TOPcast Episode 37: 6 Deadly Sins of Online Teaching

KELVIN		This episode of TOPcast is brought to you by UCF Online. 20+ years of award-winning online excellence. 75+ online programs. One of the largest and most innovative universities in the U.S. ucf.edu/online	
			
		(musical transition)	
			
TOM		From the University of Central Florida’s Center for Distributed Learning, I am Tom Cavanagh.	
			
KELVIN		And I am Kelvin Thompson.	
			
TOM		And you’re listening to TOPcast: the Teaching Online Podcast. Back at it again, Kelvin.	
			
KELVIN		Back at it again. It’s true.	
			
TOM		Here in our studio: our palatial recording studio.	
			
KELVIN		With the retractable roof and the piped-in sunlight.	
			
TOM		Yes. That’s right.	
			
KELVIN		It’s nice.	
			
TOM		It is. It’s wonderful.	
			
KELVIN		(snickering)	
			
TOM		We’ve got an aquarium full of live sharks below us.	
			
KELVIN		(laughter) Wouldn’t that be something?	
			
TOM		Yeah.	
			
KELVIN		Okay! If you don’t do a good episode, in you go! (laughter)	
			
TOM		(laughter) There are places in Orlando where we actually could do that.	
			
KELVIN		Oh, I thought there were other higher ed. institutions where that was the thing.	
			
TOM		Maybe. There’s a theme park or two that have giant aquaria.	
			
KELVIN		That’s true. Aquaria? I guess that’s a thing. Sure.	
			
TOM		I guess.	
			
KELVIN		I guess it’s plural.	
			
TOM		I’m saying it is.	
			
KELVIN		It’s Latin.	
			
TOM		Aquariums. Aquaria.	
			
KELVIN		That’s like the snobby people who talk about discussion forums.	
			
TOM		And fora?	
			
KELVIN		Yes!	
			
TOM		Yes, I’ve heard those discussions.	
			
KELVIN		I’ve been that person.	
			
TOM		Yeah. I am a data/datum guy.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah, sure.	
			
TOM		I try to use data correctly as a plural.	
			
KELVIN		That’s right!	
			
TOM		So, while I’m blathering on about fish, I’m hearing the gentle gurgles of a Thermos.	
			
KELVIN		Gentle gurgles? That’s just my stomach. (laughter)	
			
TOM		(laughter) That might be the shark down there.	
			
KELVIN		Could be. That’s right. Yes, sir.	
			
TOM		So, what is being poured into my mug here?	
			
KELVIN		Well, Tom, we’re setting the stage with this first episode of our fourth season, thank you very much.	
			
TOM		Yay!	
			
KELVIN		That’s right.	
			
TOM		Fourth season.	
			
KELVIN		That’s right. Happy anniversary.	
			
TOM		Happy anniversary.	
			
KELVIN		We’re setting the stage for this first episode of our fourth season for adventure.	
			
TOM		Adventure?	
			
KELVIN		Daring!	
			
TOM		Okay.	
			
KELVIN		Mayhem! Zest! (whispering) And danger!	
			
TOM		Wow.	
			
KELVIN		You know what you’re drinking?	
			
TOM		No, but now I’m a little bit scared.	
			
KELVIN		You’re scared? (laughter)	
			
TOM		Yeah.	
			
KELVIN		Take a sip and see what you think. I hope I did a good job brewing it.	
			
TOM		Okay. Yeah.	
			
KELVIN		That’s Death Wish Coffee.	
			
TOM		Death Wish Coffee?!	
			
KELVIN		That’s Death Wish Coffee.	
			
TOM		Wow. Like, Charles Bronson.	
			
KELVIN		Exactly! Which am I wrong? I think now there’s a remake.	
			
TOM		There is. I think it’s Bruce Willis.	
			
KELVIN		I’m like, I don’t know how to feel about that.	
			
TOM		Yeah.	
			
KELVIN		That’s kind of weird.	
			
TOM		Death Wish Coffee.	
			
KELVIN		Death Wish Coffee.	
			
