EP 10 - Podcast Super-friends Crossover Episode at OLC Innovate 23

In this episode, John and Jason record with podcasting friends from ASU and West Chester University at OLC Innovate 2023 to talk about (what else) podcasting and humanizing online education in the second half. 

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Podcast Super-friends Links:

• Course Stories Podcast at ASU
  • Course Stories, Episode #4: Don’t Fret Design: A Student-Centered Approach to Online Learning, with Brendan Lake
• ODLI On Air at West Chester University

Resources:

- The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work

Guest Bios:

• Arizona State University
  • Mary Loder is an Online Learning Manager at EdPlus, supporting Faculty professional development and training along with managing special projects in a variety of disciplines. She is also co-creator and co-host of Course Stories, a podcast where an array of course design stories are told alongside other designers and faculty from Arizona State University.
  • Ricardo Leon is a Media Developer Sr for EdPlus and is a co-creator and co-host of Course Stories. He has developed a number of other podcasts and various other forms of instructional media.
  • Brendan Lake is the Director of Digital Learning for the ASU Thunderbird’s 100 Million Learners project, offering no-cost management education in 40 languages.  He also moonlights as a music faculty member with ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
  • Timothy McKean is the Manager of Online Learning for the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at ASU. He advocates for authentic assessment and ensures faculty presence and personality are highlighted in online learning. Tim can be heard as an online learning guest in several podcasts and youtube channels and does freelance audiobook and eLearning narration. 
• West Chester University
  • Dr. Tom Pantazes is an instructional designer and podcast cohost with the Office of Digital Learning and Innovation whose research examines the practical applications of interactive and multimedia content in digital instructional environments. Towards this end, his work seeks to connect learning theory with the affordances of various technologies as they are utilized with students. If he is not building Legos, you can catch him on Twitter @TomPantazes.

Transcript:

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections! And in this transcript, apologies to all the speakers we didn't label or mislabeled! We hope it helps having the transcript some and just don't have the capacity to fix every small detail. 

[00:00:00] Ricardo: Oh, this is like the crossover episode. Yeah. You're hosting the Super Friends episode. Awesome. I didn't realize it until this moment. I love those episodes. I can't believe I get to be part of one.

[00:00:32] John: Hi, I'm John Nash. I'm here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:34] Jason: Hey John. Hey everyone. Hey, hey, what's going on here? Hey, we've got people in the—

[00:00:38] John: Room.

[00:00:39] Jason: With us, John. This is—

[00:00:40] John: Exciting. It's not a live audience. It's, it's, uh, colleagues and brethren and sisters and, uh, podcasters.

Yeah, that's pretty—

[00:00:47] Jason: Cool. We're here at OLC 2023 Innovate in Nashville, Tennessee. And, uh, we've got some of, uh, new friends and old friends with us here to talk about online learning. And we have a little bit of a common denominator here with podcasting. So we'll talk a little bit about that, but why don't we start with some introductions? We're going to start over here on this side.

Hello. My—

[00:01:09] Brendan: Name is Brendan Lake. I'm an instructional designer and music faculty at Arizona State.

[00:01:14] Mary: But what is your title at Arizona State University? Because I feel like you're too humble, honestly.

[00:01:18] Brendan: I have a lot of titles. I wanted this to be less than three hours. So my title is Director of Digital Learning Initiatives with the Thunderbird School of Global Management, where I lead the 100 Million Learners instructional design team. And I'm also a music faculty, teaching guitar and other music topics at the Herberger Institute.

[00:01:35] Jason: Sounds cool.

[00:01:36] Tom: I—

[00:01:36] Speaker 2: Like that a lot.

[00:01:39] Tom: I will not be that long. Dr. Tom Pantazis, an instructional designer with West Chester University, which is outside of Philadelphia, and the co-host of the ODLI on the Air podcast.

[00:01:50] Mary: That's a cool name.

[00:01:51] Tom: We worked very hard to get it. It's a good one. And we're—our office is changing its name and we're very sad about—

[00:01:59] Mary: I'm Mary Louder. I'm the Manager of Professional Development and Training at Arizona State University. I'm primarily working within EdPlus and ASU Online. And I am also co-host, co-creator of Course Stories, a podcast where we talk about an array of course design stories alongside other faculty and instructional designers.

[00:02:19] Speaker 8: I'm Tim McKean. I'm the Manager of Online Learning for the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. And I have no current podcast, but I started podcasting way back in like 2005 with my middle school students, and I'm an avid podcast listener.

[00:02:36] Ricardo: Uh, my name is Ricardo Leon. I'm a Media Developer Senior with EdPlus and, uh, ASU Online, uh, and I'm a co-host along with Mary, co-producer along with Mary, of Course Stories.

[00:02:51] Mary: Yes, we work together.

[00:02:51] Ricardo: We work together.

[00:02:53] Jason: Hey, and that's your—

[00:02:54] Speaker: Intro. That's cool.

[00:02:56] Jason: You guys do a great podcast, so I encourage listeners to check out the Course Stories podcast. And say and spell your podcast name once again, Tom.

[00:03:06] Tom: So, ODLI on the Air is O-D-L-I, which is the abbreviation of our office. It's actually a podcast where we interview our faculty at West Chester about their teaching and all the different ways that they do it. And we have about a thousand faculty, so I figure we've got a good 45 years in front of us.

[00:03:21] Jason: That's awesome. That's great, and they keep changing faculty, so you probably—you may, maybe non-stop actually—you may just keep on going.

[00:03:29] Ricardo: Yeah, that's good. Well, I want to mention real quick that Brendan is actually a guest on the first season of our podcast, a really great episode talking about, uh, a guitar, uh, course. And, uh, and we even have music of Brendan playing guitar as our interstitial music.

Yeah.

[00:03:48] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's get talking a little more about podcasting. You know, one thing I really like about the Course Stories podcast—I, I think you produce it well, you've got some great guests on—but I also like how you guys kind of, you kind of, in my mind anyway, you're like a bubble that kind of pops out of the podcast for a minute. I visualize this kind of bubble that pops out of the podcast, and you just talk about whatever it is you're talking about. And you give a little background and maybe explain something for people that aren't listening. And then you pop back into the podcast again. How did that—is that something you started from the beginning? Because I'll admit I have not listened to all of them.

That's fair, there's a lot of them now.

Um, how did that come about? What was the, kind of, the thinking behind that?

[00:04:31] Mary: I want to give Ricardo all credit. Our podcast is awesome because he's an awesome media specialist. And then in addition, he's the one who came up with the idea of these, like, intentional interventions for debriefing concepts that a typical listener who's not faculty or an instructional designer wouldn't know about, or that he genuinely has a question on, and then vice versa.

