Harnessing the Power of Interactive Training
Combining Canvas and Canvas Credentials, we created an interactive training program focused on improving instructional design skills, using instructional software in Canvas, and developing customer service etiquette.This led to higher levels of engagement, motivation, and skill development among staff compared to traditional training methods that we have used in the past.
You all so much for kinda to my presentation harnessing the power of interactive training. I will admit fully that Chachi PT helped me write this title. Because I always go to conferences and I'm like, man, people think of the coolest titles for conferences. So when I started this, I was like, I may have a really cool title, and I feel like it's pretty cool. I went through a lot of, different ones with it. So I will fully that choppy PT is good for helping write titles for presentations.
My name is Claire Baron Zitell. I'm the associate director of instructional design at Teachers College Columbia University. And I work in a department called the Digital Futures Institute, which I'll tell you about in a little bit. First, I'll tell you a little bit about myself. Before I made the transition into instructional design.
I was actually a fifth grade teacher for eight and a half years. And my I lived in San Francisco, and I was teaching. I'd wanted to be a teacher since I was in the third grade, and I had never wanted anything else. And it was great. I it was very stressful as I'm sure all of you know, but, I had gotten my master's degree while I was teaching in instructional design because I loved using technology with my kids, and I saw how important having technology components with my teaching could be.
And so I was really interested in instructional design. And then fast forward to my husband getting into to a master's program in New York City, and we had to move to across the country in two months. And I had to find a job and was a little bit ready to take a break from teaching and, I feel like I was given, like, a huge chance. Like, my my old supervisor took a huge chance on me and hired me, at Teachers College as an educational technology specialist because I feel like actually getting a job outside of being a teacher is probably like one of the most difficult things to do when you make that decision to try and do it. So I started at TC, in the IT department with a group of student workers.
They were tech fellows, and two other people in my department, and we worked with fully in person courses and faculty and helping them get their courses ready to go and all that stuff. So, when we started that, We made some training for faculty, and I made some training for our students, but it's always hard. Making training is really hard. And I feel like actually think it's gonna be that hard until you're trying to do it. So just by a raise of hands, how many of you all have a difficult time making training.
Because usually that's how I feel is like half a heart at the end of it. So I'm gonna take you on a little bit of a journey of when I started at Digital Futures Institute and some training that I've all up there through our crazy time during COVID, which I feel like I've been to so many presentations that I think COVID's always been a gen or AI has been mentioned. So today I'm gonna talk a little bit about what the need for this training was, the planning and preparation process that went into it the contact the content development and then the results and the impact. So understanding the need this is where I'm gonna tell you my little story about what the Digital Futures Institute is. Like I said, when I started at TC, I was actually in the IT department.
And I when COVID happened, as I'm sure all of you experienced within, like, two weeks, they were like, okay, surprise. Everyone's going online. So we were just kind of like going psychotic with all of that. And that lasted probably through the entire year of twenty twenty. Everyone was just going crazy.
No one really knew what was happening, everyone was piecing things together. And then in twenty twenty one, January, they made this big announcement, our office of digital learning, which was the group that worked with courses before the pandemic that were fully online which at TC, we didn't really have that many. It wasn't in a huge lift for them. And so their department, my department, we're gonna combine to make the Digital Futures Institute. And so we were all like, yay.
That's exciting. We get to work with other people that love doing the same thing as we do. And We also brought over some media people, some people that run different spaces around the college. But then with that announcement, we were like, yay, we're so excited. They were oh, also, we're gonna bring everybody back in the fall for hybrid teaching, and you have to take care of it.
So we were like, wow, that's really crazy. And our staff at the time consisted of me, another instructional designer, my supervisor, and then two other structural designers. So there was only like five of us. So we were kinda like, that's really crazy. We can't just do this by ourselves.
We're gonna need some help. So what their solution to this was, and I say, like, the administration and some of our super supervisors kinda got together and they okay. We're gonna help you guys. We're gonna let you hire thirteen instructional support associates, which are like, wow, that's incredible thirteen people. And they're going to help you with Canvas templating.
They're gonna help faculty to edit their course content. They're gonna assist faculty in learning the classroom technology and hybrid instruction. And this sounds like such a dream. And then, the last part of it was like, but they all have to be outside hires. Like, they can't be students at TC.
They can't really be people that already work here. So we're like, okay, we can work with that. I mean, we tried to find some outside hires, but sometimes it kinda felt we were just hiring anybody that applied that could, like, breathe and was willing to go into this arthritis. So it kind of turned into this, like, mishmash of people who were really excited about this and people that were just like, Hey, I just need a part time job, and I'm willing to do this. So we had to create a training for those different types of people.
And we they said to us, you're gonna hire them in July of twenty twenty and they announced at the beginning of July and twenty twenty one, September first, everyone's coming back in person. And So you all have to train these thirteen people who have no idea what teachers' college is and what you all do and how to do these courses. So basically, month of July of twenty twenty one felt like a fever dream. We were like, how are we gonna do this? It was insane. So our challenge was we needed to create a training that we teach these folks to have not I don't I don't wanna say Canvas level access because we created a role for them that had pretty limited access where they could search for courses, view student grades, things like that, and help faculty in that way, but it didn't have all of the capabilities of admin we had to teach them how to edit content as an instructor in Canvas.
I will say a lot of these people had been, like, students at other universities and had experienced Canvas from the student perspective, so they had that on their side. All of our templates at that time and still now, which, like, drives me so crazy, are pretty much all HTML based, which is, like, really challenging because because not a lot of people are really good at knowing how to fix it when it breaks. So we had to teach them how to do basic fixes. How to understand what the university policies were that we had to integrate into these courses, how to utilize the zoom LTI and how faculty were going to, create these these meetings. There was even like a crazy thing that happened where they were like, oh, we're all gonna create the Zoom links for the faculty.
And we were like, that's not gonna happen. They're like, it's gonna happen. And then literally two weeks before the beginning of the semester, like, okay, that's not gonna happen. So you have to help faculty do this. So we had to do that.
And then we had to teach them instruction practices in the classroom and how to use classroom technology. So they had we have classrooms that have four cameras in the room, whiteboards on the entire wall, you can project four different things all over the place. So we had to teach them how to use that. So because because in August we ran probably a hundred and fifty sessions with faculty one on one to show them how to use this for their teaching. And then we also had to teach them about how to have a meeting with a faculty member.
Like, what should you talk about with, what shouldn't you say to a faculty member that's gonna make them panic? So it was a pretty, like, big lift. So In the fever dream, that was July of twenty twenty one, we were like, okay, our training, we're just gonna make this giant Google document. Which I think about it now, and it was such a terrible idea for us to do that because it started off really great. We were like, oh, this is so useful. Has it separated by weeks, it has little assignments, like you can make little highlights and add little images.
But then as the training started getting more and more, and we started seeing more needs, this document grew to be like forty pages. And it turned into like, it was basically like a refrigerator manual at that point. And we had assigned we had given it to the new people who were hired. There was thirteen of them, and each full time person was a signed, I think, like, four people each to to manage and to grade all of their stuff and make sure they were they were doing this and creating courses correctly, and it was terrible. It was an awful experience.
But we, like, made it through. I mean, obviously, we did it. And and the faculty were fine. Everything. I feel like everything that happens usually in higher ed feels like it's going to be awful, and then it's just fine.
Everyone learns how to deal with it. So we had this and and at the end, I was kinda like, we can't do this anymore. So after we had gotten over this crazy hump of twenty twenty one, everyone was back. There were still a lot of issues that were coming up that we were training folks on, but it was much less of a lift. I made the choice when I was, promoted to associate director of instructional design, like, okay, we're gonna reevaluate this program.