TOM		So we’re drinking vigilante coffee.	
			
KELVIN		I know! Don’t you feel like (growl)? It’s good stuff here.	
			
TOM		Nothing says tough vigilante like Tom and Kelvin.	
			
KELVIN		(laughter) That’s so true.	
			
TOM		Alright, so I think I kind of get the connection.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah, so, why don’t you take us on? It wasn’t just setting the stage for the next season, although it maybe does that. It actually has relevance to today’s topic.	
			
TOM		Maybe. Really, if it doesn’t, does it matter anyway?	
			
KELVIN		Oh, it does, Tom. It always matters.	
			
TOM		It always matters. Okay. So, I would say that if you are a vigilante, you are a wrathful person.	
			
KELVIN		Okay.	
			
TOM		You want vengeance.	
			
KELVIN		Uh huh.	
			
TOM		And those are attributes that are not considered the most wholesome.	
			
KELVIN		Okay.	
			
TOM		And that you would be suffering may I even say from sinful behavior?	
			
KELVIN		(gasp)	
			
TOM		You would be wrathful.	
			
KELVIN		I feel like I need a shower now.	
			
TOM		(laughter) That would be one of the seven deadly or capital sins.	
			
KELVIN		Ah. Seven deadly sins. Yes, that’s right. Yeah, that’s kind of where I was going. We’re going to talk today about what we might call the six deadly sins of online teaching. Getting back to our online teaching roots in this first episode of our new season. So, six deadly sins.	
			
TOM		Okay!	
			
KELVIN		Death Wish, deadly sins.	
			
TOM		Deadly sins of online teaching.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah.	
			
TOM		Wow. Abandon all hope, ye who enter the TOPcast podcast.	
			
KELVIN		You know why these are the deadly sins of online teaching?	
			
TOM		Why?	
			
KELVIN		They’ll kill your courses if you do ‘em.	
			
TOM		Ooh! That’s good!	
			
KELVIN		That’s it.	
			
TOM		Let’s hope that we can save some people—	
			
KELVIN		—from that?	
			
TOM		Yeah. The sixth level of Dante’s Hell.	
			
KELVIN		(laughter) That’s right. Whatever. Yeah, sure, and I don’t know. These are just six. These are some that we’ve talked about, and you know, you guys might have other ones and if you do, let us know. It’s all good. So, how do you want to proceed? Do you want me to tell you the first one?	
			
TOM		Well, maybe before we jump in, I think it’s important to know that—at least in Christian thought, and I imagine it’s the same elsewhere—the seven deadly sins are kind of not in isolation.	
			
KELVIN		Well, that’s true.	
			
TOM		There’s a countervailing virtue that is something that you can aspire towards to overcome that particular deadly sin.	
			
KELVIN		Well, that sounds a whole lot better than this other stuff. Maybe I should have gotten like Angel Coffee and we could have drank that instead of the Death Wish Coffee.	
			
TOM		Death Wish Coffee. No.	
			
KELVIN		But I feel a lot tougher now.	
			
TOM		You know, if it bleeds it leads, right? So, let’s go with Death Wish Coffee.	
			
KELVIN		(laughter) Okay.	
			
TOM		But I think that keeping in mind the ameliorating virtue as we go through the six deadly sins of online teaching will be helpful because this is a hopeful podcast.	
			
KELVIN		And helpful! But a little bit dangerous.	
			
TOM		Helpful and hopeful.	
			
KELVIN		Tell your friends. This is a dangerous podcast.	
			
TOM		That’s right.	
			
KELVIN		They might not be able to handle it. Tell them that.	
			
TOM		I’ll tell them! I will!	
			
KELVIN		(laughter)	
			
TOM		Just wait ‘til you see my Tweets. Alright, so, you want to start?	
			
KELVIN		Sure.	
			
TOM		Okay.	
			
KELVIN		So, I think this arguably is the foundational deadly sin of online teaching. You ready?	
			
TOM		Bum bum bum!	
			
KELVIN		Being absent.	
			
TOM		Being absent. Oh my gosh, that is the number one complaint that we hear from students.	
			