[00:04:51] Ricardo: Yeah. We just—we wanted to add a didactic, a didactic element to it, uh, so that it could be more accessible to a lot of different listeners. So, you know, primarily our audience is faculty and course designers, but a student might be interested in the course. I think we've got a lot of crossover with Brendan's episode because people want to hear about this really great guitar, uh, course. Uh, but we might be, you know, some of those designers or the faculty might be talking at a level that might not be familiar to, you know, every listener. So we want to have that didactic piece to kind of catch everyone who's listening up to what the topics are. And I'm a dummy, so that's easy for me to, like, be there going, what is, what is PlayPosit, Mary? I don't know what that is. I probably have forgotten by the time—now I can, I guess I kind of know what it is. But, you know, so that—so I'm that, you know, in an infomercial, the guy: "But, but how do you get juice out of that whole, you know, orange?"

[00:05:45] Tom: Hearing you say that then, are you guys doing those bursts as you're recording in that moment, or are you doing that in post?

[00:05:51] Ricardo: In live, uh, episodes, we are doing them in the moment, but no, they're all being done in post. We have conversations, uh, right, you know, right after. Usually it's—it works best when we are able to do it right after, but we're not always able to. But then, yeah, we, we take notes as we're listening. So Mary and I, even though we're not featured in the interviews, we are taking notes, producing, uh, coaching our instructional designers on, on good questions to ask, or maybe saying, "Hey, you know, that's really not clear. Can we get you to, you know, define that a little more?" Or we take a note and we define it later.

[00:06:25] Speaker 8: Which I think is really great because it allows the continuity of the two hosts throughout all the episodes. Yeah. But then it empowers you to have other voices, you know, it empowers you to bring in your instructional designers or, mm-hmm, you know, to, to interview the, the faculty that they worked with. And I think it's really cool how you get a lot more voices in there while still having the consistency of the commentary.

[00:06:46] Ricardo: Yeah, and sometimes those interjections are a totally another guest that's in the studio with us that can bring—

[00:06:51] Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah.

[00:06:51] Ricardo: Yeah. Oh yeah, Regina—on one episode, we have another podcast producer from Arizona State, Open Conversation. Uh, she—and I could not say her last name if you held a gun up to my head—but Open Conversation's the name of her podcast that she produces for ASU, and she's coming in. And so we had an episode—what was that covering, Mary? Do you recall?

[00:07:17] Mary: Oh yeah, misinformation.

[00:07:21] Ricardo: And she's a—she's a Russian-born journalist. So she had a lot to say about misinformation in society, so we were kind of able to color and kind of elevate some of the, the topics that we were talking about.

[00:07:32] Tom: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:34] Jason: Tom, I'm curious about—were you there at the start of your podcast? Were you a part of the beginning there?

I very much was at the beginning. We actually have—

[00:07:41] Tom: An episode on that, if you're interested.

Oh, that's cool. That's good to know. What, what kind of brought it about?

So I was thinking about professional development and ways that we can engage our faculty kind of beyond the traditional models of workshops and, uh, webinars. And it is something that kind of came to mind, like, "Hey, we should give this a try," right. Particularly because they're evergreen. Like they, they just—once they're out there, they're always there. We can reference people back to them. And I really love talking with our faculty and hearing their stories, and it sounds like, in some respects, like what Course Stories—

[00:08:13] Mary: Talks—

[00:08:13] Tom: About.

Um—

[00:08:15] Speaker: And—

Crossover.

Exactly. Oh, this is like the crossover episode. You're hosting the Super Friends episode. Awesome. I didn't realize it until this moment. I love those episodes. I can't believe I—

[00:08:28] Tom: Get to be part of one. So, that opportunity to bring some folks in and hear their story and share that with others. Um, a chance for them to promote their work a little bit. So to kind of help them. And when we set out, we said, you know, if this totally bombs, at a minimum we will get some experience creating and producing. Um, and it is safe to say it has not totally bombed. We are—we'll be back for episode, or season three here.

Nice.

So, uh, I think for me, one of the big things too has been how much fun it has been. I didn't go into it thinking it was going to be this much of a joy, and I wish I could just do it all the time now. So, um, highly recommend podcasting for anyone who's interested.

[00:09:10] Mary: I will say, Brendan's episode helped us highlight some really unique things that are good for any online classroom. Specifically, just the level of care that it takes to be a good online instructor. And that's not always present, necessarily. Like, a lot of our faculty are amazing—Brendan—but there's a true concern, I think, at any university when you're an online instructor and you've done it online, you're great. When you're an on-campus instructor who's being asked to go online who doesn't have experience, it's not a vein of understanding, it's a totally different potential experience and perspective.

So Brendan's episode's great because he's an online instructional designer who then developed an online course around guitar. And like, what? Learning how to play guitar? But like, that's a thing that you do.

Right?

[00:09:58] Brendan: And actually the whole episode is not about guitar. It's really about how I approach growth mindset and how I approach practice and feedback at scale. And I just gotta say, like, the Course Stories podcast has been such a blessing for me as a faculty member, both to tell my story, because, you know, when faculty—unless you're really good friends with each other—you talk about the product, not the process. And the process is 98 percent of it. Um, your philosophy about why you do your grading system, you know, instead of just saying about the rubric, which is the end of the road.

Um, so my opportunity to hear, um, you know, what other faculty are doing, it's, it's, it's amazing. It's easy faculty development. And any instructional designer will know faculty listen to each other a lot more than listen to an external instructional designer. And so that trust is immediately there and those lessons just hit deeper. It's just an amazing faculty development resource for anybody.

[00:10:47] Tom: For the faculty at ASU, will this—being on a podcast—count as scholarship for them?

[00:10:54] Ricardo: I think, I think that, you know, certainly our leadership is, is—feels that that is important. I think that they've been very supportive of, of our IDs and our media specialists taking time, uh, you know, within the bandwidth of what they do altogether to, to, to appear on these episodes. Because it is, it is, uh, it's not a huge lift, but it is, you know, it does take time. There's a lot of investment of, of time and energy into, into doing an episode. Uh, so we, we—and that's kind of been one of the things to help me and my bandwidth—is to say, okay, we, we have, uh, this—instruct, we have this instructional designer working on this episode, and their job is to coordinate the, the pre-interview and to come up with questions and, and bring that to the table. And so that gives us, you know—they do that production side of it, and then that helps us, you know, with the rest of it.

[00:11:49] Mary: And to the faculty perspective, it's going on their CV, so they must care.

[00:11:53] Speaker 2: Right.

[00:11:53] Mary: And they are advertising, right?

Yes.

And they're sharing it with their friends, they're sharing it with their program leads. And I think, like, is it accepted as part of their scholarship? Maybe. I think that all depends on who their program lead is and maybe their ability to see podcasting as a viable source of creating content. Um, and it is. So for those who are listening and don't think it is, you're wrong. It is.