And we're gonna redevelop this training because what we did was really bad. And we need to do something that can be sustained and is interesting and is applicable to these folks so they can actually help faculty and and be satisfied with their work because lot of the feedback from that Google document was not good, and a lot of people actually left working for us because they were like, this is too much. It's way too intense, which I agree. So when I started that reevaluation process, I decided, let's look at what the pros of what we were doing with that Google document were and what were the cons of it. The pros is that it had all the content that we needed.
Like, it was good content. We had all come together and developed content that we needed to train them on. It had a good weekly structure, and that's something I really wanted to to keep. And it also provided them with mentors they could go to. So they weren't always seeking answers from random people, so they had a point person.
The cons is that it was difficult to follow. There was no visualizations for them to reference. And it was just too much information compacted into one place. Which it's it was just really confusing for them. So what I decided to do, was move this onto canvas because I thought they're using Canvas with faculty already.
So why not experience it from the student perspective and actually do their work within Canvas? So I decided to create a badging experience to add that kind of interactive element to it. And then I created micro courses for each learning topic that has that badger experience inside of it. I decided to reuse an audit materials we already had. So When I was still working in TCIT, I had developed these series of courses that were meant for faculty with this, like, very much an elementary school mind of, yes, of course, these faculty are gonna go through this. They definitely wanna continue learning and everyone just is on their own journey, but then no one ever wanted to take these courses.
So I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna redo these courses and I'm gonna reuse them and repurpose them for internal training purposes. And then I also wanted to make this course a place that could also act as a reference for them. So, yes, they're doing training, but if they had a question about something that they learned in their training, they could go back to the course and find it within there. I also would pose like, what do you need to do if you're resigning? Like, what are the steps you need to do there? Where's the guide to the policies and where is our, department guide, things like that. So what I came up with was our ISSA info hub and you can see this is kind of the landing page there, and it has a lot of different thumbnails on it.
So these thumbnails range from onboarding for new hires, which I'll show you what that one looks like. Canvas educators, ServiceNow, which is our ticketing platform and Monday dot com, which we for, like, course organization and stuff like that. TC Digital Media, which is actually UJA, but that's what we call it at my school. Zoom, interactive teach tools for teaching and learning. And then I've added a lot.
So the there's an accessibility piece when our school adopted Ally for Canvas, and then we have some different training materials there at the bottom. So, Oops. I just hit something. Okay. So I'm actually gonna show this to you.
I I have some videos in in there, but, they didn't bring over, like, when they brought the presentation over. So I'm just gonna show it to you, in Canvas itself. So, in this info hub, you can see here there's informational materials, that they can access that are, like, different workshop recordings. Like, they did a a workshop with the library about their new course reserves, and so I would put it in there. But they start in the onboarding for new hires.
So This really also works a lot because we're not hiring thirteen people at once. A lot of our turnover now is because somebody finds a full time job and they leave, and so we'll hire maybe one or two people at the same time. So they start in this new boarding, the onboarding for new hire and it kinda gives them an overview of what our department is. And then I have it laid out by week. So it kind of tells them this is what you're schedule is.
It goes by days, and they should pretty much be done with this training in a month. And when they go through this course, there also assigned a mentor ISA. So one of our other part time ISAs who's been with us for a while is their mentor in their direct if you have questions, any of that, that should be your first person that you go to. And we did that for a few different reasons. And I think the biggest was so that they could create a community with each other, because they all had shared experiences.
I mean, they're working part time. They're working really in-depth with faculty, and all that good stuff. So that's what our overview page looks like. And just to just to get a little, background on that me just play from the current slide. So like I said, they go through it in a month and it explained all of the community medians and the training schedule, it tells who's the supervisor of what? What do all of our different teams do? And it also builds on itself and it saves the more difficult stuff for the end.
So when they do service now training, that's really training with their mentor. And and I'm a huge believer because what I took out from that old training document was we would do these trainings with them that were very scripted of, like, hello, professor sir. I'm so excited to be working on your course. And to me, I no one ever talks like that because I'm like, we're not at, like, a call center, and you have to realistic. Like, they're gonna have their own conversations, they're their own people.
So I took that out. And what I I did is when they're meeting with faculty to begin with, their mentor goes to the meeting as well to help any, help with any questions that they might have that they don't know the answer to. And then before we actually launched this course, I took a couple of our senior instructional support associates that had been there since very beginning and went through that Google document with us. And I had them do user testing to give me feedback on what they thought of it. And we changed around a lot of stuff.
We implemented some new, like, structures and things like that based on them saying, I think this would be better. So within that course, after that overview page, it links out to all of the different kind of little chunks within it. So some of them are external courses, and some of them are internal courses. So the external courses are things like Canvas educator, zoom, all of that because Those are our really big products, especially Canvas. So our external courses contain modular tasks, that build upon themselves, and then the students submit assignments that are graded, by their mentors.
So that was another big reason that we did with mentors because we were like, We need somebody to grade these. So I'm gonna show you, Canvas educators. So When I developed Canvas educators, the first kind of iteration of this course, it had like screenshots in it, and the pages were really long, and the editing of it and upkeep upkeep of it was not great because it was really hard to maintain that. So what I did instead is I kinda pieced it out Let me just show you at the beginning. Into I thought to myself, what are the main things our faculty do here? They add content, they create discussion boards, they create assignments and quizzes, they wanna do the grade book announcements and customizing their course.
So in the beginning started, you can see I tried to kind of piece it out into just like three to four things per module. So it wasn't super overwhelming. And then they have assignments for each one. So, like, in the getting started with Canvas, they request a sandbox course so they can build and create their own course. That their mentor can go into their course and see.
And then that also works twofold. When they start working with faculty and they need to test things out, they can test it out in their sandbox course before going to a faculty's course and messing with a bunch of stuff and making sure that it works. So these external courses work just like this, and then they have to click mark as done, before moving on to the next, and then they submit their assignments, and their mentor comes in and grades those assignments as they're going. So when I developed this, I wanted to make sure that I was linking out to instructions that were always going to be upkept. So we have a pretty large, library of screen steps instructions that are always upkept by our tech team.
So I linked out to those, and this is it goes back to the idea of giving them a place to reference. So if they were working with a faculty and they wanted to send follow-up in obstructions of how to create a page in Canvas, they could come here and find the link to that, rather than having to search through the entire screen steps manual like, full of millions of things to try and find that. And then you can see here they had assignments for each of those. So they had to create their own page in their own Can this course. So the intention behind this course was really to make them the instructor of their own course and put them in the shoes of why the instructors working with are actually going through and doing.
And I have some of the we did some advanced, TC stuff like, with our templates and stuff. But as the training kinda went on and as faculty started to come back, I noticed there are full templates that were super built out like that overview page and all that that are really utilizing HTML. We're being used a lot less, so the need for that wasn't as great. Because we do have full time staff that they can just direct them to. So along with those external courses, as I started to add more training, I built internal courses as well.
And that was for smaller, products that weren't as robust. So An example of an internal course are is our interactive tools for teaching. With this, I was really trying to pinpoint the products that they u that our faculty really utilize a lot in their courses. So padlet, Microsoft, whiteboard, thing link and perusal were the ones that we started with because that's what a lot of faculty were really using. So in these, rather than linking out to an external course, there's an actual module that deals with padlet.
So within the padlet module, it has, like, padlet basics, customizing your padlet and then, moderating your posts. Those are all things that faculty, we noticed when they were using Pallet in their courses were doing. And so those were the assignments had to submit. And so we did that, and we did it for all of the, interactive, tools, and you can see all of them here. So they could always come at any time into their modules and find whichever section they were at, And since it's a badging course, they could also see where their progress was when they clicked on modules, which was really great.
