History UK launched a ‘Pandemic Pedagogy’ initiative to help support historians move out of the ‘emergency’ phase of online teaching and start planning for a remote and socially-distanced campus in the Autumn. The aim is to produce short, user-friendly, and practical guides than can inform planning, including:

An overview of tools for online teaching – an annotated list introducing various digital tools people may have heard of but not used
An introduction to various ways of staging digital small-group interactions
A page on tools and strategies for collaborative close ‘reading’ and annotation of ‘texts’

History UK is seeking a postgraduate student for a fixed-term fellowship to support the initiative. The History UK fellow will conduct desk-based searches of websites, blog posts, and social media for relevant case studies, reports, and other practical guides. They will write clear and concise summaries of their findings to help inform the resources that History UK will produce and curate, and attend virtual team meetings. They will be encouraged to write a blog post for the History UK website on a topic of their choosing (relevant to the initiative), and may also be required to assist in the organisation of an online ‘Pandemic Pedagogy’ roundtable.

The fellow will be expected to work flexibly for 50 hours in total over four weeks, starting on Wednesday 17 June, or soon after. All work needs to be completed by Wednesday 15 July. The renumeration for the fellowship is fixed at £750.

Person specification:

A postgraduate student (MA or PhD) in History, or a related subject, based at a higher education institution in the UK
Strong research skills
Excellent written and oral communication skills
Ability to work independently and with minimal supervision
Excellent organisation, project management skills, and attention to detail
Expertise and interest in pedagogy (preferable)
Experience of writing for the web (preferable)

To apply:

Send a CV of up to two pages and a one-page cover letter to pandemicpedagogy2020@gmail.com. In the cover letter you should explain why you are interested in the role, how you meet the person specification, and what you will bring to the initiative.

The deadline for applications is Thursday 11 June at 2pm.

Applications will be reviewed by the team working on the Pandemic Pedagogy initiative: www.history-uk.ac.uk/2020/06/03/history-uks-pandemic-pedagogy-initiative-starts-today and the successful candidate notified by the end of Monday 15 June.

History UK’s Pandemic Pedagogy initiative – starts today!

June 3, 2020access, accessibility, e-learning, Education, inclusivity, News, Pandemic Pedagogy, pedagogy, Project, Survey, Teaching, Technology

Over the past few weeks members of the HUK Steering Committee, coordinated by Prof. Kate Cooper (Royal Holloway) have been putting together a project to support historians as we move out of the ‘emergency’ phase of online teaching and start planning for the next semester/ term. Following our Steering Committee meeting in early June, we ran a survey of members’ views. This has helped us form a working group to generate some useful resources and to run (online) events. We are keen to reflect on the ‘emergency’ phase of teaching and learning and to share best practice through collaborative problem-solving.

To that end, we’ve divided our ‘Pandemic Pedagogy’ activities into two broad strands:

Lucinda Matthews-Jones (LJMU), Yolana Pringle (Roehampton) and Manuela Williams (Sitrling) are developing the strand on inclusivity and community-building.
Kristen Brill (Keele), Kate Cooper (Royal Holloway) and Jamie Wood (Lincoln)are working on our second strand on pedagogy and online tools.

The inclusivity strand will kick off with the first of a series of Twitter chats today (Weds 3^rd June) at 11am. Here’s the poster:

We hope that you’ll be able to join us.

Alongside this, the pedagogy and technology group aims to produce some pages for the History UK website over the next few weeks, each of which will involve a short summary of the results of our information-gathering on three topics:

An overview of tools for online teaching – an annotated list introducing various digital tools people may have heard of but not used.
An introduction to various ways of staging digital small-group interactions that move replication of face-to-face teaching (e.g. lectures or seminars).
A page focussing specifically on tools and strategies for collaborative close ‘reading’ (including images and other media) and annotation of ‘texts’.

Our key aim here is to produce short, user-friendly and practical resources (i.e. case studies rather than research papers or theoretical works).

To draw on the knowledge that’s already out there to inform this initiative, we are conducting a survey of historians in HE. Please follow this link to complete it:

History UK Pandemic Pedagogy Survey

We will be sharing the results of our work as soon as possible via the HUK website and/or Twitter account.

Finally, if any historians are interested in joining our group to help out with this initiative, then please do get in touch with any of us directly.

