Workshop: Get Them Out of the Cave! Using audio in online learning
This workshop is intended to take colleagues through the analysis of content usage by students. The premise is that instructors may be overwhelming students with too much video or written material when another form of content (audio) is available. Participants will emerge from the interactive presentation with a tool that helps faculty achieve balance with their content, as well as talking points to recommend audio for future courses.
Description of the Workshop
Things were different before March 2020. Students might have taken one or two classes online, and as such their asynchronous content was a small piece of their overall schedule. But when courses went virtual, and now the entire schedule was being delivered online, what was once minimal became everything.
A big part of this conversation is simple math. Even though we certainly aren’t measuring how much video each instructor is expecting students to watch, it’s likely more than we realize. Assuming that students are taking 4-6 classes, the math can be very scary when it comes to screen time. We often think of screen time when it comes to young adults and PK-12, but given the number of students that are learning online it is distressing. How can this be good for them? As a note, this does not even count personal screen time.
Integrating video in an online course is a best practice. Whether it is a video that is recorded by the instructor or video that is borrowed from an open-source, video is seen as the preferred medium representing an alternative to the written word. A vibrant video option is an attractive complement to articles and chapters in a book. But what about audio? Why did we basically skip this very old and established medium?
There are over 30 million podcast episodes that can be streamed on any number of devices. Tell Alexa or Google to play a podcast, and she/it will listen. If they are everywhere and can be heard anytime, why aren’t more faculty members embracing the medium? What is it about audio that made it less appealing for the purpose of online learning?
For whatever reason, and now more evident during the pandemic, instructors have skipped over audio as a source for content in online courses. In this interactive presentation, we will discuss why and how we can achieve some type of balance. Participants will be invited to share what they are seeing on their respective campuses, as well as to share their perspectives on the topic.
About the Presenter:
Dr. Duchamp is the Assistant Dean for Online Education at the Wegmans School of Nursing at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY. In addition to his main function, Damien teaches marketing, hospitality, tourism and culinary courses at Frederick Community College and St. John’s University. In 2018 he founded TeachingMVP, a place to share his passion for online pedagogy. He has worked with hundreds of faculty as they tackle the many challenges of distance learning. When time permits, Damien works on global education and diversity, equity and inclusion projects through Hospitalented, Travel Unity, ICHRIE, and Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.