Ep. 101: Dell Ann Janney & Wendy Tietz - HyFlex Teaching Model

Contact Dell Ann Janney: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dell-ann-janney-at-c-sc/
Contact Wendy Tietz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendytietz/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In IMA’s a podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch Roshong. And this is episode 101 of our series. Today's conversation includes my co-host Adam Larson, Wendy Tietz, and Dell Ann Janney. Wendy and Dell Ann are two academic leaders in accounting, higher education. In this episode, they discuss the high flex teaching model, which has gained value in popularity, following the recent educational and economic environments around the world. Keep listening to hear how high flex teaching is being implemented and can be used to help accounting education.

Adam: (00:45)
So let's start by defining what is high flex teaching? What is the high flex teaching model, and how has it affected the accounting classroom?

Wendy: (00:53)
So I'll answer that. The high flex teaching model gives students a choice of how to attend class. So they're going to be able to attend face to face,  traditional classroom, or they can attend during class time online and to be able to see what's going on in the classroom or the screen, and have a chat room to communicate with and/or video cameras and microphones. And then the third option is allowing students to view the recording at their own time. So that's the high flex model teaching like that, giving students the option and with this pandemic that really comes in handy to be able to accommodate all the student needs, and at my school I've been doing high flex for about 10 years because I teach large classes and this has worked very well for us. It's especially nice now. I'm not, we don't have the face-to-face option in the large classes right now, but we're still operating under that same mode. And I know Dell Ann has been in the high flex model. So Dell Ann.

Dell Ann: (02:03)
Sure. So last May, when, if we go back to May, when the spring semester ended and all classes went online and students were taking classes remotely, I think that all academic leaders began to contemplate what a fall semester would look like. And Culver Stockton College is located in a rural area, and at the time we had no cases whatsoever of COVID. However, we have students from all across the country and even around the globe. So we anticipated the likelihood that students traveling from more populated areas would arrive and land in quarantine or isolation. So as we began to plan, we decided that faculty needed to prepare to teach both face-to-face, but also allow those students that are in quarantine isolation to attend synchronously online from luxuries of their gorgeous residence halls. So some faculty would have students that were unable to attend completely due to the COVID illness and thus would record their class session for those students to watch the video asynchronously at a later time. So this approach is referred to as high flex.

Adam: (03:22)
So, and I know you have both different, schools that you teach at and they are different models, but what are some of the challenges you've encountered with this teaching model?

Dell Ann: (03:34)
Well, the challenges are many. We can start out with equipment. So in May, we began to determine that faculty would need to bring in their own lab laptops into the classroom, in order to zoom, the, the faculty would need Zoom pro accounts, they would need external web cameras, headsets, and stylists and pad in order to stay at their computer to, to teach their classes. We had all classrooms reconfigured so that the chairs were all six feet apart. That was pretty crazy. In fact, there were a lot of our faculty leaders who were going room to room to rearrange and ensure that that the rooms would actually accommodate the number of students that were originally assigned to it. So for example, our chapel, which normally seats 200 students, ended up becoming a classroom and was re reconfigured to seat 30 students in it. One of the other interesting changes that we made was that all students would be required to sit in the same seat for the purpose of contract contact tracing,and so faculty, we actually created seating chart, which felt very elementary school. And although the students are six feet apart, we still felt that that was important to be able to verify. So I would mention that actually ends up being a pandemic positive if there are any we'll, we'll count this one, because those seating charts have been really a win, not for the purpose of contact tracing, but more so it's really helped the faculty to become much quicker at learning names. So I think the combination of faculty, of the students sitting in that same seat, each class period, and then having the seating chart to glance down at and learn their names, it was definitely a win. I think another challenge was the sanitizing. We felt that as the students entered, we would expect them to sanitize the desk upon their arrival and at their departure. So faculty really needed to monitor and ensure that that happened. And probably one of the biggest challenges with the students that were in person in the classroom was of course we do require all students to wear mask. And it's often difficult to hear students through their mask when they were speaking. Now, the challenges with the students that are online synchronously probably was getting them to participate and keeping them engaged, you know, certainly the opportunity for them to just log in on Zoom, turn off their camera and then possibly head back to bed and fall asleep was pretty good. So, and occasionally of course there were the dreaded technology, wifi issues for students attending via Zoom. As I previously mentioned, we're a pretty rural area. So there are students that live out in the country with limited internet access. And I think from a teaching perspective, probably one of the biggest challenges was staying in front of the computer at all times. So that the camera was on you not being able to write on the board. I'm a very animated professor. So when I'm teaching, I'm moving around, I'm helping my students and all of this makes it incredibly challenging, especially when you're trying to help a student with an Excel issue and you're trying to stay six feet away from them. So the, the last challenge I'd mentioned would be really no breaks. We consolidated, we removed every single break from this semester. So students definitely felt that you could see it in their eyes, and certainly for the students that were here in person, as it got into week eight and nine, that you could just see in their eyes, how stressed they were. So I know that the students needed breaks, and I think I could say that our faculty needed breaks as well.

Wendy: (07:46)
Okay. We had some of the same challenges. Our classrooms were equipped with, cameras that would follow faculty moving around the room. So that was over the summer. That was a nice add on. We also have got camps in every room and every classroom has the same exact, equipment layout so faculty could go,.Of course, my classes with hundreds of students, are not being held in person. Anything above 50 cannot be held in person. So we're just doing the online. But I would, thinking back to when I started doing high flex several years ago, high flex, it's certainly harder to engage students, whether they're in front of you, whether they're online with you or whether they're watching the recording. So you always have to keep those three modes as you're teaching, as you're designing the class, because the class isn't like a face-to...