Rethinking Traditions: Creating an Engaging and Effective Online Orientation Experience [podcast]

Authors:

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot
Learning Designer
California State University, Channel Islands

Jaimie Hoffman
Vice President for Student Affairs and Learning
Noodle Partners

Kathe Pelletier
Director of Student Success Community Programs
EDUCAUSE

Kathe: Greetings. This is Kathe Pelletier, Director of Student Success Community Programs at EDUCAUSE. Welcome to this podcast that we're posting in the Transforming Higher Ed blog, which is a community forum of teaching and learning in higher education. As campuses are preparing for the fall, one really important student touchpoint that should be on our minds is orientation. While a few campuses plan to return to some face-to-face instruction, most will likely include some online component. And considering ways to create an engaging student experience through online orientation will be critical to help new students feel welcome, connected and armed with the information they need to be successful.

So, I'm delighted to be here today with two experts who really live at the intersection of online teaching and learning and orientation. I have with me today, Jaimie Hoffman, who is the Vice President for Student Affairs and Learning at Noodle Partners. Jaimie works with campuses to create ecosystems that are inclusive of online students. She served as a full-time and adjunct faculty member and has taught face-to-face, blended and online, and she also serves as a consultant for institutions supporting online students, and to top it all off, has written a couple books about online learning. And Megan Eberhardt-Alstot is the learning designer at Cal State University Channel Islands. Prior to joining the teaching and learning innovations team there, she taught in the K-12 space. She has a master's in educational leadership and administrative credential from CSUCI, and develops and facilitates faculty preparation for humanized and connected online teaching, manages online and blended course quality assurance and co-facilitates the teaching and learning innovations learning design team, and the Cal State University's Canvas Common Interest Group.

Megan's interests include the relationship between design, humanized engagement interaction, and the impact on student learning. Welcome to the two of you. Thanks for being with me here today.

Jaimie Hoffman: Thank you so much. So happy to be here].

Kathe Pelletier: First, let's just start off with the design component when we talk about online orientation. What are some of the practices that you use that are drawn from instructional design that should be considered when making orientation courses?

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: For me, personally, it really has to go back to starting with that backwards design approach, really beginning with what are your desired outcomes. Then from there, your outcomes will inform the content that needs to be selected, what tasks you're going to ask individuals to complete, as well as ultimately how you're going to assess or hold accountability for completing the orientation.

I also think then from there, that's going to really help you decide those modality decision points. So, what is best in that asynchronous setting? What's going to be best in the synchronous setting. Then now, my answer to this has slightly shifted. Had you asked me in January, it'd be very focused on the asynchronous component, but now with the post-COVID experience and just so many of the uncertainties that so many of our students and families are facing, we've kind of gone to the polar opposite of now there's not a choice so much about whether to be online or face-to-face, and that's always been a big advocacy in the space of online, is having that choice and flexibility. Well, I heard from my students, because I also teach when we went to this online shift, and I tried to make it a completely online designed asynchronous experience, and they didn't love it. And that aha moment for me was, "Oh, they didn't have the choice."

So, as we're looking at this orientation space now, thinking about, yes, we need the asynchronous. Yes, definitely the synchronous. But then I also think we need to think through where can we provide choice? Can they take an asynchronous route or a synchronous route, especially since we know too glaringly how much equity and inequity there is in this technical space. So, it's just being highly considerate of your audience.

I think each campus would have to take this on being laser-focused on who's your audience and how are you going to create an equitable engaging environment and still offer that choice, even though it's going to be digital, what that choice looks like.

Kathe Pelletier: And there is a lot of research about how important choice is to learning, not just the equity component, which is critical, but even just how students learn, if they're able to have the choice that lends to better learning outcomes.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: Yes, it's a huge piece of motivation. We're so much more motivated when we can choose, and the research is incredibly clear. In fact, as we were designing, doing faculty development for moving into the fall, that component of motivation through choice, it's exactly where we're focusing too.

