It's a common misconception that some students are just "made" for online learning and some just aren't. Digital classes take a different skill set, but they are obtainable for any student. The number one skill is self-discipline. UT Tyler's Associate Provost for Online and Continuing Education, Dr. Poonam Kumar, Ph. D., sits down with us to talk about online education.
It's a common misconception that some students are just "made" for online learning and some just aren't. Digital classes take a different skill set, but they are obtainable for any student. The number one skill is self-discipline. UT Tyler's Associate Provost for Online and Continuing Education, Dr. Poonam Kumar, Ph. D., sits down with us to talk about online education.
Stay tuned to the Ask Dr Ross podcast. It's created to give you info to succeed at college. Our hosts are highly qualified. Dr Catherine Ross is a member of the University of Texas Systems Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She's also a popular professor of 19th century English literature. Her co-host and multimedia editor, nathan Witt, provides a student perspective. Ask Dr Ross is a community service of the University of Texas at Tanya.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Catherine Ross, and this is a podcast for parents, students in school who are thinking about going to college, college students who are already here, adults who are thinking of maybe going back to college and really anyone who wants to know more about what life in colleges and universities is like today in the US of A. I'm here with my friend, nathan Witt, who's a student here.
Speaker 3:If you'd like to ask Dr Ross a question, you can email us at ADRquestionsatgmailcom. Today we're going to talk about online learning. It's kind of the new frontier of higher education, and so we're going to kind of figure out what that looks like today. Maybe some tips, tricks and advice on how to succeed in that. Personally, I'm really excited about that, dr Ross, because I traditionally have not been very successful with online learning.
Speaker 2:All of us have had to learn how to do it, even if we weren't interested in it, thanks to the COVID experience. But I think the change was coming and we didn't realize it. So what we have here today is Dr Poonam Kumar, who has recently been hired by the University to head up our online programs. Tell us your title and then we'd like to hear you tell us a little bit about how you came from being a regular face-to-face professor to being one of the Texas special people who knows how to do this.
Speaker 4:We'll be happy to Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here to share what I have learned and what I know about online education. So my name is Poonam Kumar and I'm the Associate Provost for Online and Continuing Education at UT Tyler. I started last year in September, so it's close to a year, not one year yet. I'm very excited about the opportunities that we have here to impact student learning through online education, so I'm very excited to talk about it.
Speaker 4:So you asked me how did I get started on this journey? So, when I came here for my doctorate in 1993 and at that time internet wasn't as prevalent as it is now so I did my doctorate in education. I started my job as a faculty member in the College of Education with the University of Wisconsin system in 1998. And then in 1999, we saw online learning just starting, because there was distance education always, which was more like correspondence courses and all In 1999. What happened is the first learning management system, which is Blackboard, came out, and I was a new faculty member, very, very excited to learn new things, to try new things, and I was part of a group that was asked to build an online program for teachers completely online program for teachers. It was a university system wide effort and I was excited about the possibilities and when we created that program I realized the potential and the power this technology has.
Speaker 2:So, before you go on with that, because I want to know how you moved into that what was the thinking at the University of Wisconsin system about launching this team to do this? That was 1998, 1999.
Speaker 4:Yes, 1999. It's a really good question, because we had teachers who were in different locations, in different rural areas. Not everybody could come to campus. They had full time jobs, they had families, so they were balancing all these responsibilities and the only way they could get the advanced training would be if we took the education to them rather than expecting them to come to campus. And so I saw firsthand the potential it has to provide increased access to learning opportunities for teachers and any other student who wants to gain educational access.
Speaker 2:So were your students at that time primarily students who were training to be teachers, or were they in every discipline?
Speaker 4:They were students who were training to be teachers and this particular project. They were already teachers, but they were training to get advanced certification.
Speaker 2:So they were folks who already had an undergraduate degree, knew the lay of the college land. By the way, your first year was my same first year.
Speaker 4:Is it In higher education?
Speaker 2:1998, right, can you believe it? Oh my god, yes, okay.
Speaker 3:So I ask is that the normal expectation for the typical online student is that there's someone, maybe, who is returning or maybe coming back later in life to finish out education?
