Quality Theater

An update from the folks behind this book.

HYBRID PEDAGOGY Quality Theater BY JEROD QUINN – 08 SEP 2022 – VIEW ONLINE → Photo by David Clode / Unsplash A post-rubric approach to online course quality Toward a Critical Instructional Design This article is part of the edited collection, Toward a Critical Instructional, from Hybrid Pedagogy. Together with its sister volume Design Designing for Care, it strives to imagine a more humanizing and problem-posing approach to the design of education. Both books are available in paperback (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design) and Kindle editions (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design); additionally, chapters can be read online as open-access articles (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design). Proceeds from both books help continue the mission of the Hybrid Pedagogy 501(c)(3) non-profit. There’s a phrase that has stuck with me since I first heard it a few years ago; security theater. It’s looking like you are taking active approaches to create a safer environment, except those actions are not really creating a safer environment. They just have the appearance of security, without actually making things more secure. I think we hold this same theatrical, wishful thinking in our rubric-based approaches of ensuring the quality of an online course. We make a lot of noise and movement, spending hours on preparing a course for a quality review, coaching the instructor on how to pass the review, reviewing the course, fixing the course, and then re-reviewing that same course. But most of our energy is spent checking off items on a list that have very little impact on the online learner’s experience. Instructional designers have become actors in our very own Quality Theater. If we take a critical look at what is a ubiquitous and often assumed process in online learning, we might build a path towards a more effective, equitable, and autonomous approach that requires far less time commitment. Building that path is the work of critical instructional design. It’s looking at the systems we have, we build, and we propel forward. Critical instructional designers prioritize collaboration, participation, social justice, agency that builds connections between learners and instructors, but also relationships between instructors and instructional designers (Morris, 2018). The critical instructional designer rebels against the standardization of one-size-fits-all processes and technologies, because when we choose practices that are rooted in equity and autonomy, in collaboration and self-determination, in the back-and-forth dialogue of critical consciousness, we can build something inclusive and powerful (Morris, 2018). A deeply common and, I would argue, deeply problematic area of instructional design in education that needs the examination of critical instructional designers is the unquestioned adoption and propagation of online course quality rubrics. When I talk about applying a quality rubric, I’m referring to the increasingly common approach in online course quality control. The assumption is that specific design characteristics of an online course can make a better learning experience for students. A course quality rubric typically has a set of categories (like assessment) with multiple items assigned to each category. A course reviewer or multiple reviewers, sometimes a peer or sometimes an instructional designer, will search for the evidence of the specified criteria and determine if the course in question meets the standards set by the rubric. If the course meets enough of the set standards it “passes” the course quality review. These reviews focus entirely on what can be viewed in the online course content in the learning management system (LMS). They do not examine the teaching or learning practice. To think that we can neatly separate the content and structure of a course from the teaching of a course in terms of defining what makes a quality online learning experience is an exercise in magical thinking. By ignoring the teaching, we knowingly choose efficiency of process over effectiveness of impact. There’s a reason most online learning isn’t in the form of a correspondence course where all the content is there for you to work through on your own with minimal, if any, instructor interaction. Interaction matters. It’s not the content that predominantly makes the online learning experience work, it’s the experience itself. The rubric approach to quality looks at what content is present and absent in a course, but not at what happens in the teaching of the course. While that is a very “scalable” approach to quality assurance, online learning is a slippery creature totally dependent on context and participants. It is not a widget on an assembly line that can be reproduced interchangeably with the right tooling. In this chapter, I will detail how the rubric-based quality approach to online courses is ineffective at producing engaging online courses. I will then identify what kinds of approaches might help create better online experiences that improve learner retention and motivation. Quality Outcomes: What are We Looking to Improve? Why go through the hassle of doing these course reviews in the first place? It’s well within reason to think instructors and instructional designers can have a positive impact on the learner’s experience with a pre-semester course check. The first step is to acknowledge what impact we can and can’t have with a course check. We cannot instructional design our learners out of food insecurity, family caretaking responsibilities, physical and mental health challenges, or lower the outrageous costs of higher education through practices of quality assurance. These are the far more common reasons learners leave college. But we can help craft a more meaningful and supportive online classroom experience. We do this by approaching the work in a way where we can show that our efforts are worth the time investment. If a quality course review isn’t improving the learner experience, then we shouldn’t waste our time doing them. We need to name our outcomes. I’m deeply tempted to point towards indicators of humanizing online learning as being our outcomes of choice. Getting individual qualitative and quantitative feedback from thousands of learners would absolutely provide rich evidence for effectiveness or lack-thereof. That would be downright glorious. But my pragmatism will not allow me to dream that big. I have never known an instructional design department to have the resources, skill sets, determination, and institutional support to be able to deploy that level of impact analysis with all the learners in all their online courses. If you can, go for it! But for the rest of us, we need a more mundane marker to use as a proxy for gauging effectiveness. I suggest learner outcomes. When I talk about learner outcomes, I’m specifically referring to grades and drop-fail-withdraw (DFW) rates. Personally, I hate grades and the performance approaches to learning they create. But they are also pervasive and available. Anonymized grades and DFW rates can often be requested from the registrar’s office without much fanfare. And like it or not, grades and GPA’s are what determine if scholarships are kept, if courses need to be repeated, and even if future enrollment is allowed. Grades are the gatekeepers in determining if learners are allowed to continue their college dreams. But measuring impact from those outcomes is a tricky business. Finding a direct line from any variable to student outcomes is a challenging task, and connecting course quality rubrics to student outcomes is no exception. Ron Legon, the Executive Director of Quality Matters™, argues that the comprehensiveness of the Quality Matters™ rubric standards makes measuring the impact of the rubric across an institution, let alone multiple institutions, a “practical impossibility” (Legon, 2015). I would argue that if measuring the impact of a quality rubric is a practical impossibility, then that is an intentional design choice in creating and maintaining that particular rubric. Course quality rubrics tend to have over 50 items, multiple standards of practice, and are divorced from an overarching learning theory. This is critical. Without an overarching theory of practice, there’s no clear way to measure if the practice works or not. For example, you could measure motivation using a scale derived from a motivational theory, like Bandura’s self-efficacy or Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory. Those theories give a marker for what counts as motivation. Without a theory for how something works, it’s difficult to find evidence that it actually works. You don’t know what to look for. Having such a huge number of items on a rubric also makes it overwhelming. And in the academic world, we tend to confuse being overwhelmed by information as being rigorous in knowledge. This is the “spaghetti-at-the-wall” approach to effectiveness. If we throw enough spaghetti at the wall (i.e., rubric items that are good in intention) something is bound to stick and make an impact on course quality. It’s not purposeful, it’s not intentional, it’s not focused, but if we throw enough standards at the course something is bound to stick eventually and make the course a “quality” experience. I will dip into some of the research on quality course reviews, but first I think there’s a simpler way to make the case for why the rubric-centric approach doesn’t work. I invite you to play along. Find a copy of the quality rubric you use to review online courses. If you are an instructional designer, I know you have one. Read the first checklist item out loud. Now answer this question: is that a common reason learners drop, fail, or withdraw from online courses in your context? No? Then why are we spending time on it as if it were? This was the fatal crack in the dam for me. I pulled out the 48 item rubric we used at the institution where I was an instructional designer at the time, and I read through each and every item asking myself if the presence or absence of that item is something that causes learners to leave or fail online classes. I ended up identifying 4 of those 48 items that were factors in completion rates. And no, “measurable learning objectives” was not one of them. I have never heard a learner say, “I failed that online class because the instructor used the verb ‘understand’ in the objectives.” Most of the items on that 48 item rubric were perfectly fine items. They were nominally good things in and of themselves. Those items were not meaningful things, not impactful things. I realized that I was spending hours of my labor per course every week with these items that don’t impact the student experience in meaningful ways. I think this feeling is common no matter the particular rubric. Quality control rubrics take many shapes and forms in academia, but that approach originated with one very well-known rubric. Quality Evidence: If it Works, We Should Be Able to Tell it Works I’ve been working in online learning in higher education since 2007. In these early days of online courses the learning management systems (LMS) were often little more than a place to put folders full of files. There were few constraints and few enforced organizational structures. In practice this meant for each course everything was always different everywhere. One course I worked on in an early iteration of Blackboard’s™ LMS had a system of nested folders fourteen levels deep as the organizational structure. The instructor was meeting with me because they noticed their learners were rarely turning in assignments on time if at all! I got to be the one to let them know that it was because their fourteen-level organization approach made absolutely no sense. It was in these first days of online learning when course quality rubrics started to emerge, most notably the Quality Matters™ rubric from Maryland Online in 2003 (Quality Matters, n.d.). Quality Matters™, and the many imitators that came after, created these rubrics in an effort to provide a system to “ensure course quality” for learners across the institution (Quality Matters, n.d.). As LMSs have become more constricting to what an online course can look like, the need for a checklist of present and absent items in an online course seems to be less pertinent because so much structure is dictated by the LMS. Much of the syllabus-related items and policies can be automated by the LMS administrator. My purpose is not to dedicate this chapter to directly critiquing Quality Matters™ (QM™), but it would be impossible for me to talk about online course quality without speaking directly about them. They have been the most successful group at pushing the conversation about online course quality around the world, while also creating a market for solutions to the challenges of quality. Every other major quality rubric out there stood on the shoulders of the QM™ process and the QM™ content to create their version of a quality rubric. Countless universities have “home-grown” versions of quality rubrics based on QM™, and countless more do unofficial reviews with bootlegged QM™ handbooks. Their influence