Increase Learning Engagement Through Peer-to-Peer Learning

Encourage peer learning by adopting a successful peer learning program

It’s been well-known in the teaching sphere for many years that a peer learning program or peer support groups are a successful way for students to study, learn, and retain more information from class lectures than just studying alone.  Peer training has been used successfully for ages. While the terms may be changing in this new online world, the concept remains the same. The benefits of mentorship or another peer-to-peer opportunity to learn are only enhanced with Echo360’s features. Theresa Arias has harnessed the power of Echo360’s note-taking, assessment, personal study guide, and other features to improve peer-to-peer learning. Learn more about how in her interview with Echo360’s Jeff Peterson.

Jeff Peterson: Welcome to EchoCast and welcome Theresa Arias. Theresa is the Director of Online Learning and Instructional Innovation at Hill College, where she works with instructors to implement learning technologies like Echo360 in and outside of the classroom. In fact, she does it so well that I’m told that Hill College, which for those that don’t know Hill, it’s a good sized school but it’s not huge, it’s not tens of thousands of students, but it’s actually one of the biggest, if not the biggest, power user of the note-taking feature of Echo360 so I’m sure we’ll dig into that a little bit here, a little bit later. But it seems to be one of the many things she is mastering now helping Hill College inspire its learners so let’s find out more from her. Hey, Theresa.

Theresa Arias: Hi.

Jeff: Well, it’s great to have you on and I can’t wait to get your perspectives as an administrator of using technologies. We’ve had instructors on the show talking about how they’re implementing it but it’s going to be great to get your perspective from your end of the learning engagement continuum. But let’s, before we get into that, maybe just give a little bit of background on how you found yourself in this line of work.

Theresa: Sure. It’s actually kind of a winding road. I didn’t expect to find myself in administration in this format. As you mentioned, I went into librarianship. I actually started with Hill as my first job out of school as a Professional Development Coordinator, so that was when I was actually first introduced to Echo360. But it was really brief at that time. I ended up going to spend a year at Florida State University as a librarian there and then I returned to Hill and that’s when I became the Director of Online Learning and Instructional Innovation and really became much more involved in all of our technologies, but Echo360, of course, specifically.

Jeff: That’s cool. As I mentioned, we’ve talked to a lot of instructors about how they’re using the technology and how it’s working and what they’re looking forward to coming up. So I’m loving to talk to you from the administration standpoint because I picture administrators like yourself going out there and finding cool technologies, finding things that are going to be great for, not just one instructor, but the whole institution at large. And then I imagine, which I’m sure doesn’t happen, all of these negotiations that have to go on between the administration and these instructors to get the adaption. I’m wondering if you could just speak to it. Again, I’m sure it’s not nearly as dramatic as that, but maybe just speak a little bit to the relationship that you have with instructors and how you see your role in curating or bringing forth the technologies. What kind of things are you looking for? And when you bring them in, how does that happen? And then how does the whole adoption process work?

Theresa: Sure. I think I actually benefit in my current role, the fact that I was a professional development coordinator first. I was able to build relationships really early on before I had the need to implement these tools in a more meaningful way for them. I also led them through our LMS change when we moved from Blackboard to Schoology in my previous role. So again, that relationship building during that time and leading through that change really strengthened their trust in me and I hope I take good care of as I find new tools for them to use, or in this case, Echo360 was already here. We were using it primarily for classroom capture. I really wanted to take advantage of the student engagement tools that we have. I had actually started a little bit before I left for FSU trying to promote Echo360 and how they could use it in their classrooms whether they were face-to-face instructors or whether or not they were doing the online instruction. Over time and coming into now, I’ve taken advantage of having our Echo360 client success managers come in and do some live training sessions. I‘ve participated there and made sure that instructors know that I am there with them, trying to learn alongside them so that they know that I can help them as they come out of it.

One of the most fascinating things, in particular, with the notetaking, is that we were contacted by some instructors in general about how they could use Echo360 in their classrooms, but I have one biology instructor who just took that notetaking and she’s really leading that charge. She’s incorporated it as part of her assessments in her classes. Students take notes, she uploads her lectures and she takes full advantage of some of those others. She was a power user prior to taking hold of this notetaking feature. She asked students to submit that proof into an assignment so she can see that they’re using the feature. So it’s been really exciting to see, to have Echo let us know that we’re leading the way in this. Now I’m working with our instructor. She’s going to submit a grant application with Echo360 to try to do some more detailed look at her students’ success over time and how this is impacting it. She really wants to dig into that information. I’m really excited to work with her on that because one of the best ways to get adoption of these types of tools is to have peer-to-peer learning. So we’re going to make sure that she participates in our professional development week in the fall and share this success so I can be there with her to say, look at how Hill is really standing out in taking advantage of this feature so that we can keep promoting it. I think it’s going to be great for our students.