Speaker 4:That is what it was initially right. We have a lot of students millions of students nationwide, who have some college credit but they don't have a degree. So this kind of a modality gives them the opportunity to complete their degree wherever they are in their life. But that was in 90s, right? So now the lot of graduate education is online because most of our students are working adults, so they are balancing a career with advanced education.
Speaker 4:But online education is also very popular now among undergraduate students, and the reason is we have a lot of students who are athletes, we have students who are working part-time jobs, you might have students who might be taking care of their families. So a little bit of flexibility with online gives them an opportunity to balance everything. So that's one, the flexibility and the convenience piece. The second piece I think is the more important piece, is, as you have seen, after COVID, we live digital lives, right? We cannot imagine any experience that is just face-to-face. So when you go to work in any environment, whether it's music industry or any industry, there will be a digital component to it Of course.
Speaker 4:And by taking online classes, you are experiencing those digital experiences and gaining digital skills, so you're actually preparing yourself for a very digital economy.
Speaker 2:After you helped, I assume you successfully launched a program for teachers. Yes, it was a team.
Speaker 4:Yes, it was very successful.
Speaker 2:The wiles of Wisconsin didn't, however. You moved on to what else. You weren't just doing full-time.
Speaker 4:I was a full-time assistant professor, so this was part of one of the projects we did in addition to teaching, research and other commitments. So after that, then individual universities within that system they started offering online programs and so we started offering graduate online programs, fully online, and I stayed there for four years and then I came to Michigan to work in a comprehensive regional university and at that university their mindset was different. They had some misperceptions about online and they thought if we offer online, we are going to lose that high-touch experience with our students. So for years they did not offer any online program. But when students started telling them it's not possible for us to come to campus and take classes in certain sequences, I was the first one who created their first online degree. It was in e-learning.
Speaker 4:Wow it was hugely successful, and then the provost over there asked me to lead the initiative in a similar role that I have here, to help faculty understand the opportunities that online education offers for us as faculty members, for our students. So I did that.
Speaker 2:I stayed in an administrative role for 10 years, so when you were in the Michigan School University you were teaching face-to-face, but you were then recruited or volunteered to do this online program, so you've had a lot of face-to-face teaching experience I have had a lot of face-to-face online, fully online, as well as hybrid, and so what are the differences and how can we help students understand that before they go in?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of my students think it'll just be Dr Ross emails, so talk a little bit about how you were happy to move from one to the other because clearly you've seen potential and opportunities a lot of other faculty never saw.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so first to when I was teaching face-to-face like every other faculty, the most enjoyable part of that experience is interaction with your students Getting to know your students, hearing their stories and helping them by sharing your own experiences. And when you're transitioned to online as faculty, it is challenging and it is different because suddenly you don't see their faces. You don't have that physical presence that you have in a face-to-face classroom. So you have to create those experiences in a virtual environment where you don't see them but you feel a social connection, a social proximity to your students through interactions. Online education is not new. Like I said, it's based on years and years of research or best practices and, because I came from a background of instructional design and curriculum, I was able to apply those practices and online, so it's based on the same foundations of face-to-face. You have to make sure that you have ongoing, regular interactions with your students. It doesn't matter what learning management system you're using. If you're doing video lectures, you're sharing your experiences through those video lectures. You still have a presence. Then you can do live sessions with your students.
Speaker 4:I did a lot of discussions with my students that were like on a video or sometimes on a video, sometimes asynchronous discussion forums. I was very actively participating in that. I was not like a professor who did not show up in those discussion forums. I would divide my class into smaller groups, because it's difficult to have a discussion when there are 50 students. I would divide the class into smaller groups and we would have topics that would be of interest. The prompts are very important in those discussion forums. We would do debates, we would take point of views, we would share stories, we would role play.
Speaker 4:I did a lot of interesting things, even within the online space, and I also used virtual worlds. I used to teach a graduate class in instructional design. At that time, second Life was a very popular virtual world. I know that one. I used to take my class to a class actual classroom there. We would go there and we would meet teachers from all over the world who would come there virtually and share with us their experiences of teaching classes in that culture, the challenges, the new technologies. Imagine how different it is from face to face, because if you're in face-to-face, you're only confined by the people who can come to your class there. Right, I had lots of guest speakers. I had lots of virtual case studies. I had virtual field trips.
