What Matters Now? Course Hero’s Education Summit 2021 (Part 1)

By Zainab Cheema

Course Hero’s Education Summit 2021 (#EdSummit21) featured some of the most exciting voices in Education today. From July 28 to July 30, 2021, faculty members, K-12 teachers, administrators, diversity and equity experts, Ed tech mavens, student leaders and other education stakeholders met in a stimulating online conference. In this blog post, I will be recapping some of the best hits from Days One and Two of the summit’s smorgasbord of learning, motivation and reflection on how COVID 19 has changed the way we do education. For Day Three, stay tuned for Part 2 of my review.

A word on how the conference was organized. In this pandemic year, all of us have experienced a range of online meetings and conferences running the gamut from “boring” to “hey, this isn’t too bad.” Online communication platforms are still an experiment, and Zoom fatigue is real. I’d like to give a shout out to Course Hero’s expert organization of their online conference. Each day’s schedule lasted no more than 4 to 5 hours. Every session ran for an hour. I enjoyed the snappy videos introducing every panel and speaker. Each talk was divided by enjoyable 5 breaks featuring student performers singing or playing instruments, which brought in the performative experience of a classroom. These strategies mitigated the specter of Zoom fatigue. As Inside Higher Ed observed in a Feb. 2020 article, Course Hero has trekked an impressive journey from its founding in 2006 as a website exacerbating teachers by enabling students to share (and plagiarize) syllabi, exams, and other items of their intellectual property to becoming a 1.1 billion dollar social networking site for educators and Ed Tech industry leader.  

Learning How to Learn in Barb Oakley’s Words

Barbara Oakley kicked off the keynote talk, Sparking a Curious Mind: Learning How to Learn in Today’s World. Her talk was based on her best-selling MOOC Learning How to Learn and her new book, Uncommon Sense Teaching, which I have reviewed here and here. One of Barb’s most memorable insights was: “If curiosity is king, then motion is monarch.” In other words, use hooks and attention getting strategies to pull students in the lesson. Also, just move. Suddenly moving towards students or backing up (even on the video screen) triggers evolutionary wired responses that can spark attention. Another takeaway from Barb’s talk was that to be a good online instructor, there is no way to get around learning how to make videos. For those of us yet to take the plunge, our goal should be to make a bad video. Just get started.

Diversity and Inclusion in Online Learning

In the year of the #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate, online teaching grappled with the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. In Disability in Higher Education, Tiffany Yu and Gaye Theresa Johnson offered some powerful insights on how educators can create open and inclusive spaces for disabled students and participants. Language is key because language is how we practice inclusion or exclusion. While some educators have “differently abled” in place of “disabled,” Yu emphasized that it’s actually important to use the term “disabled.” Otherwise, we risk perpetuating the stigma that we are afraid of the word disability or think disability is negative. In allyship, how we do empathy is key. Yu highlighted how not to box differently abled students within labels, rather creating an atmosphere of openness and letting them define the interdependence they need. DEI work needs to be at the core of ensuring standards and quality of education. As Laura Hamilton emphasized in the roundtable on Inclusivity and Rigor in the Classroom, “Equity isn’t a side show, this is the work.” Teachers can bring DEI themes from their research to the classroom and involve students in these rich conversations and practices.

Who decides what “rigor” is in the learning experience anyway? As Jessica Rowland Williams pointed out, there needs to be a collective conversation about the standard setting: what does rigor really mean, for whom is it intended, and how does it translate at the individual, classroom and institutional levels. Michael Collins also critiqued “the politics of some of the dog whistling” around rigor, observing that Black, Latinx and indigenous students are the student populations who disproportionately suffer from narrowly defined and rigidly enforced standards. In their talk on policy’s influence on instructional design, Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel also touched upon the theme. As they observed, “fairness” is a heavily loaded term that needs to be unpacked at the structural as well as individual level. A test cannot adequately measure “fairness” between a student who has arrived at the classroom equipped with the advantages of study time and nutrition paid for by mom and dad, versus a student suffering from food and financial insecurity. These structural forces need to be factored into the way we define and do “rigor” in the classroom.   

The Future of Higher Education

COVID-19’s forced shift to online education has been transformative. A number of speakers highlighted the good, the bad and the ugly of the evolving of new models of education (and what it means for higher-ed). Kelly Pope and Arthur Levine’s conversation revolved around the topic, offering insights from Levine’s forthcoming book, The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present and Uncertain Future. 

As Levine observed, this is not the first time that higher education has confronted a tectonic shift. If the Industrial Revolution birthed the modern university and occupational college model, COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to the global digital information economy. For Levine, this means that Higher Ed’s monopoly is finished. The future in education will be defined by nimble education providers who can offer cheaper, more efficiently targeted options to students. This in turn will transform higher education. “This is a daunting time,” said Levine. “We have the chance to put our fingerprints on what Higher Ed looks like. We get to build it. That’s the opportunity. That’s the challenge.”

Resources for Educators: Watch Recordings from #EdSummit21 Days Two and Three 

• Barbara Oakley, Opening Keynote: Sparking A Curious Mind: Learning How to Learn in Today’s World
• Tiffany Yu and Gaye Theresa Johnson, Disability in Higher Education: How to be a Better Ally?
• Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, Designing for Care: From Policy to Pedagogy
• Jessica Rowland Williams, Michael Baston, Laura Hamilton, Michael Collins, and Wil Del Pilar, Inclusivity and Rigor in the Classroom: How to Ensure Both
• Kelly Pope and Arthur Levine, What Matters Next? The Future of Higher Education
• I have linked the sessions I referenced in my post. For the other sessions, check out the EdSummit21 Agenda