Empowering University Teachers in the Digital Age: Leaving No One Behind

“We full-time workers do not have any time to use supportive web pages, participate in training sessions, or watch an instructive video. I hope this impractical teacher support will be stopped. Go to hell.”

This was one of the responses, we got on our survey for teaching personnel at the University of Eastern Finland in spring 2024. The survey aimed to explore the variance in the teaching methods and to reveal the quality and quantity of technological and pedagogical support that the teachers are using in the practice and the development of their teaching work. Clearly, not all our colleagues were 100 % satisfied with the available support. These themes evoke emotions and the experience of interfering with one’s own professional competence. Teaching is a sensitive matter.

The survey was done as a part of our four-year pedagogical peer-support project in which five experienced teachers were hired as facilitators of online and blended teaching at the University of Eastern Finland. Because we were working at the faculty level, we became, in spring 2021, an easy-access first-aid for teachers needing help with their course development or daily technical issues. The COVID pandemic in 2020 suddenly forced most of us to become online teachers and students, and to learn the pros and cons of online teaching. At the beginning of the project, we were helping our peers to re-open the campus after the COVID lockdown and setting their teaching in a hybrid mode. Later, when emergency challenges of teaching were fading out, we started to build self-regulated learning platforms to enhance teachers’ practical skills in online teaching, organise several training sessions at the department, faculty, and university level, and operate as a link between teachers in practice, faculties, and IT support. Our goal was not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to scale up the best practices of online teaching to the toolbox of every teacher and to the agenda of every board in the university. The new peer support model deviated from earlier pedagogical support in our university in three fundamental ways:

1. Economic investment to hire half-time teachers for peer-support

In all discussions on peer support-based development of higher education we have talked more about academic careers and publish-or-perish-politics than the tools teachers need in their work. In many cases, higher education is organised by researchers, working typically with external and temporal funding, and faculty members with full calendars and high expectations of the faculty annual budget. In neither of these cases, the long-term development of learning environments has a major role. Therefore, voluntary groups can have large and unexpected challenges:

“Six years ago, I got an excellent teacher in practice award and participated in a meeting with other nominees to organise some university-level activity to share the best practices. After 30 minutes of brainstorming, we crashed to the Earth’s surface when realised it is impossible to use our working hours even for this single meeting.”

Instead of voluntary groups helping their peers on weekends, the facilitator project with time allocations made it possible to organise the peer support within working hours. Therefore, facilitators helped their individual peers, as well as departments, faculties, or the whole university for 2.5 working days per week throughout the project’s four years. Moreover, the 50 % workload inside departments helped us to detect the challenges in practice, interact with our students, and meet our peer teachers outside our facilitator role.

2. Digitally non-native teachers are the main target group of peer support

In campus-development there is a risk to simply follow the innovative technologies used by advanced “foil-hats”. They have novel ideas for teaching practices, and if they are old academic foxes, they can summarise their idea into a reasonable plan. Although these pilot projects and showrooms might look tempting for university marketing, they are used only by a small part of the faculty. This can cause bitterness and reduces the motivation to develop teaching, especially in cases where other teachers are dissatisfied with the non-functioning technologies they can use in the rest of campus. Moreover, in the worst case, technological tools are strewn unused as teachers do not have either time or skills for their use:

“Almost a decade ago, I was talking about my educational podcasts in one established technology-oriented university in Southern Finland. I felt elated (and a bit jealous) on a short tour of their studios designed for teaching purposes. At the same, they were renovating some of these places for podcasting as professors did not use the provided video technology.”

The goal of the facilitator project was to support and disseminate the tools and best practices for every teacher working in our university. However, one-size-fits-all does not work in pedagogical upscaling. To highlight the variability of teachers’ digital skills and their pedagogical needs, we invented three stereotypic characters: Suzanne Super-Hybrid, Diana Desperate & Bill Blackboard-man. With these roles we demonstrated the need to hold the horses of digitally hyperactive colleagues, encourage teachers who are afraid to use any technological tools, and find the motivation for pedagogical re-thinking for employees who swim against the tide.

