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Speaker: OTAN. Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Avi Jones: I'm Avi, and this is my presentation. I teach at too many places to mention, so I'm mentioning the two where I most often use video production. I also use it at adult schools. But the context is a little bit different, depending on where you go. And I'm presenting. Here we go.

OK, you have to start with a plan. OK, we'll start with the intro, talk about what needs I perceived in my classes. And then go on to talk just a little bit about the EEE framework, which is the approach that I used to come at this educational challenge. As in number 3, challenges to success included equity. That is lack of and the presence of stage fright among students.

And then we'll talk about a couple of digital solutions, some that you're, no doubt, familiar with, some that you might not be, and give some examples of student work in part 5. Everybody's been anonymized. So I've got a sample video, and we'll talk about some qualitative and quantitative student outcomes.

And then, finally, my very modest conclusions. OK, do we have questions in the chat? All right. OK, so I wrote this. I realized this sounds like this section needs identification. But really, it's just identifying the needs among the students is what I'm trying to communicate here.

So as we all know, I mean, why are we all here at TDLS? Online courses just exploded in 2020 to the point where we no longer really need to talk about digital natives because that's already half of a generation ago. Now it's more like online education natives.

Now, when I ask students at one of the universities to go online, if we need to, in an emergency, it's just automatic. And they all show up. It's a huge change. I didn't expect this, even in this part of my lifetime. But now we've all got it, and we have to deal with it.

Engagement can be an issue. I don't have to tell any of you that in a classroom, engagement is an issue. How about outside of a classroom, when we're on the internet and free to goof around if we want to? Yeah, it's an issue there as well, as you all know.

Equity's also an issue. I am fond of saying that one size does not fit all. So for instance, fully in-person education with no other option does not fit all, neither does fully online education with no other option. It just doesn't. it just doesn't. And the things that we might take for granted.

We might be tempted to take for granted, like turning on a camera in a Zoom meeting or participating in a class using your microphone are not-- they're not given. They're not granted. And so that's how I approach-- how I approach teaching online.

Resources are finite, both for-- as you well know, both for us, the instructors and for the students. So in order to offer anything new, I always really try hard to take into consideration the fact that I can't assume that everybody has the tools that I have or the tools that another student has.

OK, when we went to online teaching, I've had a few different styles. And this character, this actor here is representing the, yes, I may be online, but I'm still going to use my chalkboard. Gosh darn it, versus other person. A different person, may be an earlier adopter, but the way that this is set up, it's still, hey, can I see that?

Can I see-- can I read anything on that whiteboard? No matter your age, it seems like that's a stretch. Of course, we use whiteboards in Zoom, and they're great. And they're getting better all the time. We can get tired of those two, can't we? I mean, the students can, and we can as well.

And then there's the try hard. The try hard, like me, always trying to really boost up that experience and trying to get students to come along with it. Couldn't find a better image than this. In this one, she's still using-- the actor is still using the physical boards, but that's-- if you're a photographer, that's how you have to depict this, I guess.

OK, your mileage may vary, where student engagement is concerned. We all suffer from Zoom fatigue. I always ask people to get up and walk away for five minutes and come back, and I do the same. There are also-- it's pretty rare. I mean, in my experience, it's fairly rare, but there are some folks who-- they just don't want to be there.

They'd rather be taking a nap. And so I included this humorous photo here. OK, let's talk about EEE. I promise, I'm not turning it into a lecture. This will be brief. The problem, as I identified it, was that instructors need to be engaging with students. That's part of it.

But also, students need to take part, or it won't work. As we all know, it's the same thing as in the classroom. It's a push and pull. We all have to be involved, or a lesson or an assignment will not turn out well. So what's the best way? Or I should have said one of the best ways to achieve this.

Through this framework, EEE, probably most folks know about already. It's got three main components. The first is engage, which focuses on how technology can capture students' interest and motivation. And I included a picture of somebody who's terminally online. A lot of us-- a lot of us are too much tech-- too much tech.

The Engage aspect evaluates whether the education technology is able to stimulate curiosity. Can it encourage students to participate actively, of course, in concert with our instruction. And can it create a conducive learning environment? So that's E number 1. Enhance, E number 2.

This assesses whether the technology adds value to the learning experience. Here, we see a dystopian view of somebody with too much tech, ostensibly being served, but really of being isolated from other human beings. The enhanced aspect looks at whether technology improves understanding.

Does it facilitate knowledge retention, or does it allow for the exploration of complex concepts in ways that traditional methods cannot? So I think that this last bit is the most important one for us. Because we teach online, and we're looking for-- we're looking to use the technologies that have been made available to us, especially where they are provided for free.

And finally, Extend, the last E. It evaluates how tech enables students to extend their learning beyond the classroom. And I think this angle is the one that's most relevant to my current work. It could involve using technology to connect with experts, like having a guest speaker or resources outside of the school, but particularly collaborating with peers on projects outside of the walls.