KELVIN		Being absent, and to your point, the countervailing virtue to that vice is what one might call instructor presence, right? So absence versus presence. We’ve heard all of these terms. Phoning it in, you know. Robo-course, right? That’s a thing. So, what are some tactic ways that come to your mind that students can feel the absence of an instructor?	
			
TOM		Feel the absence? It’s a risk in some self-paced courses. Different kinds of self-paced tutorials, some competency-based or mastery-based.	
			
KELVIN		It’s a risk.	
			
TOM		Yeah. Elements of adaptive if you’re not careful with how you deploy it. I think for all of those, you need to just keep this in mind.	
			
KELVIN		At the same time, though, even in—dare I say—traditional online courses at this point, if one is not sensitive to how one develops content materials and how one posts and interacts with students, you can do that in a way that really feels detached, right? So, the presence. Our colleague—now retired—Dr. Bill Phillips talked about instructor persona and interjecting that into the materials and into your discussion postings and announcements and individual student messages and so forth. Doing that on a regular basis. That’s a thing. That’s a positive cultivation thing.	
			
TOM		Okay. So, that’s deadly sin number one.	
			
KELVIN		Deadly sin number one.	
			
TOM		And the virtue associated with it.	
			
KELVIN		Absence versus presence, right?	
			
TOM		So, number two!	
			
KELVIN		Number two—	
			
TOM		Dun dun dun.	
			
KELVIN		Dun dun dun—I think follows rather well from the first one so it’s just a degree removed: aloofness. So, there’s absence, but then there’s aloofness. Aloofness versus engagement, we might say.	
			
TOM		Okay, I can see that as being qualitatively different from presence and absence.	
			
KELVIN		That’s right, because it’s not just that you’re not there, but there’s a tone. I’m told sometimes I have tone. (laughter)	
			
TOM		(laughter) Okay.	
			
KELVIN		Like, don’t have tone.	
			
TOM		Nonverbal communication cues.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah, so I think we really see this as interactions with the whole class and with individual students whether that’s synchronous communication or asynchronous communication. Discussion boards or voice thread, individual messages or what have you, podcasts, whatever your shtick is, you can cultivate a positive tone or more of an aloof, detached tone. Can I tell you this story? This is horrible. I’d get fired for this today probably, I think, but back in the day when we were using stone knives and bear skins to teach online, you know, I was working here but I was in grad school also here and I accidentally logged in with the full god’s eye instructor view.	
			
TOM		Yeah. Still happens to people today. They report them to me. (laughter)	
			
KELVIN		That’s right. I would have owned it if there was anybody to tell or if there was a protocol for doing it. I felt really bad, because here’s what I saw. I logged in—and we were using an older learning management system at the time—and I went into the discussion board, and I suddenly realized that I wasn’t logged in as me because I saw the million unread discussion postings from the instructor’s view, and I suddenly had a whole different perspective of that instructor, and I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to know this! I don’t want to know that you haven’t read a single that anybody’s written all semester!” So, that’s horrible.	
			
TOM		Yeah, well, judge not.	
			
KELVIN		I know!	
			
TOM		Lest ye be judged, because there are different ways of managing a course, and sometimes the discussion boards are set up to just be a discussion between students, not to be a mediated thing by faculty. But I get your point.	
			
KELVIN		Yes, that’s right, and that is a good point, right? That we should be aware of our unintentional aloofness and try to cultivate a perception that you never perfectly control how you’re perceived by somebody else, but there are strategies for cultivating student engagement by faculty. Shout out here to the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (topr.online.ucf.edu). You could find all kinds of stuff there. If you’re afraid of aloofness, you can pursue the virtue of engagement.	
			
TOM		Pursue the virtue. Alright! That’s two down.	
			
KELVIN		Mhmm. Here’s the halfway point.	
			
TOM		Halfway point. Deadly sin number three.	
			
KELVIN		This one might be controversial.	
			
TOM		Dun dun dun. Yeah, I can see that.	
			
KELVIN		Being teaching-focused.	
			
