Episode 4: Creating a centralized course hub and improving course accessibility with Dr. Travis Martin

Download: 04-Dr.Martin-Transcript

 

BECCA

Welcome to the Teach Anywhere Podcast: EdTech Stories from Real Educators, where we interview faculty and instructors about how they use educational technology in their courses at UVic. My name is Rebecca Edwards, and my pronouns are she, her.

 

THIAGO

I’m your co-host, Thiago Hinkel, and my pronouns are he and him. Before we begin, we 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.

 

BECCA

With us today is Dr. Travis Martin. Doctor Martin is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UVic. As an instructor, Travis focuses on modernizing the undergraduate curriculum in his department. Hello, Travis. Welcome to the podcast.

 

MARTIN

Hello. Thank you for having me.

 

BECCA

So thanks so much for joining us today. In your profile online, you mention modernizing the undergraduate curriculum, and I’m curious what you mean by modernizing the undergraduate curriculum.

 

MARTIN

That’s a good question. To answer it, I think it’s important to get kind of an idea of what the traditional physics curriculum looks like, physics and astronomy. In my experience, the field of physics, and to an extent astronomy, tends to be very traditional, very conservative in how it teaches. When talking to other instructors, there is definitely a preference for a traditional style lecture, writing on the board, talking to the students, having them passively sitting there and listening and going through extensive amounts of math. And I don’t feel that that is really working that well for students today. So, for me, I’m trying very hard to find ways to change the way that we interact with students, change the way that the classroom and the contact hours are spent. Sometimes there’s still going to be an emphasis on the lecture, but what that lecture is doesn’t have to be the same as when I was an undergraduate, where so many of my professors they would answer questions but mostly had their back to us. And so I don’t want to have my back to my students. I wanna see, look in their faces, I wanna see their reactions. I wanna have a discussion with them. I want them to ask their questions, and I want to focus on those questions more than focusing on things that they could read anyways.

 

BECCA

So it seems like to you modernizing the undergraduate curriculum means kind of inviting students into kind of the conversation and increasing student engagement in your courses.

 

MARTIN

As much as possible. Yes.

 

BECCA

And how did this become your focus? Like how did you become quite interested in working in this area?

 

MARTIN

I loved teaching and was really interested in teaching from a fairly young age. I had a number of instructors, high school and university, that had a profound impact on me. That kind of changed my attitudes and the ability for someone in that kind of position to have such a positive impact on students at such a critical time in their lives has always been an interest me. So, when my research wasn’t really going places, I’ve come to terms with that, I started focusing on possibility of a career doing education, doing the teaching side. And UVic had some need for teaching, which the need expanded due to a variety of very bizarre circumstances. And I found that I had a place in the department here and I was welcomed. But during my time starting out as an instructor here, I realized that I want to try different things. The course I teach, Astronomy 101, when I first started teaching it, I had some former colleagues, people at other universities say, oh, you’re gonna be teaching that. Oh, don’t do that. No one likes to teach that course. And I thought, I need to find a way to make it mine. If I’m gonna be teaching this course a lot, let’s make it interesting. I want to be interested in it. If I’m not interested, how can I expect the students to be? And so then I started trying new things, exploring things, and then noticed what worked and what didn’t, got feedback from students and realized, hey, there’s a problem with accessibility, there’s a problem with the way that it’s taught, there’s a problem with textbooks, all these kind of things. Slowly, I kind of built up this and then what I learned in that class informed how I taught other classes, expanded from there.

 

BECCA

Well, today I think that we wanted to talk about your Astronomy 101 course. Is that… am I getting the name right?

 

MARTIN

Yes. Astronomy 101 is the course designation.

 

BECCA

OK, perfect. And I’m curious. What is this course about? And could you tell me a little bit about the students in your course? Like what does a typical student look like? What year are they in? How big is the course? Just tell us a little bit about this course.