in these practices runs deep, well beyond the official Quality Matters™ certified courses. I have to talk about Quality Matters™ because so many of our unchallenged assumptions about quality online experiences come from their legacy. There are many online course quality rubrics, most of which follow a similar construction as the Quality Matters™ rubric. Baldwin, Ching, and Hsu looked at the six most prevalent online course quality rubrics publicly available to compare their features, emphasis, and course quality criteria (Baldwin et al., 2018). They found that the rubrics had an average of 59 items, with twelve common overarching standards. These standards are: objectives are available navigation is intuitive technology is used to promote learner engagement-facilitate learning student-to-student interaction is supported communication and activities are used to build community instructor contact information is stated expectations regarding quality of communication-participation are provided assessment rubrics for graded assignments are provided assessments align with objectives links to institutional services are provided course has accommodations for disabilities course policies are stated for behavior expectations. The application of a rubric has a similar process too. A single or multiple reviewer(s) checks for compliance to the standards, feedback is offered at least on missed standards, and the instructor is given the opportunity to revise their online course based on that feedback in order to meet the standards. Jaggars and Xu worked to isolate which, if any, standards are directly connected to student outcomes (2016). After comparing multiple course quality rubrics they name four general categories of quality from all the collected rubrics: (1) organization and presentation, (2) learning objectives and assessments, (3) interpersonal interaction, and (4) use of technology (Jaggars & Xu, 2016). Using these categories, they examined 23 online courses and found that only one category, the quality of interpersonal interaction within a course, positively and significantly connects to student grades. They go on to explain that interaction is most impactful with frequent and effective student-instructor interactions. Despite the large collection of standards and items on quality rubrics, it seems that proportionally few of them are directly connected to improving student outcomes in online classes. In fact, they conclude by suggesting the creation of rubrics that move beyond checking for the mere presence of an item or standard and instead note how they are being used in the learning environment. They also encourage practitioners to validate each component of the new rubrics against student outcomes. Validity and reliability are two foundational terms used in statistics and measurement conversations. Validity means your measurement tool (like a ruler) actually measures the thing it was designed to measure (like the length of a pencil). This is a crucial concept for measuring things that are hard to measure, like learning or depression. If the depression questionnaire can’t help a doctor determine if someone is showing symptoms of depression then it doesn’t work, it does not have validity in the doctor-patient context. Reliability means your measurement tool works properly over and over again with multiple populations. If we are going to claim our rubrics as measurers of course quality, then they need to be valid and reliable tools. Noting there is very little public research available on the reliability and validity of online course quality rubrics, Yuan and Recker completed one of the more comprehensive studies on validity and reliability (2015). They looked at the validity and reliability of their university’s course quality rubric, which was adapted from the Quality Matters™ rubric, and found that one-fourth of the total items were problematic and had to be eliminated. From the remaining items they identified nine factors, explaining 73% of the total variance, with “learning activities & materials” explaining the highest amount of total variance in course quality (Yuan & Recker, 2015). Explaining variance is a good thing; it means something important is happening in that area and we should pay attention. Their conclusions state that only rubric items related to learner engagement and interaction have a significant and positive effect on online interactions, while only student-content interaction significantly and positively influence course passing rates. There’s more research out there, but the main takeaways I have found are: Many rubric items will not survive statistical validation (Yuan & Recker, 2015) Course quality rubrics average 59 items over twelve common themes (Baldwin et al., 2018) Learners are not in agreement with rubric publishers about which standards are most important in online courses (Ralston-Berg, 2014) In practice, the multiple reviewer process doesn’t provide useful specific examples of aligning the item in question with the standard (Schwegler & Altman, 2015) Faculty resist course quality rubrics mainly because of the overwhelming time commitment involved in the process (Gregory et al., 2020; McGahan et al., 2015; Roehrs et al., 2013) Quality course reviews are often done in tandem with faculty development programs, so separating the effects of the programs versus the effects of the rubric is challenging if not impossible (examples of overlapping programs and their effects Harkness, 2015; Swan et al., 2012) Few standards connect to outcomes, mainly the standards that relate to faculty-student interactions are traceable to improving student outcomes (Jaggars & Xu, 2016) I realize there are more reasons to use these rubrics than improving student outcomes. But honestly, I don’t care about those reasons. I want to keep students enrolled and on scholarship, which means outcomes. I still believe a degree opens doors in life that are unavailable otherwise. It changes people’s futures, family’s futures, and the community’s futures. That’s why outcomes are my focus. I also realize that if the course review process is too suffocating for instructors, then we have lost the opportunity to improve outcomes for their students. We don’t just need a better course quality tool, we need a better approach to course reviews. We need an approach that feels empowering as opposed to punitive. Quality Feels: Power and Authority for the Precarious Worker If you want to pick a fight with instructional designers, just throw shade at their quality rubrics. When I started questioning these rubrics the reactions from my colleagues were fast and furious. I was caught completely off-guard. Johanna Inman addresses this in her comments on using evidence-based research when talking with instructors about their courses. She says, “it is important to address the feelings about the evidence as much as it is to share the evidence” (Inman, 2021, p. 71). So when I push against a process of quality reviews, processes that bring feelings of clarity and authority in the work we instructional designers do, I’m also pushing against something that feels safe. I think it’s challenging that feeling of safety that gets such visceral reactions from my colleagues. There is a large group of instructional designers who will defend quality rubrics with their lives. (You can find them trolling me on Twitter right now.) Instructional designers roll their eyes at me when I roll my eyes at learning objective measurability. But when I publicly question the power of the rubric, I get such a disproportionate reaction of anger as if these instructional designers gave birth to the quality control rubrics, and I’m insulting their babies. It’s curious, but I think I understand why this topic stirs such forceful feelings. I have a theory about the relationship between course quality rubrics and instructional designers. I don’t have any “empirical evidence” about it, just observations and ideas. Instructional designers have expertise and experience in their profession. However, we are often working in a culture that puts us (and other staff) in a power dynamic where we are treated as subservient to the faculty (or the SME). That context implies that our expertise is without merit. That wears on you. It can make you second guess your professional (and personal) value. Instructional design is also work that takes broad expertise and some pretty good social negotiation skills to really feel like you know what you are doing. Every person you work with is different, and every context you work in is different. It is often nebulous work. That’s actually what I enjoy about the job, it’s always changing so it’s always challenging. If you are new to the work, or something has shaken your confidence in your skill, it’s easy to shame-spiral into a feeling of incompetence. Enter the quality rubric. You know what feels authoritative? A rubric of 50-ish items, all annotated in annoying yet ambiguous detail with the word “QUALITY” in the title. Preferably in all caps. If you are the keeper of that powerful rubric, you become the expert. If you work with one for even a short time, you can get to know the standards and the required items thoroughly. The nebulous work of instructional design becomes clear in the light of rubric-based compliance mandates. Enforcing a course rubric is work that is anything but ambiguous. When your work is checking off boxes, you never really feel like an imposter. It’s just box checking, after all. When your work is checking boxes, it’s really easy to quantify your value to the university administrators, few of whom are interested in the nuances of instructional design consultations. Telling the people who determine your employment status that you completed 25 quality course reviews this month and have “certified” those courses sounds concrete and valuable. Few people are asking if that work actually made a difference with the learners, but numbers and certifications are easy to support. Entire instructional design departments are anchored in these course reviews. But box checking isn’t instructional design, at best it’s compliance monitoring. When instructional designers push against my criticisms with such venom, it’s partly because by pushing against the core work of their departments, I’m questioning their value as professionals. Enforcing a rubric is safe. It’s a lot of effort, but it doesn’t demand much risk. Even when things get difficult with the instructor it’s easy to deflect blame to the rubric itself or the administration that prescribed it. But it also positions the instructional designer as the gatekeeper of quality. For a staff member who is typically treated as an inferior to the great and powerful tenured faculty, it can taste pretty delicious to be in a position of authority for a change. These rubrics and their associated processes can bring a sense of value and clarity to instructional designers when so much of our work is ambiguous and often dismissed. These rubrics are safe. They are authoritative. They are powerful. They are really easy to explain to administrators who decide if your department gets to keep its funding. When the clarity and security of your career is questioned, you can get really mad, really fast. But if we can move away from the work of compliance, we can lean into the work of instructional design. It’s there we can put our energies into the things that matter most to our learners in online courses. We leverage our professional skills to help create an environment that better connects, empowers, and includes both the learners and the instructors. Quality Focus: What Matters Most? Earlier I noted how the rubric items that influence faculty-student connections are the ones most likely connected to outcomes. I also criticized the “spaghetti-at-the-wall” approach as being both ineffective and overwhelming to instructors. To move forward, we need to reject the 59 items on a rubric approach in favor of an approach that focuses on a smaller set of the most impactful categories on online learning: faculty-student connections, inclusion, and clarity of structure. I use the term categories deliberately because there are many practices in each of these categories that could be impactful given a specific context and population. By utilizing an approach that asks instructors to commit to categories of practice instead of prescribing universal, one-size-fits-all actions, we offer instructors and instructional designers the autonomy to leverage their professional experience in selecting (and changing as needed) the specific practices that might be the most interesting and the most effective in their own unique courses. Faculty-student connections The largest impact instructional designers can have on the learner experience in online classes is through creating an environment with deep and wide faculty-student connections. “Decades of research demonstrate that peer-to-peer, student-faculty, and student-staff relationships are the foundation of learning, belonging, and achieving in college” (Felten & Lambert, 2020, p. 5). Faculty-student connections tend to directly improve cognitive skill development while also directly encouraging classroom engagement (Kim & Lundberg, 2016). These