Jaimie Hoffman: I would add, just thinking about the fact that some of the individuals tuning into this may be primarily orientation professionals figuring this out as they go with limited resources because their campus instructional designers are helping faculty design their courses. I'd add some really basic things to consider too, like looking at Merrill's principles of instruction as a way to think through presenting learning experience, making sure that universal design for learning is baked in to how content is presented. And last, I really appreciated leveraging the CSU systems rubric for effective online teaching. I've actually appreciated using it to make sure I'm on the right track in how I build the course though. I acknowledge that it's really built to assess something that's already created. I think the way that that particular rubric is written is very understandable, even to someone that may be new to this space. And it helps you to think through like, you just want it to be user-friendly, we want a student to log in and not be expected to watch an hour-long video, or read 10 paragraphs worth of content without it being punctuated with some sort of engagement or even multimedia.

So, some of those things I would add, and resources to further explore that will kind of help catch folks up to speed that may not have this background.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. And it does seem like that marriage of best practices in online teaching and learning, certainly, and instructional design in general can apply to the orientation space.

Jaimie Hoffman: Yeah, absolutely.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. You mentioned video and multimedia. Certainly not having a video that's an hour-long without some sort of interaction seems like common sense, but are there other best practices in video making that folks should consider when they're making orientation courses?

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: You mentioned the big one, which is time: keeping them short and, in a sense, snackable for people to watch and digest, because we know so much it's a lot easier to be engaged in the face-to-face in-person moment than it is through a video. So yes, think snackable, soundbite information, as well as that basic accessibility, you want to make sure you have time with your video production to have captions, because folks may or may not be using the captions because of a physical disability, but it may also be that I'm in transit and I need to watch this, then I can read the captions. So, there's that other layer of accessibility too. That's kind of on the basics.

Also, you want it to be easy to watch. So, considering lighting, making sure that you can be seen. Then also, I think it's being really mindful of your background, choosing... There are the virtual backgrounds, but then also, what's my messaging? What is it I'm wanting students to focus on? Do I want them to focus on my message? Or am I trying to share or show something? So, I think thinking through, again, just like a course design, what's the purpose of the video.

Then video is such a humanizing experience. It allows us to do that nonverbal communication, facial expressions, body language. So, it's a way to help students feel connected with the campus. We talk about why instructors need to use video in an online course. Well, when students can't be physically at a campus, which is right now not necessarily the option, then they're going to get that sense of connection from the instructor, or in this case, it's going to be through the people they interact with in that online orientation.

I think another thing is matching faces with places. So, even though I can't physically be at the library right now, I know what the librarian looks like and sounds like, and they've portrayed this approachable person that I can talk to later on. So, who are the folks in your orientation, the students, the faculty voices that you want to be sure students can have a sense of comfort and connection to.

Then finally videos are such easy ways to do virtual tours. So, can they show spaces, these spaces, and give students the option to kind of get that sense of location, even though they can't physically be there at the time.

Kathe Pelletier: This is an example from my children, I have a kindergartner and a second grader, and they had a virtual field day that their PE teacher and other supporting staff coordinated. And it was so cool that the video wasn't just the teacher talking at them, but they were recording themselves doing an obstacle course and jumping off logs and just doing things in a space. Again, it seems like, well, of course you should record yourself doing stuff that's fun and engaging and not just talk to the camera. But it just was a neat way to use video that I would imagine would also translate to an orientation kind of setting.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot:You bring up such a good point, is I think right now too, don't worry about being perfect in the video, because you want to be human. And if we're going to be asking students in the online orientation to also be engaging, if you're using a video platform for responding like Flipgrid or VoiceThread, we want to make it permissible to not be perfect so that we can get a real sense of human connection, and so that's authentic, which is important too.

Jaimie Hoffman: I also think it normalizes the lives we're all living right now, right? Like, my dog barked when I introduced myself, which I was like, "Oh, thanks. She's coming this call too." My kids have been known to barge in. Luckily, I think that's not going to happen right now, but I still kind of keep the recording going when those things happen, because that is the lives of many of our students. I just will kind of reflect on and mention sort of something to bring the two questions together about both sort of approach to instructional and video making. And it's kind of to underscore what you said, Kathe, about the obvious, which is that...

