Episode 2: Video and open-source textbooks with Dr. Trefor Bazett

Download: 02-Dr.Bazett-Transcript

 

THIAGO

Welcome to the Teach Anywhere Podcast: Tech Stories from Real Educators, where we interview faculty and instructors about how they use educational technology in their courses at UVic. My name is Thiago Hinkel, and my pronouns are he and him.

 

REBECCA

I’m your co-host, Rebecca Edwards, and my pronouns are she and her. Before we begin, we would like to acknowledge and respect the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on whose traditional territory the university stands and the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

 

THIAGO

With us today is Dr. Trevor Bazett. Dr. Bazett is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UVic. His passions include mathematics education and algebraic topology. Hello, Trevor, welcome to the podcast.

 

TREFOR

Thank you so much for having me.

 

THIAGO

So we hear that in addition to being a professor here at UVic, you also have a YouTube channel, which is quite popular. Would you like to tell us a bit about your channel?

 

TREFOR

Sure. Well, it came with something of a surprise. Before I was at UVic, I was teaching an online class, even before the pandemic started, and it was just intended for about 20 students in this online discrete math students. The students that weren’t able to come to sort of normal 9 to 5 classes, so the idea was to have this sort of online section and for a lack of other options, I just posted these videos that I was making for the class on YouTube, never thought of anything more than these 20 people. And then a few years later, now hundreds of thousands of people are subscribing to it, which is kind of remarkable. And so now I think of myself as a professor and a sort of, you know, educational youtuber.

 

REBECCA

So thanks so much for joining us today, Trevor. Before we start chatting about your course, we were hoping that you could kind of introduce yourself and perhaps tell us a little bit about your journey here at UVic

 

TREFOR

Yeah, absolutely. So, well, my name’s Trevor and by the way, my pronouns are he and him. And as mentioned, I’m an assistant teaching professor. So I have just been finishing up my fourth year here at UVic, and I’ve really enjoyed my time here and sort of settling in. And I typically am teaching a lot of sort of 1st and 2nd year calculus courses as well as a couple fun sort of up year courses and mathematical modeling and topology and things like this.

 

THIAGO

And what about your research interests? Is that part of your job as a professor too to do some research?

 

TREFOR

It is. So I’m an assistant teaching professor. And so that roughly means that 70% of my time is teaching, 20% is service, but 10% of my time is meant to be scholarship. So for myself, these days I’m primarily working on things that are in mathematics education as opposed to mathematics itself. So I had a background in algebraic topology, as you mentioned in your little bio about me, but these days I mainly focus on math education.

 

THIAGO

Yes. And could you tell us a bit more about that expression, right? . I confess I struggled in the beginning to say it, like the algebraic topology.

 

TREFOR

That’ right!

 

THIAGO

What would be a brief description of that?

 

TREFOR

Yeah, absolutely. So topology is a little bit like geometry. But in geometry, you care about things like angles and distances and imagine that those are very rigid. But topology is a study of shape and space where you sort of don’t care about that. You imagine everything’s made out of play dough, like you can stretch stuff and move things around. So the classic topology joke is that a coffee cup, a thing that’s got a single hole in the handle and a doughnut are to a topologist the exact same thing. But then I’m an algebraic topologist. So people know about algebra, you know, adding numbers together, and there’s a lot of rigidity to numbers like one plus one equaling two, this kind of thing. So the idea is how can you merge these two different things together and have some information passed forth between these two different worlds? So that’s sort of the idea of an algebraic topology.

 

THIAGO

That sounds really cool.

 

TREFOR

It’s a, it’s a pretty fun field.

 

THIAGO

Yeah.

 

REBECCA

And can I ask, Trevor, you mentioned that you have an interest in kind of mathematics education? So obviously you’re a mathematics educator, but when you say one of your research interests, I believe that’s what you said, is mathematics education. What does that look like?

 

TREFOR

Oh, it can be all sorts of things. So, for example, the major project that I’m working on this summer, for instance, is taking in first year calculus, which has typically had a very expensive online homework system, and we’re trying to replace that online homework system with an open source one that’s gonna be free to the students. So this is an example of a project that’s not teaching today; I’m not working with individual students, but it fits into that sort of larger work. But, anyway, in scholarship we do all sorts of different things, talking at conferences and writing papers and any number of different things like this.

 

REBECCA

Thanks so much.

 

THIAGO

Yeah. So today, the focus of our interview with you is to talk about one of your courses specifically or your use of educational technology for that course. So you want to tell us the name of that course specifically and what it covers?