Speaker 4:You can do a lot more with an online class than you can do with a face-to-face class. That's the positive side. The challenging side is that you need structure, especially from a student perspective. It's easy to go to a class on Wednesdays from noon to one, but when it is online, it's out of sight, out of mind. The deadline seems like they are not real and students tend to procrastinate a lot. Online classes need to have a lot more structure than your face-to-face classes. From a student perspective, you need to be more driven, you need to have better time management skills and I think you also need to be open to reaching out to your faculty A lot of time students do hesitate right.
Speaker 3:Yeah absolutely.
Speaker 2:What has your experience been taking online classes?
Speaker 3:I think, especially with asynchronous online classes, it's almost like an object permanence thing where if it's not like a physical class, it's a little easier to not give it priority. And so it's really easy to be like especially asynchronous because they tell you, okay, even though they don't have a day for you, in asynchronous you pick a day, pick a time, that this is what I'm doing, this online class. But it's really easy for that time to come around and you have something going on and you're like, oh, I can push it back till tomorrow or I can push it to this afternoon. And in my experience, after the first time you push it back, you lose it. If you push it back one time, like there goes that rigid structure that you had.
Speaker 4:So you need discipline, you need a lot of discipline. Both faculty and students. Right as a faculty, it's easy for me to say, oh, I'm not going to grade these papers this week, I'll do it next week.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know about that, yes.
Speaker 4:So I had to create that structure for myself too. So I would say, on Tuesday I'm going to grade these papers and I'm going to give you feedback by Wednesday. And I wrote it in the syllabus because then I was like, if I write it in the syllabus, I'm going to do it Well and is it part of your design, then, to build in deadlines for students so that they can't do that kind of procrastinating?
Speaker 4:Yes, that's part of a good design, where you have multiple assessments, not just midterm and final, and you want to make sure you have regular check-ins with your students, because you don't see their body language right. You don't know if they're confused, they're excited.
Speaker 3:Is it a misconception in your experience that online classes have a heavier workload, or is that part of what comes with the territory of online classes?
Speaker 4:Technically, if it is the same class, it should have the same workload regardless, because that's based on credit hours and contact hours and workload expectations. But in online as an instructor, I can tell you from my own experiences it's easy to sort of overwhelm students and give them a lot more work. Because we can hyperlink five articles, you can upload a lot of videos.
Speaker 4:You can't see their faces when you say and I want you to read them and they look panic and you go oh, wait a minute, Maybe that yeah, and so unless you have experienced it as a student yourself, you don't realize how much of a workload it is for students to go through that. Make sense of it. That's why it has to be a lot of scaffolding built in online.
Speaker 2:So in a sense, though and this is the one drawback for me as faculty member launching these classes is a lot more work for a faculty member, because you don't have to just remember your own lecture note, you have to prepare it so that it's ready. One of the things about these learning management things, Nathan, I don't know if you know this for faculty there's about 17 little buttons you have to click to get one simple little quiz up, and if you miss one, then there could be all sorts of or.
Speaker 2:if it's not a quiz, it's anything, and so it's really easy for faculty members like me to have to slow down, have a little checklist all these sorts of things.
Speaker 2:But once you get into the swing of it and you learn to do the same thing about 15 times or whatever, you can get a lot better at it. And I'm hoping and praying this fall when I teach these asynchronous classes, that because I've done so much careful work ahead of time, that it will flow a little more smoothly and I'll actually be more at ease maybe even then. I am in a regular face to face class where I'm always trying to hit and miss and not hit and miss, but always in my experience is face to face classes. A lot depends on how I experience the students taking in what I'm doing. Sure, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And so there's time for adjustment and things like that.