I think this is a real opportunity here to disrupt what really is probably, and I might be a little unpopular for saying this, but it's kind of a chance to disrupt how we're thinking we're delivering content to students on ground during orientation, much like we experience when we work with faculty. We see faculty when they're migrating their courses online in non-COVID scenarios, realizing, "Wow, this is actually helping me improve my teaching on ground." I would love to see the same thing happen in the orientation space, because it is really not a great experience for students to sit or their families, which both do all day long, two days, sometimes three days in a row, when we know better, we actually know people don't learn in that way. None of us want to sit through eight hours’ worth of lectures, sometimes in the heat. All of those things.

So, let's use this as a chance to actually leverage the dual modality to make it a great learning experience. The reason to I want to underscore that is because even as late as last night, I was in a Facebook group and people were asking for strategies about making their orientation course online, and a few people have said we're posting our PowerPoints with the record over. I think people are just doing the best that they can and they're actually migrating what they literally see on ground online, but unfortunately that doesn't really make it a great experience. So, I hope that folks do see this as a chance to transform the orientation experience holistically for the summer and the future.

Kathe Pelletier: So, you're actually leading right into my next question. How do you know when it's great? How do you assess on an online orientation?

Jaimie Hoffman: Well, that is a really great question. The thing that I really like about the online modality is the fact that there's much more data available at our fingertips to understand students' engagement with our content, from everything, from conducting, if you want knowledge checks, which I say, if you want, because sometimes I feel a little uneasy about what that presents to students because we wouldn't make them do it on ground. So, to say they have to pass a knowledge check with a certain amount of numbers is, to me, not necessarily equitable to on-ground, although I still think it's actually a good practice. So, maybe we bake it in on-ground though. That's another way to think of it. But we can have knowledge checks and surveys that we can actually ask students to respond to much like they would on ground, but they're already at their online campus, so it's all online and they can click the buttons, so that makes it easy.

We can also leverage technology to help us understand how often they're clicking from one asynchronous component to the next, how long are they staying on videos? How long have they been in an orientation course? So, things in which you don't even have to ask students about, but you can leverage yourself. That's very useful to that inform maybe even just the organization of your content. Certainly asking students about their experience through a culminating survey is an important step. And I'd love to invite Megan to talk about that a little bit more, because we have done that in a course that we co-created specifically geared toward orienting students to online education, not necessarily an entire campus, but still many of the same tenets are present. So, I'll pass it over to Megan to talk about that, as well as badging, which I think is a really unique and efficient way to kind of leverage technology to kind of get confirmation of completion of orientation activities.

Before I pass it over, I'd be remiss to not say that in those knowledge checks and culminating surveys, that is a chance to make sure that you're assessing for the demonstration of learning outcomes, which is what we, were talking about Megan's suggestion about backwards mapping that this is the chance to it, obviously to assess that, but they can also demonstrate it through assignments and such if you wanted to bake that into the course. So, I'll pass over to you, Megan, to talk a little bit about the results we've seen with students engaging and giving feedback on their experience, and then a little bit about badging.

Kathe Pelletier: Great.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: Sure. And Jaimie mentioned that we co-developed an online orientation course for students to build their skillset and being successful online students. And so, because we didn't have the capacity to have a really highly facilitated experience, the knowledge checks were a way for us to just that students had in fact engaged in the content. And of course that double benefit of if you are an online student and you're planning to be in an online class, you're probably going to be using an online quiz or survey tool. So, it gave them experience with that.

So, like Jaimie said, it's being mindful about, okay, so what skillset are we really building and checking? In that same vein, we were able to survey students at the end of the course. And that has given us just invaluable feedback. One about satisfaction with the course, how useful they found it, what they found specifically useful. Then also leaving it open for suggestions. Those suggestions have been amazing as we've gone back and revised our previous work and made adjustments to things to meet students' needs. It's just been a great space to one collect institutional data, but then also to get that formative feedback that lets us improve on our learning, and that also is perspective into what is effective for students in some of these online spaces and what they are enjoying. So, that's helpful to pass on to faculty as well as we're supporting course design.

