This week my digital public speaking students completed their 2nd assignment – peer informational interviews. Prior to crafting this iteration of the assignment, I debated as to what kind of interview including mock job interviews, a general qualitative interview, or, potentially, a more journalistic-style interview. However, I knew I wanted to encourage this online class to interview each other to help imbue the class with a greater sense of buy-in and connection that can come when you design a curriculum with a computer-supported collaborative learning perspective.

Due to some coordination issues, I ended up taking part as an interviewee for 2 students. While I could have had them work together, I saw it as an opportunity to get a more in-depth understanding of how the assignment worked. In an attempt to gain more insights into crafting a digital communication skills course, I attempted to speak with one of my students (I will refer to them as Student A to maintain their confidentiality) to learn a little bit more about their experience in the class. By “attempt,” I mean that I did speak with them but my inexperience in/trust of the technology negated my ability to fully capture our conversation. Using Teams, Student A first had to record their interview with me. Since I only needed the transcript for review, I started the transcription when we discussed the assignments we completed. Unfortunately, the only transcript Teams generated came from the video.

Although I am not able to share a transcript from my conversation with my student, I did enjoy speaking with them concerning their experiences in the course specifically and online education more generally. Student A reported that while they weren’t sure how an online public speaking class was going to work, they are enjoying the different activities we have completed in the class. Also, Student A already had a LinkedIn profile but, in their assessment, it wasn’t very good. Going through the pre-assignments helped them to both develop their profile as well as give more insight into their long-term professional goals. Student A is pursuing a degree in public relations; however, they did not know what that could look like post-graduation. As part of the pre-assignments, students were required to both research entry-level jobs to help them develop their skill list and find other LinkedIn profiles of more advanced professionals in their field. Finally, we discussed the non-verbal elements (information design and visual imagery) of the profile design which I think can be more fully developed in future iterations of the assignment. 

Rather than ask my student to re-create the interview, I reached out to my long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Erin Ryan. She is the Associate Director of the School of Communication and Media and was the driving force behind the creation of the Media & Entertainment major. She has worked to create connections within the Kennesaw State Community and with the greater Atlanta area for our students. Here is our conversation about online education in higher ed:

Karen Sichler
So thank you, Erin, for taking time out of your Sunday to speak with me. Can you share a little bit about your role in the School of Communication and Media at Kennesaw State University?

Erin Ryan

I am the associate director, so I step in for the director whenever she needs a backup. I also create the schedules for four undergraduate majors and two graduate majors. I do all of the assessment. I do all the core substitutions for our students and work very closely with the advisors and then as reports pop up, they get put on my plate to handle as well.

Karen Sichler
What is your involvement with curriculum and curriculum development?

Erin Ryan
Good question. I used to be the chair of the Curriculum Committee for the school before I stepped into this role. So I’m very familiar with the mechanics of how to get courses through the curriculum process, and then I also gather feedback from faculty and students and from the professional folks that we try to keep in touch with about what our needs are in the classroom, what’s working, what’s not working, what’s helping with workforce development and things that we can potentially do better.
And then connect with the individual majors and find out how they want to try to incorporate some of those changes into their courses.

Karen Sichler
Thank you. What are your thoughts in regards to online education sort of generally?

Erin Ryan
I think if it’s done well, it can really mimic the classroom environment, the face-to-face classroom environment. I definitely think that we need to have some standards, whether that’s within our own unit or at the university that we are. It’s not just that people are recording a lecture on slapping it online and calling it a day. We need to really, if we’re going to lean into the online environment, we have to kind of update ourselves on best practices in online pedagogy, figure out ways to make students feel included, help them with things like time management, maybe with widgets or something like that. But that seems to be where this our students fall short is they take online courses and they’re not quite ready for them because they don’t have those basic time management skills.

I think if the instructor is well versed in how to put, how to design their course properly that the students could have even maybe a better experience in a class than they would if they were taking it face to face.

Karen Sichler
No, I think that’s true. Are there particular strengths and weaknesses that you, you know really focus on or think about when say allowing a class to go online or designing one yourself or sort of or end is in your role?

Erin Ryan
You know there there’s been a couple of things that have come up recently. During the pandemic, we had to pivot to all online classes and what we realized is that some classes do not lend themselves well to being online, one of them being our digital media production class. They were doing all of their coursework on their iPhones and they were not touching a camera and not doing any editing in Adobe Premiere Pro. Throughout the entire curriculum and then they’re graduating with a degree in media and entertainment, for example, having never picked up a camera. So with that class in particular, we realized the hybrid approach makes more sense to that there at least spending some time in the classroom touching the equipment, learning the equipment, you know, lighting, mics. And so a fully online version of that class just didn’t work for our needs.

But a lot of our courses can I think, really benefit from being online. I’ve seen some of our PR classes, for example, because they’re online, they’re able to bring in speakers, and you know the instructor can sometimes interview somebody virtually and then make that part of the coursework. There can be a lot of interactive stuff that you do for assignments rather than just like write a paper. It’s it becomes more interactive, more professionally based. I think that there are things depending on your course objectives that you can do really well in the online environment. But for some of the skills classes, I think it still makes sense to at least teach a hybrid version if not fully face to face.

Karen Sichler
Are there any other skills courses or anything that’s kind of part of what we do that may not translate well?

Erin Ryan
That’s a good question. I’m trying to think so most of the skills classes are based in Adobe software and writing classes.
Sometimes the students need more hand-holding for some of our basic writing classes and they somebody there who can face-to-face again, at least in a hybrid kind of format, see on their face when they’re not understanding what’s going on. And that’s super helpful to be in a lab with computers and you can walk around as the instructor and you can kind of judge the nonverbals of some of your students when they’re struggling.