TOM		As opposed to?	
			
KELVIN		Being learning-focused.	
			
TOM		Learning-focused. That’s right.	
			
KELVIN		It’s not really about you. It’s not really about me. 	
			
TOM		There are some faculty that might take exception to the way we’ve characterized them	
			
KELVIN		(whispering) I think that’s right.	
			
TOM		But I take your point. I don’t disagree. I think that…I was teaching at a community college a number of years ago and their big thing was being a learning-focused institution, and there was all this training and I went through classes on flipping the script a little bit from being a teaching-focused institution to being a learning-focused institution. It was all about the students learning, and I think if you come at it that way, it makes you a better teacher.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah.	
			
TOM		It’s two sides of a coin.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah, I think that’s right, but conversely, you can make a fetish out of focusing on teaching and it doesn’t necessarily get you to the learning.	
			
TOM		Yeah.	
			
KELVIN		You hope it does.	
			
TOM		Yeah. Sage on a stage or whatever kind of tropes we can trot out.	
			
KELVIN		That’s right. All the lecture stuff. Barr and Tagg’s seminal 1995 article that kind of does this nice dichotomy between…I forget how they frame it. It’s either sage on the stage or lecturer/non-lecturer, or it might be teaching and learning. I don’t know, but it’s a good read if you haven’t read it in a while.	
			
TOM		Mhmm.	
			
KELVIN		Number four?	
			
TOM		Number four! Dun dun dun.	
			
KELVIN		And these get a little bit more nuanced as we go down or up or whichever way we’re going. Rote learning centered. That’s R-O-T-E. Rote learning oriented.	
			
TOM		That’s the sin.	
			
KELVIN		Yup. Versus meaningful learning oriented.	
			
TOM		Okay.	
			
KELVIN		Right? We talked before about lower-ordered thinking skills and higher-ordered thinking skills so maybe another alternative title is HOTS versus NOTS.	
			
TOM		It’s a good thing I was drinking during that.	
			
KELVIN		(laughter) I was waiting for a spit take.	
			
TOM		Yeah. (laughter) HOTS versus NOTS. Higher-ordered thinking skills.	
			
KELVIN		It’s an egregious pun. Yeah, but recall kind of stuff, that lower level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and I don’t think anybody sets out for that, but we sometimes stumble into it. We don’t think about it, right? And I think a lot of it is just if we just sort of accept the functionality of the learning management system without really critically thinking about how to design for higher-ordered thinking and so forth, we can stumble into a bunch of multiple choice tests that are just recall-oriented, for instance.	
			
TOM		Yeah, I think that’s true, and as you know, you can write a multiple choice test that gets to synthesis.	
			
KELVIN		Of course! It’s just hard!	
			
TOM		It is hard! It takes a lot of work, but it can be done. And this also puts me in mind of an initiative that our Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning was working on. I want to say it was sometime last year. This notion of transparent teaching, about being really honest with students about why they’re learning the thing that they’re learning and how it’s applicable in different contexts whether it’s a professional environment or work or job or whatever, but “here’s why I’m teaching you this thing,” so that they don’t just think it’s some pointless make work that the teacher’s putting me through this gauntlet of nonsense.	
			
KELVIN		I think that’s an excellent point because otherwise you’re in this box-checking thing. The faculty are box-checking and the students are box-checking. You know, it is kind of mindless. Box-checking.	
			
TOM		Yeah.	
			
KELVIN		Number five?	
			
TOM		Number five!	
			
KELVIN		Another controversial one, maybe, and you know, I don’t know.	
			
TOM		Dun dun dun.	
			
KELVIN		Just being a grader versus maybe what we might call adopting kind of a reviewer mindset. Speaking of box-checking, you’re just kind of going through and going B, C, A, F, 0. You know? As opposed to, “I see what you were going for there but you didn’t quite land.”	
			
TOM		I wonder if maybe even another term besides reviewer—and I know this term is used elsewhere so it’s probably not the right term because it has different context but almost like a coach.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah! I like that! I see what you’re doing there.	
			