 

TREFOR

So I think I’m going to talk about a course called Math 204, otherwise known as sort of Calculus 4. And so for a lot of students who are in math, physics, engineering and a number of other disciplines, this is their fourth calculus course in a row. And, and for many of them, actually, particularly the engineers, it’s their last big math course before they sort of go on and just work inside of their disciplines. And so this course we’re really trying to sort of put the big sort of feather on the cap of their development of calculus and send them off into the world being really competent mathematicians. And then, for people who are gonna continue on in math as well, also give some hints to the future and what’s coming up in years three and four. So, Math 204 is this really, really fun course and, and it really sort of blends together actually two different types of math. One’s called vector calculus, one’s called differential equations. It doesn’t really matter, but they’re sort of put together here in this one sort of final course. And I have so much fun with it.

 

THIAGO

Yeah, that sounds like fun. And I wonder how many students do you usually get in this course? And who is a typical student in this course?

 

TREFOR

So about 300 or so will be in sort of the main sequence, and then there’ll be maybe less than that throughout the summer and the sort of the fall terms of it. But in the spring, yeah, about 300. And that usually breaks up into two classes of about 150 students. So, they’re pretty big classes nevertheless. And, as mentioned, it’s a whole bunch of different types of students. So the most common student is an engineering student, but all across different STEM, they’re going to have people who are going to be going through the calculus sequence and, depending on exactly what program, you might stop at different places. But a good number of programs go all the way through Calculus 4.

 

THIAGO

And when you teach this course, what is the main um education or instructional strategy that you like to focus on?

 

TREFOR

So this course, like the ones before it, is relatively, let’s call it traditional lecture with some spins on it, let’s say. So we’re typically in the classroom, we’re learning a somewhat unfortunately large volume of content that’s been prescribed that we have to teach through this, and so, yeah, the students are sort of, it will look like a, a relatively traditional mathematics lecture, but we add our sort of little twists on it like we’ve been talking about.

 

REBECCA

So I’m gonna jump in and ask. Trevor, what is one way that you use educational technology in this course that you kind of wanted to talk about today?

 

TREFOR

Yeah. So one of the things that really struck me was we went through this online teaching era, and then we came back to face-to-face. And so one of the questions that I had when we were doing that transition was, can we take some of the resources and skills that we’ve learned out from teaching online and then bring them back into the classroom? And, in my case, I mean, we talked about videos a little bit at the beginning, but I had worked really, really, really hard on a series of videos to sort of replace the class for when it was the online era. And I had all of these videos, and in fact, they were on YouTube, which is sort of fine, but the real question was, how can you go and bring them and sort of put them as a part of the classroom. At the same time, other conversations were going around, Well, like, OK, how should you replace a student, for example, who is sick and would like to have some materials that they can deal with afterwards? Should you put notes online? Should you be recording your class with Echo360? And so what I tried to do was create a way to take all of the videos that had already been used and incorporate them as sort of the better version of a replacement class. Because one of the things I sort of noticed is that, when you’re teaching online, I didn’t just do an hour-long lecture, let’s say. That the way I was structuring things online was really broken up to try to be quite active in an asynchronous course. So you’d have a little video and then you’d have a bunch of different texts and questions and things the students were supposed to work on and opportunities for the students to get feedback, and then it would sort of continue. And so the challenge then is that I’m really not a super fan of having to sort of this hour long recorded video of the classroom that seemed to have somehow a worse experience than being in the classroom and being able to really participate in the discussions and so forth. At the same time, so that was my first concern, and then the second thing was that completely separately, we were working on writing an open source textbook for this course. So we were thinking, it would be really nice if instead of the students having to pay hundreds of dollars for their book, and it’s even worse; it was a book that was only gonna be used for literally two thirds of one course, so a lot of money. We would work on adapting an open source book. And so then everything sort of came together. Well, the pandemic interrupted that project to make a whole bunch of videos, and then we wanted to work on the book anyways. And so the ultimate outcome was to take this open source book that now has been fully integrated with videos. And, as a result, if you’re a student who misses a class, for instance, you can now go and have this sort of relatively engaging, or at least I hope it’s engaging, sort of video text thing that’s got everything that was there in the online era available for you. And this is a perfect option. At the same time, I will use these resources in what I call in between class activities. So, a student who finishes the class, has been present, doesn’t need to study the whole thing, will have some information about just the subset of stuff that they can go and do that’s recommended as preparation for the next class or review from the previous class. So, to sort of get all integrated together in this one place.

