Better Online Education With Flexible Online Learning

Online classes that offer students the flexibility they need in an online learning program

Distance learning has been with us for a long time, many years before Covid and even before computers were in nearly every home. But flexible online learning programs are just starting to gain global acceptance in academia, career training, and other educational settings. Online classes have become more and more flexible since their Covid-era ubiquity and students benefit from being able to attend classes in person or online as their schedule allows. Dr. John Drea chose Echo360 for its flexibility, powerful e-learning capabilities, and a variety of features that allows his students to learn in the way that best suits them. Read more about it in the following interview he did with Echo360’s own Jeff Peterson. 

Jeff Peterson: Welcome to EchoCast and welcome to Dr. John Drea. Our Dr. Drea is a Professor of Business and the Ruth Badger Pixley Professor of Social Sciences at Illinois College utilizing Echo360 both in and outside the classroom through what he calls the Choice Model, which we’ll learn more about today. Dr. Drea, it’s great to meet you here and have you on the show.

Dr. John Drea: Pleasure to be here.

Jeff: You know, I did a little bit of my research, and you have a long history in higher ed, but you have also been doing consulting with businesses along the way. Let’s start out by giving, in your own words, a little background on your path and specifically how it found its way into this area of video learning and utilizing technology. You’re also creating a ton of content out there. So just give us a little path of Dr. Drea here.

Dr. Drea: Sure. I started out my career the first 11 years working at a community college, primarily in administrative roles and doing some teaching as well. I finished my Doctorate degree in marketing and then went on to teach for a year at Montana State. Then I taught for the next 19 years at Western Illinois University, where I was also a Department Chair and ended up being Associate Dean for the College of Business and Technology there before I technically retired at a certain age and came back to Illinois College, where I’m at now. This is the school where I earned my undergraduate degree. So I could come back and give something back to the place that helped to make me what I am. 

In terms of some of the technologies, I’m one of those people who uses technology to solve a problem. I don’t just tinker with technologies all the time. So when I see a problem, I try to find a technology that solves the problem as opposed to taking a technology and then going and looking for something that I can solve with it. I’ve created games for classrooms using technology. Three of them, I ended up selling to textbook companies that principals love those textbooks. And as you said, I’ve done a fair amount of consulting with third-party logistics companies, some work in higher ed, and I do a lot of work with my students with pro sports teams. I’ve been working a lot, mostly with major league baseball teams since 2004.

Jeff: Wow, we need you up here in Minnesota. 

Dr. Drea: You’re going to be fine.

Jeff: Exactly, right. I love that perspective that you just shared about using technology as a means toward an end. So often in any kind of technological field, but especially sometimes in that tech, we’re a bunch of hammers looking for nails. So I love that perspective. If you think back to when, specifically, you started using video in working with a company like Echo360, do you remember what was that problem that you were, at the time, trying to solve. Has that changed?

Dr. Drea: I can remember the moment really specifically. Back in, I guess about April of 2020, when Covid was just really kind of devastating what was going on in higher ed and everybody was being, all the campuses were being closed and we were all sent home and we’re trying to figure out, how in the world are we going to teach our classes? Not just finish up the semester, but how are we going to teach in the fall? I listened to a webinar that dealt with this question, and this was really a golden opportunity to try some experiments in the fall to see what would work. I started looking at how I could help my college by being able to work with the problem that you have in a pandemic of needing to socially distance students, but you still have the constraint of the physical space in the classroom.

So I started looking at this thing that I called a choice model, which was basically giving the students the option each day of would they want to attend in person or would they want to attend through Zoom and being able to switch back and forth, which at that point, that’s basically just the high flex model. But then also, using Echo360 as a means of student engagement, so that I could then embed questions into what I was doing for both groups simultaneously as a means of student engagement. So I would basically cover material for 10 minutes, stop, and then everybody would have to answer a multiple-choice question that covered the material that we had just talked about in class. So there was no way of nodding off or zoning out during the class. It kind of brought people back. That was what got it started and we were able to basically, in the case of my classes, keep my class limits at the same level they were pre-pandemic, which in terms of a private college with all the financial challenges that they had during a pandemic, it helped them in terms of the staffing and everything. Because my classes were typically always full. So I could keep all my enrollments in classes going and keep the revenue stream coming in.

Jeff: How have you, unfortunately, it’s been a couple of years of having to deal with this, how have you found, have there been specific applications or just techniques that you’ve used? You mentioned the multiple-choice quizzes and stuff like that. Have there been certain things that have helped you as an instructor ensure that you’ve got an equal playing field regardless of where the students are choosing to show up that day?