Speaker 4:And you're absolutely right, online requires a lot more planning, preparation and thinking through the structure, because that sequence, that learning sequence, is so important and that's why we have a team of instructional designers that work with faculty and we have also created we are calling it template, but in a sensual it is like a structure for a course, so faculty can just focus on the content and teaching.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad that you said this about learning the learning science, because I remember when I first became a college professor, I knew my British literature and I knew a lot about writing and research and I knew how it felt to be a student, but I didn't know always how it really worked intellectually and I always thought to myself why don't they teach college professors what they teach about learning? And in fact now one of the standard links in my class is to a professor of psychology's Dr Steven Choo's lectures on how learning works for students. So the students understand why it is if you cram, it doesn't work as well as if you do things like that. That's one of the things I really enjoyed and appreciated about what we're doing at UT Tyler is because, like I've worked with Steve Myers and instructional designers and they've helped me break down the learning task into the pieces that as student experiences. Now I've always prodded myself on thinking like a student and I'll tell you the story. Why is that?
Speaker 2:When I was a graduate student but older graduate student I had to take my foreign language. Well, as a graduate student, I was also an assistant instructor teaching English literature survey courses. So I ended up in a German freshman level German class taught by another graduate student up here and one of them treated us like it was so simple what's the matter with you? And I just hated that class. The next semester, another one of the graduate students taught it and she recognized our difficulties and just that simple difference of being what it's like Recognize how hard it can be, because so many times professors what we teach is just we know it, we get it, we understand. We don't always explain all the connections to things because we assume people know it and a lot of times students don't. I'm getting off on a tangent here, but what I like about this shift to starting to do more and more online is that I think it's intellectually challenging to faculty and I think it's going to make all of us whether we teach all online or face to face or both make us more thoughtful.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. It's grounded in good teaching. Like over the years I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of faculty so that when I worked with them to transition them to online teaching, it was already grounded in learning science. When one comment I got again and again was it has improved my face to face, yes, because it helps you see things through a student's lens and it helps you see what is important how to put a structure where the cognitive load for students is minimized and students can actually focus on those connections that you're helping them make.
Speaker 2:The cognitive load is minimized. Now, that's a phrase I want to come back to, but as you were saying that, I thought Nathan, tell me from the student standpoint what I need to do to make an online English class manageable for you so you don't end up getting lost.
Speaker 3:Listen to everything she says.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3:Really a lot of this stuff that you're saying. It almost just makes me man. I think I've said it in a previous episode. I've always subscribed to the school of thought that online learning just works for some people and just doesn't for some people. But what I'm getting and correct me if I'm wrong from what you're saying is that a lot more of your success is determined by how the course is built. There's a lot can be determined by is the course built for you to succeed?
Speaker 4:And facilitated by the instructor. So it's not like an autopilot, where just the readings are there but the instructor is not there to help you understand, just like in a face-to-face class.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and one of the things you mentioned about I believe it was Michigan. Right, you were at where they were worried. You called it a misconception that the they were going to lose that experience, the college experience, and I think that has been, dr Ross. What it's been like in some of my online classes that I've taken is that it feels like I'm out there on my own.
Speaker 2:So we faculty need to be intervening more, as you said, facilitating and keeping making it. It's not just create it, throw it out there and let them take it on their own.
Speaker 4:It is about the interactions, right? So learning happens in a social context, so it's not just about the content. Yes, so you got to have different kind of interactions interactions that students will have with other students, students will have with the instructor and students will have with the content.
Speaker 3:To me, one of the biggest motivators to want to show up to class is because I've got those two friends that I sit next to or I really like that professor. I had Dr Cali. Right, I had him for a night course. It was my only night course in the week. It's like miserable, you know. It's like a six hour gap in between my last class and his class and it was so hard to get to that class. But I just really enjoyed talking to Dr Cali. That was like enough to tip the scale for.
Speaker 3:Okay, I'm going to go to this class and I think that is something that is easy to miss with online classes. Is that social aspect of it, the fact that you like your professors like I know that you, dr Ross, when people are filing into your class, you're making conversations with them. You're, hey, how is your day? You're building connections, you're following up on that. You're like, hey, how is your mom's surgery? That kind of stuff. I know you do a lot of that and good teachers try to, and I think that's something that is easy to miss in online classes those kind of relationships, because that a lot of times at least in my experience in college can tip the scale of how committed I am to the class.
