Montgomery College Tackles Remote Teaching and Learning

As schools throughout the country prepare for the fall semester, the success of students will hinge in part on the preparedness of the faculty. Specifically, pedagogical and technological preparedness.

Montgomery College, a two-year community college in Montgomery County, Maryland, was impacted like every other educational institution by COVID-19 beginning in March. Faculty who historically had not used various online tools had to scramble to move into a remote environment. It was the Wild West of online teaching. Whatever worked to keep students engaged was fair game: video, email, telephone, texting apps, learning management system and even traditional snail mail.

Jeff Selingo, in a July 16 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, said that instead of institutions worrying about Plexiglass and other virus barriers, leaders should turn their attention to embracing remote learning. “If colleges continue to succumb to shortsightedness and have nothing to offer next semester but another diminished online educational experience, the repercussions could be felt for years to come,” Selingo wrote.

Playing to its strength of agility and realizing that an unfocused approach could not continue into the summer and fall, Montgomery College decided in the spring that summer and fall classes would be fully online or in a remote setting. The College embarked on a Herculean task of training all faculty who never taught online for remote teaching. As a result, a seven-week required Structured Remote Teaching (SRT) training was developed by a team of faculty, staff and administrators and offered to about 700 full-time and part-time faculty using CARES Act funding. Participants received instruction rooted in best practices and guidance from a team of instructional designers and 31 faculty mentors.

This training, offered by the Office of E-learning, Innovation and Teaching Excellence (ELITE), combined synchronous and asynchronous components to focus on pedagogy and technology. Course design and training were centered around student engagement, with participants being reminded throughout that students would be coming to classes with the pandemic and social unrest playing out in the world around them.

Blackboard Essentials
Collaborate Ultra and Zoom
Text Editor
Assessments
Grade Center
Communication Tools
Embedded Support Resources
Discipline-based Best Practice

While the training was not prescriptive in nature, each section or module did require participants to complete a quiz. A capstone project had to be developed that included learning modules, communication tools and assessments. Only after completion and successful review by an instructional designer was the faculty approved to teach in the upcoming semesters.

It was important for college leadership to emphasize that while faculty were not expected to have a cookie-cutter template for each course, students would benefit from having courses that were easy to navigate. This common student experience is expected to aid in course retention and completion.

The faculty at Montgomery College responded in incredible ways. While they acknowledged the training was intense, they also understood the pedagogical transformation within their courses. One part-time faculty recently stated that he compared the course he created this summer with his emergency remote course, and the contrast was numbing. Another participant stated, “SRT training has taken face-to-face teaching to a new and higher level. Professors, even professors who would have been considered well organized in a traditional classroom setting, must think through every “move” to weave classes seamlessly so that student interest is maintained, especially in long evening classes.” And yet another said, “No one likes change, but (this training has) done an incredible job at facilitating an unbelievable pivot to the future in the midst of a very trying time.”

While this initial training has been successful, we realize that if we are to meet the complex needs of our students moving forward, we will have to continue to re-imagine education. SRT 2.0 will include an even stronger focus on the academic disciplines and the content faculty deliver. Program advising will be take center stage. Online support services such as tutoring and embedded coaching will be enhanced.

Montgomery College has leaned into remote learning. Post-COVID we will be an institution that will be able to boast about even stronger academics and support services.

Do Not Let COVID-19 Kill the Quality of Online Teaching

As every higher education institution and K-12 school in the country has had to shift to some form of remote teaching, misconceptions abound comparing what we are currently doing to effective online teaching.

Online teaching and remote teaching are not one and the same.

Many faculty who transitioned quickly to remote teaching as a result of COVID-19 did so with little regard to instructional design; content was quickly put together for delivery over a synchronous video-conferencing platform. Learning Management Systems were thrust into the fore, but faculty had to be quickly trained on all the tools: gradebooks, discussion boards, assessments. It was the Wild West education episode.

But now, across the country, we hear cries from some faculty that they are ready to teach fully online because they have been teaching in a remote environment for several weeks. We cannot let COVID-19, and the rush to remote instruction, kill the quality of online teaching that so many of us have been focused on — and helped to enhance — for years.

Community colleges are poised to help win that battle. Our faculty are engaged in the scholarship of teaching, not just the scholarship of research. And our students, many of whom are working or taking care of children or elders, need the flexibility during this pandemic that fully online courses bring. They expect quality courses.

Not only will the institutions be harmed but, more importantly, our students will suffer. If institutional leaders rush to compare remote instruction with online teaching, the naysayers of online education may point fingers and say, “I told you.” They may suggest that online courses are thrown together, and consequently, students cannot digest content and success is impacted. They may say that the in-depth training that our institutions provide for teaching online is exaggerated. “After all,” they may say, “you let me teach in an online environment after two days of training. Why do I need weeks of preparation?”

An article in Educause Review last month highlighted the concern:

Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody making the transition to online teaching under these circumstances will truly be designing to take full advantage of the affordances and possibilities of the online format.

We have to fight against these temptations. Now is the time for the online community to tout its successes and to talk about the positive impact quality design has on student achievement. To do anything less allows the educational naysayers to claim victory.

