2018 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Can online students be fully integrated into residential courses via web conferencing? Lessons learned from two pilot courses at Columbia University -- #OLCAccelerate

Marquart, Matthea S.; Englisher, Martin G.; Tokieda, Kathryn J.; Samuel, Valerie; Standlee, Joanne; Telfair-Garcia, Alexis

ABSTRACT:
When online students attend on-campus classes via web conferencing, can they be fully integrated into the classroom community? What challenges does offering two modes of attendance introduce, and how might technology and careful course design offer solutions? This session will offer lessons learned from two pilot courses at Columbia University.

EXTENDED ABSTRACT:
Institutions that offer both residential and online programs can allow residential students to enroll in online courses; the logistics are relatively simple. However, allowing online students to enroll in residential courses, without requiring them to travel to campus, is more complicated. While this can expand student choices regarding course topics, instructors, and scheduling, as well as build connections between online and residential students, enabling online students to attend residential classes via web conferencing creates challenges.

In the literature, in addition to the more common phrasing of telepresence or web conferencing to refer to this type of technology-enhanced communication (Tanaka, Nakanishi, & Ishiguro, 2014; Gleason & Greenhow, 2017), this type of course has also been called gxLearning because the classes are geographically extended (Verhaart & Hagen-Hall, 2012; Day & Verhaart, 2015; Day & Verhaart, 2016), hybrid because the classes include a hybrid blend of on-campus and remote students (Henriksen, Mishra, Greenhow, Cain, & Roseth, 2014), and synchromodal because online and residential students share synchronous sessions via different modes of attendance (Cain, Sawaya, & Bell, 2013; Bell, Sawaya, & Cain, 2014; Bell, Cain, Peterson, & Cheng, 2016; Cain & Bell, 2017). During the workshop, the presenters will share their literature review as a resource for participants who would like to learn more about the research in this area.

The bulk of the workshop will focus on sharing lessons learned from planning and teaching two Spring 2018 pilot seminar courses at Columbia University in which online social work students joined residential courses via Zoom web conferencing. The presenters will cover challenges and opportunities when planning residential courses that integrate both online and on-campus students, including:
- Logistical concerns that must be addressed prior to the start of the semester, such as student messaging, student registration, classroom setup and technology requirements, and instructor selection and training
- Considerations for designing activities and classroom materials that fully engage both online and on-campus students, including during small-group breakout activities, group presentations, and whole-class discussions
- Techniques for building one cohesive classroom community, rather than two segregated groups of students
- Methods for managing the technology in the physical classroom, or when taking online students along on a field trip off campus

The session will include the perspectives of the instructors, TAs, and online students involved in the two pilot courses.

Interactivity for the session will include informal hand-raise polls to gauge participants’ experiences and interests around the workshop topic, whole-group discussion questions to give the group the chance to share ideas, pair-share discussions to give participants the chance to consider how they might apply the workshop content to their unique work environments, and time for Q&A.

By the end of this workshop, participants should be able to:
- Describe the benefits, pedagogical challenges, and logistical concerns that accompany a decision about whether to allow online students who do not live near campus to register for residential courses
- Discuss ways to design classroom activities and materials that engage online and residential students with the coursework and with each other as one cohesive classroom community
- Share their experiences, tips, concerns, and questions around how to plan, manage, and teach this type of course
- Describe the existing literature about this type of course modality