 

MARTIN

Sure. Astronomy 101 is… the kind of description of it is exploring the night sky. It’s what’s called an outreach course. The purpose of it is not to teach majors in astronomy. It’s not to teach people who are within our department necessarily; they’re welcome to take it, but it’s aimed more at the rest of the university population. So that could be first year students who just need a science elective, but it’s frequently students who are in 2nd, 3rd and 4th year. First year students generally only make up about 40% of the class, even though it’s a 100 level class, and fourth year students often make up a good 10 to 20% of the class. So it’s a very diverse mix of students. Generally, they need some kind of an elective, some kind of science credit in their degree or they might be taking it for interest purely, purely for interest. But then there’s another group of students that really surprised me that only recently have I been trying to reach better, and that is people who are not actually full time students, for example, a teacher trying to do career advancement training or things like that, trying to expand their teaching capabilities. So I frequently have students in that are doing that, especially during the summer session.

 

BECCA

So it’s kind of a mixing pot of different, different types of students. And you mentioned before we kind of started our chat today that you’ve taught this course several times. And so I’m just wondering, could you estimate how many times you’ve taught the course?

 

MARTIN

So I have taught the course, fall semester, winter semester, summer semester, except for one summer ever since I started here. So I think 2016 to now it’s over 20 times, but under 30. So it’s in that range. The course I’ve taught the most.

 

BECCA

OK.

 

THIAGO

And when you teach this course, is there a specific instructional strategy that you tend to focus on?

 

MARTIN

The main instructional strategy is the lecture. It’s really hard to get away from that. In physics and astronomy, we’re not necessarily teaching a skill so much as a knowledge base. So the main instructional method is through lecture. But my lectures, I hope at least, I hope it comes across to the students that it’s not necessarily going to be a standard lecture. I definitely pause for discussion, I pose questions to the students, I incorporate video, I incorporate simulations and other things to break things up. But the main one is definitely a lecture.

 

THIAGO

Thanks for that. One of the focuses of our conversation today is the use of educational technology in the course you teach. And I wonder, when you use digital technologies in your course, if you could mention some examples, but also especially what were you trying to achieve or what do you try to achieve when you incorporate educational technology in your course?

 

MARTIN

So, to me, educational technologies tend to be directed towards a specific challenge right in the moment. I have my course highly integrated with Brightspace, our learning management system I think it’s technically called. So my course is highly integrated into Brightspace, which means that students handle all of their quizzes, all of their assignments and everything through a single portal. Their labs are managed through that portal, providing kind of a central location. I use Brightspace heavily in my class because it provides a lot of options to do everything in a central location. Prior to using that, the challenge was that homework… before I started teaching the course, homework was handled through the textbook. The textbook publishers had an online portal and there was an online textbook as well as a paper copy. And then there were questions, assignment questions, and activities done there. Then, separately, the labs were handled in person. There was a lab manual, students would work in a workbook and then they’d have a, you know, on their own computer, they’d be working on their lab reports and then they’d hand it in in-person and then exams would be an in-person thing. We’d have a bubble sheet, piece of paper, wasted an immense amount of paper with 200 students, 2 to 3 times a semester, writing an exam. And it just seemed like everything was disjointed. So previously to Brightspace, we had CourseSpaces. I started with CourseSpaces trying to pull everything together, and now with Brightspace everything’s integrated. I’ve created my own assignments rather than using the textbook assignments. The labs and the lab manual are all integrated on Brightspace. Echo360, which the university provides a subscription to, handles my recorded video lectures and they’re posted on Brightspace. So there’s just that single portal, so students can get everything that they need for the course as much as possible from that location.

 

BECCA

So it seems one of the problems that you were trying to solve is that students had a lot of different places that they needed to go to find information and kind of do their coursework, and that was taking up perhaps their time and energy, dividing their attention, and that caused maybe some challenges for their learning.

 

MARTIN

Absolutely. That’s a good way to summarize it. Thank you. The challenge in part was students, especially at the beginning of the semester, not even knowing how much was needed of them. Yes, they had to buy the textbook. Yes, they had to buy the lab manual. Yes, they had to have this set up. They had to know their logins for all these different sites and that frequently resulted in students who had struggles with their time management or with their managing, you know, that’s one course. How many other courses do they have? And do they have to keep track of these things? So, those students who struggled with those kinds of parts of their education were falling behind, and it wasn’t a measure of their ability in the course. I think that, that’s… a theme in a lot of what I do is, am I doing something that actually measures their knowledge and their dedication and their understanding of the course material? Or is there something else that’s getting in the way of that, in this case, time management or products management in a sense. Is that getting in the way? And once you get that out of the way, all of a sudden the course becomes more accessible to those students.

