Presence and Integrity in Online Learning
So, again, I think that all students being in the meeting at the same time is very important. And together we work toward true presence, and maybe share the integrity of the moment.
Grush: Can you tell us more about your personal experience trying to integrate the idea of integrity into your own teaching practice?
Campbell: There's a lot of experimentation these days in learning space design that is focused on getting more information-rich technologies into a particular space.
But for me, the learning space design that's always been the most compelling is the one that imagines this as a kind of a theatrical space.
You're in a classroom, but it's as if you're making a movie together, or you're in a play or a drama of some kind together. Since online learning is in a virtual space (at least, in a synchronous meeting), you can make the entire experience theatrical, like a play or movie or radio drama.
Ask: How can you structure a learning space, physical or virtual, to bring an invitation to presence, to make the class an experience that students want to try to remember — reminding themselves of not only the information presented, but of aspects of the experience? Again, it's part of how they grow their capacity to learn.
Ask: How can you structure a learning space, physical or virtual, to bring an invitation to presence, to make the class an experience that students want to try to remember?
Grush: It seems like for teachers, there could be a ton of techniques and familiar cues to create that theatrical environment for a class.
Campbell: That's the case. There should be something that starts off the action. And something that leaves students wanting more at the end.
To make it more of a theatrical experience, I do things like having music at the beginning of the class.
I'll play some kind of thematically relevant song for whatever we are doing that day, and start it maybe a couple minutes before the class is actually scheduled to begin. Onscreen is a title slide designed to evoke the day's learning. I think hard about that slide.
I begin clicking on the little Admit button, letting people enter the virtual space, and then within the next three or four minutes, depending on the length of the song, everybody's in, hopefully. And at that point we've kind of set the tone.
Grush: It sounds like you are almost literally setting the stage; drawing the students in — without overtly saying so, you are telling them it is alright to lose their self-consciousness and forget, for a time, the problems of their everyday lives… to focus and be more fully connected to the learning process and to experience that "integrity of the moment" you talk about.
Campbell: Exactly! There are probably hundreds of small details I could cite that contribute to that theater. I try to remain mindful of these possibilities in my preparation as well as during the class session when new possibilities may emerge.
I try to get students to think of the chat in a Zoom online meeting as not just a kind of a back channel, which it is, but a place where they can be present to each other, with everything aimed at the integrity of the experience. And so, after the music has ended and we're gathered and ready, I ask them to go to the chat and wish each other a good morning or a good afternoon, depending on the time. It's a subtle way of saying, "We're here and we're in this together." And it means that they are wishing each other well in a way that begins to amplify and make visible their presence in this meeting. Soon, we are all engaging in the class the way we say we are. It's the idea of integrity in the teaching and learning process.
And then off we go into the day's content… The idea is to try to build an arc into the experience of the meeting so that there is some shape to it, and it's not just one thing after another.