 

REBECCA

So kind of having kind of a curated set of activities, videos, etcetera that students can use either to supplement their in-class attendance or potentially in replacement if, for example, they’re sick.

 

TREFOR

Exactly. So, in theory, if you never wanted to come to class, you could get pretty close to what you got in the online era, however good that may or may not have been; you can get that. But, if you’re coming to class, it’s also there to sort of support you and enrich your learning a little bit. So you used this strategy for these videos and I

 

THIAGO

wonder was there anything that got in the way? And maybe you could tell us a bit of the steps you had to take to prepare for this.

 

TREFOR

Yeah, absolutely. So, I’ve really somewhat refined my process over a number of years. So, when I started making videos, they looked sort of very hacked together. But because I had the fortune of starting making videos before the pandemic, I was able to iterate over a number of years. So now creating a video that looks very fancy from a production quality, quite separate from whether it’s got good content, but from a production quality, they look relatively good in the sense that they have lots of animations, and they have green screens, you sort of see me present, and they sort of, they look very sort of like a youtubers kind of video, I suppose. But that process was quite long and slow. And actually the hardest part I personally found was when you’re in a classroom, you just sort of speak continuously for however long you’re going to speak until you get the students to be involved. And if you make little small verbal errors, you just sort of go along with it and you roll with it and you correct it. However, when I’m trying to make videos, I want them to be really polished and a little bit energetic and engaging. And this typically results in me ended up doing an enormous number of cuts and little micro edits. And, in some sense, I had to sort of learn a slightly different style of speaking. Like I have my normal, like talking voice, kind of like I’m doing right now, and then I have my sort of like YouTube type voice, and it does make a difference, but that’s the one that’s actually sort of got training to do it. So anyway, it took a long process to get to where I’m at. But I found that I think I was lucky compared to most of my peers that when it was in the pandemic and I was recording videos, it wasn’t a large additional burden to be focusing on production quality; or at least I’d focus on enough in the past that that sort of went away and I could just think about content. And you’re just thinking about content, well, that’s the fun part. And so the things that were taking me time was stuff like programming and animation; that’s always going to take some time to do. But, nevertheless.

 

REBECCA

So how did your students react? And I guess maybe the question is for both sets of students, like the students that you originally prepared the the videos for and then also these students that you’re reusing the videos with?

 

TREFOR

Yeah, I think the reaction has been pretty positive. So actually, recently I’ve sort of gotten out of asking a whole bunch of surveys of the students about things; I was doing this a lot more in the online era. So the sort of the big signal is just what you see in your course experience survey and then just have conversation with students. And the sense that I have is because it’s not today a required thing, there is an optional thing. So, if you’re sick, you can go and do it. And then I also have these sort of supportive in between lecture sort of prompts that I’ve talked about. So some students may wish to sort of like get a little bit of a preview of the coming up lecture by seeing some of these resources. Because it’s optional and not something they’re forced to, sort of all this sounds like sort of universally positive, but sort of almost not quite the right metric because it’s more of a question of how many people are actually using it. But the sense that I have in general is that it is used by a nontrivial portion and that it’s relatively positive. It’s also kind of fun this sort of online book that we put forward. Similar to the YouTube experience is I started making it, and while I knew that I was somewhat large on YouTube, I wasn’t sure that people would be going and looking at the online book, particularly because I was adapting it. So a lot of the text was from other people; that was not just myself. But even the book itself, I think I saw the other day it at 130,000 views on a textbook, which is pretty crazy. So it shows that there’s a lot of people outside of just UVic who are sort of getting to benefit from that as well. And this was one of the things that I really wanted to motivate it for is that, at universities, we often have these sort of walled gardens where everything lives in our case on Brightspace, but in general, in a learning management system. Unless you’re paying money to the course, you don’t really have access; it’s not showing up on search engines to all these resources. And for myself, I think, well, hold on a lot of this, there’s no real reason that it should be locked in. The stuff that I’m really providing benefit to the students who are at UVic is primarily happening in the classroom, in our engagements, in our office hours, in our assessments, in all of this kind of stuff. So as much of this can be pushed online and available, it’s good; and as much as I liked YouTube and thought that YouTube was part of that, a YouTube video by itself isn’t the entire learning process because it doesn’t have like, you know, other text and interactive opportunities and even just sometimes the learning objectives of what the videos are about and put all together in one package. So that’s what I thought having sort of an online book would be really getting that extra benefit for.

 

THIAGO

So it sounds like that this book that you have put together, it’s online and it’s open not only to your students.