 

BECCA

Right? So, kind of removing some of those barriers to learning that just can easily be taken away by the instructor or easily be taken away by the department or something like that.

 

MARTIN

Absolutely.

 

THIAGO

Yeah. And so, it seems that access is something important, that you considere important here, making sure your students have access to everything they need to be successful in the course. And again, so that their success in the course is then measured by not if they can find where things are, if they have to get all over the place, but then success is measured by, you know, the content itself, what you’re trying to teach, right? So how did you decide on on that strategy? Of course, I understand Brightspace is the platform we have at the university, the LMS is available for instructors, right? But for you to take it on, and before that CourseSpaces, why did you decide on that strategy?

 

MARTIN

I like to credit my wife in part for this. My wife is OK with me talking about this; she’s given me approval on many occasions. My wife has multiple disabilities. And when I was a graduate student, my wife was an undergraduate student. And I watched the struggles that she had. She went to Carleton University, and there they had really interesting system for many courses that would record the entire lecture. And then, especially for students with disabilities, they could access the recordings and watch them. It wasn’t necessarily available to all students, but they could watch them in their own time. And I saw that my wife struggled with more traditional styles of grinding through and writing notes and things like that. But she would spend four hours watching a lecture and rewatching it and rewatching it. And that worked really well for her and she got excellent grades. But she got excellent grades by doing something different than I did and different than I would have if I was taking those courses. And it helped me understand that there is… expecting students to do the thing that worked for me was not understanding and accepting their differences and not embracing their differences. I don’t think that university should be about producing duplicates to the instructor. It should be about finding ways to get students interested in their own way and find their own understandings of the material. And so I credit my wife a lot in starting me down that journey and in understanding the differences of students and embracing them.

 

BECCA

So it seems like you really value um kind of flexibility for your students, creating like different ways that they might be able to engage with the material so that they can do it in a way that resonates the best with them.

 

MARTIN

Yes, that’s a good way to put it.

 

BECCA

Perfect. So I wanted to ask, so you’ve talked quite a bit about this kind of Brightspace and creating this central portal and kind of preparing your material so that they, your students go to one place and they’re able to do um labs, homework, access video recordings of your lectures, kind of all in this one place. And that’s obviously one of our essentially supported learning technologies here at UVic. And I wanted to ask, did anything kind of get in your way as you kind of headed down this path of trying to kind of put these things in a central learning technology?

 

MARTIN

I have a difficult relationship with Brightspace.

 

BECCA

OK.

 

MARTIN

It does some things very well and it fails at doing other things. For a while I was using other technologies. For about a year, especially during the pandemic, there was a new service that was offered that allowed me to encourage discussion amongst the students. I find that the discussion forums on Brightspace are underutilized when they’re available to students. This other one encouraged it, and I was able to incorporate it as part of an assignment that their participation was graded. And there was an artificial intelligence on the service that would go through and ensured that there was a minimum quality level, minimum amount of content, that they were on topic, things like that. And it was useful, but it was taking them away from the central one. And so, I’ve come to terms with not every student likes or responds well to that type of an assignment. I tried that for a while and I’ve tried other technologies, and every time I branched away students were lost. So I’ve now kind of consolidated back, if it’s integrated into Brightspace, I’m more willing to use it. If it’s not, there will be a student lost. And that’s a student that in a sense my decisions in creating the course, something that I’m choosing for ease of instruction, isn’t working for a student. So I’m failing the student by making a decision for myself. So I try to avoid those.

 

BECCA

So from what you were saying, in kind of what you just said, it seems that even though we have a suite of learning technologies, there are places where they don’t necessarily meet your needs as an instructor, but you do have to balance kind of your needs and kind of what you’re trying to do with what your students, what works best for your students. And from what you’ve said, it works best for your students to have kind of the simple, most straightforward kind of course hub that allows them to find things easily. Yeah?

