EP 20 - Dr. Olysha Magruder from Johns Hopkins talks about their three-pronged approach to online faculty development

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Dr. Olysha Magruder about the future of online education, a three-pronged approach to faculty development including JHU’s Coursera MOOC Course, and time boxing to help achieve successful outcomes. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com

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Links and Resources:

• Dr. Olysha Magruder is the Interim Assistant Dean in the Center for Learning Design at Johns Hopkins University and can be found here at LinkedIn
• Excellence in Online Teaching Coursera Course
• Johns Hopkins Excellence in Online Teaching Symposium
• Beth McMurtrie on Teaching: What happens to teaching after Covid? (Chronicle of Higher Ed Paywall)

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

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!

False Start

[00:00:00] Jason Johnston: Any other questions for us before we get rolling? We'll do our normal kind of intro here, and then we'll get into the conversation.

[00:00:07] Olysha Magruder: No, no questions. I hope I don't sound too goofy, but...

[00:00:10] John Nash: No, we like goofy.

[00:00:11] Jason Johnston: Yeah, you'll fit right in! . We decided on the front end. We're just going to let it roll in that way. And I feel like john people have appreciated that

[00:00:18] John Nash: I even laugh at our own dumb intros because it's just, but yeah, we're not too stiff about it, but we have a serious topic here, but yeah, we're still humans.

Start of Episode

[00:00:27] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:30] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is online learning in the second half, the online learning podcast.

[00:00:35] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot still isn't. How are we going to get to the next stage, Jason?

[00:00:49] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?

[00:00:54] John Nash: I agree. Let's do a podcast and talk about it right now. What do you want to talk about today?

[00:01:00] Jason Johnston: Wait, we are doing a podcast to talk about it. That's the weird thing about our intro. We're already doing a podcast

[00:01:05] John Nash: Yeah. It's very meta.

[00:01:07] Jason Johnston: a little meta that way. Yeah. Yeah today we are going to talk with Alicia Magruder. Dr. Alicia Magruder from John Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering.

[00:01:22] Olysha Magruder: Hello, Alicia here.

[00:01:25] Jason Johnston: Did I say all that right?

[00:01:27] Olysha Magruder: tHere is one funny thing about the name of my university, which is it's named after somebody. who has a weird first name, and it's Johns. That was his name. It's very common to say John because it feels weird to say Johns, and in fact, when I originally applied for my position in my cover letter, I also said John.

[00:01:47] Jason Johnston: Oh boy.

[00:01:48] Olysha Magruder: I learned very quickly that, oops, it's a weird name, Johns Hopkins, but everything else, yes.

[00:01:53] Jason Johnston: I'm glad you, you made it through that first that first test and they were kind to you, somebody not too long ago spelled Tennessee wrong on a cover letter, hard one to look over, easy to do though, easy to do, but also a little hard to look over sometimes.

Yeah nice to have you here. So Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering.

[00:02:14] Olysha Magruder: Yes, that's right. Whiting School of Engineering.

[00:02:17] Jason Johnston: Yeah. And tell us about what you do there.

[00:02:21] Olysha Magruder: So I am the interim assistant dean of learning design and innovation, which is a somewhat new position not on the team, but for me, but I lead the learning design team of instructional designers and course support specialists. And we work collaboratively with our multimedia and instructional technology team to create online courses.

So we have our main program that we I guess we could say service is a engineering for professionals program and there are 22 online master's degrees that we help support. So we run hundreds of courses at any given time. We have right now we have about 130 plus courses in development with our instructional designers and yeah, that's what we do.

[00:03:09] Jason Johnston: Yeah. That's exciting. You've got a lot going on there though with with a hundred plus

[00:03:15] Olysha Magruder: Yeah,

[00:03:15] Jason Johnston: Does it feel like a lot?

[00:03:18] Olysha Magruder: it does, but we've structured our team so that it's very collaborative amongst our instructional designers, faculty, the multimedia folks, the course support specialists. So we have what we call pods of team members and they work together for certain programs. And that way they can. Discuss the program specific needs, but because of that, we have a very nice workflow that we've created.

So it is a lot, but it's manageable. So far. I haven't had any anybody tell me that they're ready to put their hands up in frustration. That happens occasionally, we get through it.

[00:03:53] Jason Johnston: Yeah.

[00:03:55] John Nash: Alicia, does every program that you just mentioned receive the benefits of your services or do some just still go on their own?

