Social Presence and Closing the Circle

“I just don’t know my students this semester.”

Are you feeling this? I've discovered colleagues are sharing this sentiment since the COVID pivot to remote and distance learning models. 

For those who have taught online previously, we structure classes with social presence theory in mind — making sure students connect with us, their colleagues, and the content.  But are we closing the loop, and making sure we get to know them? 

Take this scenario: A great internship opportunity pops into your email and you immediately scroll through your mind for students who would be a good fit. Not having a great fit yourself, you spread the word to other profs teaching courses more related to the opportunity. Nope, none, nada. “I just don’t know my students this semester.”

As a professor who teaches in all modalities, I work to create experiences and connections for students. For online courses, I intentionally create opportunities for social presence. My three-prong approach aims to connect students to the content, me, and other students. 

In all honesty, it’s a hub and spoke model. The key is viewing each arm with an input and output — two-way communication.

I think we might be worrying about the students connecting with us and forgetting about us connecting back with them. The switch to remote learning for many instructors stripped away their normal ways to exchanging with students — the before and after class conversations or watching for faces light up during particular topics — and making those mental notes of interests and preferences.

This especially comes into play when we are trying to match students with internships and opportunities. Yes, you can send the notice to all students, but sometimes that individual nudge that "you'd be great at this" pushes a student to apply.

We need to find ways to adapt. 

• Online get-to-know-you interest surveys can help. Ask students what kinds of opportunities would they like to hear about. Then keep the answers in a safe place and reference it when an opportunity comes along.
• Ask students to email you their interests with a specified subject line. Then you can capture all of those messages into one folder, and it's searchable for key words when you have a hot lead.
• Even in an asynchronous course, I have set up small virtual group meeting times where students can pop in for a quick chat. I find this is where I learn a bit more about each student as an individual.
• Low stakes reflective writing assignments can illuminate a student's talents and career interests as well. As you notice a student's strengths, make a note in your gradebook about it.

How do you close the circle in a two-way communication loop? How are you making social presence theory work for your students and you?

Ethics - Quick Ways to Incorporate Reminders

In preparation for a panel for an area journalism group on ethics, I tried to think of the major areas of concern in today's media world and how we prepare students to be ethical communicators. 

After receiving ethics training across the curriculum and in practice working on student-run PR agencies, TV, radio and news products, students leave their college programs armed to recognize when they're in a potentially tricky spot, how to work through a decision-making process, and what resources they can consult to uphold industry codes of ethics. 

But how can we keep ethics at the forefront once outside of the college experience?

1. Keep a copy of your industry's Code of Ethics where you can see it while you work.
2. Set a reminder on your calendar to review the Code of Ethics every six months or so.
3. Participate in Twitter chats for your industry. PRSA hosts #PREthics and the entire month of September is dedicated to ethics in public relations.
4. Attend or plan an ethics presentation or panel for your local industry organization. 
5. Follow the social media feeds of organizations promoting ethics. Then, your daily feed will give you little reminders. The Arthur W. Page Center is one idea (full disclosure — I'm a Page grant recipient).
6. Consume publications about ethics or sign up for their e-newsletters: http://www.mediaethicsmagazine.com/
7. Bring "fun" case studies to discuss at staff meetings. It's much easier to debate and learn when it's not YOUR immediate crisis. Dissect someone else's ethical dilemma with the help of hindsight: https://mediaethicsinitiative.org/case-studies/
8. Seek out mentors and create a network of your ethics sages. It helps to have those you can call and chat through the nuisances of an ethical situation.

In the daily grind of producing content and communicating, the bigger discussions about ethics can get placed on the backburner. Keeping the conversation going throughout the year can make the more ethical decisions easier to make in the moment. 

Zoom Check-ins — Preventing the Zone Outs in Meetings and Online Classes

We're living in a Zoom world. Recently, I heard people questioning if students are actually participating in the synchronous online sessions, or if they "set it and forget it" — walk away or let someone else babysit the screen. The same goes for any of us in a meeting. Zoom fatigue is real, and check-ins help to re-engage participants.

Whether in class or in a meeting, a few little tricks and tools can help engage participants in low stakes ways. I can't take credit for these — I'm collating tips from a recent conference and my university's HyFlex training. 

Annotate - You can ask participants to mark up your slides. This requires some thought beforehand like checking your settings to make sure you have allowed for participants to annotate slides. You could have a slide in your presentation with lots of space for student comments. Or it could be a T chart where students leave an emoji or drawing to indicate a level of comfort with a subject or even their opinions about a course topic. As someone who has taught editing, I'm tempted to insert a bunch of typos and have students edit as we move along. (Remember to clear the annotations as you move to the next slide.)

Breakout rooms - Everyone needs a change of scenery. Using breakout rooms gives participants a chance to refresh. Maybe ask the participants in each room to do quick intros or answer an easy question to get the ball rolling in the new room. Ask participants to assume roles like notetaker and reporter. When you reconvene as the larger group, small group reporters can help lead the larger discussion.

Rename feature - In Zoom, you have the option to change how your name appears. Once I joined a session at a national convention with "Sarah's Iphone" appearing on the screen. I quickly changed that to a more professional name with personal pronouns. One suggestion was to have students change their screen name to "Anon" and then with video muted, they could anonymously chat with feedback or check understanding with reactions. For a fun change, have them rename their profile with a pet's name. 

Reactions - Simply ask participants to use the reaction (clap or thumbs up) to a question or comment. You could use the symbols as a polling feature, too. Participants can change the skin tone of their hand icons in the settings.