[00:12:16] Ricardo: It's a publication. You know, we call it that. We say, you know, these episodes are being published, you know.

[00:12:21] Mary: And you're speaking about this specific process of working within that vein. It's the same as writing an article, in our perspective.

[00:12:30] John: I'm a regular titled-series, tenure-line professor at an SEC institution, and the answer is, it depends. And chiefly, no, if you've said the word scholarship. So you're right, Mary, it goes on the vita. It's, it's probably—and depending on when it comes time for biennial reviews, for merit. It all depends on your unit head, your department chair, and your dean. If your dean is hardcore science and believes in, you know, traditional publications and peer-reviewed journals count as the scholarship, this probably won't rise to the level of their interest in changing your score. Or maybe they'll even lower the score because they think you have a sympathetic chair, it hits the dean's desk, and the dean goes, "No, not so much."

And so, it really, it depends. I value it, you know, of course, and I see how it can work, but it's not everybody's cup of tea yet.

[00:13:28] Ricardo: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head—the scholarship part of it. Because that's when I was like, "Wait, wait, uh, scholarship." Well, certainly career building. And, you know, it's certainly something that you can list on your CV that has a link to something. You can hear about your, your—what's going on in your brain.

[00:13:43] John: Yeah. Tenure-line faculty have three big jobs: teaching, research, service. So you help us figure out where it fits in one of those three things, we're golden.

Service.

Probably service. Um, and teaching too. I mean, depending on what you're podcasting and if it's hitting your courses or advancing learner outcomes, absolutely, I think.

[00:13:59] Tom: And I ask because it does count for some of our faculty. It just depends on department.

Right.

And that's, that's—it depends. And we love to use it as instructional designers.

[00:14:07] Jason: And I think, for, for us, one of the reasons why we started this podcast—we were kind of talking about this previously—was, uh, we just, we wanted to get stuff out in front of other people. We wanted to continue the conversation with other people. And I feel like so much research, as valued as that is, you know, it hits—like, what are some of the percentages, John? You might know, or somebody else might know, about the number of, yeah, the papers that are out there in the wild that get read. Like, a handful of people read those papers. And we were thinking about just ways that we could continue online education in a way that would, uh, you know, continue the conversation and research and maybe connect with a larger audience than a paper would.

[00:14:48] John: But it's—it goes to this translational nature of research. And I think even—it's been what, I guess, sort of—help me out if you guys were around 20, maybe 20 years ago, 23 years ago, when NSF decided that some sort of translational aspect had to be a part of everything that was going on, and all the scientists were going, "Oh my gosh, how am I going to talk plainly about this work?" And I think still that's not getting the credit it deserves. I think still this sort of translational work and others is not as valued as the scholarship that gets translated. So, um, which is a shame.

[00:15:22] Jason: Yeah.

[00:15:23] Tom: It's interesting we hit this because it's something I didn't mention about our podcast—we always anchor every episode around some piece of scholarship, whether it's a publication or an article that's related to the topic at hand so that we can make some of those connections and help the faculty kind of do exactly as you're talking about and share that in a way that's accessible to a wider audience. Because we know all our moms are listening to the episodes. That's—

[00:15:46] Ricardo: At least three.

I think there's also—

[00:15:50] Tom: An—

[00:15:51] Speaker 8: Aspect of modeling. Right. One of the things that we want to do for professional development as much as possible is model the skills and the techniques and the tools that we want faculty to use. So if they can see themselves using it as a learner, then they can see how they could use it as an instructor. Um, so using media and, and basic and simple media production techniques to, uh, to broadcast your, your knowledge, your research, your ideas, uh, in a way that has personality, that, that creates a—you used the word connection—that creates a connection and creates a community. Um, and I think that podcasting often creates more community than a publication does because of the nature of comments or feedback. If you're—especially if your podcast is one that, you know, takes feedback or, or reads, um, reads off listener comments on the show or answers questions and creates that back and forth, um, then you're really creating a, uh, community of practice that a more traditional publication can never really do.

[00:16:52] Mary: And there's all these layers and textures that go into creating these podcasts, right? So there's the storytelling component around what you're saying, but then there's also the storytelling component around, like, what you're hearing while they're saying what they're saying. And, like, the connection that comes from that is far more meaningful than reading text on a page.

[00:17:09] Tom: So I was doing some prep, because we're going to present on our podcast coming up here locally—not, not big time—and one of the things I read was this idea that when we're hearing it, we are creating the mental image.

[00:17:21] Mary: Yeah, theater of the mind.

Yes, versus—

[00:17:23] Tom: If you're watching a video, someone else has already done that. And so there's a stronger personal connection to the stories that are being told. That just kind of blew my mind. And I know it blew yours too, John.

[00:17:33] Jason: Yeah, it's really neat.

It did.

And—

[00:17:33] John: I just love the accessibility of podcasts. I mean, I think about the amount of time I spend in the car, and how accessible it is to, to learn from podcasts myself.

[00:17:41] Speaker: I—

[00:17:42] Jason: Have yet to see a full online course that is just podcasts. Have you guys ever played with that, or have you done any?

[00:17:49] Mary: So we just talked to somebody who does literature, and he teaches it using podcasts.

Really?

So his content are podcasts, and they're different genres, and they take two weeks to get to know the podcast. They dissect the podcast as a group. We just interviewed him, so it'll be on the episode we produce from this.

[00:18:08] Ricardo: Uh, yeah, when I, I produced, uh, some podcasts for courses. Uh, but one of the things is, is, is—I think that, and it might just be some insecurities about it, uh, but that we, we use it mostly as supplemental to the course. It's not the course content. It's "please listen to this episode I'm in it." So, you know, in an on-ground course you have a guest come in from out of town, you have a little conversation with them for the students. And so a lot of times those—these, these podcasts for courses are just that. It's a conversation with an expert. And we did an exercise science course, and the host of that, she brought in all these, uh, you know, people that she knows that are experts in different parts of the field. And, and, and this was during the pandemic, so this was really the only way that she could, uh, to have, have these guests on. And so those became supplemental to the course. And I—and I think that there's some trepidation, and I'll be honest on my part as well, that we don't know what the efficacy of it—because it is so accessible and it is almost, it could very much be a passive, a passive, uh, activity where you're just, you know, you're on, you're on, uh, public transportation or driving your car or exercising. I mean, is there a lot of learning happening during that? I know when I listen to podcasts, I will bring it up later. But I know also that sometimes I won't even pay attention to the thing I'm listening to. I'm just listening to voices. And so I think, at least on my part and at least until—and we talked about this on the floor, Tim—that we don't know the efficacy of podcasts in terms of learning.