[00:04:02] Olysha Magruder: They all go through us to create their courses. There are some, a couple of programs that have a slightly different approach that we accommodate, but eventually they end up with us. So everything that goes online through those master's programs through that one engineering for professionals is all the courses go through us at some point and we have a the course support specialists.

We also have a quality assurance manager. They make sure everything is like accessible and, we have all these quality checks throughout the process. So that's by design. So all of those courses are vetted, reviewed, et cetera.

[00:04:41] John Nash: That's wonderful. I know at my institution, there are online programs that do the best they can, and we have folks that can help us, but it's not as systematic as that.

[00:04:52] Olysha Magruder: Yeah, we are somewhat unique and a part of that is because these big online programs, most of the faculty are by design people in the field. So they're super busy people and they're incredible people. It's pretty cool working with people who work at NASA or worked on the, asteroid destruction mission or are doing biomedical engineering things that you see on LinkedIn .

And I don't even know half the time what they're working on, but then I see these posts and I'm like, whoa, they're like revolutionizing the medical field and. So they're super busy people, and so we've designed this to work with that particular type of person, and it's a longer, it's a very, it's a committed process, and it's a longer term process, but it works, mostly.

[00:05:39] John Nash: Nice.

[00:05:40] Jason Johnston: If we ever wondered whether or not online learning was important we now know that it is because we're training up the next people that will actually stop that asteroid from hitting the earth, right? The current people that know how to save us aren't going to be alive when the asteroids hit. So we're online learning is essential for training up the next generation.

[00:06:02] Olysha Magruder: We actually had , one of the mission coordinator for the DART mission speak at it at a recent event, I don't think she teaches for us, but she's affiliated with one of our units. Anyways, she gave the whole awesome session on the DART mission, which was the asteroid deflection mission.

She reassured everyone that it's very rare that's going to happen, that we have an asteroid that will hit that, We'll destroy the earth or what have you, but some of the statistics you put up there, she seemed reassured by, but I was like, oh my gosh, I don't feel good about these numbers.

I know she does, but they still as any number seems a little bit,

[00:06:38] Jason Johnston: right? If it's not zero, it still feels like something that could happen.

[00:06:42] Olysha Magruder: Exactly,

[00:06:43] Jason Johnston: Willis

When you need them too, right? Because I, he's not going to be saving us. That's an Armageddon reference. I don't know if you've seen it. Have you seen that one, John

[00:06:50] John Nash: I have years ago, 80s or 90s, I think. Yeah, but yeah,

[00:06:55] Olysha Magruder: I'll have to look for it. I don't think I've seen it.

[00:06:58] Jason Johnston: Yeah. It's an action movie where they're the ones that are skilled and determined to, to take care of this asteroid before it hits the earth. So I won't tell you how it ends.

[00:07:09] Olysha Magruder: The good news is with the real life dart mission, they managed to hit not the big, I guess there are two, a big asteroid and small asteroid. This is all layman terms because

[00:07:19] Jason Johnston: I don't know.

[00:07:21] Olysha Magruder: but they managed to hit the small asteroid that was orbiting the larger one and they managed to change the time of it by 30 minutes.

So it would, the orbit would take 15 hours and I don't know, I'm just gonna make this up, 50 minutes. But after they hit it, it's now orbiting at 15 hours and 20 minutes. And her point was like, this was just an experiment to see if we could, and we can, and so we can change the sort of, I don't know.

It's wild. You can change space. We can change space.

[00:07:54] John Nash: it is wild. It's as if they're playing a game of galactic billiards.

[00:07:58] Olysha Magruder: Yeah. So all that to say, I get to work with cool people like that. We get to work with cool people like that and have to accommodate their extremely busy professional lives.

[00:08:08] Jason Johnston: And it sounds like your approach, because as John was talking about, there's a lot of centralized units where their approach is a little bit more of a consulting approach. You come to us, if you need something, we're going to help you do a couple of things in Canvas or your LMS or whatever it is that you're in versus a, Let's walk you through more of a systematic process to really build this out.

We're going to hold your hand through this. We're going to try to help this, um, happen in a reasonable timeframe and to a good quality and that kind of thing. So it sounds like yours is a lot of approach that more build out kind of approach, right?

[00:08:46] Olysha Magruder: Yeah. We call it a high touch approach versus what you were saying, the consultant. And I was at an institution prior to this one where it was very much come to us. We will help you, but we only had three instructional designers for an entire college campus. So it wasn't a very one on one walk you through everything kind of situation.