And so, I was really happy with this. I thought it was a really good, and what I did is I actually made all of our instructional support associates. Even if they went through that Google document, they had to go through this again. Because I wanted to make sure that it was a good course, and I say there's a little disclaimer in most of the pages that says this course is in development if you see something wrong, email me so we are constantly auditing it when they're going through. So I just had some these are where my videos were, but, I showed this all to you.
So, we've built a lot of courses. So we've done the onboarding schedule. We did Canvas for edge cater's service now on Monday. For service now on Monday training, I actually found, Monday dot com has like training module courses on their site. So I have them do that.
Because I'm like, why reinvent the wheel when you know the people at Monday or dot dot com are like, let's create this cool training course. So I just have them go through that. We did zoom for educators, intro to TC digital interactive tools for teaching and learning, accessibility essentials. The accessibility essentials, like I said, we really utilized a lot when we implemented Ally into Canvas, which is still very early on right now. But basically, what we did with the accessibility essentials is they took the course that they created in, Canvas educators because in Canvas, educators, intro to TCDM and Zoom, all of those build on the sandbox course that they build in Canvas educators.
So they're creating Zoom meetings in that sandbox course. They're embedding videos into that sandbox course. So when we implemented Ally, I'm not sure how many of you all are familiar with Ally. It's like an accessibility checker within campus. They went into that sandbox course where they had put all this content for their training, and then they had to analyze it using Ally.
And they were analyzing videos, analyzing pdfs that they had uploaded and learning why they shouldn't be uploading those pdfs so it was really great because they had already done all of the work. So creating the training for that was pretty simple. And they were actually getting a perspective of what a real faculty would see, because they had in those courses usually built out like a twelve to fifteen week course already. And then we have informational materials past trainings that we always post for them as well. So after all of that, I that pretty much took, I will say the entire year of twenty twenty two.
I started this probably in, like, November, December twenty twenty one, I where I was really thinking, like, we really need to redo this so that we can have something that's sustainable because we're always hiring new instructional support associates. And I will say, I do like to brag a lot of our instructional support associates now, stay with us and they only leave when they find full time instructional design jobs or full time jobs in in the crew that they wanna go into. And they've all been, like, really sad to leave, and I'm always sad for them to leave, but they say to me, these these courses have really given me skills to go and the jobs that I really want because they're knowledgeable in so many tools, at the end. So some of the feedback from the training courses, that I got where I find the ISA info hub more user friendly than Google doc training, less overwhelming. It is easier to follow directions and go back and forward between the different badging courses.
It's easier to find the answers, and it's also great to be able to receive feedback when submissions are not done correctly. So that's one thing is when they turn something in and their mentor is grading it, they give them comments, and they actually give the assignment back if not what they're looking for. So they don't just pass them through. So they have to go back and redo it before they can move on in their training. Some more feedback, the layouts appealing, organized, easy to understand, straightforward.
I love self paced learning. It meets people where they're at. Very detailed modules. It was almost like the whole textbook with specific chapters that did deep dives into each topic. I will say even though it's a month that they're supposed to go through this, most of them completed it in, like, two to three weeks.
So they they can go at their own pace. And it's really all they're doing when they, start. So some challenges that we found when we started this in that we're still, kind of working through. One was the grading assignments, because full time staff, we can't always be trying to figure out when they're turning an assignment. Keeping everything updated, which I think is just for training in general, always such a tough thing to do is making sure it's staying up to date.
And then creating a process for continued training. So the solutions that we've come up with, and I already talked about the first one, was the mentor program. And then we do semester audits, and then a process for continued training. I've created that process. Which I'll talk about in a little bit.
So like I said, I already talked a little bit about the mentor program here, but, basically newly hired ISAs, assigned a veteran, they create that relationship, camaraderies, support, and then they complete their course, and then the mentor ISAs do everything. I mean, it's really nice. I feel like they get hired and I'm kinda like, okay. Good luck. But, I the the mentor really talks to me a lot if they're having trouble with some or if they don't know how to maybe, like, have a hard conversation of you're not doing what you need to be doing, things like that.
So it's a very, like, symbiotic relation relationship. So I wanna talk a little bit about our auditing process because that's, I think, like I said, one of the biggest challenges of doing, training is making sure that it's audited. So what I developed, was a pretty much semester by semester auditing process. Where the ISAs are actually the ones who were auditing the course for me. So in Monday dot com, because that's what we use for all of our projects and organization and things that.
During our our biweekly meetings, I say to them, okay, we're gonna do our our auditing process, which basically means you are responsible for going through the course, making sure all of the links still work. If there's any new components or things that have been added to things Canvas and Zoom, those are all in there. If there's any spelling mistakes, you're correcting them. And then if there's things that they're not sure of, there's a spreadsheet that's attached to these little comment bubbles, and they write their comments in there and then I go in and fix it. And then when they are finished with their auditing process, they click done We usually do this, like, at the end of the semester when there's a little bit of a lag time, and they are given a month to go through and do it.
So they're working with faculty and stuff. And it's worked really well. I feel like having them go through and do it makes them a part of it. And it's really turned into a place now of where they're also creating trainings for new ISAs as well. So it's become really a fun process and it's nice to have help with the auditing process and to have a a kind of schedule when we're doing it.
So the continued training, so every semester we do some sort of training. I'm sure a lot of you probably similar cycles as we do. Ours, like, fall cycle will start August first. That's when I start emailing faculty nonstop that we are there to help, and we start to get people coming back, looking for help with their courses. So Our off month starts usually in October.
So our off month is usually all of October, maybe the first or second week in November, but in November before Thanksgiving break, we do start to send those, spring. Hey, think about your spring semester before you go on winter break. And so when our off month, we think about what new product are we using with ISAs. The big one this is gonna be AI in education, how we're talking to faculty about AI. And so when we develop these trainings, it usually allows for them two to three weeks to complete it.
So regardless of the modality of the training, so a lot of our trainees now are done in person. There is always a follow-up page. So that overview page I showed you all, that has the information, and there's always like an assignment after the training that they have to go into do to refresh themselves on that. So it's been really great. So that's kind of our process now is when you do a training, if it's on you record it, you go in and you create a module, and we add it to the course in whatever way it fits, and then you create an assignment.
And like I said, now, a lot of our instructional support associates, I'm having them run these trainings because they become experts on these technologies because they use them with faculty, they go in and they create the overview page. They send it to me and say, how does this look? What is your feedback on it? And I have them create, like, learning objectives on there. Usually, they put some sort of video up. It's an overview, and then they come up with a follow-up assignment to their training. So then they're in turn learning how to create training for their colleagues as well, which to me is like another job skill that they can take to find a job.
I always want them to find a job. I mean, I don't want them to leave me because then I have to hire new ones, but I want them to be successful. So it's been really great. We do ongoing improvements to this. I mean, after each training, we send surveys about what could be could be better.
We ask them what type of training that they want, especially when I'm kind of puzzled, like, what should I tell them what should we do next? So this is some of the feedback that we got after our summer. I would like to add more Canvas tutorial videos and pedagogical tool workshops in the info hub that can be implemented in a canvas course to eventually be shared with faculty so they can try them firsthand in the info hub before implementing in their class. So their idea is making like a little laboratory for the faculty to come in and play. And then maybe if there is a table of contents that you could really access a page, that's actually a really good idea, more opportunities to collaborate with other colleagues So I feel like that last one, the collaborating with other colleagues, was really great with this training because they get to do assignments together, and they love doing that. Because I, a lot of times, do feel like training, especially when you become an adult, can become very tiring because then it's a very, like, alone thing you sit at your desk clicking through something to get to the end really fast.