Dr. Drea: One of the things that I do is, instead of waiting for students to raise hands to respond to questions, I just have to, in Zoom, which is what I’m using for the students to access it, I have to basically call on students in Zoom. Because if I wait for them to interrupt me, I’m going to be waiting a long time. So I’ve got to do something to pull them in. So I just tell them that they’re more likely to be called on if they’re in Zoom than if they’re in the classroom. And I never know from one day to the other how many people I’m going to have in one location and how many I’m going to have in the other. I was teaching a management class with 30 people enrolled, and I think there were a few days where I would have 28 people in the classroom and 2 on Zoom. And there was one day where I had 5 people in the classroom and the rest of them were all out on Zoom. It was a day when it was raining. But one of the things that, again, you have to reflect back on where we were at that time, I was very concerned about the level of fear that was in students back in the fall of 2020. Some students would just blow off the whole thing with the pandemic. Ah, it’s no big deal. I’m young. I’m healthy. Nothing’s ever going to happen to me. And there were others that just below the surface, are worried but they don’t want to admit it. But this just gave them the option that, if they woke up on a day and they were just worried, and there was something going on in their life and they just didn’t want to have to make the choice between their education and feeling unsafe about their health, then they could have both and they could stay where they were at and connect into the class. So it allowed that.

The long-term application for this, assuming we get to, I don’t know if we’ll ever be completely post-pandemic, but we’ll be at least in a managed state coming out of this, is I think it has the potential to help us to reach an entirely new population of students. There’s a group of students that falls in a gap between the ones who like fully online courses and the ones who want nothing to do with online courses. And this bridges that gap of the student who can’t commit to coming to campus for 15 weeks to take a course, but they want that option that, if they are struggling in some way with the material and they want to come in and sit in a class, that they can come in and be in that class. It also, from an administrative standpoint, gets around the problem of, when you want to offer a classroom class and you want to offer an online class and you can’t afford to staff two sections of it, you could have a campus class that has 10 in it and have maybe a dozen online students and put them together in one of these and be just fine. I think in that respect, it creates more economy scale for a campus and greater efficiencies. 

The thing this semester I’ve found, as well as last semester, too, is that when students get sick, whether it’s from Covid or anything else, and you’re trying to figure out how to bring anybody up to speed, it’s no big deal. You can be flat on your back and just pick up your phone and look at it and you’re good to go.

Jeff: Just hearing you describe that, I would think, and I know you’ve worked with a lot of business clients in various capacities, what you’re describing, I think, would have a lot of application outside of education. Just think about people who have jobs that maybe don’t necessarily need to be in a workplace environment everyday. Have you had a chance to road test the choice model outside of education? Or if you haven’t, could you speculate on its utility outside of the classroom?

Dr. Drea: That’s the plan for the fall semester. I’m teaching a sales class using this technique. I’m hoping that we will end up enrolling a substantial number of people who are already in the workforce who want to upgrade or sharpen their sales skills with something like this. Because we can also record these things to provide a third option for those students. I’ve been reticent about recording what we do and then providing it to our campus students because the students that we deal with on our campus are all traditional-age students. If I give them a recorded class as an option, unfortunately, the ones who shouldn’t take that option probably will, and if they do that, then they miss the interactive part and the engagement part that Echo360 actually adds to it. Because you’re losing that functionality of covering the material and stopping and asking the questions. That’s all just recorded for them at that point. So for the sales class, what I’ve done is I’ve built the whole class so that the lectures are actually pre-recorded and using Echo360, the questions are embedded in the lecture so that it stops periodically. They have to answer the question, and the question is then downloaded into my gradebook. The answers for it are downloaded into my gradebook so that I get a score each day for how well somebody’s doing. It also makes sure that everybody has covered the material prior to coming to class. So it’s a great use of the technology and it’s a wonderful technology for improving learning.

Jeff: I love what you’re describing, too. My mind went to this analogy a little bit of streaming a movie versus watching a movie in a theater. What you’re doing in the way you’re using the technology is you’re allowing for a community to still happen. So there’s still part of that crowd, if you will, that’s going through it at the same time, similar to in a movie theater, you’re all consuming the movie at the same time, versus, if you’re streaming it on your own, well, you’re either paying attention or not. You’re not necessarily having a shared experience.