 

TREFOR

That’s right. Yeah, it’s just, and it’s completely open source actually. So if you wanted to take it and, and tweak a few things, you’re welcome to go to the Github and make a few changes just as I made changes to previous people who sort of came ahead of me.

 

THIAGO

Yeah, good. So, in addition to having then this book in a fully open platform, your videos on YouTube, what are some of the educational tools that you use with your students here at UVic? Of course you mentioned Brightspace, so I wonder if you have a course page there, but I was especially interested in learning about where do you host your videos for your students? Are they on YouTube or do you have them in Echo360 for example?

 

TREFOR

I’ve done a bunch of everything. So, I actually, I talk about YouTube like it’s one thing. I’ve always maintained two YouTube channels; one that is for UVic students specifically that you typically won’t find if you sort of go searching, and then one that’s for sort of the rest of the world. And pretty much the videos are the same, except I might do something like, like and subscribe on the public YouTube one and not waste the time of that for our individual students. So I was actually quite happy about this, but then YouTube relatively recently has slightly changed their policies so that even if you set a video to not be monetized, as in to not pay any ads, YouTube is still going to sometimes put ads on that video and pay themselves entirely for it. So the original purpose of the UVic channel has slightly shifted. And as a result, a bunch of my courses, I have now transferred videos back into Brightspace. But again, we sort of with the, we talked about the wall garden thing, so in the open source book that’s available, I leave those on YouTube so that it is publicly accessible everywhere. And sometimes I have, so as a result, it’s a big mess and sometimes I have videos in Brightspace and sometimes I have them on YouTube. It just sort of depends. So basically the tradeoff seems to be, at least as as I understand it, that you sort of get more sort of control and and better sort of privacy issues and lack of ads when you put everything in the learning management system. And then the cost of that can sometimes be that you are now closing the door a little bit to people outside of that system. So there’s a balance.

 

THIAGO

So in the whole process of making these videos, before the pandemic, now, was there anything you didn’t expect? And, an additional question, what is the most important lesson you have learned?

 

TREFOR

Well, for not expecting, I sort of alluded to earlier, I really didn’t expect that things would take off the way they did. I mean, this really, the original project was for 20 students. And we didn’t have, the learning management system that I used to be using, literally just couldn’t upload videos of the file size that was, that was needed; you couldn’t do them in 10 mbp, which is kind of hilarious. This is only five years ago that these restrictions were place. And so I really never expected that it’d sort of blow up. And then, as I say again, even when doing the book, I didn’t expect that that would do well in sort of a global thing. But I think it’s important to create these quality resources that we’re making here at UVic, and hopefully we think we’re doing a good job at UVic, but I think most of us try to aspire to that at least, is to have those available to people who may not have access to those kind of resources. So, interestingly, I think is that working in the video medium has really changed my just in-class sort of presentation style. And one of the things that’s really nice about the video is that you can really focus on storylines. YouTube teaches you one of these weird things, which is, OK, if you want to have a video that does well algorithmically, as separate from a video that does well because it’s like pedagogically great let’s say, one of the things that needs to happen for that to be the case, neither good nor bad, it’s just sort of the reality of it, is that in the first sort of 30 seconds to a minute of a video, there needs to be some sort of hook that grabs people’s attention and sort of then takes them on this sort of narrative journey. And so, when I was thinking about how do I make videos that are effective for YouTube, I was really trying to transition more into telling stories which you might not think of in mathematics, but there’s so many amazing and beautiful stories in mathematics all the time. And when you’re constantly thinking, I want to take this particular learning objective and storify it, that’s probably not a word, but, but, but see how I can make a story that hooks students really early on, maybe there’s an intriguing question or there’s a tension between two things that we need to resolve and we’re gonna go to that sort of, you know, big resolution moment, well, if that’s what’s working on YouTube to get people hooked, why would it work in class? And then, of course, I started doing this in class all the time and it really made sense. And now when I sit down, I sort of look at my notes for class, I try to really not have it, you know, some math fact and another math fact and another math fact; much more, here’s this math fact, but then the surprising thing happens and, therefore, and really sort of lead to the story development. And you can sort of have an arc. So sometimes, this is kind of funny, you can imagine an arc might be only 10 minutes of a class, or maybe it’s the entire class, or maybe it’s a week of class, but if you’re sort of thinking about those storylines. So that’s just one really sort of a little important tip that, that I’ve taken away from YouTube to the classes. I think it makes them way better.

 

THIAGO

Interesting. It sounds like a very nice pedagogical strategy, right, to use stories to teach? I hope so. Fantastic.

