[MUSIC, Title:"Today's Online Learners Have No Time to Waste"] [David] You might be surprised to learn that online platforms teaching for industry actually worry about things like fifteen wasted seconds on a lengthy, repetitive montage at the beginning of a video. Teaching time can be so limited and precious that advertising companies will sometimes spend weeks to find just the perfect 10-second visual metaphor to convey how a drug might work. This leads us to a key and frequently overlooked point about online teaching. Many of today's online learners are also working full-time jobs and raising families. They DO NOT HAVE TIME TO WASTE! In fact, many people avoid trying to learn online, because they believe the only way they could succeed is if we were somehow able to give them an extra couple of hours each day on a magical platter. Even K-12 students are under increasing time pressure, with the rising pressure to have a solid college application filled with extracurriculars and good grades. But there IS a way to add learning time to a person's day, without resorting to magic or altering the space-time continuum. What we're hinting at, is that a big step toward improving YOUR online teaching, is to do what you can to tighten your teaching. For example, during your explanations, quickly home in on the essence of what you mean to convey, using visual metaphors wherever possible to help speed your students' learning. In fact, you can help learning "stick" better in students' brains not only through your gesticulation and expressiveness, but also through compelling imagery and animations that can't help but attract attention. We'll talk more about attention next week. Now at times, this can actually be somewhat uncomfortable. We've been conditioned to equate volume with quality or comprehensiveness. It can feel like you can't tighten up your teaching without leaving some valuable information out. I've worked with dozens of faculty members on creating their own online courses. And one thing I hear over and over is shock at how much shorter their online content feels. A class that in-person would meet for three hours a week, fifteen weeks per semester, can somehow end up with only 12-15 hours of video content when recorded in a studio. The faculty I work with, initially view this as a problem— they think they've left a lot out, or that their content will be perceived as less rigorous, just because it's so much shorter. Really though, this is the great asset of teaching through video. Your teaching can become more efficient, not because you're leaving content out, but because you're leaving out time-wasters, like fiddling with the projector, or waiting for the screen to turn on. You can also present your best, most efficient self. You can try the same video multiple times until you're comfortable with it. And it can even be pretty easy to edit out little hesitations or stammers, to come up with a very efficient final presentation— with the added bonus that students can then watch it again and again! Even simply reducing your word count and syllable count makes a difference— use the word "use" for example, not "utilize." This is one reason we recommend writing a detailed script BEFORE you present: it's easier to iterate on a written script before recording than to record over and over until your presentation feels tight enough. If you're more comfortable presenting more improvisationally, you can do a test recording once, and then get a transcript and read through that. Tools like Zoom and Teams will automatically generate that transcript for you. Or you can use a speech-to-text converter, like Rev.com or Descript.com. You can be shocked at how disjointed your speaking can be— and how much you could tighten your teaching. [Barb] Look, too, at your scripts using a program like Grammarly. You can be shocked at the number of long-winded, incomprehensible sentences that will turn up. And see what your readability statistics are. If your statistic show your script to be a graduate school level, watch out! Even if you ARE teaching at a graduate school level! Odds are you're falling into the usual problem for academics of being overly— and unnecessarily—pedantic. And incidentally, one trick I use when writing, is to first let my writing flow out in its natural "academese." Then I go back through and translate it into something simpler and more human-sounding. [David] You yourself have very real time constraints as you prepare your online teaching materials, and we realize that. But we also realize that putting in the time beforehand, as you develop your materials, can pay off big time. Especially if you plan to reuse the material you're recording again and again. And don't be afraid to integrate useful materials from other online instructors into your classes, where appropriate. Your own videos are definitely best, but good videos made by experts can often convey ideas quickly without you having to do your own production work. If you're going to use others' content, I have two recommendations. First, link to the material where it is, rather than uploading it to your own course, to avoid intellectual property issues. Just check your links regularly to make sure all your sources are still live. Second, add your own context around these external sources. Film a short video introducing the other resource, so that the students know what YOU want them to get out of it. Or, even just add a little text blurb before the resource. Context like that can help students understand how they should use external resources, as well as reassure them that they're learning from YOU, not just a library of randomly collected online videos. [Barb] As important as improving our own teaching, however, is helping students understand what THEY can do on their end to learn more efficiently. Key ideas here include retrieval practice, and spaced repetition— that is, encouraging students to retrieve key ideas from their own minds, over a number of days. In fact, retrieval practice and spaced repetition are so important in online coursework— not to mention teaching in general— that we want to devote this week to these topics. The beauty of these practices is not only that they speed learning. It's that students are also able to use them when they're commuting, taking a shower, or about to fall asleep at night— in other words, during times that are often not thought of as learning times. Oddly, despite the hundreds of research papers that have shown the efficiency of retrieval practice, some instructors still question its usefulness. After all, retrieval practice is so easy to do for simplistic concepts like vocabulary words in a foreign language, or anatomical terms, or learning different bird species. Hah! Remember? We love birds! But the thinking often goes: deep conceptual understanding involves something altogether different from simplistic retrieval practice. Au contraire! To gain a better understanding of the real complexity that retrieval practice is useful for, and also to begin setting the stage for why social learning is of value, we need to go deeper into— you guessed it—mental models. [Barb] I'm Barb Oakley. [David] I'm David Joyner. [Terry] I'm Terry Sejnowski. [All] Learn it, link it, let's do it!