[00:09:07] Jason Johnston: Your team is also called it's Learning Design and Innovation. So what does innovation mean for you right now? I'm just curious about what things are on your plate.

[00:09:17] Olysha Magruder: Funny you should mention that. No I am. I just, I wrote a dissertation about faculty development and getting faculty on board to adopt some things. And this was. A while back before I was at this institution, but I like to go back to my definition of innovation, which is something that is new to someone, basically, a pencil could be an innovative tool if one has never used a pencil before to keep it like super simplistic.

So to me, innovation is what is new? Even if it's new to someone one of the things I'm interested in right now is I'm working on looking at bilingual programming, and if that's something that we can pursue, so I have some things in the works.

Because, that increases the audience of people that could obtain this sort of education. That's one of the things. Obviously, AI is on everyone's mind, and we'd be... Not to include that in our innovative approaches. So we're looking at we have several of my team members are using a tool called Descript.

I don't know if you've heard of that

[00:10:23] Jason Johnston: We use it for our podcasts. So we are a little familiar and will put a link in the show notes for listeners

[00:10:28] Olysha Magruder: cool. Yeah. So they're trying to use that to help with the editing of faculty videos. Because there are lots of ums and ahs and I hope that you will use that to help with this.

[00:10:39] Jason Johnston: Oh yeah, we're there for that. Yeah.

[00:10:41] Olysha Magruder: One thing I'm really trying to help is move away from, the typical PowerPoint video lecture kind of thing. And so we have team members working with different interactive tools to create material that. is I would say engaging in a different kind of way. sO yeah, that's, those are kinds of the things that specific things that we're working on that I think could be under the umbrella of innovation.

[00:11:07] Jason Johnston: We actually connected at OLC Innovate this last spring, 2023 and. One of the things that was over some common people that we knew, but also around this Coursera course that you helped developed called excellence in online teaching. coUld you tell us a little bit of about that course?

[00:11:33] Olysha Magruder: Sure. I'll start by sharing just. how it came to be because it was a cross divisional effort across the campus of Hopkins. sO within Hopkins, and I don't want to get too in the weeds with this, but they offer something called Delta Grants internally. And the Delta grant is the acronyms, digital education and learning technology acceleration.

So it's pretty cool that Hopkins is invested in supporting, these kinds of initiatives. And so in 2021, I and other a few others. put together a grant for this project. And so we call it the online excellence and multi pronged approach to prepare faculty for excellence in online teaching and learning. So the three different, I like to think of it as like a spork perhaps has three different prongs or maybe a plug, an outlet plug. Anyway, one of them is this MOOC that we created. Another one is an internal certificate of completion for Hopkins folks. And then the third one is a conference or symposium that showcases excellence in online teaching.

So the MOOC was the sort of most straightforward one to work on. So that's what we started with. So we Coursera relationships across the campus. School of Public Health has a really a lot of Coursera courses, uh, engineering as well. We've added a few to our portfolio there. So we had a relationship with Coursera already, so we were able to pitch this.

They gave us a good idea of what we could expect in terms of enrollments and went forward. And then what we also wanted to do was to Like I said, it was cross divisional. So we had a an advisory board or committee created where we invited people from all over the campus to join us to talk about what should this MOOC hold, what topics, the MOOC and the Certificate of Completion program.

So we worked with them to come up with the topics that made the most sense. And a big part of this was to actually focus on the faculty who are teaching online in our institution and to showcase them. So we recruited those faculty, we got the topics and put together the MOOC. So my one of my instructional designers on the team, Kimberly Barce, was the one who led the project and basically managed to get all these people together and do all these different recordings.

And we do have studio recording spaces. on campus, but a lot of folks are remote. For example, I am remote. So we were flexible in terms of how the content was created. But essentially we have in the Coursera MOOC I think it's five modules and they cover some pretty broad topics. And then within those modules are short videos and lessons created by those faculty.

And then, also the content gathered through that. So that's the structure.

[00:14:40] John Nash: And is the intended audience is beyond Hopkins though, isn't that the case? Obviously I was looking at it today and so it goes pretty broad.

[00:14:49] Olysha Magruder: yes, the intended audience is anyone who wants to pick up some general practices and ideas about excellent online teaching. And we really try to steer away from course design, because that's, A different ballgame altogether. We were talking more about the facilitation, the actual student interaction piece of online learning.