So with this, I have them, like, create zoom meetings and zoom with your colleague. Take a screenshot Zoom meeting, or, we did like a training where they had to go all around the college and, like, find different things, and they do it all together. So it's a fun way to to be really creative, and it's pretty low stakes because they're your part time folks, so you can kinda get a handle on, so, yeah, that's that's pretty much it. I we have, about ten minutes left. So if anyone has any questions, I'm happy to answer them.
That's my email if you ever wanna email me, but yeah. That's a great question. So when we create our career thing, it pushes out to, like, LinkedIn and indeed it is on the teacher's college website. So I always, like, hope that we'll get alumni to apply because they, again, like, know the culture and stuff like that but most of them, I think, find them on LinkedIn and indeed. Thirteen.
We're not actually at thirteen right now. So, at as as the well, so what wound up happening, like I said, in IfI, we have the instructional team, the technology team, we have a media team that creates media with, faculty in in the all this other crazy stuff. And then we have a spaces team. So when, like, that strangle of twenty twenty one ended a little bit, we started to disperse the ISAs to other teams. So now we have ISAs that work events downstairs.
We have ISAs that do media creation. And so they a lot of their background is in, like, video editing and things like that. So in the instructional team, we usually, go between five to six ISAs. And then the tech team has some that kind of bleed over into ours sometimes, but, what we really try to do is make all of those regardless of what team they're in. We give them exposure to other teams as well by having them go through training.
But the thirteen at the beginning was really insane, and it was really crazy. So, yeah. And and like I said, I feel like when we were hiring them, many of them were just like, I've never seen Canvas before. I have no idea what's going on. I bet there was, like, a handful of them that were like, yeah, I'm I'm going into instructional design at NYU or something like that.
So, Yeah. It was pretty crazy. In your overview page, I like how you did the color. Are you using a table or That's HTML code. Yeah.
So you make one wrong backspace, and it's all messed up. So that's why I was so excited about that cool AI thing they showed this morning. I was like, wow, that's a game changer. Yeah. That list of the interactive tools.
Oh, yeah. For sure. So in the course itself, I can show you. Yeah. So our interactive tools for teaching and learning, Right now, it's padlet, Microsoft whiteboard, SINGLink, and perusal.
Because those are the main ones used by faculty. I think we're gonna add couple more in. It's a long, like, approval process, which I'm sure for you all, like, going through IT, going through accessibility, going through general counsel, and then you can implement it. And then you have to find money from somewhere to pay for it. So, those are the ones that they mainly know now.
Yeah. Was to onboard your ISAs. Mhmm. You must have a separate, of micro courses to you know, that's the dream. I we've tried so much with faculty to get them to be interested in this, but they're not.
Like, we can never get them to want to do it. So what I've started to do, which I've actually found a lot of success with, is, I've started to do these micro workshops where I go to faculty meeting and force them to listen to me, but they're only fifteen minutes. And I'll cover something like creating an enriching discussion like how what are different, like, prompts you can do. And we've found that's usually a better way to get them in. We also do like summits in the summer where we do a lot of different workshops and a lot of them like to come to that.
We do something called the software expo which we hide behind, like, a curtain when the big faculty meetings going on. And then when it's over, they put the back so they, like, have to come and talk to us and see the different stuff. So in at Teachers College, we just haven't really had a ton of success with faculty going through courses and self training. And that's I was thinking I was talking to someone earlier at lunch about how that's, like, always been such a hard thing and something we always really want to try, but I just we haven't spent a ton of time on it nowadays because they're just not very interested, unfortunately, but maybe someday they will be. Yeah.
When we try scaling it to something like one of our needs is tutors. Mhmm. It is very kind of what training those tutors within the specific things that we needed to be Yeah. I mean, something we have tried is, we created kind of a similar course, for teaching assistance. And for that, it worked pretty well.
When they were hired, we would put them into the course. But a lot of we found our faculty and our TA's really like is just not one on one. So we do office hours. We have really open schedules where they can schedule Zoom meetings with us. And just kinda make ourselves available to them as much as possible.
So that's really what works at our university. And teachers college is relatively small. So it works pretty well. But yeah, someday I think we'll figure out faculty training that works really well. I hope.
So Yeah. When did you say it was the most difficult subject topic or thing for your ISAs to I think the hardest for them with some of our faculty was zoom that was really hard. Even though you would think through the whole pandemic, they would have figured it out. But it was very shocking. How many of them had not figured it out.
So I think Zoom, and I think the actual most difficult was us trying to give pedagogical techniques to faculty for teaching hybrid instruction because it's so hard when you're talking to a group of people, and you also have people online to ignore them. So what we actually had a lot of our instructional support associates did is for a really large class is they would go and assist the faculty for the first few weeks. Like, we would train them on how to do that, and they would help assist with an online, tech kind of thing of helping the students and really working with the faculty. So if I have to think about all of the things that they've done, I think the classroom technology helping faculty in the classroom using that, is definitely the hardest. Now most of the faculty that have hybrid courses do it by choice.
And they did it by choice before the pandemic. So we don't have a ton of people that have issues with it. And I would say the second most now is probably video quizzing with Uja is a a huge pain point for them and for us. It's it's very frustrating. So, that's, I think, been one of the other really tricky ones.
So, yeah. Yeah. More at all, but to compare, was it too, products and things, you know, because the whole universe we have Yeah. Have been using because all these products are are trying their best to do the accessibility, commodating, and, the quizzing Yeah. So, Uja is So, I don't wanna, like, bash Uja.
They're great. We've had Uja since I was with TC, and I think we pretty much had them when they were pretty still pretty young. They're great with storage, they're great with storing videos, a lot of faculty know how to put videos up for students to see. We have it turned on so that when faculty upload videos, it automatically transcribes them. We can link like human captioning to them and all that good stuff.
So I feel like for the video part of it, it's been really great. We used to have playposite that we used for just video quizzing. And then we kinda ran into some stuff where we were like, oh, only our online courses are using it, and all that kind of stuff. So let's try dropping it and going solely to TC Digital Media for video quizzing. And I will say it's it's a pretty it's a pretty good, interface.
The issues that we've mainly had are, like, feedback with the grade book, because of authentication and like finding the grades is really tricky for some faculty. A lot of our, like, non credit courses really wanna use it so those students don't actually get Unis. So that's like a whole another, like, best, but when they don't authenticate, like, it doesn't give them a name. So it says, unknown user and it has all their grades. So I think that's been our biggest pain point, and I will say you just been really wonderful with working with us on it.
And they've made a lot of changes since we made transition. But I think that's probably been our biggest pain point. But again, they never advertise themselves to as just a video quizzing platform. So for the video storage and stuff, they're great. And I will say for video quizzing for our credit courses, they work just fine.
But for non credit, we've run into some issues but like I said, their support's been really wonderful. I've never used Kaltura before. Our Columbia's main campus uses it, but we haven't ever used it. So, yeah. I think we have time for one more.
I have, like, one minute left. Yeah. I was just wondering if you had any experience Oh, hi. Great to meet you. Mhmm.
Yeah. So there's some programs at TC that do use badging, but we I think where we really run into an issue is like the credentialing part of it. Like, when you put your university stamp on a badge, it, like, means a lot. So We kinda shy away from working with faculty doing it, and I don't think a lot of faculty wanna go through it because it's like I said, it's like a whole credentialing all this. I actually went to a really great, session yesterday of someone that did faculty PD.