Dr. Drea: That’s a really good point, Jeff. That’s one of the things that we have to be careful in online education that we don’t lose that sense of community in a class. It can’t be just, or it shouldn’t be in most classes, a one-on-one relationship between just the student and the faculty member. I think sometimes some of the most interesting learning occurs in a horizontal level from student to student. I’m teaching an online class now and if you run a discussion group well, sometimes students will point out the flaws in each others’ arguments. If they are polite about it, it’s a great experience. I’ve got a really great group right now in an online class.

Jeff: That’s greater. So we made it to the last question here of our episode here, and it’s kind of a big question, so if what you were just saying is the answer to it, you’re more than welcome to use it. So this is a little segment we call Inspiration Point. At Echo360, we’re all about inspired learning, so we ask every EchoCast guest this same last question, which is this: What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned along the way or the biggest piece of advice that you would want to impart on somebody else about getting people inspired to learn?

Dr. Drea: I think, for me, the biggest thing is always focusing on what it is that students want out of an education. And that is, that everybody comes to your classroom wanting to get from where they are to where they want to be. And that where they want to be is a little different for everybody. But when everybody comes to your class, whether it’s in person or online, they don’t want to leave at the same level that they came in. Whether they will admit it or not, everybody is looking for some kind of a transformation. If they just wanted to come in, get their three credits, and leave, they could choose somebody far easier with far less work than coming to most of our campuses. Just through some mail order shop. So it’s focusing on that and then delivering to students what they need and not necessarily what they’re asking for. Sometimes what students need is to be challenged and challenged within reason on things. Because I think sometimes we don’t know what we’re capable of until we are asked to do it and we have to be challenged a little bit and then we have to be supported in the process. So that’s, I think, that’s probably the biggest thing from a personal standpoint, the thing I would suggest to folks is that, keep in mind why we’re here and why we’re doing what we’re doing. This is all about students, so whatever’s in the best interests of students, that’s what we need to be doing. Look at the technology, and bottom line is, if it helps to do a better job of helping students to learn and get to where they need to go, then learn it. I mean, that’s why we’re here. And this is a technology that works for students and helps them learn better.

Jeff: Fantastic. I really want to thank you, Dr. John Drea, for joining us here on EchoCast and sharing your creativity and your commitment comes through loud and clear. Just your deep, authentic commitment to learning and those students. We’re going to let Dr. Drea go, but everybody else stick around for a quick demonstration now, of some of the applications that he referenced in this EchoCast, and you can always go to Echo360.com for more episodes and resources to create your inspired learning experiences.

Announcer: Here’s a quick demonstration of an Echo360 solution related to this episode of EchoCast. Reach out to us at Echo360.com to learn more.

When this feature has been turned on by your institution, Echo360’s discussion tool can be used with any video shared via Echo360. For video or presentations shared to a class, the discussion feature is represented by blue speech bubbles at the top of the classroom screen. All discussions will be visible to all students in that class. Click on the double speech bubble to view any discussions already started. A panel will open on the right-hand side of the screen displaying all discussion questions. Any comments already posted can be up-voted by clicking on the thumbs-up icon. And any up-votes from the instructor will appear to students with text saying, “instructor endorsed.” Students can also bookmark comments to appear in their study guide.

To respond to a post, click on the discussion to open a panel for that particular thread. Click on the blue “respond to this question” button. You can then respond to the post with a comment, add a link to new content, or attach a file. When done, click post. The single speech bubble with a blue cross can be clicked on to ask a new question, start a discussion, or share a link. Any question or comment added can be tagged with a video time code or presentation slide number to pinpoint the exact location for others and can also be toggled to post anonymously. Anonymously means that a name is hidden from other contributors, yet can still be viewed by instructors. For video embedded in the LMS, the underscored word “discussion” appears at the bottom of the video. Click on discussion and a panel will open. Click on the comment box to add a new question, comment, or attach other content. Names can be hidden from other contributors by toggling the “hide my name” button. Students or instructors can respond or up-vote the comments by using the thumbs-up and speech-bubble icons within the comment section.

With embedded video content, student names will be visible to instructors and can be hidden by using the “hide names” button at the top of discussions. This is helpful if instructors wish to screen share parts of the discussion with students.

Announcer: Thanks for tuning into EchoCast. For more information on these and other inspired learning solutions, visit us at Echo360.com. 

Flexible learning courses work for both in-person and online education

Dr. Drea’s flexible learning solution is successful because of Echo360’s many helpful features. It’s just one example of how the Echosystem benefits organizations around the world. Whether it’s recording classes for hybrid learning or using live discussion features within videos, Echo360 solutions take your flexible learning ideas to the next level. Request a demo to find out more.