[00:19:46] Speaker 2: But—

[00:19:47] Ricardo: We do know that there is these, you know, this, this engagement that's happening and this, uh, this community building that's happening that, that we don't know really how to qualify yet. Quantify. Qualify? Both.

Both.

Huh.

[00:20:02] Jason: That's good. Yeah. When I was doing my PhD studies, I had one professor who—good professor—but he read absolutely everything off of his very detailed slides. And after the first time, and you probably know who I'm talking about, John, but, um, after the first lecture, I, you know, I was just thinking, "Oh, this could have been a podcast," right? And so I actually made podcasts out of all his other lectures because, for me, it was quicker. It was really quick for me to make a podcast out of his lectures. Like, there's ways to do it. So you can just pull the audio, or I would just listen to it in the car off the podcast and, and not look at the video, because it didn't—it didn't matter at that point. And I found that I would sometimes listen to them a few times because I was just driving the car anyway, because it—

[00:20:50] Speaker 8: Was easy.

[00:20:51] Jason: And it was easy, right? Versus watching. I don't think I could have gotten through it, honestly, barely one time, if I was having to sit there in front of a screen and watch this. It would have been very difficult for me, and maybe that's just me.

[00:21:04] Speaker 8: I like that point about accessibility from a standpoint of how easy it is to access the material, right?

Yeah, that's right.

We did a course, uh, last summer where the instructor was remote. Uh, she didn't have—she didn't feel comfortable making her own video. Um, so she just did audio lectures only. And then we paired that in the LMS with embedded slideshows so the students could listen, and then they could follow along, you know, kind of like when you're a child and you have a book that says, you know, "Now turn the page," you know, that kind of thing. Um, and I really liked it. It was a fallback at the, at the beginning, but as it came together, I really enjoyed it because it gave students so much more opportunity to access in different ways. They could just listen, they could go back and look at the slides later. They could listen and follow along if they're sitting at a computer. Having the slides independent from the audio made it so much easier to go back and review or to stay on a slide a little bit longer while she went on to the next thing. And I just—it felt like a lower quality production, but it also felt like a higher quality experience, just because it gave the student that flexibility and that choice in how to consume it and how to interact with it.

[00:22:13] Tom: There's an idea a faculty shared with me at one point, and I don't know where she got it from, but it was the idea of you recording yourself reading your text, your reading, and putting that in audio form with your own little bit of commentary. That was how she got around copyright. Um, and then making that available in the course in addition to the reading, almost in the same way that you were talking about there—to give students that flexibility of "you can read it, you can listen to it, you can read it and listen to it." Um, so I, I just use that as another example there of exactly what you're talking about. I still do wonder about the copyright side of it, but I'm sure there's a way to figure that out.

As you were saying—

[00:22:48] Mary: That, it made me think of, like, this yogic thing. So, like, our voice is the best thing to hypnotize ourselves, to, like, reprogram ourselves. And so what if you read your content to a recording and then you listen to yourself as a student reading the content? Double consumption. You could speed it up twice the speed, and you're hearing your own voice say it, and for some reason it resonates in our brain better to hear our own voice talking about these things. Like, we remember, we believe. It's a whole thing.

[00:23:14] Speaker 8: Put it on a loop while you sleep?

[00:23:15] Mary: Yeah! Sleep programming. I'm into it.

[00:23:19] Speaker 8: Pillow—

[00:23:19] John: Speaker.

[00:23:22] Ricardo: Yeah, when I was a kid, I used to hook our VCR up to the stereo and record audio of TV and movies and stuff so I could listen to it when I went to bed, and I probably know every line from Men in Black because of that. So maybe there is some efficacy—

[00:23:40] Jason: Right there. Huh. I don't know.

That's good. Well, uh, turning maybe towards a little bit of a theme for us in our podcast, which is thinking about humanizing online education and looking into the second half of life in terms of online education. We've talked a little bit of it here about podcasting, about some of the ways in which it's being utilized and potentially some really effective ways of learning. What do you think it means to kind of look into the second half of life online, looking forward aspirationally into developing online courses? And what are some of the things that you think about that either we could, um, get better at—and maybe get better at, particularly from a humanizing standpoint?

[00:24:28] Ricardo: Well, since this is a crossover episode, uh, I'm going to have to do something that I do on the show, which is to say, I'm—What? What is, what do you mean by second half of life?

[00:24:39] John: Oh yeah. Fair enough.

Yep.

Really, yeah. Well, Jason and I are in the second half of our lives. And he recommended to me a book by James Hollis that was of a similar title and Leading an Examined Life.

That's right.

And Reflections as One Enters the Second Half of Life. And there's some interesting things there to think about—about, um, giving up old ways and sort of, uh, thinking about what you're going to do in the future. And, uh, we both admitted also that there's no way that online learning is entering its second half of life. It's more that, uh—but it's been around for 30, 30 years-ish, 40 years. And so, um, it's enough time for it to have learned a few lessons. And if it were 45 years old, what would it look back on and say, "Hey, I need to do this a little better. I need to stop doing this. I need to listen to my parents. Or, oh my gosh, I've become my parents." Um, and so I'm just wondering, and so is Jason—I think it's our overarching wondering—is, you know, what do we need to turn up? What do we need to turn down? Um, I'm thoughtful of a, of a—sort of the, I think it was Maddux, uh, who was talking about the "Everest Syndrome," that we should have computers in classrooms just because they're there, and when provided in sufficient quantity, quality will follow. And this sort of myth, uh, that, that exists. And I think still some of that pervades our work today, which is kind of shocking after all this effort. So, that's where my head is at—is, um, what do we need to, uh, be thoughtful of and what do we need to call out when we notice it because we know it doesn't work, but people still insist that we need to try it. So that's part of it.

Mm-hmm.

[00:26:23] Mary: I could go on for hours on this, but I will keep it to like two things out of respect for everybody. Um, my first consideration when having conversations with faculty who are doing it the way that we did when we were just children of online learning, right—the lecture capture. So just standing up there and doing things exactly the same way you did in the classroom, but just in front of a camera, and it's still a two-hour long lecture. That needs to die and be reborn. I want to see the phoenix rise in really intentional content creation. So, Ricardo's team—plug—does a great job. I mean, not only from the consideration of helping faculty chunk content along with our instructional designers, but then there's animations, there's using B-roll instead of the faculty being the full focus, that you have visual contextual pairings so that, like, learning happens in a more multimodal type situation. It's far more engaging for our students to have that happen than watching the same person, even for 10 minutes. If you can put in visualization and intentional editing, that is a huge thing.

