In EP 33, John and Jason talk to Flower Darby about small steps for inclusive, equitable, and humanized online learning, and explore the transformative power of community, connection, and compassion in digital classrooms while tackling the future of AI’s role in education.

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Resources:

Flower Darby Website
Small Teaching Online (book)
The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching
- Request a free copy: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/equityguide
Karen Costa’s 99 Tips For Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos(book)
Steven Covey - Circle of Control - Circle of Influence
Flower’s Recent article in the Chronicle: https://www.chronicle.com/article/5-small-steps-for-ai-skeptics
I’m a Doctor. ChatGPT’s Bedside Manner Is Better Than Mine.

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!

False Start

[00:00:00] Flower Darby: It's always fun to talk to interesting, intelligent people who care deeply about our work. So I've, enjoyed our conversation.

[00:00:11] Jason:. So that's our,that's a lot of our main goal here, really, John, is to get to that point. Where people say nice things about us. And to know it's coming from a real person. I mean, ChatGPT loves everything I say, NotebookLM. Absolutely adores every article I've ever written and every line, but to know this is coming from a real person makes a difference for me. So thank you.

Real Start

[00:00:34] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:37] Jason: John. Hey, everyone. And this is online learning in the second half, the online learning podcast.

[00:00:42] John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look,

online learning's had its chance to be great and some of it is, but there's still some that isn't. So can we get to the next stage?

[00:00:56] Jason: That's a great question, John. How about we do a podcast to talk about it?

[00:01:00] John Nash: I think that's a great idea. What do you want to talk about today?

[00:01:04] Jason: Well, you know, one of the great things about being able to do a podcast is meeting cool people and people that can help us answer this question about, you know, what are we going to do in the second half of life as it comes to theonline podcast?

And maybe the second half of our lives too. I don't know, John. We could, I guess we could that into some of our podcast, actually get some, get some life coaching or something from the, from the guests as they come in.

[00:01:32] John Nash: if that involves me divulging my age. I'll, I'm not doing that yet.

[00:01:36] Jason: Okay. All right. Well, I think I just did a little bit, so, in just in a general sense. So that's good. Well, we have Flower Darby with us as a guest. And so I'm really excited to

talk to Flower. Hi Flower. How are you?

[00:01:51] Flower Darby: Hi, Jason. I'm so good. Hi, John. Thank you so much for inviting me onto your podcast. It is always a pleasure and a privilege. I don't take that for granted at all, but anybody cares what I think about anything. So thanks for having me.

[00:02:05] Jason: Yeah, well, thank you so much. Yeah. How would you like to introduce yourself, Flower? I mean, we could read some of the things off your bio, but what would you like our audience to know about you that might be helpful for them to understand our conversation today?

[00:02:21] Flower Darby: Sure, let me just quickly and conversationally sum up my background I don't, I'm not a fan of reading a bio, people can look that up themselves if they would like to get more information, right, But I have been teaching in higher education for coming up on 29 years, this January, it'll make 29 years, I have taught lots of different things, including English, dance, Pilates, and I've been teaching for over 30 years.

Leadership technology, educational technology. And as we were chatting about a few minutes ago, now I'm teaching social psychology because I just like to keep it interesting. But most of that teaching, there's two other things that I would quickly add. Most of that teaching has been as a part time instructor on top of the rest of my life, right?

That's just how we do. And that's how a lot of online instructors do. And the other thing I would add is that I've been teaching online for 16 years or so and have had the amazing opportunity to. Co author a couple of books on that topic. So, that's the perspective that I'm bringing here today.

[00:03:18] Jason: That's great. Yeah. And really the first time I saw your name that a little bit about who you were, through some of your writing and specifically book, Small Teaching Online.

This was a resource in my work that I both valued and learned from, but also have recommended to a lot of people over the years. and I think it's a really brilliant book and brilliant approach, which of course is a book, Small Teaching. You give people a synopsis of the approach of the book, if they're not familiar?

[00:03:59] Flower Darby: All credit to James Lang for the concept in general. Small teaching is about how we can make little changes in our teaching practices that are based in the science of how people learn. And because they're based on such strong evidence, and such a strong research base, they actually have an outsized impact on student learning, student engagement, student memory and recall of information.

And, but the point is that these things are not overwhelming. They don't create a large grading burden. They don't take a lot of time to execute in a class or in a module. They're little things, little changes that have that outsized impact. And so, his book,

Small Teaching, has been extremely impactful for many faculty because it is so doable.

And so in around 2018 or so I met him and asked if he would be interested in working on a project together. Because I know that for online instructors, sometimes at heart, it can feel overwhelming. So that's what this book does, is it takes his very practical idea and just applies it very directly to specifically asynchronous online classes.

Synchronous classes were not As much of a thing when

we wrote that book as they became during COVID-19. So that's the idea. Little things that online instructors can do that are not overwhelming that really help online students to persist, to learn to thrive in these spaces.

[00:05:20] Jason: Yeah, and I think that that's a great synopsis. I love that. And I think I would just like to say to people, if you haven't read this book, and if you teach online, whether it's asynchronous or, or synchronous, I just go grab the book. It'll be really helpful. And I'm not saying this just because Flower is here, but it truly is is one of those books when people have asked me over the years. and I'm kind of glad we're coming back to this a little bit, John, too, because we've talked about the fact that, you know, we started this podcast to talk about online learning, and we just kind of dived right into talking about some of the almost 10, 000 foot kind of level stuff, right?

And we've talked a lot about AI and about overall theoretical kind of things. I'm not sure we've really gotten into kind of the smaller day to day practices. So this is just a good, maybe call it for that

[00:06:11] John Nash: Yeah, not so much. I think that's right. Yeah,

[00:06:14] Flower Darby: And thank you for your kind words about the book.

[00:06:18] Jason: Yeah. Well, it's true. You wrote that, it was published at least in 2019. A couple things have happened since then. I don't need to remind everybody of all the things, but one being COVID that you mentioned, of course. Hearing you describe it today, Got me thinking about , , some of the mental health crisis, both in students, but also the fact that teachers are feeling overwhelmed and how helpful it is to think about these small iterative improvements that we can make that don't feel overwhelming when we feel so overwhelmed about teaching and all the things that we're being expected to do on campus.

Do you think, so there's, I think there's.

it was pre-COVID doesn't mean there's not a lot of value there, because I think that there is, and I think a lot of it continues to translate.

But is there anything in this book that you would change, or update, or a new chapter that you would tag on if you were to write it today?

[00:07:18] Flower Darby: Yeah, good question. And I, one that I've thought a lot about, of course, and it may happen. There may be a second edition. I'm not going to commit to that right this minute, but I think there would be interest if capacit...