same interactions also seem to be the most significant factor for both first-generation learners and non-white learners regarding positive outcomes (Felten & Lambert, 2020, p. 83). Not all interactions are positive ones, but overall, knowing that the instructors care for the learners and are actively working for learner success is the major factor in learner outcomes. Instructional designers can assist with these connections by helping instructors create online courses full of opportunities for connection and communication. Instructional designers can equip instructors to host conversations outside the LMS using text and messaging tools like Slack, Discord, and GroupMe. But the purpose isn’t the tools (just to be clear), the purpose is to help create discussion and conversation that goes beyond “post once, reply twice” to feel more like regular, dare I say actual, conversations. I worked with an instructor on a fluid mechanics engineering course and we created an activity called “Fluid Mechanics in the Wild.” The idea was to take a selfie video where you saw fluid mechanics happening in your daily life, and then explain as best you could the principles at work. The instructor would give weekly examples of this and ask the learners to try this practice themselves. This could be the steam pipes in the engineering building or the large margarita with an upside-down bottled beer in it. These were shared and would provoke conversation (and connection) about the everyday relevance of their classwork. These connection practices don’t have to be new practices, they can just as easily be a refocusing old practices: instructors participating in discussion forums instead of merely observing them, modeling discipline-specific reading practices through social annotation as opposed to just assigning journal articles, or trying contract or negotiated grading practices (think ungrading) instead of one-way evaluation. Again, we are not talking about prescribing a single required item or practice but drawing from a broad category of approaches that can create connection while offering instructor autonomy. Instructional designers can use their professional experience to help guide instructors towards more meaningful connections that build both relatedness and competence in their unique population of learners. Inclusion Knowing and feeling like you belong in a space is a powerful motivator. When I talk about designing for inclusion, I am referring to practices like culturally responsive teaching, accessibility, universal design for learning, trauma-informed pedagogy, and designing for neurodiverse learners. I’m casting a wide net for sure here, but I would argue that any steps that make the online classroom more inclusive are positive steps. Inclusion in these terms also means establishing a sense of belonging, which has been demonstrated as a factor in keeping learners enrolled (Tinto, 2005). That sense of belonging helps retain learners in college programs, from women in STEM (Banchefsky et al., 2019) to diverse and underrepresented groups in higher education (Thomas, 2015). Instructional designers can influence online courses through inclusive design practices. Amy Collier describes inclusive design as a practice that, “goes beyond accessibility, though accessibility is considered within inclusive design. Inclusive design celebrates difference and focuses on designs that allow for diversity to thrive. In higher education, this means asking ourselves, ‘Who has been served, supported, or allowed to thrive by our educational designs and who has not?’ And, ‘How might we design for inclusion of more students’ “(Collier, 2020)? While instructional designers can begin with content accessibility and perhaps even “Decolonizing the Syllabus” (DeChavez, 2018), depending on the experience of the instructor and the population of learners, we can also help guide instructors in creating approaches like land-based pedagogies (Sam et al., 2021) or legacy assessments, in which projects engage with the community and the environment and take the purpose of learning beyond the individual, toward the betterment of the community (Chavez & Longerbeam, 2016). Again, this isn’t a checklist of inclusive practices to be included in a course without consideration of context. This is a wide category of options that build a sense of relatedness in the learners while instilling autonomy about the course material by being able to learn in more culturally responsive ways. Clarity of structure In my initial investigations of what are the most impactful factors in online learning, I tried my best to stay away from specifics on content and structure. The rubric-centric approach is entirely focused on content and structure and my hesitation was that I was trading one list of prescriptive rules for a different list of prescriptive rules. But I couldn’t get away from it. Clarity of structure matters. Not having to navigate fourteen levels of nested folders on Blackboard™ matters to the learning experience. Not having to play, “read my mind” games with the instructor matters. When I talk about clarity, what I’m getting at is structure that allows autonomy while empowering learners (and instructors) to feel competent in engaging in the tasks at hand. But there’s not one structure to rule them all, one template that will open access to all learners. “One right way” is the kind of thinking that replicates white supremacy principles in the workplace and in education (Okun, 2021). Course quality rubrics are rooted in the practice of “sameness” of every course in every space. The first step of critical instructional design is simply asking, “why?” Why is sameness mission critical? Do we ask on-campus instructors to conform to the practice of sameness? Do we tell on-campus algebra instructors to script their courses exactly like the anthropology or the astronomy courses? Of course not! That’s ludicrous! We expect, and even encourage, on-campus instructors to shape their courses with their professional experience, in accordance with expectations of the discipline, and in conversation with their learners. So why do we prescribe sameness for those courses when they move online? This is a side effect of an earlier issue: thinking we can separate the design of the course from the teaching of the course. Templates make processes scalable, not learning. Learning is contextual, and we can shape that context to empower and encourage learner participation. Clarity of structure simply means that the learning process should not be an unsolvable mystery to the learners. It does not mean that everything is always the same. Clarity happens within the chosen structure, not from requiring the same structure. Another way of thinking about structure would be in terms of making implicit expectations explicit instructions. For example, instructional designers can share the Transparency in Teaching and Learning (TiLT) framework for assessments with instructors. This is an approach that doesn’t require instructors to change their assignments, but provides a structure to explain the expectations. TiLT asks instructors to describe the assignment in three sections: purpose, task, and criteria for evaluation (Winkelmes et al., 2019). This framework with its relatively simple implementation tends to improve learners’ confidence, belonging, and skill development, but shows even more benefit for learners typically underserved by higher education institutions (Winkelmes et al., 2016). Instructional designers can use their professional experience to help guide instructors towards content structures and greater clarity that empower their unique population to navigate the experience with competence and autonomy. Overarching theory Earlier in this chapter I claimed, “without an overarching theory of practice, there’s no clear way to measure if the practice works or not.” So what would be the overarching theory that provides a framework for measurement of effectiveness for the collection of faculty-student connections, inclusion, and clarity of structure? I think there are multiple frameworks that could potentially work, but for me as a quantitative-minded educational psychology researcher interested in motivation and learning, the immediate connection is the self-determination theory of motivation. Self-determination theory (often abbreviated as SDT) states that people have a motivational need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness, and these three needs can guide a person’s behavior (Schunk et al., 2014). Individuals need to feel competent when interacting with others and when engaging with various tasks and activities. The need for autonomy refers to the need for a person to feel a sense of control or agency in their interactions with the environment. A sense of relatedness would feel like belonging to a group of people, being included and connected to others (Schunk et al., 2014). I see pairs of SDT items working together in each of the high-impact categories. Faculty-student connection = relatedness + competence. Relatedness because of the personal connection with the instructor, but also competence because that connection can lead to clarity of understanding of the course material. Inclusion = autonomy + relatedness. Inclusion can bring autonomy when we look at factors like accessibility, universal design for learning, and neurodiverse instructional approaches. It also leads to feelings of relatedness through culturally responsive instruction and creating a learning environment where learners can bring as much of themselves as they want to the experience. Clarity of structure = competence + autonomy. Clear instructions and transparent expectations let the learners know without ambiguity what they are responsible for. A navigable structure also creates marked paths for completing the course and engaging with the materials. Self-determination theory has been used in educational research in multiple contexts, including online learning, to measure engagement and effectiveness of approaches (Hsu et al., 2019; Niemiec & Ryan, 2009; Wang et al., 2019). While SDT is my choice of theoretical framework, it’s far from the only candidate. The point is in order to claim effectiveness, quality, or impact, we need a way to name and measure those factors that contribute to being effective, quality, and impactful. Otherwise, we risk spending our time and energy putting faith in the marketing promises of companies trying to sell us their products. I realize many of my colleagues will not hesitate to express their disgust at my desire for quantification and measurement of a new course quality process. I absolutely understand that aversion. Statistics and measurement have been wielded as a weapon of institutional compliance (and worse things) since they were created. Statistics, despite its rooting in seemingly objective numbers, is a deeply subjective approach just like every other approach we humans use to make sense of our world. Statistics, however, is also a very useful approach when we are trying to make decisions that will impact the time and energy of thousands of people. It generalizes practices into the most effective for the most people. I can’t in good conscience ask the 3000 online instructors at my university to devote their time, energy, and often unpaid labor to a course quality process that merely sounds like it should work. I can’t ask instructional designers to leave the main stage of the Quality Theater behind just to walk a block over to participate in the Off-Broadway Quality Theater. When we implement a system of practice that impacts thousands of educators, we need evidence that the practice makes a positive difference with learners. These online course quality practices affect thousands of educators because so many universities require some flavor of a quality check out of the fear of being out of compliance with the federal regulations. What about federal requirements? If you’re in the United States, there are federal requirements for online courses and programs that keep those courses connected to federal funding. Back in the dark ages of online classes (2008) the federal government stipulated that in order to meet the requirements for accreditation, online classes needed to have “regular and substantive interaction” between the learners and the instructor. It took an additional decade to define what that meant. Substantive interaction is the push to make the online learning experience connected and engaging. It requires at least two of the following: “(i) Providing direct instruction; (ii) Assessing or providing feedback on a student’s coursework; (iii) Providing information or responding to questions about the content of a course or competency; (iv) Facilitating a group discussion regarding the content of a course or competency; or (v) Other instructional activities approved by the institution’s or program’s accrediting agency” (Code of Federal Regulations Title 34, 2022). The definition of regular interaction is “(i) Providing the opportunity for substantive interactions with the student on a predictable and scheduled basis commensurate with the length of time and the amount of content in the course or competency; and (ii) Monitoring the