[00:15:16] John Nash: Can I follow up on that? I think that's really interesting. And that may be for some who listen to this and others in our sort of colleague space as a distinction without a difference. Can you talk for a second about that decision? And what is the difference between the two?

[00:15:30] Olysha Magruder: Sure, so from our perspective, and this is very much like from What my team does. When you speak of course design to us, that implies you're laying out the blueprint for the course. You're deciding, you're making these curriculum decisions. I also teach for the School of Education within Hopkins and I did the same thing with them.

So what do I want to teach? What are the topics? How am I going to present this content? What are the resources I want to pull in? So there, that piece where it's the taking, it's like a flipped house, you're taking the structure and just making those design decisions.

And then the other side of that is the teaching piece. So that's when you actually have The students in the house and they're using the rooms in the house and exploring and you're there to help them along. So that was just a really random comparison I came up with, but hopefully it makes sense.

[00:16:26] Jason Johnston: I think it makes a lot of sense to me the building of it versus the using of it. The delivery as we define it out as we're talking with our faculty, we talk about. Design, development and delivery often with them with deliver being a complete focus on that teaching aspect.

Ours we, we do internally professional development, both synchronous, asynchronous with our faculty and But we just focus internally selfishly of University of Tennessee. We just focus on our own faculty. What kind of took you to that decision of using Coursera as a platform.

It was being used already there, but it's a public platform. Was there any conversation about the good and bad of this being in more of a public forum or was there an impetus there someplace to really make it public?

[00:17:17] Olysha Magruder: That's a really good question. Well, there, I think I could say a couple of things to that. And the first is a really pragmatic comment, which is a part of the grant proposal was to have a sustainability plan. And as with anything, you need resources and resources means money. So we had to be creative about, okay, so if we're going to offer something. Campus wide or externally like this symposium, which I'll talk about later if you'd like, because that's coming up. But how do we actually pay for this stuff? So that's why we were like the MOOC will help. So with Coursera, there's a a share in the, in whatever income the course makes.

It's not a whole lot. It's not like we're out here making a bunch of money off of people or something, but it's enough to feed back into the programming. And so we've worked it out with our institution where we get those funds put back into that sort of bucket that will then help us make these other things happen so that was one piece of it was, this could help us sustain this plan, and then the other piece of it was just, we internally know we have all these cool things happening.

Is there a way we can showcase this and get More awareness around online learning at Hopkins. So it's just more of a, let's, let's shine some light on this and celebrate some of our faculty who are doing some cool stuff. So those were the two main reasons for choosing the MOOC.

[00:18:48] Jason Johnston: Have you been happy with using the Coursera platform? I I've taken Coursera courses there. I've got, I probably have 20 that I started and haven't completed, is my guess at least. But were you happy with working within that structure? I've never made one there

[00:19:04] Olysha Magruder: Yeah, Coursera has a really they've, they have a really good process set up for people developing. Materials you basically work with them. So our instructional designer, Kim, she worked closely with their processes and it was pretty easy for her now in terms of the platform itself. I agree. I tend to go into things and I don't always finish them.

But the way I look at. This particular MOOC is that again, we tried to make things intentionally bite sized. We wanted you just to get a taste of some of these topics. And then if you're curious or interested, we have this symposium that we're setting up. To have a more alive presence to talk about these topics in more depth.

So I think if you use a MOOC as a sort of a springboard for other things, it can be effective. Or at least for faculty development, that's my thought anyway.

[00:19:59] John Nash: Innovation. You, one of the examples you talked about was getting past PowerPoint lectures and I was thinking of the term shovelware and in the Coursera course, there was a section that you have one of the modules, maybe on student engagement, and there's a video by your colleague, Mike Reeson there, and I could see several elements in that video that aligned with our Thank you.

theme for this podcast, which is around humanizing online learning in lots of things around building relationships and community sharing personal experiences, this idea of explicitly centralizing climate some neat ideas in there. It made me wonder about your experiences and how you've navigated the challenges that come with transitioning faculty and instructors to online or hybrid models both as an instructor yourself and now in your administrative role.

Are there specific strategies or tools or things you've found effective in fostering, belonging and active participation in online courses that help faculty who maybe have not really been there or have it in their head that's what they have to do?

[00:21:05] Olysha Magruder: I'd say that's always an ongoing challenge, to be honest. It's. It's a definite mind shift because, as with face to face teachings, you walk into a physical space, people smiling, happy faces, or gauge their reactions to things and so then you go into this sort of online situation, and it can be, nerve wracking, I think, for people.