TOM		Yeah, because I’m thinking I’ve been guilty of this. So, I teach writing, and when I’m teaching online, I use Track Changes a lot, and it’s easy for me to go into a student’s paper and make the change with Track Changes, and the intention I have is to say, “Look what I’ve done so that you can learn and understand what I’m looking for or what I think the professional workplace is looking for so that you can do it differently next time.” But I worry it’s maybe not as big a concern here because I’ve taught grad courses at UCF pretty exclusively and they kind of get it, but even so, I worry that they just go, “Okay” and just don’t really critically think about that comment, and if maybe I would put in a little more effort, it would be, “This area is not quite working. Why do you think that?” Like, force them to work a little harder at it so that they come up with the answer as opposed to me just saying, “Change this to this.”	
			
KELVIN		Yeah! I like how you’re framing that, right? And I do think it has a lot to do with the nature of the feedback.	
			
TOM		Mhmm.	
			
KELVIN		Like, I do think in terms of robust and appropriate, but I like where you’re going. It’s the raising the issue not solving the problem, necessarily.	
			
TOM		Yes, and in fact our writing center, if you go in and want help with your English Composition paper, they’re not going to edit it for you. They’re not going to write on it. What they’re going to do is point out themes and give you tips and send you back to do your own work on it.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah.	
			
TOM		And I think that’s the right approach. It’s harder, and it takes more work on the faculty member or the writing tutor’s part, but I think it has much greater long-term benefits for the students.	
			
KELVIN		And it’s not just writing as a subject area, but this dynamic honestly probably could be somewhat influenced by subject area.	
			
TOM		Sure.	
			
KELVIN		In some subject areas it may manifest in certain ways, but I like to think there’s a broadly applicable principle here that if you’re coming from a place of “What’s wrong with this?” or “Fix this” versus “Hey Tom. How could this be better?”	
			
TOM		Yeah. Well maybe in like a quantitative context, if you think about math, it’s why the faculty and teachers in the K-12 environment want you to show your work.	
			
KELVIN		Yes!	
			
TOM		So, they can find out where you messed up and point you back there, and maybe the analog—I don’t teach math—but the analog would be instead of changing the numbers on step three, you’d be like, “Ok. You got it wrong right here in step three. What do you think you did wrong?”	
			
KELVIN		Yeah. That’s good. But like so many things with teaching and learning, scale can be an issue with this kind of thing that we’re talking about.	
			
TOM		Yeah, because it’s work.	
			
KELVIN		It’s a lot more efficient just to A, 0, 1, 2, 3.	
			
TOM		Let the LMS grade it automatically.	
			
KELVIN		Something. That’s right.	
			
TOM		Alright, so, we’ve come to our very last deadly sin.	
			
KELVIN		There’s probably more. (laughter)	
			
TOM		(laughter) Just between you and me, there’s probably another couple volumes.	
			
KELVIN		I could tell you lots of stuff I’ve done wrong that have made horrible experiences for students.	
			
TOM		Maybe we’ll do a part two with even more sins.	
			
KELVIN		Even more sins!	
			
TOM		It’ll be Tom and Kelvin’s confessional.	
			
KELVIN		(laughter) Well, it is a little sweatbox-y in here. Is it just me or is it hot in here? Yeah, I don’t know exactly what to call this one, but I am thinking of it as individualist or isolationist versus interventionist. I know it sounds kind of foreign policy-related, but individualist versus interventionist, and I think really we could frame this as being related to student success at the course level. Do individual students sink or swim on their own or is it the role of the instructor to throw the student a life preserver, to step in and offer help?	
			
TOM		Yeah.	
			
KELVIN		And I think it varies. I would assert that you’re not helping your students—and maybe you are killing your course—if you were just adopting, “Hey! You’re on your own in here! I’m not helping you! You haven’t logged in in three weeks, but I’m not going to say anything to you.”	
			
TOM		I think that maybe this one is also somewhat related to number three, which is learning-focused versus teaching-focused.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah, that’s probably true.	
			