Speaker 4:So it is a learning community, right you have to feel as if you belong to that learning community.
Speaker 4:And I would like to add that it's not just faculty doing all the work. I think students also have to play a key role. So in my classes, my first session was always roles and responsibilities. So, as a faculty, this is what you will expect from me and as a student, to get the most out of this class. These are the five things. Sometimes students don't know how they can be successful in an online environment. Right, so they, if you share with them. These are the expectations for my class. This is how you can do it. I think students would benefit from it.
Speaker 2:And I think about how much people build communities out there in social media, and so our job as online teachers is to build a social media kind of community, the connections, yeah, and I have to admit I just barely touch the social media in general, and so that's a learning curve for me and probably a learning curve for a lot of faculty who are over about 30, maybe over 40. Tell me 20. Some years ago, you started looking at online things. What do you think if you and I are still alive 20 years from now? How are universities going to look with this? Of course, we also have to get into AI, which we're going to talk about.
Speaker 4:Right, right right.
Speaker 2:But did you imagine first of all that we would have changed so quickly after the pandemic?
Speaker 4:I did not, honestly, and I think nobody did. But I think what COVID also showed us, in my view, one it did show us that technology can do a lot of things. We were doing everything virtually right Zoom meetings and everything was done but it also showed us that human connection is equally important and people crave for that. So I think, as I look at the future, I see a very good balance of both. I remember when I started teaching online at University of Wisconsin, there used to be some people who say, oh, now, online education is going to take over. There won't be any face to face. I don't think so. We will always live in a hybrid world, and I think the key to success would be how do you balance the two and optimize the two?
Speaker 2:Actually, I think in some ways, although the COVID crisis caused all of us to have to go online, I think it also caused a bit of a backlash against online.
Speaker 4:Yes, Because we were not prepared to do it right.
Speaker 4:A lot of faculty had to switch overnight and I would also say the transition we did during COVID I would not call it online teaching, it was remote teaching, because a lot of faculty were because of the time and the constraints, they were given the technology and said now do it through Zoom, but they were never trained to do it well, like online, like learning science, how do students learn in an online environment? What would be some pain points for them? Crisis teaching? So it was crisis.
Speaker 2:Yes, remote teaching, crisis teaching, and I know a lot of people think that is the version of online teaching, which is not and I think that's an important thing to remember is that, while it's accelerated now because of what happened, we've got some catching up to do, but we also have some great opportunities. Really, do so, tell me a little bit about what you think. How does AI figure into this? I was at a conference recently where the fellow from Princeton who developed chat, gpt, was interviewed and then he's followed up very quickly with a program called Origin so you can check to see how much of your students writing is AI generated. The question is how do we use AI responsibly and effectively? You and I just had a wonderful conversation about it and you want to share with Dr Kumar some of your thoughts about AI before we drag her into this conversation.
Speaker 3:Dr Ross and I both see AI as a tool and it's going to have some interesting ripples in higher education and really change a lot of things. As you're talking about this chat GBT guy, a lot of the ways we test and check to see if you are doing well in the class are vulnerable now.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because AI can autonomously do a lot of the types of work that we're assigning to students, and so I'm really interested what do you think? I feel like no area in higher education will be affected more by AI than online learning, because it's all on the computer already.
Speaker 4:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:How is it affecting you all already and maybe how is it going to affect you yeah.
Speaker 4:I think you can see a comment that AI is a tool. It is a tool, right. So how we use it it's going to determine a lot of things, whether it is an advantage or it's a disadvantage. So I think AI is going to transform the way we teach and the way we learn both. The way we learn, yeah, the way we learn too.
Speaker 2:Now you don't mean literally the way our brains learn.
Speaker 4:You mean the way we experience school Like as a student. My experience as a student.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:And if you look at the real world, how Theresa I say that Is that.
Speaker 2:one friend of mine said it's possible, it's going to be the end of thinking no way.