Karen Sichler
Well, I want to pivot a little bit back to something you mentioned earlier, especially about curriculum design and your role in the department. With the idea of workforce education as well as having to move to the new IMPACTS core curriculum. Do you think that that is an important note to take when designing new courses and updating courses, regardless of discipline, as we go forward?

Erin Ryan
I do. I think that, you know, we live in a very digital world right now and the expectation of the average college student, regardless of major, is that they’re going understand and be able to create using digital tools. I think it’s important for us as educators to keep that in mind as we assign them even the same kind of course projects or things that we’re trying to achieve the same objectives as we always have been, but maybe assigning them in a different way so that they are learning a workforce skill that they can put on a resume, they can put something in their portfolio.

I think it’s really a matter of us as instructors like you said, pivoting the way we think about the delivery of information and the expectations we have of the students. A lot of our classes that don’t necessarily need to use Adobe are using some of the Adobe things. Even incorporating some of those things into coursework in a class like public speaking like we’ve talked about is making a huge difference in the marketability of the students once they graduate.

Karen Sichler
And you know, I shared with you what I was thinking about this new this redesign that I’m testing out this semester, sort of an overview of what I was developing for the online public speaking course, and kind of remind you because I know you have lots on your plate, alright, instead of the traditional speeches where students would be just filming themselves probably and hopefully in front of an audience that they brought together, that’s been what online public speaking has been. I replaced it with four digital forward assignments and the first one, which includes either creating or improving because I have had some students who already had a LinkedIn profile and they give a digital presentation like they have to sort of give a recorded overview of what they’ve done and the process for them. They also are doing peer informational interviews. We go through what’s an informational interview kind of teach them that process, and they have to both be interviewer and interviewee as part of the rubric. And their next assignment is going to be a persuasive video essay. That’s to get at the outlining and research aspect of public speaking and also to hit those rhetorical proofs that are important. The last assignment is an online recorded presentation where they have to use a visual aid, which is another one of those learning objectives that we have as part of public speaking.

What were your thoughts when I approached you with this new design?

Erin Ryan
I think this is going be the direction that we’re going have to go overall.

Frankly, because we are being tasked with that workforce development portion of things in the core but also its going to be coming down the pike for all of the majors as well. We’re going, I think, have to justify how we’re doing that and in what courses we’re doing that.
I think it makes sense to, in a 2000 level class or actually it’s a 1000 level class now to give the foundation and the expectation to those students that OK, particularly if you’re going to go into Communication, these are the kind of skills that you need to learn. If you’ve never done this before, Learn it during a class like public speaking, and then continue to develop it over the course of your curriculum and expect that your professors are going to want you to present things digitally.

They’re going to want you to be able to Interview people, whether it’s and you know, traditional kind of journalism interviews, or maybe you’re a producer and a documentary. And you have to be the person kind of off camera interviewing the whoever your subject is. If you’re in PR, you have to do media relations. You have to talk to people within your organization and that goes for Org Com students as well. With the internal com stuff, so these are the foundational skills that they’re going to have to learn beyond just like what you would think of as a traditional public speaking class where you’re standing in front of the classroom giving a speech.

I mean that’s a skill they’re going need to master as well, because so much has gone digital. So many of the jobs now are completely remote, they not even be in a board room. They might not even be in a meeting with physical people to their left and to their right. It might all be virtual, so they need to be comfortable in this environment and these kind of assignments are going to help them do that.

 

Karen Sichler
So, are there other skills that can be incorporated into this class or whether we pivoted it to the university as a whole or pivoted to a more saying digital communication skills course? Are there other things that you think we could start including as well?

Erin Ryan
Yeah, that’s interesting because the lines are blurring between what we might have thought of digital communication a few years ago, more like, you know, emailing and which I think is a skill that students need to learn as well. How to write professional emails but so much of the way we communicate is done through like social media and tik tok videos and YouTube.
I mean that’s the only really thing I could think of to add to this particular class is maybe creating content for one of these applications like a YouTube or a tik tok or an Instagram story or something like that because that a that’s the way our students communicate with each other very often or they send each other voice threads or those kinds of things. Maybe that’s a way to bring in some of the things they’re already interested in into the classroom and have them develop some content for one of these online platforms.

Karen Sichler
Using your administrator hat, what next steps do you think I should take to sort of move this concept further?

Erin Ryan
That’s a great question. I think coming from an administrative standpoint, I think what you’re doing is sort of state-of-the-art best practices level of public speaking education. I think gathering some data about that, like from your students, the kinds of benefits that they’re seeing from it getting, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly of what they’re experiencing as they’re taking these courses and then sharing that with the rest of our public speaking faculty, potentially having you train other faculty in the ways in which you are approaching some of these course objectives could be helpful, especially if we’re seeing from the data that the students who are taking your sections are getting more out of the class or are being more successful in. I think that’ll give us a lot to use as justification to do some professional development with our colleagues. And then I would also offer that beyond SCOM (School of Communication and Media) as well, if these are skills that we can be incorporating into courses across the curriculum, you know they have like English has writing across the curriculum. This could be an opportunity for us to house something like digital pedagogy across what do you or integrating digital skills into lower-level classes and then offering those opportunities to connect with people in other departments might be really cool.

Yeah, that could be really exciting.

And you know it, it would be a feather in the cap for the unit, but also, you know, that would be for you in particular.

You’re then training your colleagues and it’s sort of like the training and development stuff that we’ve talked about