TOM		Because it’s about the ultimate success of the student and what can you do to be an agent for that?	
			
KELVIN		And this, too, I imagine is controversial. I have plenty of folks I know—just like I’m sure you do, too—faculty, colleagues who I can imagine taking issue with this framing because they want to enact a level of rigor and a level of students stepping up and not being like helicopter faculty or bailing students out and so forth, but there is a balance there in my mind.	
			
TOM		Yeah, I agree.	
			
KELVIN		And scale is an issue, like so many things.	
			
TOM		You could probably say that about every single one of these.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah, scale’s always an issue. But those are the six.	
			
TOM		Six deadly sins!	
			
KELVIN		They’ll kill your courses.	
			
TOM		So, what about you, dear listener? One, what are you guilty of?	
			
KELVIN		Oh!	
			
TOM		But two, maybe you’ve got some others to suggest, and we’ve got a really cool TOPcast community that you can share them with and maybe even more so share your strategies for counterbalancing them. To counteracting them.	
			
KELVIN		How could they do that?	
			
TOM		They would go to our website at topcast.ucf— No, I always get it wrong! topcast.online.ucf.edu	
			
KELVIN		topcast.online.ucf.edu	
			
TOM		Oh my gosh.	
			
KELVIN		That is correct.	
			
TOM		And you will know that these are unedited episodes because of my fumbling.	
			
KELVIN		(laughter) It’s all good.	
			
TOM		What you hear is what you get, folks.	
			
KELVIN		That’s it.	
			
TOM		Yeah, so go to the community and share your ideas about what would be a sin and what would not be a sin and who knows? Maybe we’ll structure this into some sort of a conference proposal.	
			
KELVIN		That’d be kind of crowd-sourced. That’d be kind of cool! A panel.	
			
TOM		It would be cool.	
			
KELVIN		Hey! If you want to participate, you just go right in there and drop a comment. Or if you want to be real creative, you can voice record a comment about this and email it to us at topcast@ucf.edu.	
			
TOM		We’d love that! And we take coffee donations which guarantees a shout out.	
			
KELVIN		(laughter) That’s so true!	
			
TOM		So, in addition to going to the community, you can always just reach out to us through our email at topcast@ucf.edu, and just a reminder, this is the beginning of season four of TOPcast, so invite a friend to listen.	
			
KELVIN		It’s dangerous!	
			
TOM		It’s dangerous! (laughter)	
			
KELVIN		(laughter) They might not be able to handle it.	
			
TOM		That’s right, but you know, maybe you can hold their hand through the first episode.	
			
KELVIN		Yeah, we’ve got some plans for season four. We’ve got some stuff we’ve talked about. Some are kind of dangerous, sharp edges, but if you’ve got thoughts that you’d love to hear us talk about, then shoot us a note. Let us know.	
			
TOM		To make an Orlando-based reference, where we are, keep your hands and feet inside TOPcast at all times because the ride’s about to get bumpy!	
			
KELVIN		(laughter)	
			
TOM		Fasten your seatbelts!	
			
KELVIN		Buckle up!	
			
TOM		Alright, I think we’ve stretched that one out as far as it’s going to go. So maybe you want me to take a shot at the bottom line here?	
			
KELVIN		Sure!	
			
TOM		So, online courses—as we know—can be wonderfully engaging and very human learning experiences, but they can also be mind-numbingly dead environments, where faculty and students are just kind of going through the motions. Like our Death Wish Coffee. Almost like the undead zombies wandering the landscape. So, the faculty member that’s teaching the course is probably the key differentiator between these two possible outcomes. Will they choose virtue or will they choose vice?	
			
KELVIN		Yeah, I think that’s probably true, and I’m always stunned still by the folks who—when we talk about online teaching—really worry about the role of the faculty member, but you know, it’s job security. I do think it does come all the way back to the instructor of the course. They can make or break an online course, so that’s job security, Tom.	
			
TOM		Absolutely. So, maybe that’s a good place to wrap it up for TOPcast. I’m Tom.	
			
KELVIN		I’m Kelvin.	
			
TOM		See ya!