Okay, and then the second thing: technology is your friend. And getting into this idea of personalizing learning, creating the ability for students to move beyond the path you envision for them only. Like, especially in the online world, we have a different demographic than campus. So these people are professionals, they know, and they're probably there to check a box to get a certificate to get more money. So if they already know, let's create a path for them. Like, I love the idea of adaptive learning when it's done right, and letting people pass the test to check the box to then move on to the next thing, and allowing them to go back and figure out what spaces they want to be in to then curate a better environment and community that will actually be beneficial to them.

Okay, I turn over the mic.

[00:28:17] Tom: That was good. I would love to hear more.

[00:28:21] John: You said something interesting about faculty and, um, maybe the recorded lecture sort of thing. But I also think that there are a swath of faculty who are maybe nerds—I'll put myself in this category for a while—who, um, who understand technology and are kind of into the technology, the materials, and are hefty as in teachers, but they've never once, uh, thought about talking to an instructional designer because they think they've got it nailed.

[00:28:46] Speaker 2: Yeah.

[00:28:47] John: And I'm kind of like that—getting better. Uh, and—but I know a lot of people like that too. And I think that that's part of it, that we've got some folks that are sort of stuck in thinking that because they understand tech and they're teaching, maybe even in education circles or preparing educators, but they're not, they're not touching on the quality aspects that you mentioned that make great experiences for learners.

[00:29:11] Mary: And it's really a team effort, right? So I feel like we all get better when we work together.

[00:29:16] Speaker 2: And—

[00:29:16] Mary: So, like, the siloed working habits of the old way of "I'm the subject matter expert, so I know exactly how things should happen." Like, now we have the ability to tap on media specialists, instructional designers, your students. Reading evaluations is a huge piece. Like, what didn't they like? Maybe go back and look at your analytics, if you can, on your video. When did they stop watching?

[00:29:37] Speaker 2: And—

[00:29:37] Mary: Then it's, like, kind of a hard thing because you have to reflect. Like, why did that happen? And then you kind of have to eat the humble pie and be like, okay, I need to make a change. And I might not be able to see the change I need to make because I wrote the paper, right? So I can't see the places where I need the commas or the edits or I went along too long, but somebody else, another lens, they can. And if you have a good relationship—which I think is actually the best part of our team—when you have a good relationship and a long-term relationship, and you trust your designer, it's—they're only saying things to make you better, not to put themselves above you. Our names don't go on the courses, right? I mean, sometimes they do, but not the actual faculty courses that are created. But like, you know, faculty support. I do love getting nods. We don't deserve those nods in the subject matter expertise areas. We are there to be partners. We're there to be collaborators. We're there to be the ChatGPT in human form.

[00:30:32] John: Speaking of nods, Tom's nodding like—

[00:30:34] Tom: Crazy. I don't mean to keep promoting our podcast, but we did an episode where, uh, we brought in basically, like, the, the faculty member we had the best relationship with. And there were two designers with their paired faculty member. And it—we talked about those things that we can do together that were so much more impactful for our students than when we were trying to do it on our own or trying to be separate. And it's—some of it is because we have that trust relationship that's built up, but the ones that we, like, really enjoy working with, because we think in similar, complementary ways. And they can put out an idea and then we're like, "Oh, but what if we tweak it this way?" And it just—we get this thing rolling that turns into this amazing product for students. And I really, truly believe that every faculty member can find that designer that they have that connection with, and then can begin to develop those things. Um, and we don't have a media production team in the same way it sounds like y'all do, but that's another person to bring to the collaboration to just continue to enhance that experience. And it's—it's grounded in that human relationship, which I think is going to be so important as the information and technology continues to just spin around us and grow. I haven't fully formed that thought yet, but we're working on it.

[00:31:45] Jason: That's good.

[00:31:47] Ricardo: Uh, you know, I think that I'm really taking this metaphor to heart here about this second half of life. And, uh, and as I'm, I'm, uh, approaching 40—

[00:32:01] Mary: Youngin.

[00:32:02] Ricardo: Youngin. Um, I think more about—so like, let's look at the pandemic as like, you know, you're in college and you know, "Oh, I can get a burger for a dollar at Burger King," and you eat that. But that's not sustainable. So during the pandemic, we had all these instructors creating videos from home and realizing how easy it was to do that. And now we're outside the pandemic, and this is, you know, you're, you're graduated from, from college and now you have to live a normal life. You can't continue to eat $1 burgers for the rest of your life.

[00:32:33] Mary: Yeah. And EdPlus is giving you a whole buffet of Whole Foods.

[00:32:36] Ricardo: Yeah. So, so, so we are getting—and even getting feedback from students—that what the, the content that they're seeing from their instructors, the instructors who are having trouble making time to come into the studio and produce quality content, or even take some of the advice of, "Okay, don't film in front of a lot of window and then—you have a nice backyard, but we're not going to see it. We're going to see you in silhouette and your window just fully, just a big bright light." So, so to take that, because it got a little too easy for instructors to just produce—

[00:33:07] John: Video content at home. I really appreciate this comment, and it was actually—driving down here to Nashville from Lexington, I was listening to the—I've forgotten the Monster Professor's name.

[00:33:16] Speaker: Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

[00:33:18] John: And—but you guys took just a second to say, "Look, it's not complicated. Get a nice little light. It's not expensive, and everybody notices." And, um, I don't think we say that enough—these little things that really make a difference. And when—

[00:33:30] Ricardo: We're getting feedback from the students that are saying, you know, it's mostly positive because they're saying that the instructors that are taking the time to make this better content are much better than the professors who—they're saying, "Oh, all the professors I see, they're all just terrible videos." And we're taking that to heart, and we're trying to encourage more people to come into the studio or to elevate their own content.

Can you say something, Tom?

[00:33:53] Speaker 8: I also, I also think we're moving into, like, a third generation of, of the level—as far as the level of interactivity, right? Early, early distance learning—I knew people that put instruction on laser discs, right?

And it was just a, purely a broadcast model, right?

[00:34:09] Speaker: Dating—

[00:34:11] Speaker 8: Himself. And then—and then we got to the early 2000s and we got the web 2.0 "read–write web," and we got comments and LMSs that had discussion boards. And I think we're moving now into this area where it's going to be largely around community building. And, and, uh, because of—also because of the pandemic—the integration of synchronous experiences into, uh, what was traditionally an asynchronous, um, primarily an asynchronous experience. And, and this idea of, of real connection. I just went to a session earlier about, um, creating a sense of belonging and how that's, you know, one of those core needs that has to take place before real learning can happen. Um, and I, and I think there's a lot of potential and a lot of promise there around community building, around real personal connections between the instructors and the students. And part of that is done through, through good media, through good course design, all those things, but also that informal and kind of unstructured interaction between students so that they can feel that sense of belonging and that sense of togetherness.