I can't remember for the life of me where he from, but he talked about how when they started doing their faculty, they'd held these badges, and it was so great. But then they ran into this big roadblock of like, okay. What is it how is this different from, like, coming to a class here? So I know there are a couple of programs at TC that use it, but we're not really connect did with it, and we've never really gone down that road with faculty. Because even when we issue these badges, they're through a DFI badging account. They're not, like, TC stamped because it's a big thing. So, okay, I think that's it. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a great rest of your, conference.
My name is Claire Baron Zitell. I'm the associate director of instructional design at Teachers College Columbia University. And I work in a department called the Digital Futures Institute, which I'll tell you about in a little bit. First, I'll tell you a little bit about myself. Before I made the transition into instructional design.
I was actually a fifth grade teacher for eight and a half years. And my I lived in San Francisco, and I was teaching. I'd wanted to be a teacher since I was in the third grade, and I had never wanted anything else. And it was great. I it was very stressful as I'm sure all of you know, but, I had gotten my master's degree while I was teaching in instructional design because I loved using technology with my kids, and I saw how important having technology components with my teaching could be.
And so I was really interested in instructional design. And then fast forward to my husband getting into to a master's program in New York City, and we had to move to across the country in two months. And I had to find a job and was a little bit ready to take a break from teaching and, I feel like I was given, like, a huge chance. Like, my my old supervisor took a huge chance on me and hired me, at Teachers College as an educational technology specialist because I feel like actually getting a job outside of being a teacher is probably like one of the most difficult things to do when you make that decision to try and do it. So I started at TC, in the IT department with a group of student workers.
They were tech fellows, and two other people in my department, and we worked with fully in person courses and faculty and helping them get their courses ready to go and all that stuff. So, when we started that, We made some training for faculty, and I made some training for our students, but it's always hard. Making training is really hard. And I feel like actually think it's gonna be that hard until you're trying to do it. So just by a raise of hands, how many of you all have a difficult time making training.
Because usually that's how I feel is like half a heart at the end of it. So I'm gonna take you on a little bit of a journey of when I started at Digital Futures Institute and some training that I've all up there through our crazy time during COVID, which I feel like I've been to so many presentations that I think COVID's always been a gen or AI has been mentioned. So today I'm gonna talk a little bit about what the need for this training was, the planning and preparation process that went into it the contact the content development and then the results and the impact. So understanding the need this is where I'm gonna tell you my little story about what the Digital Futures Institute is. Like I said, when I started at TC, I was actually in the IT department.
And I when COVID happened, as I'm sure all of you experienced within, like, two weeks, they were like, okay, surprise. Everyone's going online. So we were just kind of like going psychotic with all of that. And that lasted probably through the entire year of twenty twenty. Everyone was just going crazy.
No one really knew what was happening, everyone was piecing things together. And then in twenty twenty one, January, they made this big announcement, our office of digital learning, which was the group that worked with courses before the pandemic that were fully online which at TC, we didn't really have that many. It wasn't in a huge lift for them. And so their department, my department, we're gonna combine to make the Digital Futures Institute. And so we were all like, yay.
That's exciting. We get to work with other people that love doing the same thing as we do. And We also brought over some media people, some people that run different spaces around the college. But then with that announcement, we were like, yay, we're so excited. They were oh, also, we're gonna bring everybody back in the fall for hybrid teaching, and you have to take care of it.
So we were like, wow, that's really crazy. And our staff at the time consisted of me, another instructional designer, my supervisor, and then two other structural designers. So there was only like five of us. So we were kinda like, that's really crazy. We can't just do this by ourselves.
We're gonna need some help. So what their solution to this was, and I say, like, the administration and some of our super supervisors kinda got together and they okay. We're gonna help you guys. We're gonna let you hire thirteen instructional support associates, which are like, wow, that's incredible thirteen people. And they're going to help you with Canvas templating.
They're gonna help faculty to edit their course content. They're gonna assist faculty in learning the classroom technology and hybrid instruction. And this sounds like such a dream. And then, the last part of it was like, but they all have to be outside hires. Like, they can't be students at TC.
They can't really be people that already work here. So we're like, okay, we can work with that. I mean, we tried to find some outside hires, but sometimes it kinda felt we were just hiring anybody that applied that could, like, breathe and was willing to go into this arthritis. So it kind of turned into this, like, mishmash of people who were really excited about this and people that were just like, Hey, I just need a part time job, and I'm willing to do this. So we had to create a training for those different types of people.
And we they said to us, you're gonna hire them in July of twenty twenty and they announced at the beginning of July and twenty twenty one, September first, everyone's coming back in person. And So you all have to train these thirteen people who have no idea what teachers' college is and what you all do and how to do these courses. So basically, month of July of twenty twenty one felt like a fever dream. We were like, how are we gonna do this? It was insane. So our challenge was we needed to create a training that we teach these folks to have not I don't I don't wanna say Canvas level access because we created a role for them that had pretty limited access where they could search for courses, view student grades, things like that, and help faculty in that way, but it didn't have all of the capabilities of admin we had to teach them how to edit content as an instructor in Canvas.
I will say a lot of these people had been, like, students at other universities and had experienced Canvas from the student perspective, so they had that on their side. All of our templates at that time and still now, which, like, drives me so crazy, are pretty much all HTML based, which is, like, really challenging because because not a lot of people are really good at knowing how to fix it when it breaks. So we had to teach them how to do basic fixes. How to understand what the university policies were that we had to integrate into these courses, how to utilize the zoom LTI and how faculty were going to, create these these meetings. There was even like a crazy thing that happened where they were like, oh, we're all gonna create the Zoom links for the faculty.
And we were like, that's not gonna happen. They're like, it's gonna happen. And then literally two weeks before the beginning of the semester, like, okay, that's not gonna happen. So you have to help faculty do this. So we had to do that.
And then we had to teach them instruction practices in the classroom and how to use classroom technology. So they had we have classrooms that have four cameras in the room, whiteboards on the entire wall, you can project four different things all over the place. So we had to teach them how to use that. So because because in August we ran probably a hundred and fifty sessions with faculty one on one to show them how to use this for their teaching. And then we also had to teach them about how to have a meeting with a faculty member.
Like, what should you talk about with, what shouldn't you say to a faculty member that's gonna make them panic? So it was a pretty, like, big lift. So In the fever dream, that was July of twenty twenty one, we were like, okay, our training, we're just gonna make this giant Google document. Which I think about it now, and it was such a terrible idea for us to do that because it started off really great. We were like, oh, this is so useful. Has it separated by weeks, it has little assignments, like you can make little highlights and add little images.
But then as the training started getting more and more, and we started seeing more needs, this document grew to be like forty pages. And it turned into like, it was basically like a refrigerator manual at that point. And we had assigned we had given it to the new people who were hired. There was thirteen of them, and each full time person was a signed, I think, like, four people each to to manage and to grade all of their stuff and make sure they were they were doing this and creating courses correctly, and it was terrible. It was an awful experience.
But we, like, made it through. I mean, obviously, we did it. And and the faculty were fine. Everything. I feel like everything that happens usually in higher ed feels like it's going to be awful, and then it's just fine.
Everyone learns how to deal with it. So we had this and and at the end, I was kinda like, we can't do this anymore. So after we had gotten over this crazy hump of twenty twenty one, everyone was back. There were still a lot of issues that were coming up that we were training folks on, but it was much less of a lift. I made the choice when I was, promoted to associate director of instructional design, like, okay, we're gonna reevaluate this program.
And we're gonna redevelop this training because what we did was really bad. And we need to do something that can be sustained and is interesting and is applicable to these folks so they can actually help faculty and and be satisfied with their work because lot of the feedback from that Google document was not good, and a lot of people actually left working for us because they were like, this is too much. It's way too intense, which I agree. So when I started that reevaluation process, I decided, let's look at what the pros of what we were doing with that Google document were and what were the cons of it. The pros is that it had all the content that we needed.
