Talk to Me: Leveraging Modalities in Remote Instruction

This post will probably be shorter than usual because I am, as they say in England, right knackered. I have found myself feeling “on” pretty much non-stop since this quarantine started and even if I give myself distance from my paid work on the weekend, I still have publishing and editing commitments that will not stop even if the world is ending (which is another issue that I am too exhausted to get into right now). However, there is something that has been haunting my mind over the past few days so it would be nice to write it out so I can think it through.

A tweet that went by this week highlighted the sheer amount of information and resources that are being produced to support faculty and students through this time of remote or online instruction. On the one hand it is so great that teams are coming together and creating these resources and supporting faculty the best that they can in this situation. I know there are many smaller colleges or universities that do not have these kinds of supports and are actually benefiting from the resources created and distributed by other institutions because these resources are open source for the most part, and distributed widely on social media channels and via email.

However, and the point that the tweet was making is, the large majority of them, actually close to 90% if I had to guess, are just walls of text. These resources are by and large textually based and when you multiply these paragraphs and paragraphs of words by the number of resources floating around, you simply have walls and walls of words that are difficult to parse. So the other side of this wealth of resource riches is that we are actually drowning in information.  Because of the shear amount of resources, specialized application becomes difficult, and even finding “that tweet I read the other day” becomes difficult if you do not have a good system for storing and curating all of this information. So even if so many are well versed in Universal Design and know how having multiple modalities to access information has been studied and supported with evidence, the default is still text. So my question is why, and can we please stop?

When I am not working or reading I am usually listening to podcasts. In the mornings when I work I listen to the radio, to The Current (when I am not in a meeting of course, which is often). Then when I end my day at 5 (or 6 or 7) I listen to some ed tech podcast or some pedagogical podcast. Sometimes it’s 99% Invisible which doesn’t have to do with education per se, or the cool new podcast by Samin Nosrat on quarantine cooking. And usually on Fridays when Hannah’s Secret Feminist Agenda comes out I will make dinner and listen to that.  I learn a lot from podcasts. Yesterday, I listened to all 5 hours of Thomas King’s Massey lectures from 2003. I learned that Audubon killed the birds so he could draw them better, which made me sad because I didn’t know that at all.

So why aren’t we podcasting more (like Hannah asked in a tweet this week)? Or why aren’t we creating more infographics? Maybe the answer is because it seems as though those modalities take more time, but in fact they don’t. This week some participants asked for a “how to” for the live captions I had running in a Zoom Webinar and it took me all of 15 minutes to make a screencast, upload it on YouTube, and caption it for distribution. It would have taken me double that if I wrote that down as instructions.  So maybe it is because we need to do this more until we get comfortable. Maybe we need to be open to other modalities as instructors when we are creating assessments and activities but also as learners and as those creating resources. Many of us are still time poor even if others believe this is a time rich opportunity. Simone demonstrated how to create video feedback on assignments in our LMS this week. It even does captions so that it is accessible. So let’s do this a bit more, and the words a bit less. I understand the irony of a 750 word blog post to say use less words…but a podcast is coming…I’m just sorting out the framework. More soon….but remember if you use less words make sure it is all accessible.