[00:35:15] Tom: As I'm hearing y'all talk too, it's almost like when we put the quality into the construction and the design, it's a demonstration of care to the students—that we care about your experience enough to do the best job that we can. And that care is an important part of building the trust that the students need to then move into the learning—

[00:35:35] Speaker 2: Process.

[00:35:36] Speaker 8: I heard someone use an analogy of dressing up for work.

[00:35:39] Speaker 2: Right.

[00:35:39] Speaker 8: I, I, I knew this teacher that wore a shirt and tie every day to work, and someone asked him, like, "Why do you do that? Like, it's not common at school."

I was that guy.

[00:35:48] Speaker 2: Okay.

[00:35:50] Speaker 8: But his answer, like, completely blew me away. He said, "I want to make sure that my students see that I take this more seriously than they do. That I care about this and that I'm treating this as a professional." And I thought, that's amazing, right. And it does. It sets that scene. And I think, and I think what you're making the comparison to is your course design, your media production, your copywriting, even your page layout on your documents. All of that polish sets the scene and shows the students how much you care about the course, how seriously you take it.

[00:36:23] Ricardo: Tim, would you mind talking about informal versus formal media that you guys have, uh, kind of talked about?

[00:36:30] Speaker 8: Yeah, I, uh—no, I don't mind. Um, I, I—we like this idea of, of this, uh, juxtaposition or this nice combination of using both formal and informal media in courses. Because there is that quality and there is that value in that polished production.

[00:36:49] Ricardo: Could—

[00:36:49] Speaker 8: You—

[00:36:50] Ricardo: Define the formal?

Yeah, so—

[00:36:51] Speaker 8: Formal media being something that is perhaps shot in a studio, well lit, has some post-production, um, maybe, you know, lower thirds, some graphics, whatever. It's been produced, it's been intentionally made, um, and it's reusable, right. Mm-hmm. Um, and then, you know, sprinkle in with that informal media, which, you know—maybe a podcast conversation like this maybe falls more towards the side of informal media, or maybe just turning on your webcam and recording a week-two introduction: "This week, we're going to do these things." Um, and it's very informal. You don't edit it. You just record it and post it. Um, and then that's something that's not reusable, right, because you've talked about things that are very specific to that week. Um, and students can see you, they can hear you, your dog comes in, your kids come in, it doesn't matter. It's all part of the personality building. And then that, you know, at the end of that week, you throw that away and you move on. And, and those two things together have different values. The, the value of the, of the, uh, production and the polish and the professionalism, but also the other value of being a real human and being, um, and having that real interaction with students in a different way.

I think there's a lot—if I were to ever do another degree, I would, I would research the area around this, uh—what's it called—parasocial relationship. You know, this idea that, um, your students are seeing you and experiencing you, you know, daily, weekly, whatever—how often, how much media you're putting out. Um, you're experiencing them at a very different level, right. Um, and, and, you know, the iconic, uh, parasocial relationship is like if you are, uh, watching a TV series that goes on for like 10 years, right. This character, or this actor, or this person has been in your life for a decade now, um, and you feel like you really, really know—

[00:38:36] Speaker 2: Them.

[00:38:37] Speaker 8: And they don't know who you are, right. It's a, it's a completely one-sided relationship, but to you it feels real, really real. And there's an aspect to that in online teaching too—of your students are seeing you and experiencing you at all these different levels and at all these different times in their lives, you experiencing them very little when they submit stuff back to you. Um, and so that's something to be—

[00:38:57] Tom: Explored there. That relationship exists between designers and faculty too, when they use media like podcasts or video to do similar things. I, um, have been running a—I call it Tom's One-Minute Update. I did it in video form, because I knew faculty were not reading email. And they could just hit play and move on to the next email and hear me. But, they get that experience of me talking to them, but I don't get the return. So they are like, "Hey, I've been talking to Tom or interacting with Tom," and in fact they have not been doing that. I get a weekly—

[00:39:24] Speaker 8: Lesson from Tom.

Yeah, yeah.

[00:39:26] Tom: And it's been fascinating for them to kind of come back and be like, "Oh yeah, I really love that." See them feel like they have that connection, and I'm like, "I—

[00:39:34] Speaker 2: Haven't talked to you in—

[00:39:35] Tom: Six months. Like, how's it going?" So I didn't even know how to term—so thanks for sharing that.

[00:39:39] Speaker 8: Well, and that's, I think, one of those values of that informal media, is because it is so much more sustainable from a production perspective. You know, if you're just turning on your camera and posting a one-minute lesson, you can do that in one minute.

Right.

You could do that weekly. You could do that almost daily if you had enough content, right. And, and it's, it's those contacts—those repeated contact points—that it helps to establish that relationship. So you're going to establish a better relationship by posting weekly or a couple times a week informally than you would if you—if it took you too long to edit your video and you could only put out one a month. You know, that's a—you're going to get a better experience out of that informal video that's weekly or daily.

[00:40:21] Mary: That's one thing Brendan's course does really well, is you have this polished—even though it was recorded pandemic, so it was in your house—but you, like, very intentionally dressed your set. I remember you going through that practice and, like, "How does it look?" Right. And, like, made a bunch of really intentional videos. But then you shared with us in the podcast that along the line you learned that, like, sharing in an open discussion board led people to being afraid to play guitar, and you changed your model to one-on-one. I would love to hear your perspective on, like, the relationship building, the level of trust that you noticed, and the shift.

[00:40:55] Brendan: Right. I think the most impactful thing about, I think, humanizing learning for me as a faculty member and a designer is that element of trust. It's not enough to care. It's not—you really have to build that trust. And to use Charles Feltman's framework about trust that really revolutionized my thinking about my own relationships with students and my peers was that caring is the first step, but it's not the last step. People can care and be very ineffective. You need care, you need honesty and integrity to walk the walk, to honor your commitments. You need to be reliable and you need to be competent. Um, and that level of care shows up also in that reliability and competence. And so it's—you start by saying, "I really care about you, I'm showing up for you." Um, but also you need that reliability. You need to be available to your learners or they're not—it's going to seem very shallow. Um, and then, of course, in the actual learning experience, you know, one thing that I often tell faculty is, you know, "Can you say that you've done everything you can to make this a good experience for your students?" And if you really care—and I've never honestly met a faculty that didn't care about their learners, you know. It's really usually a matter of being overworked by their academic department. Um, it's about a lack of ideas, sometimes they're just very confident, it's been working. And again, it often comes back to that amount of time. But they never don't care. And so if you can really—if they have the capacity, and if you can enable the system where they have that time, then that's the first thing I say is, you know, "You need to be able to, you know, if you really care about your learners the way that I know you do, working with your instructional designer is the easiest way to get that smooth connection and that great experience for your students."

