Episode
7
17:19
Guest
If the past few years have shown us anything, it’s that students want to be able to learn on their own terms. They want accessible educational materials that they can make use of without barriers. Whether we’re talking about students with disabilities or students with other accessibility issues, it’s important for instructors to create accessible education for all of their students. Linzey and Marnie have been able to leverage many of Echo360’s features, such as pre-recording classes and using a flipped classroom to address their students’ questions and incorporating closed captions that make sure that their students are receiving an accessible education. Keep reading to see how they did this in their interview with Echo360’s own Jeff Peterson.
Jeff Peterson: Welcome to EchoCast and welcome Dr. Linsey Donner and Marnie Imhoff from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Linsey is an Assistant Professor of Microbiology. Marnie is an Assistant Professor and Associate Program Director in the Division of Medical Laboratory Science. And both are recipients of a 2022 Echo360 Innovation Grant, which they’ll speak more of today and how it will further advance the innovative work that they’ve been leading for a while now at the school to raise the engagement and equitable learning experiences for their Medical Laboratory Science Program students. Prior to joining the ranks of higher education, Linsey was on the frontlines of science as a microbiologist and a medical laboratory scientist, accruing a slew of certifications and degrees along the way, including her Ph.D. from UNMC in 2021. And Marnie’s journey within higher education has been equally interesting and impressive. She’s held a number of operations and management positions where her degrees not only in medical technology but also her MBA and her Master’s in Higher Education Administration have, I’m guessing, come in quite handy to this dynamic duo that we have here doing some great things for the grateful students at UNMC. They’re both also long-time champions, literally and figurately, here at Echo360 for inspired learning. Good friends of ours, so please welcome Marnie Imhoff and Dr. Linsey Donner. Hey, guys.
Dr. Linsey Donner: Thank you for that wonderful introduction.
Marnie Imhoff: I never felt so special.
Jeff: Well, thank you both for sharing your work here and everything that you’re doing and for sharing here on EchoCast. Let’s jump right in. I’m sure a lot of people who are watching this are like, oh, my gosh, I’ve seen them before. Because you have been such long-time advocates and champions for inspired learning, so in the specific grant that you just received is going to be extending a program that you’ve already had in place for a while, so let’s get a little benchmark. Take us back a little bit and tell us the origin story of how you first started working with Echo360 on the video learning front, and how that program, we’ll call it Phase 1 for now, has been working, the feedback that you’ve been getting. And then we’ll talk about where you’re going to take it moving forward.
Marnie: We did start using Echo360 several years ago. We’ve been using it for a while so I can’t even remember the exact date or timeframe we were using it. We started pretty slow. It was just really, we were using it to record lectures that our students could watch asynchronously because our program, it’s a little bit different. It’s a hybrid program at one point. At one point, we were in person. But that’s just where we started. It was just recording lectures that we could post into our learning management system. Then I believe in 2018, Linsey and I applied for another grant through Echo360, their Champions program, and that’s where we really took it to the next level. We continued to record lectures, but that’s where we got into the transcript process, providing our students the closed captioning, and we started to look at how the videos and the transcripts impacted our students’ learning. Did it increase their engagement? How did that impact their scores? And like you said, we’re really into engaging our students to get them to that deeper learning, that critical thinking process that’s really essential in healthcare. We felt that the videos and those engagement techniques that we were using, for example, the active learning platform, the polling platform within Echo, started to allow us to do that. Our next step is with this new grant that we’ve received.
Jeff: For Linsey, I’ll put you on the spot. As now an instructor and somebody who’s actually leading the educational experience for students, you were one of those students, how much of what you’re doing now and where you want to take your work is influenced, if at all, by your own personal experience as a learner coming up through the years?