 

REBECCA

So I wanted to know, kind of thinking forward, what is one piece of advice you’d give to another instructor who might want to try something like this out?

 

TREFOR

Well, I sort of think that a lot of this is maybe just getting started, and let’s talk let’s say specifically about sort of the idea of trying to be a little bit more public with your resources and having them available to an audience beyond just your students. I think at UVic there’s so many instructors who are doing so many great and wonderful things, but it can seem really intimidating, putting yourself out there. Now, more people can judge you or maybe your face is gonna be on the camera, although that’s not particularly important if you don’t want to do that. And I, I think just if you can think about your classroom in the sort of online learning space, and we’ve used this metaphor of the walled garden, is there one tree that you could put outside the walled garden? It doesn’t have to be everything. Is there one thing that’s sort of really valuable that could be sort of taken outside? And, if so, I would encourage you to try it.

 

REBECCA

Super. And a follow up question then, this isn’t about other instructors but kind of for yourself, is there any way that you would adapt your approach in the future? Like, you’ve done this particular thing in the past and with this particular class, but if you were to do it again next semester or next year, is there anything you would do differently?

 

TREFOR

Well, one of the big questions that we have is, how much active learning should be incorporated in the calculus sequence, broadly speaking? And I’m definitely a big advocate of a lot of active learning. So next semester, in the fall at least, I’m gonna be teaching Math 100. And so in this case, I’m planning to use the videos that I previously recorded for Math 100 as well, a different course, but use them more sort of forcefully in the sense that this is something that students are expected to watch and have like an incentivizing quiz component to check that they’ve actually watched them. I’ve done this in the past with some of my flip classrooms, and I’ve, I sometimes do and I sometimes haven’t done it. So the 204 course that we were talking about, because these were relatively strong and mature students who have gone through four sequence of calculus, I wasn’t making some of these things mandatory. But, but coming up with the with the first year students, they’re, they’re gonna be expected to do some of these things. And, of course, that might change their perceptions a little bit, but that’s all right.

 

THIAGO

So thanks so much for sharing the story of your course with us, Trevor. And, before we say goodbye, we would like to ask you one final question. What’s one question you wish we had asked you? And how would you have answered?

 

TREFOR

Well, perhaps one thing that I would have just sort of talked a little bit about is in society, because I’m being quite public and getting this sort of this big, large sort of cross section, one of the things that I have noticed so often is students who take the view that they’re bad at math, or they have various ranges of math anxiety and they express this through frustrations or apathy or dislike towards mathematics. And this can be very common. For instance, you know, on YouTube, one of the tight common comments that I make, people are trying to sort of praise me in some sense when they leave a comment, but they’re doing it in a way that reveals that they have a whole bunch of underlying anxieties towards mathematics. You know, I could never do it but for this one video, that type of thing. And so something that I’m really working on right now is trying to understand math anxiety a little bit better and try to think about ways that we in the classroom and online can try to sort of deal with this. And I think that YouTube has been helpful because it creates a little bit of a sort of a safety blanket and perhaps I’ll say for students sort of around the world. So, if they’re in an instructional setting where they feel like they’re not getting something out of it, they have access to resources to sort of be able to support them, and they claim it makes a big difference. But I think that it creates an incentive on us instructors to sort of be recognizing that a lot of people have a lot of anxieties about math and are bad at math. And for myself, this isn’t something that I believe. I mean, I believe that people have anxieties about math, but I don’t think that people are intrinsically bad at math. Never been able to convince my own mother that this is not true. But any student that I worked with, I mean, they’re capable of being able to sort of learn and develop even though, you know, of course, mathematics is a challenging thing, so this is sort of a, a big avenue that I’m trying to work on and to think about the kind of messaging that I want to do in the classroom just to support people with their math anxiety and to try to make math something that’s delightful and fun and something that you can do because you really can.

 

THIAGO

That’s amazing and it’s very nice of you to do that. Well, thanks again for joining us today, Trevor. This has been a great conversation and we wish you all our best. It has been my pleasure.

 

TREFOR

Thank you so much for having me.

 

REBECCA

So that brings our episode to a close. Make sure to visit our website at uvic.ca/teachanywhere, where you can learn more about teaching and learning at UVic. Thanks again, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Hosts: Thiago Hinkel & Rebecca Edwards

Guest: Dr. Trefor Bazett

Technical Production: Thiago Hinkel

Transcript Preparation: Thiago Hinkel

Theme music: “freesound1.wav” by freezound5 (https://freesound.org/people/freezound5/sounds/588258/). Available for use under the CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication at freesound.org.