[00:42:31] Jason: I like that. And, uh, you know, pulling back to something you had mentioned earlier, Timothy—we're at, of course, at the OLC conference, and I was at the same session you were at about belonging, and it felt—it feels like kind of the flip side of those five things that you just mentioned. Um, when they were talking about in the session, they were talking about where the student, in order to feel, uh, like they belong, they would need to feel accepted, valued, and connected.

That's right.

And, um, and it was interesting hearing you—that, would you say that list again from the—

[00:43:07] Brendan: It was Charles Feltman's framework, The Thin Book of Trust, I believe is what it's called.

Okay.

Um, it's just an 80-page book, but he talks about, um, kind of the four dimensions. The first is caring. Second is honesty and integrity, which is kind of hand in hand often. Reliability and competence. Um, and so I only talk about my expertise to the end of competence, but then I also make sure, am I—do I, am I a reliable professor? Do I have my office hours? Am I available? Um, do I get my work returned to them in time? Is my feedback personalized? And that really shows them, I have made the time for you. And they will come to me when they need support, which is the most important part of teacher–student relationships.

[00:43:44] Jason: That's good. And this is the first time I've heard that list, but in my mind I'm seeing one of those charts where you have the two lists and you see all the connections between them.

[00:43:53] Mary: Venn diagram.

[00:43:53] Jason: Yeah, it's not exactly the Venn with the circles. It's the one with all the—you've got two lists and you've got all the swimlanes—

Yeah.

All the swimlanes exactly, kind of, going between. And because of this kind of flip side of being—feeling accepted, valued, and connected. And you can see almost all of those things that you just mentioned kind of maybe, um, some of the swimlanes will be larger going to a few of those, and how sometimes instructors or professors will do some of those things, but maybe they won't be as, you know, diligent about returning emails or something like that, which is, honestly for students, is way up there. Much higher than how good the content was, or the videos were, or whatever like that. "They're not very good about returning emails." But that directly connects to all these things—they don't feel valued because he's not returning my emails. Um, and they don't feel connected because, well, this person's just doing it once a week or something like that, and, and, and they don't feel like, you know, much of a connection if all they do is return their emails every Tuesday for one hour kind of thing, right?

[00:45:03] Brendan: Yeah, and you don't have to be a superhero, you know, to demonstrate that. I think as long as you're clear to learners that, yes, I need 72 hours, you know, that way they're not waiting after 24 hours and wondering, "Oh, he doesn't care about me." If learners have all that expectation, it's all outlined—if you have a great, you know, concise syllabus that outlines your grading expectations, you know, learners really appreciate that. If you can make it concise and clear to them. And that's really an art, you know, I can't pretend that's easy.

Right.

Um, but if you can really outline that communication and then follow through, that—it pays dividends.

Yeah.

[00:45:34] Mary: Thinking of the generational words that are used. In the generation before ours—I have kids, they're teenagers, they keep me very hip.

[00:45:45] Jason: That's funny, it doesn't work for me. They don't keep me hip. They make me feel like I'm not hip.

[00:45:50] Mary: Oh, well, I think I'm in a punk rock band, so I think I get like a baseline.

[00:45:56] Jason: All right, that's pretty good.

[00:45:56] Mary: But like, "leaving people on read"—

[00:45:56] Jason: That's funny.

[00:45:56] Mary: Ghosting me—these are terms of feeling abandoned, right? And these are terms that are often used. And so from their perspective, in this digital age, they know you got it. They know you probably got a notification on your phone of their email. So if you are opening an email and not responding to them right away, it feels like you don't care—even if you do, but you're just busy and you're going to get to it later. Like, sometimes they have notifications—they can see if you've read it. And then they just feel abandoned. And so, to that point, being clear with your communication, the expectations, your own boundaries—because it's good to have boundaries. It's good to teach people how to set their own boundaries. But just clear communication on what those will be and the intent of your communication structure.

[00:46:45] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've often told, you know, instructors, you know, just, yeah, just be really clear up front. If you don't answer emails on Sundays, just tell them you don't answer emails on Sundays. "I usually spend time with my family or outside or getting off the computer on Sundays." People will respect that and they'll, they'll understand when they send, uh, an email or a text on late Saturday night, and they don't hear anything until Monday morning, and it should be fine.

[00:47:08] Speaker 8: That way they're not just sitting there waiting.

[00:47:10] Jason: Yeah.

[00:47:11] Mary: Yeah, and you're modeling good, like, good self-care.

[00:47:14] John: That's right.

[00:47:15] Mary: We shouldn't all be available all the time. It's not healthy.

Right.

Right.

[00:47:19] John: I'm never looking for ways to lengthen my sig, but I stole something from my colleague Derek Lane. I'm sure he doesn't mind me saying it because it's wonderful, and I wrote him immediately when I saw it in his sig, and it says as follows: "I observe email-free nights and weekends."

[00:47:50] Mary: Beautiful.

[00:47:50] John: That's all it says. And it's just—yeah. And it's done wonders for my colleagues too, who email all weekend. And, um, and it's fine that they do, but I think that, um, it's starting to get them to reflect on whether or not they need to.

[00:48:04] Mary: I love that. We have a colleague, Renee Pilbeam, and she's very inclusive in general. She's also a single mom and she's like a Director of Learning Initiatives. Like, she's very busy all the time and has a flexible schedule because of that, which we all honor and we love that we have that as well. In her signature, she says, "I might email you outside of normal working hours. Please do not feel compelled to respond to me because of my working structure." Something to that effect. I probably blew that, Renee, I'm sorry. But the impact of that is huge because she's recognizing, "Look, I get it that I might be emailing you. Please don't feel like you have to respond to me because I also respect that this is probably not your working structure."

[00:48:29] Speaker 8: It's so—

[00:48:30] Mary: Inclusive.

I love her.

[00:48:31] Speaker 8: It's transparency and it's setting expectations.

[00:48:34] Mary: Absolutely.

[00:48:34] John: I've noticed now that Outlook will also just say to me, "Hey, would you like to just schedule this for Monday at 8 a.m.?"

[00:48:44] Speaker 8: Do you prefer to schedule something for work hours, or do you prefer just to put it in their inbox and then let them decide when to respond? Like, which is, which is the more preferred to—

[00:48:54] John: Go on Monday. And I, I like what your colleague is doing, and that's probably—wouldn't be my style, I would say. Because I still have enough psychopath friends and colleagues that will feel like they've got to answer it.

And so—

[00:49:04] Mary: I'm OCD, I would too.

[00:49:04] John: Yeah. So I probably would say, well, if the machine reminds me to, uh, uh, send it on Monday, then I'll just do that anyway.