 

MARTIN

Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.

 

BECCA

OK, perfect. All right, so in this kind of process of kind of moving things into a central hub and kind of putting all of your course content in one place, I’m curious how this kind of played out with your students. Often we ask like, how did the activity play out with your students? But I guess what I’m really wondering is like, how did you see your students’ kind of engagement with the course change as you made these changes to your course?

 

MARTIN

As far as the centralization aspect goes, I find that student engagement with the material has improved. There are metrics that Brightspace provides, and I’m able to see who is participating in quizzes, who’s participating in the different components. And so, in general, participation has improved. In other respects, for example that I am video recording the lectures, participation has significantly decreased.

 

BECCA

And when you say participation has significantly decreased, do you mean in your in-person classes?

 

MARTIN

Yes, participation or engagement with the lecture component in general has decreased. As much as the video lectures are provided, many students tend to convince themselves that they can catch up. The material is there; they can use it when they’re ready for it, but then they’ll prioritize other things. And so they will convince themselves that they can catch up and when they do catch up, then they’re faced with this overwhelming amount of work that they need to do. And the more overwhelming a task, the more procrastination occurs, the less motivation the individual has, especially with students with ADHD, and I’m speaking from talking with my wife about this. The challenges when the task becomes overwhelming can just be highly demotivating, so I’ve changed my perspective a little bit in the the video lectures. While I do record all my lectures, I have decided not to make them default available to all students. Instead, students who have accessibility accommodations will get them or will get access to them. But then I tell my students at the beginning of the semester, if you are sick, if you have something come up or happen, if you want to prioritize another class, I understand. I’m putting a small barrier where contact me, I will give you access to the video lecture, but I’m not going to make it by default. And so the implementation of the video recording and making that accessible reduced engagement overall. And only once I provided that small barrier did participation in the lecture go up and even then those students who miss specific lectures, they’re then more willing to watch that one or two lectures to catch up, and it kind of restored a bit of a balance in that regard.

 

BECCA

And so it seems like sometimes you’ve tried something out with technology that hasn’t quite gone the way that you’d hoped and you just kind of adapt to make changes and kind of move forward in a different way?

 

MARTIN

Absolutely. Education has to be like that. You’re going to be trying things; there isn’t one model that works for every course, for every thing. You’re going to be trying new things, new technologies, and you need to find ways to assess how well that they’re, how well they’re working and then adapt and change. That’s the modernizing the curriculum part. it’s a path, it’s a journey, it’s not a fixed goal.

 

THIAGO

So, yeah, I wonder if in the whole process of doing that, right, first making videos available to everybody and then now creating this gate, let’s say, for people to not make it available to everybody, right, but to some specific students and under demand for some other students, was there anything else you didn’t expect?

 

MARTIN

Maybe the most interesting story on that front would be what happened during the pandemic. The first semesters that we shifted to online learning, I had convinced myself that I knew exactly what to do, that I was going to record all my lectures. It worked so well for my wife when she had recorded lectures. So I was gonna record all my lectures and students could watch them. And then instead of having a lecture, I would have multiple hours of office hours, students could come and ask questions and we’d have discussion. I was convinced that that was going to be successful, and I definitely tried to convince other people of the benefits of that system. The end result was no one showed up to office hours. No one wanted to discuss. They might show up and then they’d just say, oh, I’m here to listen to other people’s questions. They hadn’t already watched the lecture videos. They would cram the lecture videos before the assessments. And I was shocked at how that technique that worked so well for my wife wasn’t working well universally. And I had to pivot and change. So that is part of what informed my more recent edition where I still feel that video lectures are important. I still think it’s critical that we allow students the ability to choose their time as effectively as they can to prioritize different things but without them missing the material and playing catch up via other means. They need to be able to access the material that their peers had access to just because they had something that interfered.

 

BECCA

Can I ask you, so you mentioned the pivot, and it sounds like during kind of that time, when you were doing this emergency remote teaching, you started off with one approach and then you pivoted. Did you pivot during the semester or was it kind of between semesters?