Write or speak option - It's not ideal to have everyone responding in unison, but you can give participants the option to write or speak in a discussion moment. You could use the chat feature for a quick one-minute writing assignment that can be used to check understanding. Or ask everyone to type one question others might want to ask about the topic.

Chat advocate - You can assign a chat advocate who makes certain the questions being asked in the chat stream receive attention. You could throw the mic to this advocate every-so-often to change up the pacing and the speaker's voice.

If we're honest, people can check-out mentally in face-to-face classes and meetings, too. Just as we read the room in a physical situation, we need to read the virtual room and decide if the audience needs a change or a check-in. 

What tricks or tips have worked for you? 

Hello from 2008

While looking for something totally unrelated, I stumbled upon a bucket of my teaching documents from 2008. Instead of staying on task, I  jumped down a rabbit hole of worksheets, tip sheets, graded papers, student evaluations, and more from semesters teaching an advanced media writing course.

As I unearthed parts of my teaching past, I found myself motivated by that teacher from 12 years ago. The time she would take to create a new worksheet and the lengths she would go to connect students with real-world learning was inspiring. I still spend time crafting documents to help students and developing real-world connections, but when reflecting on an entire tub of pedagogy, I'm reminded that the time invested matters. 

Time matters, too. It was a stark look at how much has changed in my field. The Associated Press help files are from a style guide long ago and the print-focused stories my students crafted screamed for a multimedia make-over. The gentle reminder -- keep learning and keep up -- lingered in my mind. 

This tub of goodness arrived at just the right time. I'm finishing my class plans and syllabi for the fall, and past me gave present me that extra boost of motivation I need after an unusual spring semester and stay-at-home summer. 

Did I recycle the entire contents of the tub? Whoa, let's not get too wild. I did pare it down A LOT and it now fits in one tidy binder. I hope your fall planning is coming along, and if you get diverted, don't fret. It might be exactly what you needed.

Listening and Feedback — in online classes

At the crossroads of my teaching and research, I'm thinking of how my research on listening in social media translates to listening in our online courses. In my four-week feedback for two of my online-only courses (before COVID-19 turned everything online), students liked that I offer personalized comments and feedback on each assignment. For them, this is evidence that I am listening and am a real person.

A colleague and I looked at listening expectations of stakeholders when communicating with organizations in social media. What we found is that people expected active and emphatic listening. This means responses that acknowledge the stakeholder's situation and perspective, as well as working toward a solution or action.

What if we consciously applied those concepts to our interactions in an online class? I think many teachers do this without even thinking, especially in primarily face-to-face courses. Bodie et al. (2012) identified high-ranking verbal behaviors of competent listeners. Here, I'll try to translate those to online courses, which really means continuous feedback.

• Responding with something pertinent — in many of my classes, I ask students to reflect on the week's tasks in low-stakes writing. The journal entries could be assessed with a quick rubric of check, check+, check-. But it's also an opportunity to take something they said and respond to it.
• Answers and asks questions — this could mean popping onto a discussion board to further a thread along with a follow-up question, or answering a wonder suggested in a reflection paper with another question or a link to further information.
• Elaborates on topics being discussed — when students seem to have similar questions or misunderstandings about a concept, an extra video lecture on the specific topic could help. Or if a student really seems interested in a topic or is ready for the next level, elaborate on the next relevant topic.
• Offers advice, opinions, perspectives — this is where we excel, right?! Maybe we offer a counterpoint or share how the topic worked in a real-word setting in industry or a recent news article. I shoot a weekly welcome video where I can incorporate advice, opinions, and perspectives, based on student work from the previous week.

You may be thinking, this would take me forever. It's really not that time-consuming, and it has a big impact. Quick responses to assignments in a comments field, in addition to a rubric, can make the student feel like a real person read and reviewed their work, not a teacher-bot. Additionally, I use the student's name in the response, and write in a conversational tone, using some emojis and !!!. 

Recently, a friend shared with me how her students lauded her for feedback in her online sections. She felt like she could do more. (Me, too!) We were both surprised by how thankful students are for even basic feedback — evidence that we are listening. 

As you plot your next online section, consider your feedback plan and other evidence that you are listening. Could you be more purposeful in creating that social presence? How do you show that you are listening in your online courses?

Some of my listening research has been supported by a grant from the Arthur W. Page Center​.

Reference

Bodie, G. D., St. Cyr, K., Pence, M., Rold, M., & Honeycutt, J. (2012). Listening competence in initial interactions: Distinguishing between what listening is and what listeners do. International Journal of Listening, 26(1), 1-28. doi:10.1080/10904018.2012.639645

For wider dissemination: Making infographics for your research

What do you do to fill the gap, reach beyond the Ivory Tower, or drive your gown into town? As part of my graduate research course this semester, we talked about access to research. If researchers have articles behind a publisher paywall, what can they do to bring the findings to the masses.

Enter the infographic. Students have been tasked with making infographics for a handful of research articles. But before I set them out on this project, I thought I better practice what I am now preaching. It's not perfect, but here's my stab at an infographic for a project Dr. Chris Gearhart and I recently completed.

Here's what I learned:

1. Wow, condensing your research to an inforgraphic forces you to boil it down to its core. I suspect this will be easier when the article is not YOUR baby.

2. Letting go of text is HARD for some of us. I found myself wanted to clutter the *graphic* with words. Use the templates and icons as guides. Tell yourself to think in images. Edit, edit, edit. I could probably still replace some words with graphics.

3. So many good, free resources are out there. I chose to use Visme.co, but there are tons of options. As with any freemium, you have to settle for the basic package if you're on a zero-budget. But, I was able to complete my project and export a jpg.

Let me know what you think. What has worked for you when creating an infographic for your research?