How do I know how people are actually thinking or feeling? What we've done is really that instructional designer relationship with the faculty, the high touch model. We basically push some of these ideas. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word push, but it is like a matter of persuasion

we, have a thing we call the course design matrix. Sounds really fancy. It's just basically the design document. And one of the things we asked them to lay out is what is your plan for interaction? What are your interaction plans? So upfront, we're having them think about it, and then throughout the development process, That is a key piece that is constantly reiterated and we have tools that can help interact.

It's required that they have office hours. And I think there's one video in there. I can't remember which one, but another colleague, David Porter, who's amazing. He does really interesting office hours. So he talks about that in the MOOC. It's not just, I'm going to show up and if somebody shows up, cool. If not, I'm just gonna be sitting here emailing or what have you.

He actually does an engagement piece where the students love to come to those office hours. And so we try to also share those things out with our faculty, celebrate them, put them at the center, give examples. We have a, what we call our cohort training program for the design of their courses.

They have to go through this eight week process to build their document that's why we believe in that relationship between faculty and instructional designers because that's the ticket.

[00:23:03] John Nash: Yeah, I can see that, and I get what you're saying about pushing, but you're advocates, you advocate for that, and you advocate and privilege it a little bit up front to to showcase its importance. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that there was a really timely article this week in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

It was Beth McMurtry's piece on thinking about how hybrid and online learning is just going to get bigger and larger, but there was a neat sort of discussion in there, the legacy from the pandemic and, the, these pandemic induced online learning courses really weren't representative of well prepared online, asynchronous teaching and learning.

Do you think that lulled instructors into not taking online learning as seriously as they could? Part of me feels like this, the rush to online learning during the pandemic left maybe a slight negative mark in terms of perceptions and practices surrounding online ed. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[00:24:02] Olysha Magruder: I see where you're coming from and a part of me also thinks maybe not because. Otherwise, what any of when many of these people have even tried it. And if let's just throw out some fake numbers here. Let's say we had it. I'm just going to make this all up. Please, if you're listening, this is not based on any reality.

Just a theory here. Let's say we had 20 percent more faculty. Let's say 80% more faculty teaching online. And of those 10% bought into it and now are committed to quality online learning, I'd say we, we won there a bit, and even if 70% aren't buying in, they had experience with it. So at least they understand it.

At least they know that there's an L M Ss and a thing called Zoom and a thing called flexibility for students. So I don't know, I'm gonna take that as a win personally.

[00:24:54] John Nash: I like that view. I like that. Yeah. I think if you listen to our conversations over time, I'm, I'm a regular title series, tenure track associate professor at a research one and I have this sort of, jaded look at like how everything goes.

And, I think. It is interesting in that same piece, McMurtry talks about how traditional age students are increasingly interested in online options. It's not just your father's Oldsmobile anymore sort of thing. And so I also worry about incentive structures inside research institutions like mine and yours where it may favor research over teaching quality.

And so you kind of touched on it, I mean, for places that have a consultative model for instructional design support, is there a risk that we may still have a hard time getting a lot of instructors to do this work?

[00:25:44] Olysha Magruder: Yeah, probably, but there are things that we can do. And so I mentioned I was at another institution before Hopkins and it was a state college. Mostly teaching faculty. So that's a little different than what you're talking about. But what I started there and I actually did a similar thing at Hopkins is creating this faculty development programs in which faculty go through it as students.

I think any time that you can get. faculty to experience things as a student, then you're going to help increase awareness. And so we run that through our school through Whiting School, but it's called the Faculty Forward Fellowship. It's been going on for almost five years now, and I've had about a hundred faculty go through it across the campus, like we've opened it up to everyone.

And that's one of the main things that we try to get through is. And it's actually a hybrid program. So we do meet face to face if they want to. It's very flexible. But we have four weeks of online modules. We want them to know how it feels, basically. We have a group project. We have weekly office hours. We use the tools and the LMS that we would recommend that they use. We show various ways of presenting content. We talk about Hot topic issues. This past one we did an activity with AI. So we're trying to situate them in the student perspective. And I think that really helps. Of course, they have to have an interest. And if they're not interested, they're not going to be interested. So we can't really do anything if they're not signing up for these kinds of things. So that's why I think it's probably always going to be a challenge.