Or engaging in real-world applications of their learning. So as far as language instruction goes, I would say, the last bit is really quite important, providing authentic experiences, authentic challenges for people to work through, whether it's English or French or whatever language the person may be learning and, usually, collaborating with peers to do so.

OK, what I wanted to do was apply EEE to language learning in an online class context. Just personally, most of my courses are online. It's a combination of synchronous, asynchronous, bi-synchronous, and a couple of them are on ground. So I've got the full range all the time.

We all learn to be agile in 2020, didn't we? So my thought has been, from the beginning of this presentation, that instructors and students need to meet halfway. We can provide the context that EEE provides. But when all is said and done, students need to engage with each other in order for the extend criterion to be met.

OK, what are some challenges to just asking everyone, hey, be video creators. We're in an age where most students know more about their phones than we do. They probably know more about social media than we do. Lots and lots and lots of my students make TikToks, and they do all this stuff that takes a learned skill that we don't teach in our classes.

So I do assume some knowledge that I don't have on the part-- on the part of the students or some skills that I don't have, which I know that they can modify and apply, if they do have a little bit of experience. I have a-- you can say it's a biased perspective.

So for example, at CSU Sacramento, all of the faculty, we're all provided with free Adobe everything. I don't get that anywhere else. I've never had it before. I don't expect it, if I stop working there. And the students are provided that as well, but only when they're on campus.

Sadly, they can't install the Adobe applications at home. So I come at-- I'll show you a video later that I produced in Premiere Pro. I come at video production with that perspective. So why not use the top of the line thing, you know? And I have to keep checking myself and say, most people do not have access to the top of the line thing.

So that's where equity comes in. As far as the use of technology, growing, according to the Pew Research Center, right now, 73% of American teens between 13 and 17 have access to a smartphone. My daughter does, and she's not even 11. And 87% of American teens in the same age group have or have access to a desktop or laptop computer.

I don't know what the overlap is in adult education. At the adult school where I teach, I did a straw poll last week, because we were working on a co-op-- completing a co-op, and I wanted students to be able to record themselves. And so I wanted to know, who's just on a phone, who's just on a computer?

And I was amazed to find that, actually, 90% of the students had a computer and a phone. With the populations that I work with, it was surprising to me. So we're able to work with that. OK, here's some more. Here are some more data from Pew. Should we look at another time.

I don't want to spend too much time on that. OK, part 1, as far as the challenges go, we're coming back to equity. This picture, I think, is just absolutely the definition of equity. We've probably all seen the photo-- I mean, the drawing of the kids trying to look over the fence to see the baseball game.

This takes it a little bit further. And we've got someone who's got a great idea in the middle, not being provided the same access. So, of course, we could make three stacks of books, and everyone would have the same access. But due to financial, political, lots of different reasons, that doesn't always happen.

OK, all right. How many of you have a classroom sponsored by Samsung? Yeah, me neither. It's not every teacher that has access to rooms like this with. It looks like tablets with keyboards, brand new, everything clean, everything high tech. Some of us are stuck with whatever we can come up with, right?

So I feel this way. If you want to be a really engaging online instructor, you're probably going to have to spend some money on your own lighting, your own equipment, and all that thing. OK, part 2 in terms of challenges, stage fright. I thought this image was funny. Faces on Zoom, blank screens, and ceiling fans.

There are a lot of folks who don't ever turn their cameras on. And for some instructors and some administrators, that makes them very uncomfortable. For me, personally, it doesn't, because what I notice is that folks who don't turn their cameras on are still very participatory. They still participate a lot.

So I don't make an issue of it, especially at the adult school, where it can be a cultural issue. OK, stage fright in online meetings. As I said, sometimes, this is for cultural reasons. And sometimes, they're just shy. I forget that not everyone wants to be a teacher. Not everyone wants to stand in front of a group of people, big or small, all day long, some.

For some people, it's really, really hard. And so I had been assigning skits in a second or third language for people to create and perform. And I noticed that some people were really breaking down during the performance. Because there's that-- maybe it's an urban legend that Americans are more afraid of public speaking than they are of shark attack.

I really see that play out in classrooms sometimes. But also in recording their work, students can sometimes be camera shy and not wanting to-- hating the sight of their face, hating the sound of their voice on recordings. I think probably all of us can identify with that. But for some, it's more acute.

So my thought-- I'm saying hypothesis, but really, it's just a thought. I think that when students collaborate with their peers, and they get that support and scaffolding that their confidence in their own stage presence can be heightened. It's a group project. Hey, it's not just me looking silly up there.

It's me and my three friends. And maybe I made a new friend in this process. That can be a real confidence booster. OK, so let's talk about some solutions, native and non-native. To your Canvas, OK, describing the assignment that I've been skirting around. I've made a group assignment for students to collaborate and create a short video.

I do this in all of my classes. But right now, I'm talking about a French 1A course and a French 1B course. So those are the two first year courses. Students need to submit it online. Students submit it on Canvas. So I said, I use this for my French courses.