 

MARTIN

It was between semesters.

 

BECCA

And what was the approach that you took in the next semester?

 

MARTIN

So the next semester I went back to a more in-person, or not in person, but live scenario. Lectures were on Zoom. They were still recorded. The recording was provided to students, but there was a live lecture component and participation improved. Out of 150 or so students, I’d have 30 or 40 showing up. They would watch the live lecture. But that leaves more than 100 students just watching the video. And the statistics showed that they weren’t pacing it out. They were cramming it together, if they watched it. Others would. So the assessments were online, and many students convinced themselves that they could get the answers to that by just using Google, which I’m ok with. I want students to have access to the internet. Creating an artificial assessment where students do not have access to resources, do not have access to the internet or anything else that they would in a career or job type setting, doesn’t necessarily assess their abilities using the tools that they would otherwise. So I want to create assessments that are online, and I have assessments through Brightspace that are online, but they would convince themselves that the internet could, they could just type in something to Google and it would give them the answer. And they kept convincing themselves of that. And they kept having lower… My grades, despite being the same questions, course grades were dropping. And that was in part because they didn’t realize that I had created a series of questions which require them to understand. It’s not recall questions, it’s understanding questions, synthesis questions.

 

BECCA

Kind of this higher order of thinking skills.

 

MARTIN

Absolutely. It’s a 100 level course, but I would rather have students start understanding how to do that synthesis, that higher order understanding at that level, rather than, what is the definition of this word?

 

BECCA

So through this process, what do you think is the most important lesson that you’ve learned?

 

MARTIN

Most important lesson to me would be that the diversity of student approaches is not something to fight against. It’s something to embrace and find ways to work with. And that diversity includes students with disabilities, students with accessibility issues. A couple of semesters ago, I had a student who was a retiree They had started their degree and never finished it. And it was, in a sense, one of their goals in life was they wanted to finish their degree. And so they were coming back to university. But they lived up in Campbell River. Transportation, you can imagine, big problem there. You don’t want to drive to UVic every single day from Campbell River. So, by having the video available for them, they were able to take part in that course. And by embracing that type of student, I was able to reach someone who ended up really enjoying the course, learning a lot, finding it a very valuable experience. And if I hadn’t embraced technologies that could make my course more accessible to people, I would have missed that. So I want to continue this process of finding ways to reach students in ways that work well for them.

 

BECCA

Thank you so much for sharing the story of your course with us. Before we say goodbye, I’d like to ask you one final question. And that is, what is one question that you wished that we had asked you? And how would you have answered? This is kind of your opportunity to say something that you haven’t gotten to say yet.

 

MARTIN

The question I wish you would have asked is are there other technologies, are there other things that you have incorporated as well? To which I would have responded: Yes, I actually have created a simulation. I use Mathematica software to create a visualization and simulation of orbits that students can interact with and play around with, and they can set the time, they can set initial positions based on data that they get from NASA and actually watch the orbits go and look at opposition, things like that. And while it’s not part of that centralized software, my Brightspace centralization aspect, it’s still really interesting technology, a hands-on technology that, I feel simulation is a really critical part in physics and astronomy because so much of what is happening in experiment and is happening in labs is just out of reach. It’s expensive, it’s centralized, so we can’t do anything here when the experiments are happening in Europe, happening in Japan, happening in Vancouver, things like that. So simulation gives students a way to interact with it as well. So that’s another thing I would talk about.

 

BECCA

Yeah. OK. That’s really, that’s actually really interesting. Becaus we, in our roles, we talk a lot about kind of in a learning technology ecosystem and the idea of using different tools for the purpose that they are best suited for us. So it’s great to hear that you have a kind of your own um learning technology ecosystem that you draw on in order to provide the best learning experience for your students and great feedback for us as well.

 

THIAGO

Thanks again for joining us, Dr Martin. That was a great conversation and we are wishing you all our best.

 

MARTIN

Thanks very much for having me. I appreciate it.

 

BECCA

All right. 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 and find more of our podcast episodes. Thanks so much and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Hosts: Thiago Hinkel & Rebecca Edwards

Guest: Dr. Travis Martin

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.