Speaker 4:It shouldn't. No, In fact, if anything, I think it is going to enhance our thinking if it is used properly, right? Because if you look at the real world, our industries are being changed by AI, so our students are ultimately going to go and work there. So we need to take a step back as faculty and say what kind of skills will my students taking my English class or my math class or my education class when they go out in the real field, what kind of things will they need? So they will need different skills, right? Because a lot of the things that AI can do would probably be done by AI. So it will be a human and AI interaction. So it will make us rethink some of our assignments, some of the content we teach, the way we teach it.
Speaker 4:As an instructor, I can see AI suggesting content to me based on the kind of students I have, the kind of interest they have, the kind of industry they want to go to. I can also see as an instructor, AI could tell me hey, you have 20 students, six learned this way, others learned this way. This student is really so it will allow me to personalize that instruction without actually manually doing it, so AI can bring the content that is of interest to you, Nate, if you want to work in music industry, or it might bring different examples for a student who wants to work in the sports industry, without me, as an instructor, having been able to go and research those articles. So I see that as a big benefit. And then I will take a step back and see okay, what kind of jobs will my students do, so what kind of assignment should I give them?
Speaker 2:That's going to be hard to predict those jobs, though, is it but?
Speaker 4:at least we can think about it right. That's why. So they probably won't be writing papers, I don't know. Hopefully they're writing papers, but different types of papers. From a student perspective, I can see AI can actually serve as a coach, a virtual coach, so nudging you, telling you if you need more practice here are some more problems like this. You missed steps here can coach you.
Speaker 4:Artificial intelligence, tutoring is used in many other companies and institutions. I think that is very powerful. It can also personalize your path as a student. If you learn a certain way or if you have skills that are different than others, then you will see a different kind of content and we already have that kind of adaptive learning in some of the software. I think that's a lot of potential and I heard a wonderful story this was several years ago that I have to tell about AI.
Speaker 4:We went to a conference and the professor was there from one of the big research universities. He did an experiment, so he had two TAs One was an AI TA, one was the actual human TA, but he did not tell his students. So at the end of the course he said can you rate these two TAs? And the students rated the AI TA better and then he told the students actually this is not a person. And the students were upset. They say you had a virtual TA and all this time you were asking questions to a non-human. That was like six, seven years ago. But I think that also shows the potential, because it's machine learning the more questions you ask, the better AI knows what you're going to ask. They can predict it. So I think, going into the future, a lot of the stuff that we do AI can do, but then it will leave time for us to do high-level thinking, both our students and us. So I think it's the interaction and the collaboration with AI.
Speaker 3:I can't help it. It's scary here and all that stuff. I don't know, maybe I've seen too many shows where the end times are like we're so reliant on technology to almost bottle feed us all of our entire life, so it's scary to think about that, where your class is taught by AI, not fully taught.
Speaker 4:I'm saying a balance. The human interaction is still the core and should be the core. I think AI should supplement it.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that you said that the TA, the AI TA, was better than the human TA.
Speaker 4:And the professor had a name for her and everybody was, oh, we really like this.
Speaker 2:I want to know how to do that because I'm not getting a TA this semester, if I can get an AI.
Speaker 3:I want to do it for me. Chat GVT. There you go.
Speaker 2:Also, what struck me as you were talking about all these different ways it can be used is learning how to get those, either finding those applications or loading. I was trying to load origins this morning and I couldn't get it to work. I thought oh, how brilliant am I, Brilliant am I? Nathan, can you come to my house and figure?
Speaker 3:out how to do this.
Speaker 2:It's a no, but it's a no.
Speaker 3:No, I said it's a. I was gonna say it's a, no, it's a like. It's a whole new field of specialization.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and it's evolving. It's a new job, right? Yeah, they're evolving.
Speaker 2:A friend of mine always says we can't even predict. Everyone says you've got to prepare students for jobs and we don't even know what jobs are gonna be out there in five years, oh yeah, or what versions of the jobs we think we're preparing you for. One of the greatest things we all have to learn is flexibility, huh, an adaptability. So there you go.
Speaker 3:What advice? You've had a career of online distance learning, remote learning, all the different areas. It's been my experience and many students that I've talked to that if you get in there and it's not, it doesn't immediately click. It's very hard for you to get through that class. What advice do you have for brand new students who are coming into online learning? How do you set them up for success? What do they need to know? What do they need to focus on? What do they need to think about?