Jeff: You mentioned the peer-to-peer learning and that was going to be my question. You’re in such a cool spot. How do you manage the influx of all, not just from Echo360, but from all the other technologies that you’re managing, how do you manage the influx of all the new things that come in? Recognizing that the instructors have their day jobs where they’re focused on outcomes and their students and yet you see this new stuff come in all the time. How do you manage that ebb and flow?

Theresa: I have an LMS specialist who works with me and I try to make sure that the two of us are exploring these technologies and understanding their use and benefits before we ever try to adopt anything ourselves to then roll out. One of my concerns about technology in general is relying too much on our technologies in the sense that I don’t want our students to be overwhelmed by always having to learn something new in addition to our faculty always having to learn something new. So trying to be thoughtful about what technology we implement into our programs. Just that in general helps us be careful about how, if we bring anything else in, how’s it going to work with Echo360? How is it going to team up together with that? Another thing that I try to stay focused on is student privacy and data collection and how we use our data that we do collect. So I try to be mindful of, again, how these tools are going to work together. For me, Echo360 is really great. I feel like there’s a good balance of getting some analytics, being able to turn that around and see how it’s affecting student success without really overstepping boundaries that can be really hard to define. Because what we’re doing is trying to manage what we do to get the most impact on student success. I just try to be careful about how we make our choices of what technology. Once we’ve made that choice, I feel like it’s, again, I’ve worked on those relationships in advance, so I hope faculty are going to trust the decisions I make coming out of my office or my position, so that if I’ve made a decision that I think something might be useful, once we roll that out, I think that faculty are going to at least give me that benefit of the doubt, in the beginning, to start engaging with that content and making decisions if they think it’s valuable or not. I try to think about that upfront and it’s been pretty useful. For me, one of the things I’ve learned over time, I did a lot of training in my previous career in retail, so it’s easy to latch on to our early adopters, our faculty that love what we’re doing or are our cheerleaders or are champions of what we’re doing. But I’ve found that I like to try to focus on some of my resistors, and the reason is that understanding what they’re resistant to, whether it’s change or something that they’re concerned about in how a product might work or might affect them or their workflow. If I can try to think about their perspective first, it’s typically going to remove those barriers before they even can come up, and that makes them more receptive, I think, to things that I do present to them because they feel seen, they feel heard before we get into any big challenges. So that’s really one of the most successful things I try to keep in mind is thinking about a real broad view of how the tool’s going to roll out and not just thinking about, I know this set of faculty is going to love it and thinking about how I can try to meet those resistors up front.

Jeff: How could you see, if you could imagine, if we hit the way-back button and you’re actually plopped back into that more commercial retail space, the technologies are very agnostic. They can be applied in a variety of different settings. But would there be any of the features, any of the things that you’re learning now that you would maybe be leaning on more or less if you were back in that world?

Theresa: Sure. That’s one thing, just to set this up a little bit, is one thing that benefited me from retail is that in my experience in the few companies that I did work for were very structured in their training and development goals. They went beyond, well, day 1, here’s some videos, watch these, now go to work. It was far beyond that. You got that stuff, but then management was very much geared toward developing you as a staff member. I actually started as a part-time employee and worked my way up through all the levels of working in a store until I became a store manager. I worked at two or three levels of management and then became store manager, and then became a training store manager. That has benefited me. To turn that into, what tools would I use. I think it would be hard from my position that I was in to do that stuff, but I think I would be able to promote that within my company in the other direction and say, here’s some great tools we could use and here’s why that would benefit helping to train the people. I was able to help with some training materials in my position that were then used out into some other stores. But I think that would really help me and potentially even help me in a retail environment. It could have helped me move farther upwards in the sense of, I could have been more proactive about leveraging my personal experience to impact how other stores were trained, how other managers were trained. And perhaps it could have helped me contribute more on that end as opposed to just down into my management teams and employees. I could have perhaps taken it and contributed it up into developing tools to be used.

Jeff: It goes back to what you were saying earlier about the instructor side. Kind of that peer influence. Somebody finds something that’s working and shares it. I think that’s one of the best ways ideas get spread. We are already at our last little segment here, a little segment we like to call Inspiration Point. The Inspiration Point, which is the same question we ask everybody who comes on EchoCast. It’s about the biggest lesson that you’ve learned. Over all the years that you’ve been leading organizations, whether they’re in retail, whether they’re in academia, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned or if you had one piece of advice to leave people with based on the trail you’ve blazed, what would be that one piece of advice?