student’s academic engagement and success and ensuring that an instructor is responsible for promptly and proactively engaging in substantive interaction with the student when needed on the basis of such monitoring, or upon request by the Student” (Code of Federal Regulations Title 34, 2022). Let’s be honest here: I can’t imagine a lower bar for regular and substantive interaction. Instructors have to give feedback on assessments and answer questions? Preposterous! The point of these regulations is that the Department of Education doesn’t want universities to sell correspondence courses to unsuspecting learners under the banner of online courses. You don’t need an extensive rubric and a drawn-out peer review process to meet the low-bar requirements of regular and substantive interaction set by the federal government. However, this is the point where I see rubric creators leveraging the administrator’s fear of losing federal funds to promote their own products and services. In a recent announcement from the Online Learning Consortium about their OSCQR quality rubric, they explicitly fuel this fear by saying, “Institutions are seeking assistance in successfully navigating the new RSI [regular and substantive interaction] regulation and risk losing access to student financial aid if the institution is audited and found to be out of compliance by the DoE [Department of Education] Office of Inspector General, or as part of a periodic Departmental financial aid program review” (Chmura, 2022). Few things prompt university administrators into action as quickly as the threat of losing money. But the federal requirements are so minuscule that the quality rubric process is a monumentally over-engineered approach to what in practice is a very low expectation. Quality Conclusion: New Ideas for a Post-Rubric Approach There are groups out there that also recognize and are pushing against the tensions of the quality rubric approach. Peralta has moved beyond content and created a rubric for improving online equity (Peralta District, 2020). Hybrid Pedagogy published a piece last year from Martha Burtis and Jesse Stommel that explained their tensions with implementing an unchallenged and unquestioned rubric approach while offering a list of course design considerations for instructional designers to leverage instead (Burtis & Stommel, 2021). While I’ve detailed some of the research regarding the effectiveness of quality rubric processes, I also have years of experience enforcing these rubrics. I am challenging this rubric-centric approach because I have been actively involved in these reviews for much of my professional career. I have been a Quality Matters™ certified peer reviewer and been a reviewer on many Quality Matters™ course reviews. My previous institution created a customized version of the QM™ rubric, and I was a reviewer for many courses using that rubric as well. All said, I’ve been part of approximately 200+ online course reviews over the past 6 years. These are the primary tensions I’ve felt in my experience with the rubric-centric approach. The experience almost always feels punitive for the instructor. No matter how experienced or how skilled of an educator they are, “failing” a review feels like an attack. No one passes a review without coaching which requires even more time committed to the process. Even a great online educator will not “naturally” build in the 40-60 items the rubric requires because the rubric is looking for very specific, often unintuitive, things. Our reviews averaged around 15 hours of work each between the reviewers (not including the revision work from the instructor or pre-review coaching). This same time commitment is echoed in other groups (Gregory et al., 2020). There’s surprisingly little published evidence that course checks using common rubrics make a measurable impact on student outcomes or experiences. That’s a lot of time and energy invested in something with fuzzy impacts. The prescriptive nature of the rubrics along with their processes convey, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, that there is “one right way” to teach or design a course. “One way” approaches are not inclusion-oriented practices. It universally felt like a hoop to jump through and not a genuine path to make teaching more enjoyable and learning more engaging. It dismisses the years of online teaching experience many faculty bring to these conversations by implying it’s these items that make a course “quality” and not their skill and dedication. The whole idea of a 50-point quality checklist with multiple reviewers that deploys a drawn-out song-and-dance review process is an approach that will never prioritize collaboration, relationship, social justice, agency, or any other values of critical instructional design. By doing these rubric-centric reviews in this manner I think we are investing in something that will never bring value on the scale of the costs. While along the way we are stealing the autonomy, competence, and relationships from our instructors in the name of scalability and having a job description we can easily quantify to administrators. I think a better, measurable, and more effective path to online course quality lies in a process that respects the experience of the instructors, focuses on high-impact items, approaches quality in a strengths-based framework, and empowers instructors with the support and autonomy to improve the learning experience in their online courses in ways that are uniquely appropriate to their learners, disciplines, and teaching approaches. I think this would need to be a reflective and possibly co-designed approach that respects instructor experience as opposed to templated task lists. We have mounds of research to point us toward the items that make known impacts on the online learning experience. We also have a community of human-centered instructional designers with deep skill sets and even deeper passion. We have plenty of barriers to break through, but the time is now for us to create a more effective, equitable, and empowering approach to online course quality. That starts with stepping down from the stage and leaving the Quality Theater behind. Quality References Baldwin, S., Ching, Y.-H. & Hsu, Y.-C. (2018). Online Course Design in Higher Education: A Review of National and Statewide Evaluation Instruments. TechTrends, 62(1), 46–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-017-0215-z Banchefsky, S., Lewis, K. L. & Ito, T. A. (2019). The Role of Social and Ability Belonging in Men’s and Women’s pSTEM Persistence. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2386. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02386 Burtis, M. & Stommel, J. (2021). The Cult of Quality Matters. Hybrid Pedagogy. https://hybridpedagogy.org/the-cult-of-quality-matters/ Chavez, A. F. & Longerbeam, S. D. (2016). Teaching across cultural strengths: A guide to balancing integrated and individuated cultural frameworks in college teaching. Stylus Publishing. Chmura, M. (2022). OLC and SUNY Online update course quality rubric based on new federal requirements for distance education. Online Learning Consortium. https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/news_item/olc-and-suny-online-update-course-quality-rubric-based-on-new-federal-requirements-for-distance-education/ Code of Federal Regulations Title 34, § 600.2 Definitions (2022). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-B/chapter-VI/part-600 Collier, A. (2020). Inclusive design and design Justice: Strategies to shape our classes and communities. Educause Review. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/10/inclusive-design-and-design-justice-strategies-to-shape-our-classes-and-communities DeChavez, Y. (2018). It’s time to decolonize that syllabus. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-decolonize-syllabus-20181008-story.html Felten, P. & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-Rich Education. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.78561 Gregory, R. L., Rockinson-Szapkiw, A. J. & Cook, V. S. (2020). Community college faculty perceptions of the Quality Matters™ Rubric. Online Learning, 24(2). https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v24i2.2052 Harkness, S. S. J. (2015). How a Historically Black College University (HBCU) established a sustainable online learning program in partnership with Quality Matters™. American Journal of Distance Education, 29(3), 198–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2015.1057440 Hsu, H.-C. K., Wang, C. V. & Levesque-Bristol, C. (2019). Reexamining the impact of self-determination theory on learning outcomes in the online learning environment. Education and Information Technologies, 24(3), 2159–2174. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-019-09863-w Inman, J. (2021). Grounded in research: Be good, or at least evidence-based. In J. Quinn (Ed.), The Learner-Centered Instructional Designer: Purposes, Processes, and Practicalities of Creating Online Courses in Higher Education (pp. 69–78). Stylus Publishing. Jaggars, S. S. & Xu, D. (2016). How do online course design features influence student performance? Computers & Education, 95, 270–284. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2016.01.014 Kim, Y. K. & Lundberg, C. A. (2016). A structural model of the relationship between student–faculty interaction and cognitive skills development among college students. Research in Higher Education, 57(3), 288–309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9387-6 Legon, R. (2015). Measuring the impact of the Quality Matters™ rubric: A discussion of possibilities. American Journal of Distance Education, 29(3), 166–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2015.1058114 McGahan, S., Jackson, C. & Premer, K. (2015). Online course quality assurance: Development of a quality checklist. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 10, 126–140. https://doi.org/10.46504/10201510mc Morris, S. M. (2018). Critical instructional design. In S. M. Morris & J. Stommel (Eds.), An Urgency of Teachers. Hybrid Pedagogy Inc. Niemiec, C. P. & Ryan, R. M. (2009). Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom. Theory and Research in Education, 7(2), 133–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878509104318 Okun, T. (2021). White supremacy culture. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info Peralta District, P. C. C. (2020). Peralta online equity rubric. https://www.peralta.edu/distance-education/online-equity-rubric Quality Matters. (n.d.). About QM. https://www.qualitymatters.org/why-quality-matters/about-qm Ralston-Berg, P. (2014). Surveying student perspectives of quality: Value of QM rubric items. Internet Learning. https://doi.org/10.18278/il.3.1.9 Roehrs, C., Wang, L. & Kendrick, D. (2013). Preparing faculty to use the Quality Matters model for course improvement. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(3). Sam, J., Schmeisser, C. & Hare, J. (2021). Grease trail storytelling project: Creating indigenous digital pathways. KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.149 Schunk, D. H., Meece, J. L. & Pintrich, P. R. (2014). Motivation in education: Theory, research and applications. Pearson. Schwegler, A. F. & Altman, B. W. (2015). Analysis of peer review comments: QM recommendations and feedback intervention theory. American Journal of Distance Education, 29(3), 186–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2015.1058599 Swan, K., Matthews, D., Bogle, L., Boles, E. & Day, S. (2012). Linking online course design and implementation to learning outcomes: A design experiment. The Internet and Higher Education, 15(2), 81–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.07.002 Thomas, L. (2015). Developing inclusive learning to improve the engagement, belonging, retention, and success of students from diverse groups. In M. Shah, A. Bennett & E. Southgate (Eds.), Widening Higher Education Participation (pp. 135–159). https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-100213-1.00009-3 Tinto, V. (2005). Reflections on retention and persistence: Institutional actions on behalf of student persistence. Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation, and Development, 2, 89–97. Wang, C., Hsu, H.-C. K., Bonem, E. M., Moss, J. D., Yu, S., Nelson, D. B. & Levesque-Bristol, C. (2019). Need satisfaction and need dissatisfaction: A comparative study of online and face-to-face learning contexts. Computers in Human Behavior, 95, 114–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.01.034 Winkelmes, Bernacki, M., Butler, J., Zochowski, Golanics & Weavil, &. (2016). A teaching intervention that increases underserved college students’ success. Peer Review, 18, 31–36. Winkelmes, M.-A., Boye, A. & Tapp, S. (2019). Transparent design in higher education teaching and leadership: A guide to implementing the transparency framework institution-wide to improve learning and retention. Stylus Publishing. Yuan, M. & Recker, M. (2015). Not all rubrics are equal: A review of rubrics for evaluating the quality of open educational resources. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(5). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v16i5.2389