Linsey: That’s a good question. Traditionally learning in the classroom, both in person and posting lectures tends to be what they call passive learning, where the student is just sitting there listening to the lecture and absorbing that information. Where Echo360, the video learning platform has additional tools that help us engage the students. We are big advocates for engagement, as Marnie said, so we use embedded polling in the recorded lectures, which help keep students engaged if they’re watching an online lecture. Also, in a lot of our in-person classes, we’ve used what’s called the flipped classroom, where they watch the recorded lectures on their own time when they’re ready to learn and also provides the ability to pause and replay those lectures in case they didn’t hear something correctly or need to reinforce that information. But then we use our in-classroom time to work through a case study or use the polling to engage the audience and create that visual learning experience for them so they can actively learn in the classroom. But then also, me as an instructor, it helps me identify those students who may not be understanding the information because through those polling questions, I can see the concepts that they are getting and the ones they are not. Ones that we need to discuss further, or identifying those students who are struggling before we get to the high-stakes exams or before they go out to their clinical rotations. So we’re using the learning tools through Echo360 to match that pedagogy, what fits best to help facilitate that learning process for the student, which is different than our traditional learning.
Jeff: And utilizing all the different tools, but also in the way that you just described in attending to the different learning styles, the different learning environments, obviously Covid threw everybody into a different learning environment, I would imagine that you’ve got some great, whether formal or informal, data points around how this is leveling the playing field a little bit and helping everybody learn however they need to learn. Have you been seeing how the combination of both the asynchronous and synchronous, the text, is it helping everybody get the comprehension, everybody get the content how they most need to get it?
Marnie: With our last grant with Echo, we did do some research around looking at how video views corresponded to course grade, exam grades, and we did find that the more the students watched the videos, the more that their exam scores did increase and their course grade did increase. From our evaluations from the students, the one thing that they did like about the fact that we have all of our lectures recorded is they can watch them when they’re ready to engage with the material. They can pause the videos, take notes when they want to, and they can rewind and go back and watch sections that are really confusing to them. And what is nice is we can see through the hot spots that the videos have, we can see where a student is rewatching something, so that engages me as an instructor to say, okay, this material is very confusing to students. And, as Linsey said, we embedded questions, and that’s where we started embedding questions into the videos because we knew that was material students were having a hard time grasping, so we were hoping those questions would allow them to apply that material right then and there so that they’re like, oh, okay, now I get it because I’m applying it and I see how it’s applied in real life now.
Jeff: Yeah. So cool. So now, now, with this next grant, with this next phase, talk a little bit about where you want to take what already sounds like a great program, doing great things, what’s the next step now with laddering up the engagement even further?
Linsey: Through the Echo Innovation grants, we plan to increase or kind of diversify the engagement options that we have for the students. Currently, we mostly use the polling feature through Echo360, but we are interested in providing other avenues for engagement. That could be anything from gamification to whiteboards, EchoPoll is some of the software that we’ve chosen to implement, and we’re hoping to create continuous and seamless learning modules that help facilitate that learning process for the students. That will help us increase that engagement and deepen their quality of learning.
Jeff: That’s great. We can’t wait to see how that works. Great stuff. Great program. Great, great, great stuff ahead. How about the two of you? As I mentioned in the intro, you’ve been working together now, this dynamic duo. Obviously, you’re both professional and you’ve both got this science background, but you do seem to have different, complementary experiences and skills. How did you guys ever come together in the first place and it seems that partnership seems to be working as well. So maybe talk a little bit about how this partnership started however many years ago.
Marnie: Linsey and I didn’t know each other before we joined the Medical Laboratory Science Program. Linsey was in the program before I joined it. I’m a graduate of the program itself and so is Linsey, so we had that background of how we knew we were taught when we went through the program. I think, really, we tend to think, I don’t want to say alike, but we have a lot of the same beliefs when it comes to how we approach teaching students. I think it just evolved naturally. Our conversations and our interests in how to better teach students. Kind of going back to the question you had, how our teaching style differs from how we were taught. Going way back, when I was a student, we didn’t have any recorded lectures. It was all live and I was forced to write notes and I just remember always feeling like I was missing half of what I was supposed to be learning because I couldn’t write fast enough and listen at the same time. And she and I were talking about how we were delivering the material at the time and asking our students to do that and struggling with, why are they not understanding what we meant them to understand. And looking at the solutions that were being offered to our campus, one of which was Echo, and that really, I think, got our relationship rolling. Because we were like, let’s enter into this together and support each other through implementation of our ideas.