Like, it was good content. We had all come together and developed content that we needed to train them on. It had a good weekly structure, and that's something I really wanted to to keep. And it also provided them with mentors they could go to. So they weren't always seeking answers from random people, so they had a point person.
The cons is that it was difficult to follow. There was no visualizations for them to reference. And it was just too much information compacted into one place. Which it's it was just really confusing for them. So what I decided to do, was move this onto canvas because I thought they're using Canvas with faculty already.
So why not experience it from the student perspective and actually do their work within Canvas? So I decided to create a badging experience to add that kind of interactive element to it. And then I created micro courses for each learning topic that has that badger experience inside of it. I decided to reuse an audit materials we already had. So When I was still working in TCIT, I had developed these series of courses that were meant for faculty with this, like, very much an elementary school mind of, yes, of course, these faculty are gonna go through this. They definitely wanna continue learning and everyone just is on their own journey, but then no one ever wanted to take these courses.
So I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna redo these courses and I'm gonna reuse them and repurpose them for internal training purposes. And then I also wanted to make this course a place that could also act as a reference for them. So, yes, they're doing training, but if they had a question about something that they learned in their training, they could go back to the course and find it within there. I also would pose like, what do you need to do if you're resigning? Like, what are the steps you need to do there? Where's the guide to the policies and where is our, department guide, things like that. So what I came up with was our ISSA info hub and you can see this is kind of the landing page there, and it has a lot of different thumbnails on it.
So these thumbnails range from onboarding for new hires, which I'll show you what that one looks like. Canvas educators, ServiceNow, which is our ticketing platform and Monday dot com, which we for, like, course organization and stuff like that. TC Digital Media, which is actually UJA, but that's what we call it at my school. Zoom, interactive teach tools for teaching and learning. And then I've added a lot.
So the there's an accessibility piece when our school adopted Ally for Canvas, and then we have some different training materials there at the bottom. So, Oops. I just hit something. Okay. So I'm actually gonna show this to you.
I I have some videos in in there, but, they didn't bring over, like, when they brought the presentation over. So I'm just gonna show it to you, in Canvas itself. So, in this info hub, you can see here there's informational materials, that they can access that are, like, different workshop recordings. Like, they did a a workshop with the library about their new course reserves, and so I would put it in there. But they start in the onboarding for new hires.
So This really also works a lot because we're not hiring thirteen people at once. A lot of our turnover now is because somebody finds a full time job and they leave, and so we'll hire maybe one or two people at the same time. So they start in this new boarding, the onboarding for new hire and it kinda gives them an overview of what our department is. And then I have it laid out by week. So it kind of tells them this is what you're schedule is.
It goes by days, and they should pretty much be done with this training in a month. And when they go through this course, there also assigned a mentor ISA. So one of our other part time ISAs who's been with us for a while is their mentor in their direct if you have questions, any of that, that should be your first person that you go to. And we did that for a few different reasons. And I think the biggest was so that they could create a community with each other, because they all had shared experiences.
I mean, they're working part time. They're working really in-depth with faculty, and all that good stuff. So that's what our overview page looks like. And just to just to get a little, background on that me just play from the current slide. So like I said, they go through it in a month and it explained all of the community medians and the training schedule, it tells who's the supervisor of what? What do all of our different teams do? And it also builds on itself and it saves the more difficult stuff for the end.
So when they do service now training, that's really training with their mentor. And and I'm a huge believer because what I took out from that old training document was we would do these trainings with them that were very scripted of, like, hello, professor sir. I'm so excited to be working on your course. And to me, I no one ever talks like that because I'm like, we're not at, like, a call center, and you have to realistic. Like, they're gonna have their own conversations, they're their own people.
So I took that out. And what I I did is when they're meeting with faculty to begin with, their mentor goes to the meeting as well to help any, help with any questions that they might have that they don't know the answer to. And then before we actually launched this course, I took a couple of our senior instructional support associates that had been there since very beginning and went through that Google document with us. And I had them do user testing to give me feedback on what they thought of it. And we changed around a lot of stuff.
We implemented some new, like, structures and things like that based on them saying, I think this would be better. So within that course, after that overview page, it links out to all of the different kind of little chunks within it. So some of them are external courses, and some of them are internal courses. So the external courses are things like Canvas educator, zoom, all of that because Those are our really big products, especially Canvas. So our external courses contain modular tasks, that build upon themselves, and then the students submit assignments that are graded, by their mentors.
So that was another big reason that we did with mentors because we were like, We need somebody to grade these. So I'm gonna show you, Canvas educators. So When I developed Canvas educators, the first kind of iteration of this course, it had like screenshots in it, and the pages were really long, and the editing of it and upkeep upkeep of it was not great because it was really hard to maintain that. So what I did instead is I kinda pieced it out Let me just show you at the beginning. Into I thought to myself, what are the main things our faculty do here? They add content, they create discussion boards, they create assignments and quizzes, they wanna do the grade book announcements and customizing their course.
So in the beginning started, you can see I tried to kind of piece it out into just like three to four things per module. So it wasn't super overwhelming. And then they have assignments for each one. So, like, in the getting started with Canvas, they request a sandbox course so they can build and create their own course. That their mentor can go into their course and see.
And then that also works twofold. When they start working with faculty and they need to test things out, they can test it out in their sandbox course before going to a faculty's course and messing with a bunch of stuff and making sure that it works. So these external courses work just like this, and then they have to click mark as done, before moving on to the next, and then they submit their assignments, and their mentor comes in and grades those assignments as they're going. So when I developed this, I wanted to make sure that I was linking out to instructions that were always going to be upkept. So we have a pretty large, library of screen steps instructions that are always upkept by our tech team.
So I linked out to those, and this is it goes back to the idea of giving them a place to reference. So if they were working with a faculty and they wanted to send follow-up in obstructions of how to create a page in Canvas, they could come here and find the link to that, rather than having to search through the entire screen steps manual like, full of millions of things to try and find that. And then you can see here they had assignments for each of those. So they had to create their own page in their own Can this course. So the intention behind this course was really to make them the instructor of their own course and put them in the shoes of why the instructors working with are actually going through and doing.
And I have some of the we did some advanced, TC stuff like, with our templates and stuff. But as the training kinda went on and as faculty started to come back, I noticed there are full templates that were super built out like that overview page and all that that are really utilizing HTML. We're being used a lot less, so the need for that wasn't as great. Because we do have full time staff that they can just direct them to. So along with those external courses, as I started to add more training, I built internal courses as well.
And that was for smaller, products that weren't as robust. So An example of an internal course are is our interactive tools for teaching. With this, I was really trying to pinpoint the products that they u that our faculty really utilize a lot in their courses. So padlet, Microsoft, whiteboard, thing link and perusal were the ones that we started with because that's what a lot of faculty were really using. So in these, rather than linking out to an external course, there's an actual module that deals with padlet.
So within the padlet module, it has, like, padlet basics, customizing your padlet and then, moderating your posts. Those are all things that faculty, we noticed when they were using Pallet in their courses were doing. And so those were the assignments had to submit. And so we did that, and we did it for all of the, interactive, tools, and you can see all of them here. So they could always come at any time into their modules and find whichever section they were at, And since it's a badging course, they could also see where their progress was when they clicked on modules, which was really great.
And so, I was really happy with this. I thought it was a really good, and what I did is I actually made all of our instructional support associates. Even if they went through that Google document, they had to go through this again. Because I wanted to make sure that it was a good course, and I say there's a little disclaimer in most of the pages that says this course is in development if you see something wrong, email me so we are constantly auditing it when they're going through. So I just had some these are where my videos were, but, I showed this all to you.