Jaimie Hoffman: One thing I wanted to mention about the survey results I thought was fascinating. We have a blog that captures many of the high-level results, but it didn't mention this, a blog post rather that's on EDUCAUSE's page. What I thought was fascinating is we had a little section where we talked about remembering why you're here, anchoring in your why. And we ask students to reflect on their why and report one word associated with their why into a digital word cloud. When personally I put that in there, I did with the element of wanting to anchor students in their motivation and knowing that that's an important piece, but I also really wasn't quite sure how students would perceive it, because I know from the research I've done about student orientation, especially for online learning students usually expect to learn how to use technology as a number one.

So, I thought they might see this as being a diversion to what their goal is and our goals are, and I thought that it was fascinating that they not only quantitatively rated that as an enjoyable experience, but in many of the comments, they commented on the fact that they really appreciated that. I think that emphasizes the whole element of honoring the fact that students bring their whole selves to their educational experience. I know the student affairs educators out there that are putting together orientation courses probably do that anyway, because it's our preparation, but it's still just worthwhile emphasizing. I was like, "That's so cool." Just wanted to mention that.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: That has been a big ask again and again, has been interaction like, "How can we have more interactive activities?" And so thinking about whatever LMS you're using, when we're talking about assessing, it's also, again, about giving choice. I'll get into the digital badging in just a moment, but the way that unlock or issue a badge can be multifaceted. It can be as simple as submitting a survey, completing a knowledge check, or upload a photo, take a snapshot of something that reflects you or something your why. And so those all can be different ways to let students engage and express and, again, bring that humanized component.

So, as far as the badging grows, we are fortunate that our LMS works very free and cooperatively with the badging platform. That was a really nice configuration in that component. With the badge, that gave us the freedom to design it, the image, as well as to offer the micro credentials. So, what is the badge actually evidence of? When you're thinking about how shareable, where does that badge apply in other instances than just the institution? You can really be thoughtful about what does this actually certify this person is doing so that it travels well, it can travel maybe even to that future career that I am prepared in online learning, and how many professional development post-graduation require some element of online learning. There's that component. And then from the- [crosstalk 00:21:59]. Oh, I'm sorry.

Kathe Pelletier: Finish your thought and I'll jump in after you're done.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: Okay. So, that for the student side was a consideration in the badging, plus it automated the process, so they could go as fast as they wanted and were able to go. And so that, again, allowed for that when we're talking about learning science, you could truly progress at the pace you were ready for, you could get the feedback on-demand when you needed it and complete. And so most of the students... This is the great part about the survey too, was we found most of our students were completing in one to three hours. And that's makes it very reportable when you're saying, "Hey, take this. It only takes you this long to do," which is nice as well. But from the institutional side, we can track who's completed, we can help students identify or locate their badges, and then also give data to faculty to let them know that, "Hey, students are finding this beneficial and useful and promote why it's important for them to include it in their courses." And so it's data for the user, as well as the institution.

Jaimie Hoffman: Yeah.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. I think that the badging is a really interesting opportunity for many reasons. And I'm a curriculum nerd, so I love the way that it really forces you to think about what those learning outcomes are and why you're asking students to complete, which again, back to the instructional design, to make sure that it's not just certifying some activity, but that they've actually demonstrated some competency in this area.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: That's where I think the micro-credentialing has to be incredibly thoughtful. If you're only focused on the image and the issuance, it's like giving somebody a sticker. But if you are thoughtful in the micro-credentialing and actually being clear on what the certifications are, it is like giving a certificate that validates somebody's learning. We use it with faculty as well, who complete our programming. And like Jaimie mentioned before, using those accepted quality assurance rubrics so you can cite to criteria, that's allowed our faculty to take that credentialing to other institutions and get recognition for work they've completed elsewhere.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah.

Jaimie Hoffman: Yeah. I'd love to see a campus to really dig in and use this, because I think maybe surface-wise, one might think, "Let's just do a credential or a badge for completion of orientation," but you could really segment orientation into sort of the buckets of outcomes we try to achieve like the sort of general understanding of campus support resources and academic expectations, and there could be a badge just for your major or your college. I think there's a lot that could be done to get creative and really leverage that across the board.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. And it really forces that discipline of thinking around, "Well, what do we need to include an orientation? What might be we missing and how does it all hang together. Yeah. There's a lot of value there, I think.