Kristen Brill (Keele)

Kate Cooper (Royal Holloway – @kateantiquity)

Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores – @luciejones)

Yolana Pringle (Roehampton – @y_pringle)

Manuela Williams (Strathclyde – @ManuelaAWill)

Jamie Wood (Lincoln – @woodjamie99)

Mental health and wellbeing in the history and heritage PhD community – three of three

September 30, 2019September 16, 2019blog, Careers, Education, Postdocs, Students

In my previous post, the second in this series, I showcased some research into how social media is used by emerging and established academics, and used my own experiences to highlight how it does, or could, enhance the accessibility, for PhD students with a mental health issue, of some typical research activities. In this final post I’ll explore the other side of this coin by asking: What are some of the obstacles to using social media for this purpose? I’ll also share my parting thoughts about what we might do, as active participants in the HE community, to move towards a more inclusive environment for PhD students experiencing mental illness.

Barriers to Inclusivity

Although my own experiences of using social media during my PhD have had largely positive impacts on my mental wellness, I have also encountered some barriers to inclusivity. The first involved a Twitter exchange, where I had asked if it would be possible to speak at a subject-specific PGR forum by video-link. On that occasion the group didn’t feel confident to accommodate the request, which highlights a barrier also referred to by several of the scholars I have drawn on in my previous posts.

“We don’t know how to do that…”

Nandez and Borrego, Rowlands, and Boté all point to skills being a barrier to social media use among academics. Rowlands et al in particular provide evidence that social media use is greatest among those who identify as being an ‘innovator’, or ‘early adopter’ of new technologies. As a self-professed geek I would certainly put myself into one of these two categories, which is why I felt confident to set up the live stream of my original conference paper on this topic. But I recognise that not everyone shares this confidence, and that, in the face of the range of social media available, the desire to develop skills may well be tempered by feelings of being overwhelmed.

Rowlands’ study also shows, though, that academics tend to be selective in the platforms they use (with almost two-thirds using only one or two tools) – suggesting perhaps that we don’t need proficiency in all platforms, but rather an awareness of the ones which are (to borrow a phrase) ‘trending’.

“We don’t feel comfortable doing that…”

I’ve already touched on this in my earlier comments about Bennett and Folley’s work on managing a hybridised digital identity, and my own insecurities about sharing too much about works in progress online – even to would-be collaborators. But, again, Rowlands’ work is pertinent here in highlighting that a lack of clarity about the benefits of social media constitutes a barrier to employing it for research purposes, in some cases.

Like me, Bennett and Folley self-censored their digital selves to ‘fit’ their ideas of how others perceived them. They too were anxious about revealing their weaknesses or gaps in their knowledge, and fearful of receiving a critical reception. This aligns with Pantic’s findings on social networking and mental health, which suggest that inaccurate perceptions of others online (part of what we might call ‘Imposter Syndrome’) can contribute to reduced self-esteem in those who are predisposed to psychiatric illness.

“We don’t have time for that…”

Time to acquire skills and build familiarity with tools, and time to integrate social media into the research workflow are both highlighted as issues in studies of social media use among academics. Nandez and Borrego’s work on Academia.edu in particular demonstrates that academics’ intended use of the platform was greater than their actual use; suggesting perhaps that it seemed like a good idea at the time but was demanding to put into practice. The comments on their survey confirmed that this was in part due to respondents being ‘time poor’.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, juggling ‘work’ and ‘social’ uses of social media can also be seen as a challenge. This has also been linked with time management by Leon and Pigg, who observe that “[digital multitasking can] evoke strong affective responses”, including guilt and shame, among graduate students. Such feelings can, of course, be indicators of mental unwellness.

What can we do?

So, what can we do to move towards a more inclusive environment for emerging academics, in which digital technologies play a part?

I think that what my experiences, and the research that I have presented in this blog series shows is that social media are not simply tools for socialising among ‘digital natives’ or sharing photographs of one’s dinner. They impact upon a broader range of research practices than I had appreciated before I began reflecting on my experiences, and in more nuanced ways. Likewise, I hope that I’ve been able to show mental health in a more nuanced light – not only a “crisis” affecting PhD students and HE institutions, but also a way of life, day-to-day for a significant section of the research community, whose needs might (in some cases) be addressed simply, by subtle extensions to existing practice, and by seeing social media and ‘traditional’ research practices as complementary bedfellows, rather than options to choose between. If I could offer any advice on what might be done to effect change then, it would, humbly, be this:

Seek to understand the nuances of social media in heritage and other humanities PhD research; their potential, and their potential pitfalls
Resist seeing social media and ‘traditional’ research practices as an either/or situation requiring a polarised choice; take an holistic view which values each for its own contribution to the academy
Prioritise development of social media competencies and understanding around social media/mental health relationships (both positive and negative) within organisational strategy, in order to ensure that the mental health challenges of the present lead to a healthier, more inclusive research environment in the future.

Above all though, I think that a lot can be achieved – in digital literacy and in mental health – by advocating for three things:

Understanding the needs and potential for growth.

Daring to talk.

And challenging existing practices, to bring about change.

Category: Education