Hybrid Pedagogy © 2022

Click, Click, Connect

An update from the folks behind this book.

HYBRID PEDAGOGY Click, Click, Connect BY JESSICA O’REILLY – 30 AUG 2022 – VIEW ONLINE → Designing for Care This article is part of the edited collection, Designing for Care, from Hybrid Pedagogy. Together with its sister volume Toward a Critical Instructional Design, it strives to imagine a more humanizing and problem-posing approach to the design of education. Both books are available in paperback (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design) and Kindle editions (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design); additionally, chapters can be read online as open-access articles (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design). Proceeds from both books help continue the mission of the Hybrid Pedagogy 501(c)(3) non-profit. Preamble Life is story, and stories hold truths. We can learn so much if we’re able to listen. The following vignettes are based on events that occurred during the 2020-2021 academic year, a pandemic year that called me and so many others to “pivot” to teaching and learning completely online. I hope that these stories serve as a reminder of the many ways that our human connections move through our screens and through us. – Jess “I’m Proud of You” I sip my coffee, waiting for a student to join our virtual meeting. Ding! Ding! I click to admit. One of my cats jumps in my lap as she’s joining; his tail wraps around my neck. A fluffy orange scarf. “Morning!” I say, rearranging my little helper so he’s comfortable in my lap. “Hey Jess.” She looks tired. Her voice is thin, lacking energy. Her skin is pale, hair dishevelled. I scan the room behind her. Unmade bed. Dirty dishes on the dresser. Drawers open, a few clothes peaking out. I take a sip of coffee then ask, “What’s up?” “Who’s this?” she asks, referring to the cat. We talked about pets for a while. I meet her puppy. I go get my other cat and together we marvel at his obesity. We swap fur-baby stories. At one point, I put my hand close to my camera to show her the scar my pet hamster gave me decades ago. We joke about being “foster fails.” We have an easy rapport, but there’s a heaviness too. She’s laughing, but it’s forced, thin. Eventually, she says, “I wanted to talk about my paper.” But she doesn’t. Instead, she tells me about her life. About how she moved out at sixteen because her parents were both on destructive paths. She shares details. I nod and sip my coffee. She tells me that she’s the first in her family to go to college, that she’s with a good person who loves her. Whose family loves her. She says it’s the first time she’s been a part of a healthy family dynamic. The first time she’s witnessed encouraging parents. My heart sinks. I keep listening. And caffeinating. I tell my eyebrows not to make those furrow lines that my mum calls “my elevens.” I watch myself in the Zoom window. Stay neutral. Use validating phrases. Stop taking so many sips of coffee. Don’t be drawing comparisons with your own life. Listen. Listen. I ignore my inner voice and tell her about my mum. How, like her, my mum sought to break the cycle. How, at seventeen, she got kicked out of the house for getting pregnant with me. How she moved hundreds of kilometres away to finish out her pregnancy at Bethesda Centre for Unwed Mothers. “Justin Bieber’s mum went there too,” I add. She offers a fragile smile and a slight nod. I explain that my mum finished high school through correspondence courses and evening classes, carting me in my stroller and her acoustic guitar with her on the city bus. I share how eventually, my mum went on to complete two college diplomas and found meaningful work in the developmental sector, helping others. “I see my mum’s story in yours,” I said. “Do you?” She nods again, with a bit more vigour this time and shares more about her life, about her dreams and ambitions, her path. She pauses and says quietly, “The trouble is… drugs keep killing people I care about. My cousin died of an overdose last night. We were close. He’s my friend. Well, was…” she takes a deep breath. “I think I failed my math test.” I’m surprised she’s talked about her math test; I’m her English teacher. My mind runs a quick race. It’s midterm, so that was probably an important test. Drugs keep killing her loved ones? I think of the many crosses lined up in my city’s downtown core. A memorial to those lost to addiction. The crosses seem to multiply daily. I imagine her standing in front of one, alone. I offer my condolences. It sounds canned, trite. I choose honesty. “I’m not sure what to say, other than I’m so, so sorry.” She continues to share, telling me that an hour after she found out she’d lost her cousin to an opioid overdose, she attempted to write the midterm exam in her math course. She says she doesn’t want any special treatment. She wants to be like any other student, but she fears she didn’t do well on the test. “Now what should I do?” she asks. I say what I hope are the right things. Encourage her to self-advocate with the right people. Ask how I can help. We keep talking. I find myself sharing more of my story with her. Time passes. As we’re wrapping up, I pause, then awkwardly say, “I’m not sure how to say this… It might be kind of dorky, and I know we haven’t known each other that long… but… I just want to tell you that I’m really proud of you. For taking this path, for working through all this stuff. I can’t imagine how difficult it’s been, but you’re making a life for yourself, you’re making it happen. You’re grieving, but through your grief, you’re still trying to get it all done. That’s really amazing. Really… brave.” I wish I had better words. I want to acknowledge how profoundly inspiring her commitment to her future self is. She puts her hood up over her head, way up so that it’s almost covering her eyes and says, “Oh I’m not good with the feels…. But, I don’t think it’s dorky. I never heard ‘I’m proud of you’ growing up.” We sit together for a few more moments, simply being in each other’s company. We never do talk about her paper. “That’s Not Your Job” My employer is offering a virtual training session. It’s the first day of a two-day online course. The facilitator has just finished a mini-lecture on active listening strategies. Now he’s unceremoniously launched us into breakout rooms “to discuss.” I find it jarring to be blasted through virtual space and plunked into a random “room” with random people. I wait for others to join, smile and exhale when I see a friend is in my group. Then I feel a sinking sensation when I see a certain person pop into the space. Interruptor. Interruptor is a manager whom I strongly dislike. I am biased toward this person. I can FEEL my bias towards this person in the way my hands and jaw clench when his name appears on my screen. I’ve had negative interactions with him in the past. While I’m grateful that we aren’t grouped together in person, I also feel my interest in the training fading away. What if I just quit and blame a bad internet connection…I hover my mouse over the “leave meeting” button, but think better of it. I stick around despite my discomfort. As the group gets situated, I remember how earlier in the day, Interruptor held to his nickname, several times. He only interrupted females though. I kept track. I was mid-sentence when he unmuted, spoke over me, dismissed what I was saying, then moved the conversation along to something he deemed more important. The facilitator did not correct him. I remembered how the blood moved up into my face. My heart did an angry BOOM BOOM beat as I glared at his little Zoom square. I hit my mute button in frustration, then texted my friend who was also on the call. I texted angry stuff that shouldn’t be repeated. She joked and calmed me down. But I still felt embarrassed. Silenced. And now here he is again, in this Zoom room that feels incredibly small. I wonder if I could turn my camera off. The facilitator said not to unless it was an emergency. Does this count? I feel that to him, it would not count. So I keep the camera on, and I sit there. Silent. Awkward. Defensive. I try some of the positive self-talk the facilitator lectured about earlier in the day. “Interrupting happens on Zoom,” I tell myself. “It’s not always intentional. It’s not all about YOU.” I pick up my phone and text a friend who isn’t in the session. “Have you ever had an issue with ______?” My friend texts back almost immediately. “YES. I almost went to HR about him last summer…” She goes on to provide a colourful description of this particular person, and how he’s disrespected her in the past with his characteristic interrupting. She makes me smile, even though our gossip feels childish. Is childish. Anishinaabe Elders often advise us to avoid gossip. When we put negative thoughts out into the world, they go to that person. Negative thoughts can come back to us too. I know this, but the gossiping reassures me. It feels good. Though I’m having a hard time reframing my mindset, I tell myself I should at least put my phone down and pay attention. I do. Another male manager is sharing a story. Despite this person going on at length, Interruptor just smiles and nods along. He does not unmute. Eventually, Interruptor, our self-appointed breakout room facilitator, asks “Would any of the faculty in the room like to share their perspectives?” I wait. Nobody speaks. So, eventually, begrudgingly, I do. I take a deep breath and unmute. Picking at my cuticles off-screen, I start talking about the challenge of listening to so many students’ stories, stories of suffering, of grief and loss, of real hardships that I don’t feel equipped to assist them with. I explain how I find myself talking about these students during dinner time, thinking about them before I fall asleep at night. I’m surprised that I’m feeling a bit emotional, opening up in this way. The folks in the room are nodding. “WELL, that’s not your job to offer counselling sessions,” Interruptor interrupts. I see my own Zoom video projected back at me. My mouth is hanging open, mid-sentence. I let out a long, tired breath as he starts talking about on-campus resources and 1-800 numbers to deflect students to. Off-camera, one of my cuticles starts to bleed. “Excuse me,” I hear the words before I think them. Oh no. “Would you please let me finish talking?” I see Interruptor roll his Zoom eyes as he mutes himself. I have so much I want to say, but my words have slipped away. “It Finally Feels Safe” I’m meeting with a student over Zoom. She’s fallen behind in one of my online courses and wants to connect to get back on track. I’ve got the course and her grade report open on one screen, and Zoom open on another. I smile at her when she joins. “Aanii! What’s