But I also mentioned earlier that in completing co-ops, sometimes, we have roleplay, interviews, things that we need to do with the instructor. And sometimes, the assessment is the recording. The recording is the assessment. So it applies across the board.

OK, what's free? What's free, and what's not free? I think we all know that Canvas Studio was supported during the first year of the Canvas rollout testing year for all adult schools in California. I didn't check this morning, but I had heard that it was not going to be supported anymore.

But then I saw that it was still supported pretty recently. Maybe somebody else knows. Anyways, Studio is basically a repository for students and instructors videos. To me, it just gives you a little bit more storage space, but it also has-- yeah, you can annotate videos. You can put different things in there.

You can, of course, just use the upload record media, the function that's native to Canvas. It's free, because it comes with Canvas. But it depends on you, either producing a video offline and then uploading it or recording it, making it a much more high stakes assessment because you're doing it live.

And that's tough. And then we have to react. So I should mention that only one of the-- I teach at five different institutions, and only one of them has GoReact. And I think they're not going to support it after this year. So a pie in the sky, but I have been using it for the past two years.

It's an LTI designed for students to record and turn in video. And I'll show a-- there we go. Here's a screenshot-- idealized screenshot of GoReact. And it can be something that is interactive. Students can go to different points in time and react. We're all going to go react to the latest video, this thing.

And it's pretty useful. I do a lot of individual assignments, because these can be private. Other students can't see them, or they can be opened up and be made public at the level of the class. So this is the assignment. Lots of words. OK, in the middle of the description, it says your group will record this conversation, song, rap, chant, and upload the recording to Canvas.

This part was student provided. Students asked me last year, they started saying, could we do a song? Could we do a rap? Yes, all of the above. Whatever gets you engaged sounds great. And then here's the experimental part. Be prepared to have this be played in our class.

I want to make sure that folks know that the produced video is going to be-- it's going to be played for other people. So I want to show you all an example. I had replaced the students with actors to keep everyone's anonymity here. I need to share sound and optimize for video clip. OK. OK. Please let me know if you don't hear anything.

[video playback]

- [non-english speech]

[end playback]

OK could we hear that? Could we hear the students?

Audience: Yeah, it was beautiful. [interposing voices]

Avi Jones: That was a song, I believe. OK. Thank you, Kenya. All right. OK, time for outcomes. OK, so we've been talking about student-- So we've been talking about student affect, especially as it's manifested in stage fright or things like that.

And of course, students work were always results-driven, especially if we want to publish anything. I'm not publishing any of this. I'm just presenting it here. But let's take a look. Here's a different one with the students blurred out, obviously. Excuse me.

Students figured out pretty quickly that they can simply have a Zoom meeting and record the Zoom meeting. And it's a great way. If you want to do everything in just one take, it's a great way to get it done. And sometimes, there are personality conflicts. I'm sure we're all aware that 100% of students don't get along.

But people end up turning in the assignment. And I'll tell you, in a minute, how they fare. Here it is. For the past three semesters, 100% of students have completed the assignment, with a grade of B or better. This is a quantitative outcome, and it's the thing that administration likes to hear about.

It's a quantitative outcome. We've got other numbers on this, but I think this is the most compelling one. Here's the first qualitative one. Students enjoy doing the work and seeing the finished product. The group of students that I showed a moment ago told me very directly, thank you for doing this. This is a really cool project.

And it felt more real than other things that we did. So I felt that, that was really positive. OK, what about a combination qualitative/quantitative outcome. Just about everyone in the exit surveys. I just call them exit surveys, but they're just really short surveys on Canvas.

Students indicated that they preferred this method of completing the assignment to other approaches. When we watched the video, one of the students in that group, who we didn't see, was a person who just had a terrible time. Now presenting in person, he was not having it.

And so when we went to this method, I think that he gained a lot of confidence and started being able to do his part. All right. On friends, to the future. It all comes back to equity. OK, to be realistic, I don't think we'll ever have 100% equity in education.

I'm talking about the kinds of things that we are provided with, the kinds of things that we can provide students with. Can we give a laptop to every single student we ever have? No, right? So we're aware of this, I think, and we all try to meet it and try to do what we can to increase equity, when we see that someone has more need than somebody else.

We can focus our attention on that. And then free tools, all the free stuff. Even without the LTIs is that I talked about earlier, you guys know that Canvas allows us to record and upload media. So that's fine. That's built in. But attenuating the usefulness of this are stage fright and other student affect.

Making it a little bit better, in number 4, is that doing recording, I have found really, really relieves a lot of that attenuation. In the future for my teaching, maybe for somebody else's as well. I'd like to see-- I'd like to have more widespread use of video production by students.

They get really, really creative when we let them. Thanks very much. What a wonderful slide. OK. I just wanted to say that images and video are courtesy of slidesgo.com and Adobe Stock education license. Thanks for coming to my presentation.