[00:49:15] Mary: I love they have that in Slack too. Actually, Renee's the first one who ever modeled that for me because she figured out that you can do that. She probably has figured that out with her email as well. But like, she modeled it like, "Yeah, I don't send Slacks until 9 a.m. on the next business day," which is—

[00:49:27] John: Beautiful. Yeah. I think that's great. Yeah. Yeah, so then I guess I feel like I'm practicing what I'm preaching in my sig. If I'm observing email-free nights and weekends, that means I'm not even sending them also. It's sort of a slap to say, "Don't send me stuff, I'm not going to read it." It's also saying, "I'm not composing anything this weekend either."

[00:49:47] Jason: And I think we have to be aware of power differentials as well that happen between instructors and students.

Absolutely.

That sometimes they might feel responsible to reply back—as well as if we have staff people that we're doing the same thing with. It's one thing to send it to a colleague and they can feel free to ignore you for the weekend if you have a peer, right, but someone else might not feel that way. So I try to be conscious of that.

That's right.

That's right. Yeah, that's good.

Well, as we try to wrap this up, any final, final words or thoughts about, uh, uh, our next, our next phase of online learning and the kinds of things that maybe we should be talking about on this podcast for the, for the next few months?

[00:50:29] Brendan: I think getting to the two topics that I've heard about—you know, humanizing education and also the phases of online ed—I think we've reached a point where the belief in online education has been growing exponentially, especially because of the pandemic. And we've reached a point where it's, you know, it's not just possible. It's now—we're flooding the zone with options. There's a lot of tools that are available. People are constantly receiving best practices. Um, first of all, everyone's doing enough. You know, we get to a conference like this and we hear a million recommendations. You know, if you care and you're doing the best work you can, you're enough. And I think understanding that as a faculty member is very important. But also just working with instructional designers, keeping to research-based evidence, keeping it simple in the end is going to be the key, I think, to success in this zone where you have, really, a thousand options to deliver any course.

[00:51:20] Jason: I think we need to get your voice in that pillow speaker for professors.

He's got an—

[00:51:25] Speaker 2: Amazing voice, right?

[00:51:29] Jason: "You're doing enough."

I will second that.

[00:51:31] Mary: His students love him. Wonder why.

Yeah, that's good. That's good.

[00:51:36] Jason: Yeah. What else, as we round off here?

[00:51:40] Tom: I don't know. I'll just echo the simple. That's a concept that I think is continuing to echo in my head. Information overload. How can we keep it clean and to the point? I don't know what it looks like, but that's where my head is at.

[00:51:57] Speaker 8: And along those lines, if, if people do want to make forward motion, we want to, you know—they acknowledge or they, they can see that they want to improve their, their courses in some way or their, their teaching strategies. Uh, I also like this idea of a "plus one" approach, of thinking of just, "What's one thing I can do next term?" Uh, to, to be—to keep that forward motion, but also keep it simple. Uh, allow yourself grace, allow yourself, uh, time to, to grow and, and, uh, but, but there's always, like, one thing. "What can I try? What's the one thing?" And, and Ricardo and I were kind of talking about the, uh, the homegrown media and then kind of some of the problems around that. And, and as you guys mentioned, adding one light makes a huge difference. And we were like, "Yeah, you can do 20 percent work to make an 80 percent improvement." And there are a lot of things like that, where you just do one thing and it makes—it's—and it doesn't just make one unit of growth. It's like, you can get a lot of benefit out of some small things. So, uh, feel free to, to try one thing and see where that goes.

Yeah.

[00:53:01] Ricardo: I guess going back to the metaphor of this being the second half of life, um, you know, Tim and I were talking about this. Uh, the work's not over. You know, we got ChatGPT, we have all these things that make life easier, make content production easier. But we still got to work. You know, what was the concept that you were telling me about, Tim? The, uh, the, uh, the, the, the, the, things have to be a struggle in some ways?

Yeah, what—

[00:53:28] Speaker 8: Was that? Desirable difficulties?

[00:53:30] Ricardo: Desirable difficulties. I think, especially as technology advances and makes our life easier, there's got to be some desirable difficulties. And life is hard. And to go back again to that metaphor, is, you know—again, as I'm approaching 40, I didn't spend a lot of time in the gym up until now, but now I have to. If I want to keep continuing to, to, to live and to live a good life, it's going to take rigor. And I think that, again, as things get easier, we have to step up in other ways and continue our rigor and continue to—

[00:54:03] Jason: That's good. That's like the—that's the second—that's the, uh, the between-halves talk we needed, I think, Tim.

That's right.

In multiple ways, probably.

[00:54:13] John: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, coach.

[00:54:16] Speaker 2: Get out there and teach.

[00:54:20] Jason: Good. Well, this has been great, guys. Thank you so much. It's so good seeing people face to face in the same room and recording.

Yeah. Thanks for bringing us on.

Yeah.

[00:54:31] Ricardo: Yeah, thank you for literally setting the table for us.

[00:54:36] Mary: We're all—

[00:54:41] Jason: Right before we go here though, what are your—what are your plugs for your own podcasts or other things we should be listening to?

[00:54:49] Mary: Okay. So definitely listen to our podcast, Course Stories.

That's good.

Course Stories can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:54:56] Ricardo: And I would also, uh, really encourage people to check out, especially if you have, uh, uh, people—uh, you know, uh, individuals who are entering into college or didn't get a chance to enter into college. Study Hall, uh, is a—is a, a, a program on YouTube that we, uh, we, that ASU does in, in association with Crash Course and YouTube itself, uh, which is a—which is a kind of a college prep and also a college kind of serving—you can get credits for college, uh, by, by, by watching these videos. And we do quite a bit of the production for that in the ASU, uh, EdPlus studio at the Tempe campus. So please, please check that out. It's very good.

[00:55:36] Mary: When you're done—

[00:55:38] Tom: With all of that, check out ODLI on the Air. You can get it in most places where you find podcasts, and we are commuting length. So if you're, like, in a 20-minute commute, we'll fit right in there for you.

[00:55:52] Mary: Yeah, and then I'm going to plug on behalf of these guys because they're too humble to say anything. Brendan Lake—one of the early episodes, season one of Course Stories. Go listen to his, because my gosh, not only will you feel cared for by the end of it based on how sweet he is, but you'll learn a lot. And then also, Tim McKean is on Instruction by Design. It's a fabulous episode. It's another podcast out of Arizona State University that Ricardo started and started to produce, and then transitioned to others. But great podcast also.

Okay.

[00:56:19] Jason: That's fantastic. And we'll get all the links for all of those things, and we'll put them in the notes. OnlineLearningPodcast.com is where you can find all of these episodes.

[00:56:29] John: Jason, can you believe we got that URL? I still can't believe it. We've said this a—

[00:56:33] Jason: Couple times.

OnlineLearningPodcast.com. We'll put all the notes in there, and resources, so you can look all of this stuff up. Thank you so much, everybody.

[00:56:41] Mary: Thanks.