going on?” We talk about the latest lockdown and what a rollercoaster it’s all been. I notice she’s quick to laugh. She has a childlike giggle that sounds almost like birdsong, even though I’m pretty sure she’s my age or older. Her hair is dark with a strip of indigo blue running through it. There’s a traditional painting hanging behind her as she sits on her couch. I comment on how beautiful it is, and she tells me it’s actually a blanket. She takes it down and holds it up to the camera so I can get a better look. She folds and refolds the blanket as she tells me this is her third time attempting college. I hear noises in the background, little voices, and she says, “One sec.” She leaves her camera and mic on but disappears off-screen. I hear some chatter, some banging noises, and then she’s back in the camera frame again. “Sorry! Little scuffle over a toy happening here!” she says, laughing, then continues telling me her story. She shares that when she first left her home community things didn’t go well for her and she fell into a rough crowd. “I flunked out,” she says. “But I knew I could do better.” I nod. We talk about how life paths are rarely ever straight lines. She nods then tells me about her kids, three beautiful Ojibwe Anishinaabe children who are currently all at home doing virtual school. “They’re listening to me right now,” she says and laughs her sing-song giggle. “I bet they love hearing your compliments,” I say with a smile. I think about my friends who are both teachers and parents, about the struggles they’ve been sharing on Facebook. The impossibilities of working full-time while parenting full-time, all the while doing their best to cope with the existential crises of the pandemic. I quip, “It must be hard for you to be a full-time student, parent, AND I.T. support!” Her smile disappears. She pauses, then says, “Actually…. It’s been so great having them all home with me. Their father is abusive. We left last year. Honestly, I’ve been so scared that he’s going to steal them from school. It finally feels safe, having them all here with me…” she gestures off-screen, toward her kids who I imagine are laying on their tummies or sitting on tiny kid-sized chairs, maybe colouring or listening to their teachers through headphones. She says quietly, almost to herself, “Kinda funny eh, to finally feel safe in the middle of a pandemic?” Neither of us laugh. “Just Woke Shit” For the past several semesters, I’ve been designing and facilitating an asynchronous online course titled Truth and Reconciliation. In the course, students take a sustained, in-depth look at the residential school system in Canada. I introduce concepts such as settler colonialism, terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, intergenerational trauma. We listen to stories shared by Survivors and their families. We watch archival footage. We learn about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and critically examine the progress (lack of progress) on the 94 Calls to Action. We learn, reflect, research, share, celebrate the good work, criticize the lip service and assumptions. Teaching this course is very humbling. At this point, I’ve put so much of myself into it, and through several iterations, with the guidance of many helpers, including hundreds of learners who’ve passed through, I’ve made improvements and feel it’s in a good place, always though, with space to do better. The final assessment in the course is a free writing (or free talking, should students wish to audio-record) exercise that invites students to reflect on their experiences, to think about what they’ve learned, and what they hope to remember long into the future. These submissions are often incredibly inspiring and energizing for me. Through their sharing, students tell me that the course is working, and I’m grateful for the reassurance. They also leave me with a lot to think about in terms of future improvements, additions, clarifications. I was sitting in my little makeshift at-home office, reading and listening to these final reflections, sipping a tea, and feeling pretty good about myself as an educator. Then I came across a submission that popped off the screen and slapped me right across the face. The submission basically read: I hated this course. What’s the point of learning this stuff? Nothing can be changed. We can’t right these wrongs, and anyway, it isn’t our fault. All this course and stuff like it does is promote negativity. It’s US versus THEM and this woke shit is tired. It’s just creating more division from years gone by. People just love to point fingers. Then when it happens to them, they just do it right back. Blink. Swallow. Deep breath in. I wrote, “Meegwetch for sharing your perspectives” then slammed my laptop shut for the day. “You’re a Good Kwe” I teach an online course that centers around critical thinking. Last term, I was loaded with a blended delivery, meaning I got to spend an hour with students synchronously, via Zoom, and the remainder of the course activities took place asynchronously, through our learning management system and other online spaces. I wanted to problematize the Eurocentric assumptions underpinning “critical thinking skills,” and so early in the semester, we started talking and learning about how worldview and culture impact our ways of knowing, being, and doing in the world. I approached one of our Elders on campus, Nokomis, and told her about the course and my goals. I offered semaa and asked if she would join us for a virtual guest lecture. She agreed to share her teachings of Mino Bimaadiziwin, the ways of being and stories that help Anishinaabe people live a Good Life. I prepared my students for her visit several weeks before she joined us. It was important to me that the students in the course, who were primarily non-Indigenous, appreciate the Sacred nature of these teachings and principles. That they understood what it meant to be in ceremony with an Elder, even if that ceremony was taking place via Zoom. One of the students in the course required all Zoom classes to be recorded, as per her official Accommodation from our on-campus Accessibility office. I told Nokomis about this, and she was fine with being recorded for this purpose. Day of, Nokomis logged on, checked her mic, and immediately immersed us in her beautiful teachings. She smudged, prayed in Anishinaabemowin, sang a traditional song, and shared the principles of Mino Bimaadiziwin. She kindly invited student questions, which resulted in a wonderful exchange. She is so generous in sharing her wisdom. As the class wrapped, I felt warm and hopeful. “Chi-meegwetch, Tech-Enabled Nokomis!” I said as we were logging off. She laughed a big belly laugh, and that made me feel good. That night, I prepared some gifts for Nokomis. I brought them to the next Full Moon Ceremony and offered my gratitude. She gave me a big hug. A few weeks later, a faculty member instant messaged me through Zoom chat. “Hey Jess,” she said, “I heard Nokomis did a teaching for your class recently. Can I have the link to the recording?” I started to type a response but hesitated. The hairs on the back of my neck woke up. I moved my fingers away from the keys. I didn’t know how to answer. Instead, I telephoned Nokomis, who was just about to head out for her daily walk. I explained the request, how it made me uncertain, and that I was calling her to make sure it was okay before I shared the link. My voice sounded sheepish. I felt flustered. After a short pause, she said “No. You asked in a good way. You offered semaa. She didn’t, and I don’t wish for that recording to be shared in this way.” We talked for a little bit longer. At the end of the call she said, “It was right that you called me Jess. You’re a good kwe.” I sucked in a deep breath as I hung up the phone. Nokomis thinks I’m a good kwe… I’m still contemplating what that means to this day. “Wichita Do Ya” Full-time employees at my college can take any for-credit course for $20, plus the cost of course materials. I asked a friend and faculty colleague if she’d be comfortable with me joining her course. “Sure, but do you have time for that?” she asked. “I’ll make time,” I said. “Well, I just hope it’s worth your $20!” she joked. She and I often talk at length about Indigenous education, about the challenges that come with teaching courses that some students are resistant to, the micro and macro aggressions, the imposter syndrome and constant feelings of self-doubt. We swap stories and resources daily. We attend webinars together, virtually, keeping up a lively backchannel and sharing recordings with each other when one can’t make it. We’ve sat in ceremony together. “I heard your voice tonight,” she said after our first Full Moon Ceremony. We’ve crafted together, paddled, hiked, swam, snacked. One time, we watched a mother bear and her three cubs grazing in a field not far from us. It was beautiful and spiritual, especially for my friend who is mukwa dodem. As we learned about each other and got more comfortable, we shared stories about our families and our Algonquin heritage. There are intersections and overlaps between our stories, our friendship, our ancestors. At times, it feels like we were compelled by greater forces to find each other, to get to know each other, to learn together and lean on each other, just as our relatives did before us. Now, I’m a student in her online course. I trust her, so in my course assessments, I get personal. I try to make deep connections between what she is teaching us and what my family has lived through. It deepens our friendship. The example she sets makes me a better educator. On the very last day of the semester, my friend conducts a Closing Circle via Zoom. She’s lit a smudge. I do too. It feels weird for me. Usually, I turn all of my electronics off to smudge, but I can roll with it. I turn my camera off so that I can ground myself and find some balance. My friend explains how the end of the semester can feel like a rushing river, blowing us around in an out-of-control way. I think about this first pandemic year, the raw moments I’ve shared with students, my self-doubts and constant questioning. She explains how choppy waters eventually calm down. “Hold onto that knowledge,” she says. I think about how grateful I am for my safety and health, for my family and friends who love me, for the chickadees that fed from my hand all winter, for all my relations. I remind myself to be grateful for a good job that is fulfilling and intellectually stimulating. I exhale and feel my body relaxing. My friend picks up a ceremonial shaker and introduces the Water Song. She sings it for us. Her voice is strong and steady. I close my eyes and hear the harmony. Though I’m muted, I quietly sing along.