Jaimie Hoffman: Absolutely.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: That's documented, and the documentation is great. Then that also lets you let people out of the gates and make some choices. Again, going back to our summer faculty development, we're using badging because we've got options in these different micro courses. And so, "Hey, you just need to complete two of the five. Pick something." And people can invest in their interests and you still have the document.

Jaimie Hoffman: Yeah. Great.

Kathe Pelletier: I'm going to shift gears a little bit. A couple of times you've referenced the engagement of the student either with an activity or with a person, I'm guessing that many campuses are going to be seeing a shrinking staff, unfortunately, as we approach the fall. How do you deal with this? What do you do if you have very few staff members to run an orientation and keep it engaging?

Jaimie Hoffman: I think while many professional staff members have the challenge of trying to figure out how to leverage orientation leaders, which we actually talked about in our webinar, you are very right, Kathe, to bring up this point, because there are some that just don't have orientation leaders, which is usually one of the main ways we temporarily scale up to support such a large initiative. I'll let Megan elaborate a little bit, but I think some of the examples we've already given help kind of start thinking about how you build the experience can really help foster an efficiency that you can employ without needing a lot of personnel. But it does need to be mindfully built with that. In fact, that's one of the things we talked a lot about when I contracted at Cal State Channel Islands to help build their course as what can you really sustain? Because ideally, we know the benefit of instructor feedback, which I think is relevant here. We know that, but that's just not always a luxury that we have. So, Megan can share some of the examples on her end.

I think the last example I'll share is even a lot of campuses need to just sort of validate and get proof that the student attended orientation. One thing that's just a simple thing that you can do is actually have students print out and sign a document and then upload it as an assignment to confirm they understand they're responsible for the content within the orientation. But you don't have to print it out, like download it and type their name. However each campus really feels that they need to go, at the end of the day, the student is authenticated into your LMS, so you know who they are, but that's kind of an efficient way of getting that approval. You don't need to have any or not approval, but a confirmation and having the student take responsibility, and you don't have to have any staff member involved other than at some point someone can look and see what's not been submitted.

To Megan's point, pertaining to the knowledge checks, it also gives them the students' experience of what it is like to upload an assignment. You might be tempted to use a Google form to achieve the same outcome, but then you do lose that opportunity to have them go through the exercise of submitting an assignment. So, Megan, can you share some of the other examples? I know you mentioned a couple, but I know this was a big one we talked about.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: Boy, did we, because we had this online orientation for online learning and at the end of the day, I'm one person to manage this space, and so we just didn't have the capacity to have it completely facilitated throughout. So, what did we do? We looked at how can we get faces, voices, real CI folks into the course so that they had that human component. So, one way was getting students to record videos and testimonials and give advice. So, we had that piece. It was flooded with images. You have a lot of photos and media from your campus.

So, having shots of our classrooms and students at work and the community, and then also asking instructors to share. And they were wonderful about that, sending out a call, could you send us a short video clip, giving them some prompting questions of what would you what would you share with students, and they did a wonderful job. That meant one of our very talented media people, we have Ben, everybody needs a Ben, could have... Now instead of having six or seven facilitators you're trying to organize, you had a Ben who could make these great videos and then we could stick them where they were applicable. So, you had the student voice, the faculty voice, you had the images from your campus. And then that's where I think too when you're talking about your orientation online, what can you make in that kind of static asynchronous space that's still through media brings the humanizing component.

Something else that our students found kind of fun and interesting was our library. Our librarians got incredibly motivated by this and they recorded some welcome videos. again, we had Ben. Ben went and took a picture, and using Thinglink created a 360 virtual exploration of not just the physical library, but then the librarian said, "We always struggle with getting students to use the online database." So, they did the same thing with the database. It was just, again, thinking out of the box in a sense. And a lot of our students' feedback from taking the course was, "Wow, I wish I'd have known this as a freshman. I wish I'd have had this opportunity to learn this way. I've learned things I never knew I could do. That was really validating and affirming that one, it was useful, and that two, most of them said they would recommend a peer go ahead and take this experience too.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. It depends on the campus, I think, but I know some folks allow access to the orientation content throughout the students' entire time on campus. And so if I maybe attend this orientation early on, but yet I'm finally starting to use the library a couple of semesters down, I can go back to it. And that's the cool thing about online, is that it's there and it's archived and you can actually look at it over and over instead of just hearkening back to that summer day when you were on campus before classes started.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: I do think it is really important though, and this is something one person can manage. I can speak from experience. We've had 1,800 students badge, and I'm the only touch point when they hit a glitch in the orientation. So, one, if you do have the luxury of doing some piloting, even just having... We were able to use a small group, just about four students who were already student employees. So, on their work time, they were able to just take the course and give us feedback, which was invaluable as far as to what was or wasn't working smoothly so we can get that fixed before we rolled it out.