[00:27:16] John Nash: yeah, but that's lovely and having them walk in the shoes of students so that they can see what's going to happen on the other end. Do you get that kind of feedback when they're done? Do you ever hear about that?

[00:27:27] Olysha Magruder: Yeah, definitely. They, I think there's a deeper appreciation for what students experience. And interestingly, on the flip side, we always have a deeper appreciation for what faculty experience because we're constantly dealing with Oh, this didn't work. Or why didn't you give me a score on this? Or, like we, we deal with all of those issues that faculty deal with on a regular basis.

So for us, it's humbling as well.

[00:27:55] Jason Johnston: Yeah, it's easy for us to say on a design basis oh, here, do this online discussion board, right? And without being in that place of actually trying to run one or run them week after week, right? You, we start to get a bit of a yeah, like you said, John, a walk a mile in the shoes kind of experience as we try to get busy faculty to engage into a professional development online course and do the same things that they might be asking students to do.

Yeah, that's good.

[00:28:27] John Nash: Were you also saying that when you put faculty in a course and the rules are reversed, you still find out that they're grade grubbers, just like undergraduates.

[00:28:37] Olysha Magruder: Some, yeah, we actually did a book club, uh, I think it was in the spring of this past year and it was about ungrading. I don't know if you've read the book

[00:28:47] John Nash: love that. Yeah.

[00:28:48] Olysha Magruder: Yeah.

we and in spirit of that, we took out all, Grading metrics in that program. And so now it's just more did you finish it or not?

And we give you feedback or what have you. But before that, yes, things were scored and it was always like, this is just to show you how things can be scored or show you a rubric . And it was definitely, there was anxiety and, it's always, again, that's always like insightful from this perspective

[00:29:17] John Nash: it is. Once a student, always a student, I say, yeah.

[00:29:20] Olysha Magruder: yeah. That's true.

[00:29:22] Jason Johnston: And I've felt the same thing about like we've we've tried a variety of different ways to go about professional development, as I'm sure that you have, to the fully self paced, to fully synchronous to now we are experimenting with kind of shorter and we're coming up with better language for this, but we're talking about self-paced but within a period of time, right? So it's asynchronous, but it actually is synchronous because we want you to do these assignments this week and then complete it. We'll do a two week kind of module for faculty and have certain things completed. Do you have a better name for that? Because it's not a, it's asynchronous, but we've got date constraints on it on either end,

[00:30:08] Olysha Magruder: So we've done this before too, and I feel like we were in the same kind of boat where we don't, we call it self paced, but there are due dates or deadlines.

[00:30:17] John Nash: There's a term that we'll use inside design sprints called "time boxing." I wonder if it's time boxed.

[00:30:23] Olysha Magruder: Let's write that down.

[00:30:27] Jason Johnston: I like that. If the three of us at three different institutions start calling this,

middle thing, time boxing, just as this, everybody knows of course, we've got the fully asynchronous and then synchronous and then the time box, right?

[00:30:39] John Nash: Nash

[00:30:41] Olysha Magruder: Timebox course.

[00:30:43] Jason Johnston: box. That's good. But I've found that like adding grades in, even if they're meaningless, really, like they're, these aren't going on your faculty transcripts or anything like that.

They get a sense of a little bit of that stress and about feedback and so on. I've felt the same way about time, at least time boxing. Some of our now I'm using it as a verb, at least time boxing some of our assignments because faculty then also as adult learners will get the sense of what this means and also what it means on the other end if, "oh, I might need an extension on this. How does this work? Can I ask for an extension? What are the expectations? How flexible is my teacher going to be? How does this make me feel? How does this affect my own outcomes?" I think for the most part, it feels like Faculty appreciate things being time boxed because it helps them to prioritize and it actually does help them learn do it's accountability. It helps them do something. They've already decided that I want to learn this. I want to do this and I need someone to just tell me what to do and when to get it done so that it actually comes to pass. That makes sense.

[00:31:51] Olysha Magruder: Sure. Yeah. And that program that I talked about, the fellowship program, we have taken off grades, but we still have a deadline based

And then another thing we have always had journal coaches is what we call them. So there's like a self reflection journal throughout the program because reflection is, helps you in your practice.

And What we did this past year, which I'm in love with, and we're going to continue is we actually took previous participants and they are now facilitating many pieces of the program.

[00:32:23] Jason Johnston: Nice.

[00:32:23] Olysha Magruder: So they became the journal coaches, they facilitate the discussions and they even helped with the live sessions that we had.