References

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning 2020 Charles B. Hodges, Stephanie Moore, Barbara B. Lockee, Torrey Trust, and M. Aaron Bond. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.

World Access to Higher Education

Today marks the second annual World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED), a day designed to highlight global inequalities and to create a call for local, regional and international action. I cannot think of a better entity to fulfill this mission than a community college, and specifically, Montgomery College.

WAHED primarily has a European focus, organized by the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), which is the United Kingdom group whose aim is to increase higher education access. NEON provides a few startling statistics about higher education access:

Across the 76 lowest income countries, the poorest people are 20 times less likely to complete a higher education course than the richest.
Across 23 countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a child’s chances of participating in tertiary education are twice as high if at least one of their parents has completed upper-secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education.

But make no mistake, access to higher education isn’t just an international concern. It’s a concern in Montgomery County, Maryland as well. There are pockets of communities in Montgomery County where higher education is a fleeting dream, a thought that exists only in the deep recesses of residents’ minds.

Montgomery College is doing its best to change that mindset.

From access to community engagement centers, three campuses across the county, online degrees and zero-cost textbook courses, and low tuition, Montgomery College makes a strong statement in being the community’s college. Providing access to quality higher education for the residents of Montgomery County improves the economic lifestyle for everyone.

It is for these reasons that I’m happy to help support WAHED 2019. Maybe we call it locally MCAHED 2019.

Community-engaged open pedagogy

Written in collaboration with Shinta Hernandez, chair of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, Montgomery College

Faculty have always found that engaging students in community-based projects yields more enthusiasm for learning. Students find the projects less boring and more relevant to their daily lives. And the faculty find assessing such projects less arduous.

Boyer described a higher education curriculum with a cross-disciplinary focus on social issues that “would enrich the campus, renew the communities, and give new dignity and status to the scholarship of service” (quoted in Zlotkowski, 1998, 1).

But there should be more to community-engaged pedagogy than service learning. We would like to extend the term to be more reflective of the open movement and focus on community-engaged open pedagogy.

Rubin et al. described five dimensions of community-engaged pedagogy: 1) relational approach to partnership building, 2) establishment of a learning community, 3) organic curriculum model, 4) collaborative teaching mechanism with diverse faculty, and 5) applied learning.

That sounds like open pedagogy, where students are placed at the center of the learning process as creators of information and not just consumers of that information. Students are partners with faculty in developing content, content that is shared back to the knowledge commons for others to use. This focus on student agency is critical, we believe, for deep learning to take place.

We see community-engaged open pedagogy as a high-impact practice that Vaz (2019) claims “helps students develop skills that are essential in the workplace and that transfer to a wide range of setting – such as communication, problem solving and critical thinking.”

At a recent Teaching and Learning Summit offered by Achieving the Dream, Karen Cangialosi talked about “The Power of Open Pedagogy” and discussed a plethora of opportunities for students to engage in open pedagogy: creating ancillary materials for OER textbooks, using open Google Docs to work collaboratively, sharing open blogs, developing Wikipedia entries, creating web annotations, and working on renewable assignments, to name a few.

These open pedagogical techniques can be viewed as high-impact practices, taking both students and faculty out of their comfort zones. They require planning, collaboration and active engagement.

We have opted to focus our efforts on community-based open pedagogy in the area of renewable assignments, co-facilitating a Montgomery College fellowship centered on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

The set of 17 UN SDGs addresses a wide range of social issues designed to achieve and maintain global justice. We thought it would be an opportunity to connect Montgomery College’s focus on social justice with open pedagogy.

The first-ever work of this kind was launched during the summer of 2018, when 13 Montgomery College faculty participated in the fellowship. This summer the fellowship is operating in partnership with Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Canada. This international partnership serves as the beginning of a collective approach to transforming the teaching and learning environments and to improving the world.

Faculty fellows work in teams to create several renewable assignments, which must meet the following criteria: 1) interdisciplinary, 2) openly licensed, 3) basis on at least one SDG, and 4) mandatory community or civic engagement element for students. These assignments are designed to place the students in the community through experiential learning and in the center of their learning process. This type of assignment is likely to make the students’ learning more engaging and more collaborative, and ultimately, this open educational practice may increase overall student success.

More details, including examples of faculty assignments and student projects, are available at https://www.montgomerycollege.edu/offices/elite/unesco/.

Engaging students in the learning process to improve their communities is a win-win for all involved: faculty benefit from having more engaged students, students win by engaging in assignments that mean something to them, and the communities win as a result of a focus on improvement the quality of life within those environs.

