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Case study: Student and teacher experiences of asynchronous activities with Padlet and Google docs

Department of History of Art
Nicola Sinclair and Gabriel Vyvyan

Nicola Sinclair and Gabriel Vyvyan provide an insight into staff and student experiences of asynchronous discussion-based activities linked to live seminars in a module in the History of Art during the remote teaching phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the video, they note the following based on their experiences:

  • Padlet provided a more accessible and enjoyable format for discussions than discussion boards
  • Close integration with synchronous sessions (e.g. to prepare for in-person debate) maximised engagement and usefulness of asynchronous discussions
  • Task design was crucial (integration, purpose, structure, clear expectations and attempts to ensure a ‘low entry threshold’, whilst incorporating ‘scope for the most engaged to spread their intellectual wings’)
  • The experience could be enhanced by tasks designed to encourage greater student-to-student exchange before the seminars and/or to increase student responsibility for summarising the discussions and identifying key points for further discussion during the seminars (e.g. role allocation).

Watch their presentation:

Student and teacher experiences of asynchronous activities with Padlet and Google docs (Panopto viewer) (9 mins 56 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

This presentation offers contrasting student / teacher experiences of using Google Docs and Padlets for asynchronous activities in place of and in preparation for live discussion seminars in a 10 week module in the history of art for final year students. I'm Nicola Sinclair, convenor of the module.

And I'm Gabriel Vyvyan, representing student voices from this module. I'm a third year and there are 10 people in my group and everyone who's given feedback, which I am responding.

So this is our dual reflection on key learnings from this term's emergency remote teaching, a term I take from Hodges etal (2020) who distinguish between emergency remote teaching and normal online learning. I found that teaching in the fragile circumstances of this pandemic required different strategies from the long term planning of online learning. I'll be talking about how padlets and Google Docs were planned, implemented and experienced during one module this term and the Real-Time perceptions of their contribution to learning.

And I will reflect upon what it was like to use them and my experiences in combination with the others in my group on the learning processes they provided

For context, this module is normally delivered through to three-hourly seminars a week with three to five readings each. And it's discussion based seminars with a strong student led component. In this term's blended learning, the three hours was reduced to two. With one hour, asynchronous online one hour face to face. The asynchronous activities were a key replacement for seminar- style discourse and student presentations, leaving the face to face seminars for discussions. My decision to use padlets and Google Docs was driven by the desired learning outcomes for this module. Blended learning required radical rethinking of both content and learning methods to reach those learning outcomes. It required an unnatural chunking of material into discrete tasks which are quite unlike the normal, free flowing discussions we would have in seminars. These chunks had to be driven by the learning outcomes, i.e. critical engagement with images and texts. But the very act of chunking ran counter to the integrated mode of normal art history seminars, which meant that they had to be planned to enable ideas to flow across the whole seminar experience rather than to appear or to operate as discrete tasks.

Learning tasks also had to be designed with particular sensitivity to the social context of learning in the pandemic circumstances. This was incredibly time consuming and far exceeded the normal preparation for a module. And we can't assume that modules that have been taught before can quickly be translated for blended learning by bunging in a few padlets and Google Docs. PDLT training on the VLE was itself incredibly time consuming but very useful for anyone preparing modules. My decision to use padlets and Google Docs, amongst other modes, was informed by this training, for instance, by Laurilard's conversational framework that was talked about in these sessions where learning takes place collaboratively between students and teachers. And by Salmon's research into how we make collaborative online activities work. I've put some of those references here on this slide. But counter to this training, which focuses on online learning. remote emergency learning can't be planned ahead as completely as we might want. This creates a stressful tension between having clear learning outcomes and content, but needing to be much more flexible than normal about how that learning would happen. The conversational framework for learning therefore applied as much to the mode as to the content of learning during this term. And I asked for regular feedback and changed my strategies in response to it. This meant that weekly preparation was another additional time burden, much more time consuming than normal.

So I planned two uses of padlets in this module from the start. One was to use for student presentations to be posted on a map that we kept throughout the module. You can see the pink pins here where students posted their power points that were either written or spoken. And also, I used padlets as an alternative discussion space. So on the right here, you can see a shelf template where students could post their response to stimulus questions. And you can see different responses at the same time across three or four questions. I used Google Docs for collaborative problem based learning based on images. So I posted a deck of slides or direct comparison between images and asked students to comment on those slides. So you can see four to five students truncated comments down the side here. An incremental use of padlets and Google Docs was planned for the first four weeks. But no further. So that I could gain an idea of their confidence in these modes before I used them in more complex ways. I built in clear instructions and expectations and deadlines, and I designed the task so that they had a low entry threshold, but also allowed scope for the most engaged to spread their intellectual wings. Compared to discussion forums, padlets and Google slides were faster and easier to set up, more versatile and indeed more fun to devise. The platforms themselves help for the creative process of conceptualising ways to meet learning outcomes. But what about the implementation over to you, Gabriel.