But that was a fun thing to shift to. Now, we also have some people who are probably like many of students that where they put you off and they're, can I please have this and I still haven't finished it and it's always funny just to watch the spectrum of participants, but we have all kinds.

[00:32:52] Jason Johnston: yeS, as we do. You had mentioned before, just shifting topics a little bit about the symposium, I wanted to give you a moment to talk about that, as like the, I like the Spork analogy, actually, because it gives you, you said like a three, like a

trident, a three prong, but I actually like the Spork, because it's there may be something else you need to scoop up, right?

You've got these three prongs, and Then you've still got that part of the spork where if you need it for something, you've got it there. Even if you don't have a little thing of mashed potatoes or something to eat with.

[00:33:20] John Nash: you can stab it and scoop it.

[00:33:23] Jason Johnston: and do it at the same time. Anyways, so the, but the symposium was one of the, one of the prongs.

Tell us a little bit about the symposium.

[00:33:32] Olysha Magruder: First I think I need to change the tagline to stab it or scoop it.

[00:33:36] John Nash: That's my only job here. That's all I do is just I have little quips that might be useful. And then,

[00:33:42] Jason Johnston: pretty good, John. You've got two now, Timebox and stab it or scoop it.

[00:33:48] Olysha Magruder: Yeah, so the, it's the JHU Online Excellence Symposium, and at this moment, we still have the open for proposals, but by the time I think this airs, it will be closed for that. But, It's on December 12th of 2023, and it will be a virtual event. It's a half a day. We have Flower Darby, who is our keynote speaker, and she co wrote Small Changes and Online Teaching, I think is the name of the title.

I don't have it right in front of me, but we love her, we think she's great, so she's gonna keynote. There is a small fee to attend. Again, that goes back to our sustainability piece. We need to feed it back in to help with our programming.

I'm seeing people from all over, even from Ireland, which if you wanted me to tell you a little bit about why that is, I will, but we have people from all over the world submitting proposals. And it's just going to be a half a day 12 to 5 p.

m. Eastern time of just learning about excellence and online teaching from people who are doing this on a day to day basis.

[00:34:52] Jason Johnston: That sounds great. I'm putting it on my calendar for sure. Yeah, we'll put the link in our show notes as well. Tell us verbally how to find you though, just in case, because I fear that people don't go to our show notes as much as I feel like they should, but tell us verbally how one might search for you and find the name of this the name of this symposium.

[00:35:14] Olysha Magruder: if You, I'm just doing it now to make sure. Yes, if you Google JHU Excellence in Online Teaching Symposium, you'll see there's a website, teaching. jhu. edu, and it has all the information on it. There's more to that web link, but if you get to that teaching. jhu. edu site, you'll find it. And it has all the information about registration and details and so forth.

Yes, we'll definitely link to it. That would be awesome.

[00:35:40] Jason Johnston: Yeah, that's great. And what kind of other topics are you hoping to come out of this? Did you have different tracks for the symposium or is it just a wide open whatever you want underneath the umbrella of excellence in teaching.

[00:35:54] Olysha Magruder: Yeah, we wanted to keep it pretty open this year. We had talked about do we want to have, themes or tracks and since this was our first time trying this out. We wanted to be pretty broad so that if you feel like you have something to contribute in this area, we want to hear about it.

And we Did say in the description, "the session should provoke conversation, spark new thinking, and advance the ongoing pursuit of online education excellence by actively engaging participants." So that was the the idea behind these proposals. And we have a little bit of a criteria but.

Since we're still in the planning phase, we have yet to decide which proposals will be on, but excited by what I'm seeing so far.

[00:36:37] Jason Johnston: That's great. Oh, that sounds good. Yeah. And we're here for all of that. I think that the conversations around all these things are so important. I think the more that we have them as as administrators and faculty, and even in this kind of context, which is really the reason why we.

doing this podcast. It's just really an excuse for John and I mostly to get together to have conversations, but then to be able to talk to cool people like yourself, doing amazing things out there that really line up with the things that get us excited about the future of online education. I think it's looking up myself.

Do you have a positive outlook for online education in the future?

[00:37:17] Olysha Magruder: I do, because I interviewed for a position a long time ago at another institution. And they said, they were like, what do you think is the most exciting thing on the horizon? And I was like, this is not a very. I don't know. It may not sound very exciting, but blended learning. That's what that's where we're headed.

