Gregory Tweedie

Associate Professor, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada

Interviewed July 2020 by Martina MacFarlane

MM Greg, why don’t you start by telling us a bit about what you do?

GT I’m an associate professor at the Werklund School of Education. My particular interest is to do with language teaching English as an additional language. I do a lot of online teaching, in particular teacher development for those who are language specialists.

MM You recently won a University of Calgary teaching award. Can you tell us more about that, and about what led to that accomplishment and recognition?

GT I was lucky enough to receive the Teaching in Online Environments Award. The application was due before we heard of COVID-19, and I have been involved in, and have really enjoyed, online teaching for quite some time before that. The award recognizes that earlier work. The students that nominated me, humbled me with their response about the engagement that they had experienced during my courses. That was the greatest compliment I could have received, to be recognized for that formally. The timing was quite coincidental, as then we switched the whole university to online learning.

MM Clearly, you’ve come into this current COVID situation with a wealth of prior knowledge and experience in online teaching. What, for you, has been the biggest challenge experienced when moving to remote or online teaching?

GT I think the biggest challenge in any online teaching is presence, enhancing the sense of presence. We all need human contact. I’ve learned through the school of hard knocks that it’s not enough to post an article up on to the course platform—D2L or whatever platform—and then just give instructions—in written form—for students to read it.

One of the students wrote in one of my USRIs (Universal Student Ratings of Instruction) that sometimes they experience online learning as a nebulous concept, that someone just posts an article, and then there’s a written discussion. There is no sense of person-to-person contact. And so, using video, the affordances that video gives us, the video technology that’s built into D2L (the learning platform we have at the University of Calgary), it is an enormously beneficial tool for meeting that challenge of presence, instructor to student, and student to student.

MM In trying to tackle this challenge of presence and jumping full force into the online world, what are some of the opportunities created by digital education?

GT There’s something called the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition) model. It’s a hierarchy of the affordances of technology for education. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the technological tools that don’t actually do anything different than traditional classroom methods. For example, a keyboard really is a pen and paper. It has the same functionality. At the top end of the hierarchy are things that technology actually brings to education, to learning, that are not available in a typical classroom. For example, the ability to write on a Google document simultaneously, of having people co-composing a Google Doc—you can’t really imagine that in a blackboard scenario at the front of the classroom, with people leaning over each other to co-compose. So that’s one of the opportunities the tools of technology provide. There are other tools like that. We tend to use those tools that we’re comfortable with, so a lot of those tools are the same as a traditional classroom, like posting an article and reading it, and then writing about it. So, things that enhance presence—technology affords us some of those—we just have to put them to work.

MM I apologize, Greg. You may have heard my dog barking in the background, and I guess that’s one of these added challenges of remote learning or collaboration of any kind, especially when it comes to things like Zoom meetings. You’re suddenly transported to my living room, and you’re hearing sounds around me as well.

GT Yes, but having said that, when you’re managing a group of junior high boys with the windows open, and people are passing in the hallways, and people can’t find their books, or their pencil breaks, or are asking to go to the bathroom—these distractions are, in a way, more easily managed online. On Zoom I can mute a distracting student, but I can’t press harder to mute them in a junior high classroom.

MM That makes a lot of sense. You do have a lot more control in some ways over your students, or co-collaborators, and how they participate along the way. That’s a plus! So what would you say is your most-used software tool?

GT So, an assumption you could make about me is that because of winning the online teaching award, I am the ultimate tech geek; and I’m actually not. There are a lot of people who are more tech savvy than me. What I have learned to do is to use the D2L platform, which we’re provided at the university, to the max. I do my best not to have students needing to access other software tools. I’m really interested in containing the course within the software provided by the university. So I’ve learned to use lots of tools in D2L—not all of them, I’m still learning—to maximize the teaching and learning. That way, students don’t have to sign up for a tool just for this course, get a password, and give their e-mail and contact information to who knows what, or where. Everything is self-contained. So I work almost exclusively with the university-provided course platform, D2L.

MM Working with D2L, there are lots of built-in features and different tools that you can use. So what are some of your favourite resources, within D2L, for online teaching?

GT The best feedback I’ve received from students is about the use of video in D2L. I generally don’t do written discussions. I ask students to read and respond to a prompt by video, and I use the D2L-only feature for video. It’s called Video Assignments. They click a button, the program accesses their camera and mic on their computer, and records. And so, my discussions on D2L are student-to-student video discussions. Although many students are nervous at first, in the course evaluations that’s often what they list as the strongest feature of the course. They’re producing videos themselves. I do my lecture content and recorded screencast videos in video, but here I am talking about student-produced videos using D2L itself. Another feature that I use is that I put everything that a student needs on the course landing page and use links so I don’t have them searching around looking for what they need to do each week. It’s all a click away: A new window opens to that task. So, those are a couple of the D2L features that I really use a lot.

MM It sounds like a lot of what you do in your teaching is working to bring that human element back into the platform by aligning how you would approach any regular in-person class, and then using features that can leverage that human connection in the class. Is that right?

GT The online research literature uses the term “presence”—instructor presence, student presence. How I make decisions about technology and which technology to use is to ask, “Does it enhance learner-teacher presence?”

MM As always, new tools are emerging and quick shifts to the online world are happening. What do you expect that higher education might look like in ten years’ time?