Hybrid Pedagogy © 2022

An Introduction to Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design

An update from the folks behind this book.

HYBRID PEDAGOGY An Introduction to Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design BY MARTHA BURTIS, JEROD QUINN – 25 AUG 2022 – VIEW ONLINE → This article introduces two collections released today by Hybrid Pedagogy: Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design. Together, they strive to imagine more humanizing and problem-posing approaches to the design of education. Both books are available in paperback (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design) and Kindle editions (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design); additionally, chapters can be read online as open-access articles (Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design). Proceeds from both books help continue the mission of the Hybrid Pedagogy 501(c)(3) non-profit. As we all witnessed our schools scrambling to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, the implications of instructional design had never felt so important—or so fraught. As our schools now scramble to “return to normal,” we wonder what we’ve learned? For many of us, the crisis brought into focus that  assumptions underpinning our instructional design, and our ID practices themselves, were failing our teachers, students, and institutions. Perhaps it was time for a new approach? In March of 2021, Hybrid Pedagogy put out a call for chapters for a Critical Instructional Design Reader. That call asked the questions: “What if technology had misled us, distracted us from what’s actually important for teaching online? What if technology has so far interpreted instruction for us—even from the days of correspondence courses—making the page, digital or otherwise, a surrogate for our pedagogies? How do we reclaim the relational, communal, intimate side of teaching when glass and pixels and apps stand between? When we undertake the work of defining and investigating critical instructional design, we must shift our focus from the screen to the student, from best practices to humanizing pedagogies.” Submissions from North America, Europe, Africa, and Australia came in with a wide scope for how and why a problem-posing approach of critical pedagogy can be applied to instructional design. We heard from instructional designers, educators, and students themselves. It quickly also became clear that while the COVID-19 global pandemic did not instigate these conversations, it certainly poured gasoline on the fire of implementing them. Care in online classes began to become a mainstream conversation among all kinds of educators as the pandemic created new tensions and exacerbated old ones on a literal global scale. As the editors were sifting through the submissions we noticed two related, but divergent streams emerging. One stream was focused on creating environments and experiences grounded in care and compassion. It includes conversations about the logistical hurdles of building intentional hospitality into online experiences, but also the rewards of learners being included in the experience. The other stream focused on applying the ideals of critical instructional design to the course design process. These chapters challenged the assumptions of linear, western approaches to higher education and pushed the boundaries of what online learning can look like. The editors made the decision to gather these chapters into two sibling collections: Designing for Care and Toward a Critical Instructional Design. Designing for Care When we talk about designing for care, we are talking about creating, crafting, and teaching our online courses in the intentional narrative of a shared humanity. It’s not feminine, masculine, or even gendered work. It’s the work of treating people like the fantastic, curious, unpredictable, capable, and multi-layered people they are. It’s refusing to see people as one dimensional, regardless of any system-assigned labels like student, teacher, instructional designer, disabled, at-risk, first-generation, or whatever. It’s not just being compassionate towards our learners. Being kind to our learners is great, but designing for care is the intentional framing of course design and teaching through a structure that demonstrates care towards all those involved. There is certainly a resistance to care in education. It’s easy to dismiss care as a factor in the classroom to the realm of small, liberal arts classes in small, liberal arts colleges. It’s also lazy thinking to do so. Perhaps the opposite of designing for care is designing for efficiency? Not caring is an amazingly efficient practice. There’s no lying awake at night thinking about learners, there’s no worries about the zoom screen that is not nor will ever be “camera on,” there’s no need to critique or, heaven forbid, change course design practices. Not caring is amazingly efficient. It’s also not an option for educators who take a “problem posing” approach to humanizing online learning. In the following chapters of this collection you will read how many people across many institutions have worked to design their online learning to be more humanizing to both the learners and the instructors. Some of these designs are theoretical, and some are grounded in practical application. Some worked splendidly, and some had aspects that fell painfully flat. You will hear from people who have been teaching and learning online for decades, as well as people whose first online learning experience came from being forced into a remote teaching context as COVID began raging globally. Toward a Critical Instructional Design The idea of critical instructional design, while it is still nascent and demands continued commitment from us as we strive to define it and enact it, is rooted in the ideas of critical pedagogy first laid out by Pablo Freire. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he famously compared traditional education to banking: “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing…The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence — but unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.” Freire’s critique of the banking model of education is a cornerstone of critical pedagogy. And through that metaphor, he not only illustrates for us what is wrong with the status quo, he also begins to draw a path for us in another direction, leading us toward a problem-posing pedagogy: “​​Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world.“ In the same way that Freire imagined a metaphor of capital (and its implied hoarding and distribution) as a metaphor for teaching, we would do well to understand the metaphors (and their implied practices) that underpin traditional instructional design. In fact, the roots of the field, in military and corporate training, point us in useful directions. Traditional ID often seems consumed with a militaristic and industrial ethos—and linear, mechanistic ways of describing learning (and, by extension, learners). It is demarcated by structures, rubrics, tools, and checklists. It fusses over design rules in which objectives are tidily mapped to activities that are neatly measured by assessments. In all this fussiness and tidiness, mechanics and measurements, it loses sight of the complex and messy humans that sit at its center—human teachers, students, and instructional designers. Freire describes the banking model of education as alienating and enslaving; similarly, traditional instructional design approaches separate learners from their humanity, expecting them to act as yet another (predictable and impersonal) cog in the industrial machine of learning. Just as Freire insisted that we center humans in pedagogy, critical instructional design demands we find a way to center humans in the design of education. We must learn to live without our fussy tools and find new ways of imaging and describing the work of instructional design. What can we imagine, design, create, build that will liberate our design practices—and the humans inside of them—the way Freire helped liberate our classrooms—and the teachers and students inhabiting them? We hope that this volume is just the first exchange in a new and sustained conversation about critical instructional design. Hybrid Pedagogy © 2022

A Foreword to Toward a Critical Instructional Design

An item from the folks involved with this hybrid teaching book.