My expectations for online learning and the asynchronous activities was that they should be a catalyst for further discussion, enabling us to come to seminars with some degree of prior interaction and thought. I also expected that I should learn by transferring what I absorbed in the reading into the padlet and docs in my own words and then bounce them off my fellow students. Technically speaking, I was able to access each mode of online learning with ease, although at times I felt that each contribution was in its own private vacuum. Beyond merely contributing, there was little little interaction between students, although I did find it beneficial just to read through each comment or presentation and absorb it in my own time before the live seminar. Trying to discuss subject matter asynchronously was often too difficult. But I learnt from just reading my group members' contributions and observations alone. From the feedback, it can be discerned that the padlets and Google Docs were much more well-received than those discussion boards. I can certainly echoed that sentiment. The ability to see multiple students' contributions at once displayed in a more visually active framework was more exciting than a linear dropdown menus on the discussion board. I especially like the image comparison tasks on the slides done prior to the reading from an art historical perspective. This gave me a chance to learn from the sheer diversity and detail of responses to the visual subject matter. This also allowed me to transfer this experience to my reading and, had I done this task after the reading, I feel that I would have learnt less and developed my own critical approach less. Nicola would often bring up our comments and observations in the seminar. And it was invigorating to be given the chance to apply our thoughts to the live discussion. As some of my group members commented, it did feel like she was the only one who brought up our asynchronous thoughts and potentially valued them. If a sense of learning community is to be developed, more than one person, in this case, our tutor must be involved in the role of connecting viewpoints and responding to them. The feedback shows us that students would spend anywhere between 10 minutes and half an hour contributing to the various asynchronous activities. My experience is roughly similar, but it would sometimes take me a long time to build up to submitting as I felt that reading the source material should be the priority. Oftentimes reading would take over entirely and I would never get around submitting. Overall, I learnt that in order to fully benefit from the asynchronous activities, I would need to be very strict in how much time I spend posting compared to how much time I spent commenting. In order to make the absolute most of others' contributions, I should also make time for noting down online comments of interest and bring them up in the seminars myself. It would be it would be interesting to see others to do this, too, and perhaps this could be integrated into the seminar as potentially a formalised task.

So the key taking takeaways from my experience and from and from hearing the student feedback was that once I've got the hang of these technologies, the speed and ease of creating Padlets and Google Docs and their versatility made them a really valuable tool, not just for emergency remote teaching, but for normal seminars. As Gabriel said, compared to discussion boards, it was much easier and faster to read student posts on Padlets and Google Docs. The map template, however, proved to be difficult because we couldn't see when new posts were made. Student post on these platforms gave me a much better insight into the way individuals were engaging with material than possible in normal seminars, especially for students who were reluctant to speak often. So a tutor can tailor a seminar efficiently to address issues that the students have raised or missed and to invite those less forthcoming students to elaborate on points they had already made. And this is especially helpful where the seminar time is curtailed. Tutors through these padlets and Google Docs can convey that they'd been reading student comments without having to spend hours writing responses to them. Instead, they form the beginning of a conversation in the following seminar by using posted responses this way, Google Docs and padlets avoid the tasks becoming standalone chunks. At least they have the potential to. They can actually enhance free flowing recursive conversation, normal to seminars and even make it more lively. This group spoke more than any other I have ever taught, and I would consider using these padlet and Google Doc tasks even when we return to normal teaching, Ensuring the tasks had a low floor or easy entry point was critical to boosting engagement and to creating a learning community. Once everyone was able to participate, we were then in a position for more incisive thinking to ensue.

It took a lot to keep the students engaged with these online tasks, and we need to constantly reiterate the purpose of them in relation to learning outcomes and stress that these are not additional tasks or tick box exercises. But actually part of the full live seminar that we have. Bringing students consciously into the conversation about how they are learning as much as what they are learning is helpful for maintaining that engagement. However, we have to be really mindful of the timing and mode that that conversation takes. Emergency remote teaching poses incredible challenges for socialisation. And although I had asked for and responded to feedback in various ways through the term, the best feedback I got was in the last two weeks when everyone knew each other and felt more comfortable with this online context. It was disappointing to realise that only then on an intellectual level, I was getting more out of the padlets and Google Docs than they were because I was reading all the posts at once, right before the seminar. They rarely had time to do this and hadn't realised how useful that task could be.

So effective use of these tools for learning going forward depends on setting realistic deadlines, but time enough to review their posts, which requires timetabling to be very carefully organised to give space between seminars. And it needs those tasks to have a low demand entry point, as well as to allow the most motivated to engage at a higher intellectual level. So better student engagement with padlets and Google Docs towards the end of my term demonstrated the value of continuously seeking to make students part of the conversation about how we learn as much as what we learn in emergency situations.

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