Linsey: Yes. I always tell Marnie that we lift each other up professionally and that we are excellent collaborators in that we work well together and have the same thought process, but that we’re both very passionate about engaging the learners. But then, when we talk, it’s almost like we complement each other in that we just have these wonderful ideas and epiphanies as we’re having conversations on the best practices for educating our students.
Jeff: Fantastic. The partnership obviously comes through loud and clear. So even though it’s a great partnership and you complement each other very well, this last little question, I’m going to make each of you answer it individually, and depending on who’s going to go first, I don’t know who’s going to have the advantage. Because we’re going to try to have different answers. So at the end of every EchoCast, we ask our guests, based on the great work that you’re leading, what’s the one, the one main point, the Inspiration Point, we like to have fun with it. Whether it’s a piece of advice or a piece of learning, but if you could leave all of our viewers here with one thing to either remember or take with them, what would be that as it relates to the work that you’re leading? So you’re each going to answer this, and again, we’re going to try, so for example, the second person who answers can’t just say, oh, yeah, that’s what I was going to say. So Linsey, why don’t you go first? What’s your Inspiration Point for the work that you’re leading there?
Linsey: Oh, I have so many. I guess my Inspiration Point would be, find what you are passionate about and where your students possibly are struggling and make that connection into how you can bridge that gap. Does that make sense? So, you know, I’m very passionate about student engagement, but then also with clinical microbiology, it’s like putting all the pieces together to solve a puzzle, so how do I get students from point A to point B using that learning technology. So my favorite learning feature with Echo360 is the polling, so I’ve gone 100% with key studies and using the polling feature to figure out what students, where they’re struggling and what concepts they know, so that way we can spend time on those concepts that they don’t know when I have them in class and I’m with them to get them to the point that they’re ready to take the exam or ready to go to the clinical laboratory and work through and manipulate patient cultures.
Jeff: All right, Marnie, how about you. Remember you can’t say ditto.
Marnie: Well, I did agree with everything that Linsey did say, but I think my Inspiration Point, or the way that I always try to frame myself is, when I see a student and that lightbulb is going off in their head based on something that I’ve created or done. So I always try to look for that as my inspiration of what I’m creating and what I’m trying to reach and the goal is, how can I make those lightbulbs go off for every student. Not that I always get to every student, getting that lightbulb to go off, and I think Echo360 has really allowed me to create that with the student by having assets that reach every student with their learning style. Whether they want to read the transcript instead of watching the video because they learn by reading, I think that’s a great inspiration for me, because I’ve allowed them that. They can watch it if they’re an auditory learner and they can read the transcript if they learn through reading. And some students, I always tell them, have both up. Have the video up and have that transcript off to the side so that it’s highlighting what I’m saying so that they’re getting the best of both worlds. But really, my inspiration, everything I do in my teaching is the angle of the student learning what I am trying to teach to them.
Jeff: Fantastic. Wow. Linsey and Marnie, I want to thank you on behalf of everybody. All of our team here at Echo360. Thank you for all the work that you’ve been leading, that you’re going to continue to lead. You’re not going to get rid of us because we’re hanging onto you and it’s just been great to see the impact so far and I can’t wait for more ahead there at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Very proud of the work. And thank you all for tuning in to this episode of EchoCast. You can check out more episodes just like this and other resources that we have for inspired learning at Echo360.com.
Thanks for tuning in to EchoCast. For more information on these and other inspired learning solutions, visit us at Echo360.com.
Linzey and Marnie’s success is one example of many that show what the Echosystem can do for organizations around the globe. Whether it’s creating accessible educational content for all users or ensuring student understanding using the polling feature, Echo360 solutions take your ideas for instructional excellence in all types of classrooms to the next level. Ask for a live demo to find out more.