Kathe Pelletier: Great.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: Also, was I'm the person of contact. Again, having humanizing component, they have a picture, they know who I am, and they know they can reach out to me. And so the person who's replying to students also needs to be demonstrating care for students. And so making sure that they're giving a humanized warm, "That's okay, let me get back to you." It's all right to have a question response to students. And so I will say out of the 1,800, I've probably had to navigate maybe 20 emails in the process. And typically, it's just giving students the same little tip here or there, and they're good to go.

Jaimie Hoffman: The last thing I would just add is don't forget, you can always use students to help each other. I don't mean returning. I mean incoming freshman can help incoming freshman. I always in courses and/or co-curricular activities, like an orientation, put an ask and answer thread where I invite people to put their questions and ask them to start their, especially if they think it applies to everyone, and then I ask them to help each other. Often by the time I pop in, I see, oh, good, it's been answered. I mean, there is an occasion where you're like, "Oh, well let me reel that one," and that went in a different direction than I thought. But for the most part, it becomes very, very helpful to leverage and invite current students to help each other.

Kathe Pelletier: Great idea. Well, I want to wrap up, but also if there's any kind of last tips that both of you wanted to share, that you haven't had a chance to cover, I'd love to hear one last idea for folks as they're thinking about online orientation.

Jaimie Hoffman: I think my biggest idea recommendation bandwagon is just take this as an opportunity to build a great holistic experience that isn't anchored to two days. Figure out when students really need to learn about XYZ and deliver that content at that time, because you can do that. So, why not do it right? Why stick to this three-day schedule? I can't tell you the amount of times I know students have told me they completely forgot about what they needed to know by the time they enrolled in the fall.

So, this is your chance to really be thoughtful about the timing of what you deliver and when. And it could be continuous, many campuses have changed their names from orientation to transition programs for this reason. And this is a way to live that mission in that name, and your badges can continue all the way through to the end of first year when you pass it over to your second year office. So, that's my advice, is to just take this as an opportunity while I know the circumstances are not ideal. Notably timing and resource-wise, I think that people will be really happy with the end results, because students will really appreciate it.

Kathe Pelletier: Great. Thank you. How about you, Megan?

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: Yes to everything Jaimie said. Then I think also considering the opportunity for choice again. But thinking about we can meet so many needs in the space and it can be a way to support. I mean, this can be ongoing. So, even thinking about the student who wants to do the self-paced engagement, can they do that? Can you have enrollment into cohorts for students who want to have kind of that collaborative, "I'm going to meet a group of students and interact and we're going to move through this orientation together."? And then those options for it. I'd rather attend a webinar or a synchronous meeting versus complete this online watch wall.

So, thinking about where can you offer the choice? Because we know it's motivating, but then also that alleviates the demand for personnel, because one person to do a webinar or one person to facilitate a cohort of students that wants that experience so that creativity can support both of those components. Again, hopefully you can kind of get that. I think the best of everything that blending approach, the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, if you go back to the webinar, I can't get over chocolate and peanut butter that Jaimiebrought up when we were doing that. But again, you can have the ideal Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and support your staff and your students and your faculty. Like you said, you might just find something that you want to use again and again, and again. It is a chance to rethink.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I'm going to go get a snack now, but I really appreciate your time and your expertise. Stay well. Thanks again.

Megan Eberhardt-Alstot: Thank you, Kathe.

Jaimie Hoffman: Thank you so much.

Kathe Pelletier: You too.