Getting Instructors Where They Need to Be: New Tech Toys that Give Instructors More Time With Their Online Students

In this session, participants will: 

• Analyze areas where online teaching could be more efficient;

• Discuss new tools and technologies that have been developed to streamline the online teaching experience; and

• Create a plan for a higher level of instructor and student support for their own institutions.

If instructors have the right tools, they can spend less time doing repetitive tasks and more time helping students succeed. Have you ever wondered why it takes so long to grade or send outreach? Our team has developed a set of tools designed to build efficiencies and streamline teaching online. 

How can you bridge that gap between where instructors spend their time and where they would add the most value for students? We all know that instructors want to provide the highest level of support for their students and give each student the 1-1 attention that they deserve. However, instructors are often pulled away from the work they would like to do by repetitive tasks, such as gradebook management, monitoring forums, or simply finding the information they need. This is why our team carefully evaluated where instructors were spending their time and developed a comprehensive toolset to streamline these processes and focus instructors on areas where they can help their students the most. 

Instructors always love fun new toys, but the tools we have built are all thoroughly evaluated based on student-centric data. We have found through targeted research that providing efficiency-building tools and technology to our instructors has improved overall student outcomes and satisfaction in those courses. The impacts are clear when students are more successful and retention rates are higher after providing instructors with these new tools. 

In the session, attendees will participate in a 5 minute brainstorming session where they will share ideas on where they spend the most time on key areas such as grading and support for their students. We will create areas on the board with several major categories where those pain points reside. Participants will then be prompted to write down ideas on sticky notes and bring them up to a board at the front of the room and group them into the appropriate category. Our team will then review the repeated themes with the audience, and lead a 3-5 minute discussion on the pain points that were identified and the implications on both the instructor and student experience. Then we will spend about 15 minutes showing the audience what we found at our institution and how we solved for many of those pain points by developing a new instructor dashboard that includes a targeted suite of tools. We will tie the audience’s ideas into our broader study on instructor time and efficiency, and demonstrate how the teaching process itself can be continuously improved. Finally, we will spend 5 minutes tying in the audience ideas that were not addressed, and begin the forward-facing conversation of what comes next for their own institutions. After the presentation ends, there will be 5 minutes for the audience to reflect on what was just discussed, followed by a 10 minute Q&A session. 

This session will help technologists, instructional designers, and admin to think through how they can build efficiencies for their instructors and provide the right tools to streamline the teaching process and improve student outcomes. It will also help faculty think through how they spend their time, and how they can determine what technologies or practices can focus them in the right areas based on data-driven studies. 

Instructor-facing tools and technology cannot be overlooked. Our instructors are the front line to providing the highest level of support for students. How can we ensure that we are in turn providing that level of support for our instructors?