So, we've built a lot of courses. So we've done the onboarding schedule. We did Canvas for edge cater's service now on Monday. For service now on Monday training, I actually found, Monday dot com has like training module courses on their site. So I have them do that.
Because I'm like, why reinvent the wheel when you know the people at Monday or dot dot com are like, let's create this cool training course. So I just have them go through that. We did zoom for educators, intro to TC digital interactive tools for teaching and learning, accessibility essentials. The accessibility essentials, like I said, we really utilized a lot when we implemented Ally into Canvas, which is still very early on right now. But basically, what we did with the accessibility essentials is they took the course that they created in, Canvas educators because in Canvas, educators, intro to TCDM and Zoom, all of those build on the sandbox course that they build in Canvas educators.
So they're creating Zoom meetings in that sandbox course. They're embedding videos into that sandbox course. So when we implemented Ally, I'm not sure how many of you all are familiar with Ally. It's like an accessibility checker within campus. They went into that sandbox course where they had put all this content for their training, and then they had to analyze it using Ally.
And they were analyzing videos, analyzing pdfs that they had uploaded and learning why they shouldn't be uploading those pdfs so it was really great because they had already done all of the work. So creating the training for that was pretty simple. And they were actually getting a perspective of what a real faculty would see, because they had in those courses usually built out like a twelve to fifteen week course already. And then we have informational materials past trainings that we always post for them as well. So after all of that, I that pretty much took, I will say the entire year of twenty twenty two.
I started this probably in, like, November, December twenty twenty one, I where I was really thinking, like, we really need to redo this so that we can have something that's sustainable because we're always hiring new instructional support associates. And I will say, I do like to brag a lot of our instructional support associates now, stay with us and they only leave when they find full time instructional design jobs or full time jobs in in the crew that they wanna go into. And they've all been, like, really sad to leave, and I'm always sad for them to leave, but they say to me, these these courses have really given me skills to go and the jobs that I really want because they're knowledgeable in so many tools, at the end. So some of the feedback from the training courses, that I got where I find the ISA info hub more user friendly than Google doc training, less overwhelming. It is easier to follow directions and go back and forward between the different badging courses.
It's easier to find the answers, and it's also great to be able to receive feedback when submissions are not done correctly. So that's one thing is when they turn something in and their mentor is grading it, they give them comments, and they actually give the assignment back if not what they're looking for. So they don't just pass them through. So they have to go back and redo it before they can move on in their training. Some more feedback, the layouts appealing, organized, easy to understand, straightforward.
I love self paced learning. It meets people where they're at. Very detailed modules. It was almost like the whole textbook with specific chapters that did deep dives into each topic. I will say even though it's a month that they're supposed to go through this, most of them completed it in, like, two to three weeks.
So they they can go at their own pace. And it's really all they're doing when they, start. So some challenges that we found when we started this in that we're still, kind of working through. One was the grading assignments, because full time staff, we can't always be trying to figure out when they're turning an assignment. Keeping everything updated, which I think is just for training in general, always such a tough thing to do is making sure it's staying up to date.
And then creating a process for continued training. So the solutions that we've come up with, and I already talked about the first one, was the mentor program. And then we do semester audits, and then a process for continued training. I've created that process. Which I'll talk about in a little bit.
So like I said, I already talked a little bit about the mentor program here, but, basically newly hired ISAs, assigned a veteran, they create that relationship, camaraderies, support, and then they complete their course, and then the mentor ISAs do everything. I mean, it's really nice. I feel like they get hired and I'm kinda like, okay. Good luck. But, I the the mentor really talks to me a lot if they're having trouble with some or if they don't know how to maybe, like, have a hard conversation of you're not doing what you need to be doing, things like that.
So it's a very, like, symbiotic relation relationship. So I wanna talk a little bit about our auditing process because that's, I think, like I said, one of the biggest challenges of doing, training is making sure that it's audited. So what I developed, was a pretty much semester by semester auditing process. Where the ISAs are actually the ones who were auditing the course for me. So in Monday dot com, because that's what we use for all of our projects and organization and things that.
During our our biweekly meetings, I say to them, okay, we're gonna do our our auditing process, which basically means you are responsible for going through the course, making sure all of the links still work. If there's any new components or things that have been added to things Canvas and Zoom, those are all in there. If there's any spelling mistakes, you're correcting them. And then if there's things that they're not sure of, there's a spreadsheet that's attached to these little comment bubbles, and they write their comments in there and then I go in and fix it. And then when they are finished with their auditing process, they click done We usually do this, like, at the end of the semester when there's a little bit of a lag time, and they are given a month to go through and do it.
So they're working with faculty and stuff. And it's worked really well. I feel like having them go through and do it makes them a part of it. And it's really turned into a place now of where they're also creating trainings for new ISAs as well. So it's become really a fun process and it's nice to have help with the auditing process and to have a a kind of schedule when we're doing it.
So the continued training, so every semester we do some sort of training. I'm sure a lot of you probably similar cycles as we do. Ours, like, fall cycle will start August first. That's when I start emailing faculty nonstop that we are there to help, and we start to get people coming back, looking for help with their courses. So Our off month starts usually in October.
So our off month is usually all of October, maybe the first or second week in November, but in November before Thanksgiving break, we do start to send those, spring. Hey, think about your spring semester before you go on winter break. And so when our off month, we think about what new product are we using with ISAs. The big one this is gonna be AI in education, how we're talking to faculty about AI. And so when we develop these trainings, it usually allows for them two to three weeks to complete it.
So regardless of the modality of the training, so a lot of our trainees now are done in person. There is always a follow-up page. So that overview page I showed you all, that has the information, and there's always like an assignment after the training that they have to go into do to refresh themselves on that. So it's been really great. So that's kind of our process now is when you do a training, if it's on you record it, you go in and you create a module, and we add it to the course in whatever way it fits, and then you create an assignment.
And like I said, now, a lot of our instructional support associates, I'm having them run these trainings because they become experts on these technologies because they use them with faculty, they go in and they create the overview page. They send it to me and say, how does this look? What is your feedback on it? And I have them create, like, learning objectives on there. Usually, they put some sort of video up. It's an overview, and then they come up with a follow-up assignment to their training. So then they're in turn learning how to create training for their colleagues as well, which to me is like another job skill that they can take to find a job.
I always want them to find a job. I mean, I don't want them to leave me because then I have to hire new ones, but I want them to be successful. So it's been really great. We do ongoing improvements to this. I mean, after each training, we send surveys about what could be could be better.
We ask them what type of training that they want, especially when I'm kind of puzzled, like, what should I tell them what should we do next? So this is some of the feedback that we got after our summer. I would like to add more Canvas tutorial videos and pedagogical tool workshops in the info hub that can be implemented in a canvas course to eventually be shared with faculty so they can try them firsthand in the info hub before implementing in their class. So their idea is making like a little laboratory for the faculty to come in and play. And then maybe if there is a table of contents that you could really access a page, that's actually a really good idea, more opportunities to collaborate with other colleagues So I feel like that last one, the collaborating with other colleagues, was really great with this training because they get to do assignments together, and they love doing that. Because I, a lot of times, do feel like training, especially when you become an adult, can become very tiring because then it's a very, like, alone thing you sit at your desk clicking through something to get to the end really fast.
So with this, I have them, like, create zoom meetings and zoom with your colleague. Take a screenshot Zoom meeting, or, we did like a training where they had to go all around the college and, like, find different things, and they do it all together. So it's a fun way to to be really creative, and it's pretty low stakes because they're your part time folks, so you can kinda get a handle on, so, yeah, that's that's pretty much it. I we have, about ten minutes left. So if anyone has any questions, I'm happy to answer them.