Theresa: I don’t know. It’s a challenging question. But I think the thing that maybe has helped me the most is not being afraid to let people know that I don’t have all the answers. So you have to find a balance between being the expert, being the one that can teach, being the one that can answer the questions, doing all that stuff, but then also letting those people you’re teaching know that you also face challenges. You also have to learn new things. You also need to sometimes ask questions and that’s sometimes okay to do. But to say, I’m not sure, but I’m going to get you the answer and then follow through with that. So perhaps being able to help the learner understand that you’re on a similar plane with them. You might be the expert or you might be the teacher, but there’s still going to be a factor of being a peer with that person, like, hey, I’m right there with you. I have to learn this stuff, too. I didn’t just wake up one day and have it all in my brain and I’m on the journey with you, I guess, is one way to put it. We’re in it together. It’s not my job to tell you what to do. I’m here to help you and I’m human, too, and we’re going to get there together. Sometimes, I think that has helped develop those relationships. Because they know they can come to me, and it’s that delicate balance of, there’s no stupid questions and you really have to let them know that there aren’t. No matter how small that detail that you might be thinking, at some point you had to learn that small detail. So putting that grace out there that, hey, I understand you’ve got to learn that small detail, too. You don’t know it until you know it. So just trying to be a partner with them. That’s kind of rambly but you kind of get there, I think.

Jeff: That’s the best kind of rambling right there, because again, you’re talking about building relationships, having the humility to let people know that, yeah, it sounds corny, but we are all in this together. We’re all on this journey and we can all help each other out no matter where we are. So this is fabulous. Thank you, Theresa Arias, for joining us here on EchoCast and sharing your story and your perspectives and your commitment to inspired learning. It’s just inspiring. We’re going to let Theresa go now, but everybody else stick around for a quick demonstration of some of the applications referenced here in this EchoCast. You can also go to Echo360.com for more episodes and more resources to create your own 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. 

Announcer: Welcome to Echo360’s taking notes and collaborating during class demonstration. We will show you how to launch an Echo360 class so you can navigate through your instructor’s content to follow along in the presentation, take notes about the lecture, and tag them to specific slides, bookmark and flag useful or confusing content to review later, get clarification on a topic by posting a question to your instructor or other students, and respond to a question to contribute to the class discussion.

The Echo360 platform enables you to follow along with a classroom lecture, take notes and participate in online discussions, all the while adding content to your online study guide for review after class. You can access the active learning platform from our smartphone, tablet, or laptop. Click on the thumbnail image to go directly to that class, or click the all classes button to see the full list of classes. This icon indicates that the instructor included a presentation in the class. This icon indicates that a video is attached to the class. For both of these icons, green means that you have not viewed it yet and grey means that you have already viewed it. The live icon indicates that the class is in session. 

The date and name of the class appears on the navigation bar. Navigate the presentation slides by clicking on the previous and next arrows, or click the slide number in the center to jump to a different slide. You can also toggle the presentation between regular and full screen. Use these tools to take notes, participate in online discussions, bookmark content to your study guide, and flag the instructor, letting them know that you are confused. Type your notes in the panel throughout class. They are automatically tagged to the presentation slides, both of which will then appear in your personal study guide. Your notes are personal to you and not visible by the instructor or other students. Hover the mouse over the slide tag to change and associate to another slide or delete the slide number for this note. Click the bookmark icon to include a thumbnail of this slide in your study guide. 

The remainder of this demonstration is modified to compare the instructor and student point of view. If at any point during the presentation you’re confused, click the flag icon. The instructor can see how many students are confused in real time and pause the lecture to address the issue. Use the questions panel to interact with the instructor and other students during class. Click reference class content to add the slide number reference and image to the question. If you prefer not to associate your name with a question, enable the post anonymously slider. The blue bookmark automatically appears for any question that you post. You can bookmark additional questions or responses that you want to remember. All bookmarked items will appear in your study guide for review after class. A red dot indicates that the question has not been read. Students and instructors can respond to a question. The counter reflects the number of responses.

Notice that since the student posted the question as anonymous, the instructor can see their name, but it does not appear to other students. Click respond to this question if you wish to continue the discussion. Enter your response in the text field. Anyone can endorse a question or response. An additional notation appears if one of the endorsements is from the instructor.

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

Improve upon teaching with peer learning

The success Theresa Arias has achieved is one small example of what the powerful Echosystem can do for organizations around the globe. Whether it’s taking notes collaboratively or encouraging peer-to-peer learning, Echo360 solutions take your concepts about what a modern classroom should look like and how students should learn to the next level. Check in with us for a live demo to learn more.