And then this was like pre pandemic like this is a long time ago. And here we are. And I think no matter what happens, it's just becoming a reality, versus some of us don't some of us do it's like well students especially because even my son's in third grade like He's not taking online classes, but he's doing online stuff all the time.

High school students are often required to take online courses. It's just an expectation that's going to be more and more prevalent. And we got to stay, we've got to stay up on these things. So I have a positive outlook of it too. And by the way, I was going to say, you all should submit a proposal before the end of the day to talk about your podcast.

[00:38:21] John Nash: I just saw that, and I thought, Hey Jason, they're due today, want to try one?

[00:38:27] Jason Johnston: It closes today.

Oh,

[00:38:29] Olysha Magruder: I'm sure I could get you an extension.

[00:38:31] John Nash: It's only 300 words, surely

[00:38:33] Jason Johnston: We could get there.

[00:38:34] John Nash: Claude can write 300 words before we're done with the podcast.

[00:38:39] Jason Johnston: Your short conversation with us, if you were to like a proposal from somebody like John and myself, what would this proposal perhaps be about?

[00:38:50] Olysha Magruder: Just riffing here, but I think it would be cool if you talked about your podcast, but also the trends you're seeing or the things that you and your guests are talking about because it's all related to online teaching. So you could highlight some of your guests or you could even double up and record some of the audience for one of your episodes.

I don't know. Throwing stuff out there.

[00:39:16] John Nash: we could make it a live, yeah, we could do it as a podcast, yeah,

[00:39:20] Olysha Magruder: Yeah. Why not kill two birds... Oh wait, that's not the term people like to use these days.

[00:39:23] Jason Johnston: yeah, there's a list of non violent ones like that I can't remember what the equivalent is for that one, though, but I also try to avoid skin a cat, and I think it's I don't know what it is.

[00:39:33] Olysha Magruder: Crack two eggs with one hand? I don't know.

[00:39:35] John Nash: yes. That's it. We'll go into descript and we'll overdub some good examples in a minute.

[00:39:42] Olysha Magruder: There you go. Thank you.

[00:39:43] Jason Johnston: Yeah.

[00:39:45] John Nash: thAt is interesting, though, and I think one thing that we could start to explore more, Jason, thanks to Olysha's good suggestion here is we don't really know enough about I'll just say rank and file, but we've been talking to a lot of experts, a lot of thought leaders and sort of thinkers from psychology and from instructional design.

But just, yeah, the everyday instructor who wants to do well in this space. I'd love to know more and think more clearly about their concerns and worries and where their benefits, what benefits would accrue to them most.

[00:40:18] Olysha Magruder: That'd be cool.

[00:40:19] Jason Johnston: I think it's a great idea and kind of wrap up some of what, yeah, we've been learning this last year and to hear from other people that attend. Okay, you're on the challenge accepted.

we're going to try we got a deadline now john. This, we've been time boxed. And we're gonna, we're gonna rise to meet your challenge.

Even though we've probably have other priorities today because we've been time boxed, we're going to rise and meet this challenge.

[00:40:46] Olysha Magruder: See, now you know how I operate. You invite me here thinking that you're going to get something, but I'm in fact getting something from you.

[00:40:54] Jason Johnston: And here I've got more work on my plate. Come on. This is good. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. And is there a preferred way for people to get in touch with you? We'll put obviously links in for the Coursera course, to the symposium. Are there any links or any ways that you have a preferred way for people listening to get in touch with you if they want to?

[00:41:19] Olysha Magruder: Sure. LinkedIn I'm there. I know we've connected via LinkedIn. And then Olysha at JHU. edu. O L Y S H A. I keep it simple.

[00:41:29] Jason Johnston: Okay. That's great.

[00:41:31] Olysha Magruder: Reach out if you, if anybody wants to talk about anything pretty open.

[00:41:35] Jason Johnston: Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been great and we appreciate you and the work you're doing and you just simply taking the time. And for those listening, please check us out online learningpodcast. com or you can find the same at LinkedIn. Just search Online Learning Podcast. We've got a group there you can ask to be part of.

And yeah, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn as well. That tends to be where we're hanging out more than other places that, that we're not completely out of, but we probably won't name because I'm not really at the other places that much anymore.

[00:42:12] Olysha Magruder: same, but thank you all so much for having me. It's been a lot of fun talking to you all

[00:42:16] John Nash: was a ton of fun. Thank you so much.

[00:42:18] Jason Johnston: Yeah, that's great.

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