3. Ways of teaching are not a matter of opinion but highly studied research subjects

Teachers, with limited experience in blended learning, made their first online teaching during the pandemic and in the new normal, they are, without better knowledge, at a considerable risk of turning back to old teaching traditions and not seeing the benefits of online and blended learning. This is not limited to the post-pandemic era, but it is a general challenge in higher education as “without professional development as educators, faculty members naturally teach as they were taught” (Wright 2015). Therefore, there is a high need for not only technological innovations but also pedagogical reasons for their use:

“Some time ago, I was with my colleagues presenting variable methods of teaching and assigning. In the feedback, someone wanted to hear this also from the professors of education as they have more authority in the mind of the audience. Luckily, I had been in academic business long enough to modulate my presentation on the run and use the magic words every person in universities recognise: ‘there is a statistically significant difference between the groups of students’.”

With further training of facilitators, close interactions with researchers in education as well as scientific work as a part of facilitator work, we were able to demonstrate the effects of assessments and feedback, pedagogical needs for campus development, and challenges related to pedagogical reformation in the digitalised society. An example of the last highlight is our recent publication (Kantanen et al., 2024) in which the self-organisation of the facilitator group is studied.

As an example of our practical activities, we collaborated to develop a comprehensive set of digital teacher competence packages. Therefore, teachers who do not have time for formal pedagogical education can use the self-learning materials for updating their teaching practices. We were also helping our university to renovate the formal education of university teachers and turn the management of each department and faculty more pedagogically oriented.

The survey, we made in the spring 2024, turned our observations of pedagogical variability into concrete numbers – something that can be used when planning the pedagogical support in the future. The pedagogical development, from which our university is famous, is dividing: some faculties have highly trained teachers who use versatile methods of teaching and assigning, find time for training and teaching support, and are critical if they do not receive support for specific (usually AI-related) interests. On the other hand, most of the personnel in some faculties have not participated in formal or informal pedagogical training, found any information to support their teaching, and gone back to teacher-centred learning methods and paper ’n’ pencil examinations. Therefore, it was not a surprise to have some (luckily) rare comments like at the beginning of this text.

According to our survey, teachers mentioned several well-known reasons limiting their course development. They simply do not have time, their positions are not permanent, and their workload is evaluated on research-based factors, they cannot find the information, and quite often they get frustrated as the learning platforms, discussion forums, and even the ways to have meetings are constantly changing.

Future of empowering

A few years ago, mind-blowing Mary Ellen Wiltrout’s pre-session workshop in OEB21 filled my notebook as every university and training organisation were having similar challenges in learning at the new normal. Every institute had lost some students during the pandemic, were struggling with hybrid learning and seeking ways to use more communication in education. I know similarities exist also in personnel training. Last year I was privileged to moderate “Structured upskilling for teachers facing ever-evolving learning technologies” session in OEB23 in which I learned several wonderful examples of best practices in this theme.

In OEB24 we facilitators of online and blended learning will have a half-day pre-session workshop with round-table discussions to compare the practices of higher education development and how they have benefited average teachers in various countries. Together we can find an optimal way to keep the teachers in this digitalised learning revolution.

References

Kantanen, H., Kasanen, K., Kohonen, S., Paajanen, V., Pirttilä, S. & Siitonen, P. (2024) Self-managing peer team as a facilitator of online teaching. – Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-08-2023-0390

Wright, R.D. (2015) Student-teacher interaction in online learning environments. IGI Global, Hershey, USA, 450 pp.

Written for OEB Global 2024 by Vesa Paajanen. You can join Vesa on Wednesday, November 27 2024 for his workshop ‘Empowering University Teachers in the Digital Age: Leaving No One Behind’ by clicking here.