HYBRID PEDAGOGY A Foreword to Toward a Critical Instructional Design BY ROBIN DEROSA – 24 AUG 2022 – VIEW ONLINE → Toward a Critical Instructional Design This article is part of a forthcoming, edited collection championing a problem-posing approach to instructional design. Toward a Critical Instructional Design will be available on August 25, 2022 in paperback and online in an open-access format. It will be accompanied by a sister volume, Designing for Care. Proceeds from both books will help continue the mission of the Hybrid Pedagogy 501(c)(3) non-profit. Indulge me while I tell a little story about a hypothetical faculty member. Let’s call her “Robin.” Robin accepted an adjunct teaching position at a rural public college in the Northeast United States as she was finishing her doctoral dissertation. As an early Americanist studying at a prestigious R1 university, Robin was extremely expert in several narrow areas related to 17th-century literature and history, which was disappointingly unhelpful to her as she waded into her first assigned courses: “Composition” and “Modern British Literature” (someone was on sabbatical, which still doesn’t explain why anyone thought she was qualified for that last one). In fact, even a year later when she was able to begin teaching “in her field” as a one-year full-time contracted faculty member, Robin realized that her main strategy for course design revolved around adapting 1) the syllabi of her grad school professors (many of them brilliant researchers with no pedagogical training and often very spotty abilities to interact pleasantly with other humans) and 2) the activities of her middle school teachers (particularly Miss McNeil, whose 8th-grade social studies unit on seagull regurgitation is fondly remembered by countless cohorts of Massachusetts public school graduates). When Robin was privileged and lucky enough to land a tenure-track position in English, she realized that she had almost no formal preparation for teaching the four courses per semester—most outside of her specific field—that she was assigned. While scholarship and service were now part of her professional expectations, most of her work hours were focused on teaching, a profession for which she was wholly untrained. I may as well stop pretending this is a hypothetical. I should also stop pretending it’s generalizable, since any higher ed anecdote that contains the phrase “land a tenure-track job” is already far too fantastical these days. But my story is likely a familiar one for many college-level instructors. With the exception of those who teach education, most of us secure our teaching positions primarily by demonstrating content expertise. Once we join a university faculty, we may have access to professional development workshops run by a teaching and learning center, and we may be lucky enough to have instructional designers to partner with when we need help rethinking an assignment, tweaking a syllabus, or setting up effective discussions in our learning management system. Tenure-track professors at R1 institutions may actually be disincentivized from focusing on teaching, as it can stall their progress towards tenure and promotion by taking their time away from research. Meanwhile, contingent faculty may be balancing high course loads and/or have no access to funding or compensation for time spent in professional development, and community college faculty may find their institutions lack teaching centers or instructional support staff. Even as we realize through our years of teaching that we, as faculty, are both in need of and capable of improving our teaching, higher ed as a whole simply does not prioritize the development of teaching faculty. For many years, I didn’t really understand how problematic this was for my own work. After all, I was committed to a “student-centered” classroom, genuinely invested in my students and their learning processes, and open to experimenting with new technologies and tricks. Working sporadically with instructional designers and academic technologists was eye-opening, as it dawned on me that people had actual training in the kinds of architectures that underpin a course, architectures that I was certainly using, but which were mostly invisible to me as I remained focused on my all-important content. More eye-opening, though, was watching the edges of higher education begin to fray, and indeed my own public university begin to unravel as the terrain of higher ed shifted beneath our feet. This ongoing fraying is less a random upheaval than it is a series of revelations about deep-seated problems in how our institutions are structured coming to violent fruition. Some areas of the United States where I live and teach, for example, are wrestling with demographic trends that are eroding college enrollments; combine that with the defunding of public higher education, a massive student loan debt crisis, and a national rhetoric that (given the costs that must be borne by individual families) questions the value of college, and you have a cocktail that has caused many institutions to become austerity-drunk—cutting services, supports, and staffing to the bone. Many states, including my own, have passed “divisive concept” laws preventing teachers at many levels from engaging honestly with concepts such as systemic racism, LGBTQ+ history, and genocide. And COVID has pushed every institution to its limits with bills to pay for testing and PPE; challenges keeping students, staff, and faculty safe in campus settings; and pivoting to online modalities without advance preparation. On the one hand, we have many students struggling: impoverished and unable to afford food if they purchase the required books for their classes; immunocompromised and afraid to return to class now that mask mandates are dropping and online access is being revoked as an option; suffering deeply from prejudice and discrimination that makes it far less likely for BIPOC students at predominantly white institutions to graduate; suffering from mental illness as counseling centers are overrun; navigating neurodivergence as accessibility services are underresourced; and facing pressure from families to enroll in majors that they don’t enjoy based on often-flawed speculation about which fields will deliver a much-needed return on investment. On the other hand, we have institutions focused not on these alarming struggles, but on their own. We see the most elite institutions battling each other to prove just how selective they are; in other words, they gain prestige as fewer and fewer students who want to attend are able to do so. At the same time, our open access institutions, our regional public institutions, our community colleges, our minority-serving institutions and HBCUs—the places that actually educate the vast majority of students—struggle, literally, to keep the lights on. And instead of leaning into the equity challenges that have come to a boiling point, they lean into fiscally-focused “solutions” that do nothing to relieve the heat. If you don’t teach at an elite institution (and most of us don’t!), I bet you’ve felt the burn of these solutions. Has your institution rebranded or spent money on marketing while claiming not to have funding to support expanded instruction or academic services? rallied around majors that are considered “marketable” while cutting majors that are not directly tied to workforce demand? reduced tenure-track faculty and expanded use of adjuncts or “professors of practice?” outsourced to Online Program Management companies (OPMs) to quickly offer high-demand online majors or grad programs? consolidated departments or even whole schools? increased discount rates to undercut competitor institutions and attract enrollments? And if your institution has done any of these things, has that successfully relieved the budgetary pressures on your institution? I am guessing no. And what has been the effect of these things on your struggling students? I can guess that as well. So while I would argue that it is important that higher ed faculty be offered support and professional development as they embark on teaching careers for which they are generally under-prepared, it’s important to see this support and professional development as part of a critical intervention that speaks to the confluence of storms that are buffeting us. Which brings me to my gratitude for this collection. “Critical Instructional Design,” as it will take shape in this volume, advocates for a reframing of how we think about the supports that faculty need to improve their course designs. Instead of an outsourcing model, where support staff (or external companies!) provide the design expertise, CID seeks to connect designers, technologists, learning center staff, librarians, and other key pedagogical partners with faculty to help faculty learn what they need in order to make intentional decisions about their course architectures. And unlike de-contextualized and standardized checklists or rubrics, CID seeks to situate course design in time and space, encouraging faculty to think of their specific students and their needs, their specific institutions and their missions, and the specific political and social contexts that surround their courses each time they teach them. What you will find in this volume will be less a roadmap to best practices in instructional design, and more an invitation into a learning community that trusts faculty to engage thoughtfully with the complexities of course design. We are all keenly aware that the world is currently facing severe crises, and that many of these are changing the shape of our colleges and universities—and perhaps even the shape of learning itself. It’s time for an instructional design that brings the full power of faculty to bear on the challenges that we face. As we design our courses, we are participating in a larger project to design the future of higher education, and as we develop our skills in teaching, we must also develop our engagement with the larger questions of what our students will need to thrive in a world that is currently presenting so many challenges to their livelihood, health, and happiness. I hope you will engage with this book not just as a catalyst for creative inspiration about how to approach course design, but also as a call to action for how our grassroots work teaching and learning with our students can open hopeful and humane futures for both higher education and for our world.

Hybrid Pedagogy © 2022

A Foreword to Designing for Care

An item from the folks involved with this hybrid teaching book.

HYBRID PEDAGOGY A Foreword to Designing for Care BY CATHERINE DENIAL – 23 AUG 2022 – VIEW ONLINE → Designing for Care This article is part of a forthcoming, edited collection striving to imagine more humanizing pedagogies that embrace people in our learning environments as fantastic, curious, unpredictable, capable, and complex. Designing for Care will be available on August 25, 2022 in paperback and online in an open-access format. It will be accompanied by a sister volume, Toward a Critical Instructional Design. Proceeds from both books will help continue the mission of the Hybrid Pedagogy 501(c)(3) non-profit. I write this at my dining-room table, the locus of my office for most of the past two years. It’s year three of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and our lives are divided into six-foot blocks of attention, measured by social distance (and its lack). We have traded cloth masks for N95s (or perhaps no mask at all); we have been vaccinated and boosted (or we have not). We juggle the personal calculus of risk, every decision to travel, to eat out, or to stay home colored by the hope of good health in the face of adversity. Collectively we have not agreed to protect the most vulnerable among us, nor have our governments stepped into that gap. We struggle with financial uncertainty, the vagaries of technology, the limits of broadband, and the scope of what we can claim to know. We are tired and uncertain, we are often overworked and feel underappreciated, and many of us are angry. Our students are too. We have lost a great deal to the pandemic, including the lives of people we love and, in many cases, our own good health. Many of us lost our footing in teaching when we went online for the first time, or as seasoned online instructors, when we worked with students who had not freely chosen that modality as the one in which they preferred to learn. We craved connection and struggled to know how to create it; we wrestled with new software and hardware to reach students without tipping ourselves or them into overwhelm. All of this has happened at speed. We have largely not had the breathing room to process these realities, absorbed as we have been in the work of adapting to changing circumstances, institutional policies, and personal needs. Too often we have been told that things are returning to “normal,” but in truth there is no return to how things were in 2019 (even if that were a desirable destination). But that is not the end of the story. By prioritizing care and community in our teaching and instructional design, we give ourselves and our students the opportunity to remake this uncertain world. Our students are thirsty for this, and we teachers no less. All education is relational; all of us deserve support, concern, and kindness, and the chance to work—as these essays demonstrate—in collaboration with each other so that learning can take place. We must ditch what Paulo Freire called the banking model of education. Instead of acting as sages-on-the-stage, depositing wisdom into the passive minds of students, we must (as the authors of these essays do) envision (and actualize) education as a multi-faceted collaboration between students, teachers, and designers. No learning relationship in this book is unidirectional—feedback flows from person to person as everyone involved in the enterprise of education refines their understanding of the work at hand. These essays offer hope. Hope, as Mariame Kaba famously puts it, is a discipline. It is not simply a feeling but a practice: we must do hope, not just wait for it to materialize. Even in the face of the significant challenges of these pandemic years, we can make hope happen through our actions, and this volume is chock full of suggestions for exactly how. Here you’ll find critical reflections on things that have worked in online and hybrid classrooms, and things that have not. You’ll find suggestions for making concrete changes—creating a genuine welcome for students in your classroom space; rethinking the design arc of a course; experimenting with digital tools; and transforming assessment. You’ll find critiques of our educational systems, and powerful invitations to imagine better. These essays offer each of us valuable companionship in the work of mentoring, design work, teaching, and learning. Each of these essays offers a vision of education rooted in the building of communities.  Sometimes these are communities of two, as an instructor and student sit down at either end of a Zoom connection and share their vulnerabilities. Sometimes these are communities of four, as students work, peer-to-peer, to support one another even as they work on individual projects. Sometimes these communities encompass teachers and students in an entire class, thinking seriously (and joyfully!) about what it means to disrupt the power dynamics of higher ed. In every essay in the following pages you’ll find evidence of just how vital community is, and what a powerful difference it makes to those involved. My own experience as an instructor bears out the wisdom of these essays. It was the online communities of which I am a part, especially on Twitter, that made it possible for me to teach in a pandemic and more, to discover new ways to flourish. In March and April of 2020, I learned from online-education experts about (what seemed at the time to be the mysteries of) asynchronous learning, re-imagining the use of my college’s learning management system, and using Zoom. I threw questions out into the Twitter-verse, and people (some of whom I already knew, many of whom I didn’t) provided answers. As the pandemic rolled on, I found understanding online, and solidarity in my struggles, as well as a community of people ready to cheer for the things that went right. I experimented with new course designs, formative assessments, and ungrading at large, and I asked my students what they wanted from their classes, and I implemented change. Along the way I reported back to my communities how things were going, began to offer answers to questions myself, and saw the connective tissue of human relationship strengthened by bits and bytes. If you’re looking for inspiration, you will find it here. If you’re seeking analysis and data, these essays offer both. If you want new ideas for classroom activities, projects, and assessments, these authors have many to share. But most of all I hope you find in these pages a wealth of connections to the community of which you are a part as an educator and/or learner, and the opportunity to be seen, to be encouraged, and to be understood.

Hybrid Pedagogy © 2022