Speaker 4:Absolutely, and I think that is so critical because at times, and even now when you look at any survey, students assign a for online because of flexibility and then they don't think about the challenges. But being successful in online class will require a lot more from the student side than it requires from a faculty side, because you need to be disciplined, you need to know the technology very well and you need to understand the expectations the faculty has for you in that particular class, and it could vary from class to class. So if I was a new student signed up for an online course, the first thing I would do is reach out to the orientation people and say I want to learn Canvas. Where are the resources? I want to make sure technology. I am proficient in it. You can use, probably, facebook, but Canvas is a different educational tool and has so many features. So the technology is, I would say, the required foundation.
Speaker 4:The second is I would reach out to the instructor and say I'm so excited to take this class. These are the reasons why I'm taking it online. You could be working two jobs who knows right, so you're trying to balance it. Could you please let me know what would it take to be successful in your class and that's, I think, a very good question, even for a faculty. So the faculty would love that conversation with the student, and once you have a good understanding of the expectation and the course layout, then you need to create a structure for yourself and be disciplined. I would also reach out to other students in that class. You could create study groups on your own you don't know, it doesn't have to be something that the instructor creates and make yourself familiar with all the support resources we have, like tutoring, like career success coaches. We have all the support services available, even in online, but not everybody takes advantage of it, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's important to note is that maybe you forget when you're in online class like all these resources, they're still yours.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely, and the template that you all set up for us has links to all of those on the very first page, so it's possible to find them. But I do think that there's a tendency to get passive among any student that do it the easiest way, and so, remembering that an online class is not the easiest way, no, it's not easy.
Speaker 4:It will require a lot more than students.
Speaker 2:It will be convenient, it will be flexible, but you can blow it if you're not learning all those new skills. And what you're just making me realize, though, is that such a course, when well-crafted and when taken seriously by a student, can be enormously valuable, because always, finally, we're trying to get you all ready to get out there in that world where you have to be proactive, where you have to have self-discipline, where you have to be your own best champion.
Speaker 4:Yes, and UT Tyler. We offer the same support services for online students, so there's no difference at all. They get access to everything, and our classes are taught by our own faculty, so it's not that you're going to get a different kind of experience.
Speaker 3:And what advice would you give to a student who says I want to take online classes. I have no self-discipline.
Speaker 4:Then I would say it's not a good fit for them Cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Work on the self-discipline. Then come back to online classes.
Speaker 4:Because it's going to be very difficult for any student to be very successful if they don't have self-discipline, because you don't have a class to go to on Wednesdays or Tuesdays and if you don't have that, you're going to choose probably a game or something else, because that's something you see right and self-discipline is a skill so you can develop it. So maybe you're not ready for it yet.
Speaker 3:But you feel like that's not a skill you develop as you go. That's something.
Speaker 4:Intentionally.
Speaker 3:Have that skill developed before you walk in the door. Don't try to be like I'm going to develop self-discipline as I go through my online classes by taking it online class.
Speaker 2:Uh-oh.
Speaker 4:Or reach out. We have a study strategies course, I think, on campus. Reach out to advisors and say we have advisors for every student. Hey, I'm taking this online class, but this is what I am hesitant about. Can you direct me to some resources? So if a student is motivated to do that, you can do it? You can just block out time every day for a certain period of time. You can meet in person with some of your other peers in the class and get that support system.
Speaker 3:Great.
Speaker 4:Great.
Speaker 3:Cool, that's all I have.
Speaker 2:That's all I have too, and what more would you want? So thank you so much Thank you so much.
Speaker 4:It was so much fun. Thank you for what you do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you for what you do. I might have to reconsider an online class down the road now. I'm going to work on that self-discipline, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're getting there, I'm getting there.
Speaker 3:All right, I'll close this out. This has been the Ask Dr Ross podcast. Thanks everybody for listening. If you have any questions that you want to ask Dr Ross, you can email us at adrquestionsatgmailcom. That's it for us. Thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Bye-bye, bye.