That's my email if you ever wanna email me, but yeah. That's a great question. So when we create our career thing, it pushes out to, like, LinkedIn and indeed it is on the teacher's college website. So I always, like, hope that we'll get alumni to apply because they, again, like, know the culture and stuff like that but most of them, I think, find them on LinkedIn and indeed. Thirteen.
We're not actually at thirteen right now. So, at as as the well, so what wound up happening, like I said, in IfI, we have the instructional team, the technology team, we have a media team that creates media with, faculty in in the all this other crazy stuff. And then we have a spaces team. So when, like, that strangle of twenty twenty one ended a little bit, we started to disperse the ISAs to other teams. So now we have ISAs that work events downstairs.
We have ISAs that do media creation. And so they a lot of their background is in, like, video editing and things like that. So in the instructional team, we usually, go between five to six ISAs. And then the tech team has some that kind of bleed over into ours sometimes, but, what we really try to do is make all of those regardless of what team they're in. We give them exposure to other teams as well by having them go through training.
But the thirteen at the beginning was really insane, and it was really crazy. So, yeah. And and like I said, I feel like when we were hiring them, many of them were just like, I've never seen Canvas before. I have no idea what's going on. I bet there was, like, a handful of them that were like, yeah, I'm I'm going into instructional design at NYU or something like that.
So, Yeah. It was pretty crazy. In your overview page, I like how you did the color. Are you using a table or That's HTML code. Yeah.
So you make one wrong backspace, and it's all messed up. So that's why I was so excited about that cool AI thing they showed this morning. I was like, wow, that's a game changer. Yeah. That list of the interactive tools.
Oh, yeah. For sure. So in the course itself, I can show you. Yeah. So our interactive tools for teaching and learning, Right now, it's padlet, Microsoft whiteboard, SINGLink, and perusal.
Because those are the main ones used by faculty. I think we're gonna add couple more in. It's a long, like, approval process, which I'm sure for you all, like, going through IT, going through accessibility, going through general counsel, and then you can implement it. And then you have to find money from somewhere to pay for it. So, those are the ones that they mainly know now.
Yeah. Was to onboard your ISAs. Mhmm. You must have a separate, of micro courses to you know, that's the dream. I we've tried so much with faculty to get them to be interested in this, but they're not.
Like, we can never get them to want to do it. So what I've started to do, which I've actually found a lot of success with, is, I've started to do these micro workshops where I go to faculty meeting and force them to listen to me, but they're only fifteen minutes. And I'll cover something like creating an enriching discussion like how what are different, like, prompts you can do. And we've found that's usually a better way to get them in. We also do like summits in the summer where we do a lot of different workshops and a lot of them like to come to that.
We do something called the software expo which we hide behind, like, a curtain when the big faculty meetings going on. And then when it's over, they put the back so they, like, have to come and talk to us and see the different stuff. So in at Teachers College, we just haven't really had a ton of success with faculty going through courses and self training. And that's I was thinking I was talking to someone earlier at lunch about how that's, like, always been such a hard thing and something we always really want to try, but I just we haven't spent a ton of time on it nowadays because they're just not very interested, unfortunately, but maybe someday they will be. Yeah.
When we try scaling it to something like one of our needs is tutors. Mhmm. It is very kind of what training those tutors within the specific things that we needed to be Yeah. I mean, something we have tried is, we created kind of a similar course, for teaching assistance. And for that, it worked pretty well.
When they were hired, we would put them into the course. But a lot of we found our faculty and our TA's really like is just not one on one. So we do office hours. We have really open schedules where they can schedule Zoom meetings with us. And just kinda make ourselves available to them as much as possible.
So that's really what works at our university. And teachers college is relatively small. So it works pretty well. But yeah, someday I think we'll figure out faculty training that works really well. I hope.
So Yeah. When did you say it was the most difficult subject topic or thing for your ISAs to I think the hardest for them with some of our faculty was zoom that was really hard. Even though you would think through the whole pandemic, they would have figured it out. But it was very shocking. How many of them had not figured it out.
So I think Zoom, and I think the actual most difficult was us trying to give pedagogical techniques to faculty for teaching hybrid instruction because it's so hard when you're talking to a group of people, and you also have people online to ignore them. So what we actually had a lot of our instructional support associates did is for a really large class is they would go and assist the faculty for the first few weeks. Like, we would train them on how to do that, and they would help assist with an online, tech kind of thing of helping the students and really working with the faculty. So if I have to think about all of the things that they've done, I think the classroom technology helping faculty in the classroom using that, is definitely the hardest. Now most of the faculty that have hybrid courses do it by choice.
And they did it by choice before the pandemic. So we don't have a ton of people that have issues with it. And I would say the second most now is probably video quizzing with Uja is a a huge pain point for them and for us. It's it's very frustrating. So, that's, I think, been one of the other really tricky ones.
So, yeah. Yeah. More at all, but to compare, was it too, products and things, you know, because the whole universe we have Yeah. Have been using because all these products are are trying their best to do the accessibility, commodating, and, the quizzing Yeah. So, Uja is So, I don't wanna, like, bash Uja.
They're great. We've had Uja since I was with TC, and I think we pretty much had them when they were pretty still pretty young. They're great with storage, they're great with storing videos, a lot of faculty know how to put videos up for students to see. We have it turned on so that when faculty upload videos, it automatically transcribes them. We can link like human captioning to them and all that good stuff.
So I feel like for the video part of it, it's been really great. We used to have playposite that we used for just video quizzing. And then we kinda ran into some stuff where we were like, oh, only our online courses are using it, and all that kind of stuff. So let's try dropping it and going solely to TC Digital Media for video quizzing. And I will say it's it's a pretty it's a pretty good, interface.
The issues that we've mainly had are, like, feedback with the grade book, because of authentication and like finding the grades is really tricky for some faculty. A lot of our, like, non credit courses really wanna use it so those students don't actually get Unis. So that's like a whole another, like, best, but when they don't authenticate, like, it doesn't give them a name. So it says, unknown user and it has all their grades. So I think that's been our biggest pain point, and I will say you just been really wonderful with working with us on it.
And they've made a lot of changes since we made transition. But I think that's probably been our biggest pain point. But again, they never advertise themselves to as just a video quizzing platform. So for the video storage and stuff, they're great. And I will say for video quizzing for our credit courses, they work just fine.
But for non credit, we've run into some issues but like I said, their support's been really wonderful. I've never used Kaltura before. Our Columbia's main campus uses it, but we haven't ever used it. So, yeah. I think we have time for one more.
I have, like, one minute left. Yeah. I was just wondering if you had any experience Oh, hi. Great to meet you. Mhmm.
Yeah. So there's some programs at TC that do use badging, but we I think where we really run into an issue is like the credentialing part of it. Like, when you put your university stamp on a badge, it, like, means a lot. So We kinda shy away from working with faculty doing it, and I don't think a lot of faculty wanna go through it because it's like I said, it's like a whole credentialing all this. I actually went to a really great, session yesterday of someone that did faculty PD.
I can't remember for the life of me where he from, but he talked about how when they started doing their faculty, they'd held these badges, and it was so great. But then they ran into this big roadblock of like, okay. What is it how is this different from, like, coming to a class here? So I know there are a couple of programs at TC that use it, but we're not really connect did with it, and we've never really gone down that road with faculty. Because even when we issue these badges, they're through a DFI badging account. They're not, like, TC stamped because it's a big thing. So, okay, I think that's it. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a great rest of your, conference.
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