References

Tessa Hicks Peterson (2009) Engaged scholarship: reflections and research on the pedagogy of social change, Teaching in Higher Education, 14:5, 541-552, DOI: 10.1080/13562510903186741

Rubin CL, Martinez LS, Chu J, Hacker K, Brugge D, Pirie A, Allukian N, Rodday AM, Leslie LK. Community-Engaged Pedagogy: A Strengths-Based Approach to Involving Diverse Stakeholders in Research Partnerships. Progress in Community Health Partnerships 2012 Winter; 6(4): 481–490. doi; 10.1353/cpr.2012.0057

Vaz R. High-Impact Practices Work. Inside Higher Ed June 2019. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/06/04/why-colleges-should-involve-more-students-high-impact-practices-opinion

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OERs and the Cornerstones of MC 2025

Montgomery College is embarking on a new strategic plan to guide the College over the next five years. Titled MC 2025, the plan will serve as the overarching plan for other master plans at the College, including the Academic Master Plan and the Achieving the Dream (ATD) student success work. Specific strategies are identified to support each of the six different goals approved by the Board of Trustees:

Empower students to start smart and succeed
Enhance transformational teaching practices and learning environments
Fuel the economy and drive economic mobility
Build, engage, and strengthen community partnerships
Invest in our employees
Protect affordability

Each of the goals is grounded in the concepts of excellence, rigor and equity. With the focus of these three lenses, I started thinking about our OER/Z-course work and MC Open, the institutional umbrella under which the work of “open” and open pedagogy lives. https://www.montgomerycollege.edu/academics/mc-open/.

Montgomery College intentionally began its journey of openness with the 2016 ATD grant that allowed us to create a General Studies Z-degree, with Z meaning zero-cost textbooks. A Business degree has since followed, and Criminal Justice and Early Childhood Education are nearing completion. Prior to the grant, the college had a number of faculty who were not requiring students to purchase texts, but the courses could not be accurately identified in the course schedule. The ATD grant compelled us to create a proper code so students could filter for Z-courses.

Excellence

The faculty of Montgomery College have been responsible stewards of maintaining academic excellence in their use of OER and in implementing Z-courses. Initial concerns about the quality of material has dissipated. Most faculty have found resources that adequately cover the necessary subject matter, and what is missing in one resource is supplemented by another. As the variety of resources increases, and as individual faculty members become more comfortable sharing to the commons, concerns should continue to erode about the excellence of material.

This journey of openness has also offered faculty a greater sense of agency as they maintain academic excellence in their teaching environments. More specifically, this initiative potentially gives faculty the opportunity to have the freedom to develop content that meets the needs of their students. As content experts and institutional representatives, faculty are in a powerful position to include their students in the learning process by placing them at the center of this process. Students are consequently empowered to maintain the academic excellence alongside their instructors, also making them agents of change in higher education.

Moreover, the excellence in the teaching itself has been maintained. A survey of 343 students as part of the ATD grant revealed that 60 percent said the quality of teaching in a Z-course was slightly higher or much higher when compared to a non Z-course. Only 5 percent stated it was slightly lower or much lower. These results are consistent with national results.

Rigor

When Montgomery College first began its OER/Z-course work, there were basically two objectives, which are common to many institutions around the country:

Save students money
Don’t negatively impact academic standards or academic success

The first is easy to quantify. Since being able to track Z-courses in the course schedules, Montgomery College has saved students about $2.5 million in textbook costs. Prevailing opinions suggest that students take that saved money and re-invest in themselves by taking more courses. In fact, a recent release of the Montgomery College Student Success Score Card shows that fall-to-spring retention over a five-year period has increased from 70.8 percent to 79.5 percent. All attributed to Z-courses? Absolutely not. But the initiative is seemingly a factor.

The second objective is easy to demonstrate. Four semesters worth of data show that student success has not been negatively impacted by faculty moving to OER or zero-cost textbooks. In the fall 2018 semester, success in Z-courses and non Z-courses was 76 percent, with success being defined as a grade of A, B or C.

In fact, across certain demographics, success is better in Z-courses when compared to non Z-courses. Black males did almost 3 percentage points better in Fall 2018 Z-courses compared to those courses using a traditional proprietary textbook. In the Spring 2018 semester, Hispanic males saw a success rate in Z-courses at almost 92 percent, compared to 80 percent in non Z-courses. Coincidentally, the increase in graduating Hispanic students this year is larger than any other racial/ethnic group.

Equity

As Montgomery College has embraced OER efforts by our faculty, the focus has been on equity, meaning OER implementation has become a social justice issue. It’s about providing everyone in Montgomery County with access to education and not letting the cost of textbooks be a deterrent.

The ATD grant student survey mentioned earlier revealed that 61 percent of MC students said there have been times when they did not buy or rent the required textbook or materials for a class, eight percentage points higher than the national response. Forty-eight percent of the students said the reason was because they could not afford them.

Providing equitable access to education has to include equitable access to materials. By increasing access to education, we increase access to knowledge. In fact, the United Nations charged all countries that adopted the Sustainable Development Agenda to reach the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by the year 2030, and among those goals is improving the quality of and increasing access to education. OER makes that promise.

Pakastini activist Malala Yousafzai, when fighting for the educational rights of women in her homeland, said, “I raise up my voice-not so I can shout but so that those without a voice can be heard…we cannot succeed when half of us are held back.”

Let us take the same approach with OER and not let the cost of textbooks hold anyone back, all the while sustaining excellence, maintaining rigor and embracing equity.

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