GT It’s so difficult to predict. COVID has punctured internationalization in a way, and it’s very difficult for me to predict. I think there will be micro-credentialing. I think universities worldwide will have to do a lot of work around recognizing each others’ credentials. Yeah, it’s a very confusing world at present. I expect that the key issue for successful teaching and learning, no matter how advanced the technology is, is going to be presence. To what extent does it humanize it? I guess that’s a belief that I have about education—that knowledge and values are transmitted from person to person, and that they are taken on board as people share with people. And so I don’t expect that will change. The means by which we do it might get better, faster, more complex. But I think the success of teaching and learning will always be that element of presence.

MM I think that message is both simple and really quite profound. The goal of knowledge sharing is very much the same as ever, but the tools are rapidly changing. Do you have any last thoughts, or additional tips and tricks that you’d like to share?

GT If there were two things that I would pass on to encourage instructors who are thrown into emergency online remote teaching, the first would be that you don’t have to be a tech geek to pull it off. D2L provides a lot of the tools that you need, and you don’t have to be a computer whiz. Most of the instructors I know who are struggling with the idea of online teaching in my small circle are already doing the basic functions that are required to pull off an online course—they’re emailing, they’re uploading and posting and sharing. So really, you don’t have to be a super tech geek.

The second piece of advice I’d have, and I say this because I’m not as IT savvy as other people, is to stick with a platform. In this case, stick with the university-prescribed one and learn it well. Rather than pull things from here, there and everywhere, I encourage instructors, especially if they’re beginning this process, to work within the system you have as far as possible.

I would say that this third piece of free advice probably reflects my learning style. I’ve never read an owner’s manual for a computer, or a car, or the desk I bought from IKEA. I just don’t work that way. When I have a question, I go find the answer. I don’t like to read the manual from start to finish, because a lot of the information is not relevant. But when there’s a fuse that I can’t identify, I go looking for it in the owner’s manual. So, too, much of what’s offered is one-size-fits-all workshops. And I think that freaks people out, when you have things like a workshop on how to use D2L, or a workshop on how to use YuJa. I attended an excellent workshop on YuJa, but ten percent of it was relevant to me. The presenters were outstanding, but they were trying to give a whole overview. I had a specific question about something to do in YuJa, and that’s what I needed the answer to. So, I really prefer tech drop-in sessions to workshops.

MM These technologies can be really overwhelming at first when there’s so much information to take in. As you’re picking and choosing which tools you’ll use for instruction, are there ways that you help your students to navigate using the technology itself?

GT Yeah. So, for example, I create how-to do videos in D2L for students. But Zoom is a game-changer. To be able to say to a student who’s really struggling with tech, “As long as you can get into Zoom” Most people have been dragged kicking and screaming into it. It’s like when my grandmother first saw touch-tone phones, but she got it. She had to. The other one, the rotary phone disappeared on her. So, again, people have been dragged into Zoom.

The screen share feature is also a game-changer. Now I can say to the student, “You share your screen. I’ll make you co-host, and I’ll talk you through where to click and how to do it.” What a tool. Amazing. That’s one of those ones that is high on the hierarchy of the SAMR model—something we couldn’t do in a normal classroom.

Reflection

My own experiences with remote learning began before the word “online” was in anyone’s lexicon, as a high school student in correspondence school. Course textbooks and learning materials were packaged up and sent to my rural post office box, and I returned essays, short answer responses, and quizzes for grading to my teacher in a self-addressed, stamped envelope. It must have taken weeks to get feedback on the assignments, but there was no need to identify this method as “snail mail”—there was no other kind. Despite these long lag times, I began to be cognizant, even back then, about instructor presence. Though I didn’t use the term then, I was keenly aware that some teachers marked up my written work with stars, circles, underlining and smiley faces that prefigured today’s emojis. Some told me how I could improve future assignments, indicated specifically what was good about my work, and added personal notes like remarking on the weather where they lived, or the names of their pets. Other teachers returned my work devoid of comments with only a letter grade at the top. Sometimes certain words were circled in red. Unless the circled words were obviously misspelled, I had no idea what these circles meant. You can probably guess which instructor practices led me toward more engagement with the course content, and which ones led me toward less.

I took some correspondence courses to supplement my undergraduate studies as well, and it was more of the same: some instructors would add personal touches to the reams of boxed materials, and others must have felt it was outside their brief as a “serious” university lecturer. In one exceptionally dry undergraduate course that contained an uninteresting title and equally uninteresting content, both of which I’ve forgotten, an instructor’s “presence” changed my life trajectory. The instructor saw something in my work that no one else had and took the time to write a lengthy note on my paper about the potential he saw in me for graduate level research and writing. The comments stuck with me, calling out what I couldn’t see in myself, and provided a seed of confidence that would take root in future. Now, many years later, as I myself mark up papers for undergraduate students, I try to draw out the latent potential I see in their work. I still wish for the life of me that I’d kept that page of comments from that instructor, and even more I still wish I knew how to contact that instructor to tell him how his comments shaped my life path.

All this is to say: We don’t need to be up on the latest technological gadgetry to have presence as instructors. We just need to be present.

About

Gregory Tweedie is an associate professor at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada. He is a recipient of the Teaching in Online Environments Award 2020 from the University of Calgary. Gregory holds a PhD in education (applied linguistics focus) from the University of Queensland, Australia. His teaching and research draw heavily upon his experiences as a language teacher and trainer in East, Southeast, and Central Asia, the Middle East, Canada, and his native Australia. He has been involved in remote learning since it was just called “learning.”