SASHA VASSAR: Leonardo da Vinci is quoted as saying, Learning never exhausts the mind.
The quote has a lovely sentiment attached to it.
But is it in fact true?
Ever since I was a little girl,
I really loved learning and wanted nothing
else but to share that knowledge.
I'd line up all my soft toys and would spend
hours teaching them everything that I could.
So when it came time to go to university, I surprised everyone by
choosing a computer engineering degree instead of education.
After a decade-long stint in the computing industry,
the pool of teaching grew too strong,
though, and I returned to university to complete my PhD in education.
I've spent more than a decade now studying and researching
how we learn and what can help us learn effectively,
both in the classroom and outside,
based on our capacity to remember and recall information.
In fancy speak, this is called cognitive load theory.
And what I can say without a shadow of a doubt is that learning
is hard work that does actually exhaust the mind.
To really consider how we learn and how we teach,
we must begin by understanding how things
go in and come out of our memory.
There are two main stores of memory.
The first of these and the first point of contact
information is our working memory,
a memory limited in its capacity and duration.
The second of these is our long term memory,
and in contrast to the first point of contact,
it is unlimited in both capacity and duration.
Moving things from our working memory to our unlimited long-term
memory requires a lot of practice and rehearsal.
But because the first point of contact is our limited working memory,
a bottleneck is created.
The amount of information that working memory can hold at any time.
Also called our cognitive load is approximated to be about seven items.
You can increase this number by chunking, which we do every day when
we recite mobile phone numbers by grouping them into three chunks,
a group of four digits, a group of four digits,
and a group of three digits.
That is, instead of ten separate digits or ten separate chunks.
But that still does not leave a lot to play with.
So what happens when this number is exceeded?
Complete chaos, anarchy, and great waves of overwhelm.
Welcome to the world of cognitive overload.
We all got to experience a lot of this at the start of 2020,
the beginning of the pandemic and lockdown 1.0.
I remember receiving word of the first lockdown university was closing
its doors and we had to shift online within the next 24 hours.
I found myself up half the night,
manually moving students into the digital classroom
so we could continue teaching and students could continue learning.
Students at universities, schools and some even in daycares,
were now expected to log into their classrooms,
staring at a small picture of their teacher on the screen.
And that's for those teachers that even had a camera accessible
or the Internet bandwidth that allowed this.
Forget eye contact, forget getting out of bed
and forget any type of learning routine.
We as teachers were left with no choice
but to flex and adapt things as we go.
Continually evolving.
Sometimes making changes on the fly as we
saw what was working and what was not.
I was now left lecturing a blank screen with
no indication of facial expressions
to help me set the pace and to see if things were being understood.
The whole context of learning and engaging with
students had shifted virtually overnight.
My first forays into this world of online learning
involved winding a 25-metre Ethernet cable around
my house so that I could get Internet that would
last for the duration of my two-hour lecture.
Walking out during a lecture break to get a glass of water,
I found one of my small children crouching over that Ethernet
cable with a pair of scissors in his hand, smiling with glee.
I do hold the mantra practice makes perfect very dear to my heart.
After all, this is one way of moving information
from our working memory to our long-term memory.
But I'm not sure I wanted to extend this mantra to the Ethernet cable.
All fun and games now.
But two years ago, the reality of teaching and learning wholly
online without a choice in the matter was confronting.
Even now, there is no guidebook.
Everyone is still adapting as they go.
As things slowly start to return to normal,
students are now given more choices.
Show up face to face or stay online and learn
at the same time as the face-to-face
students using the same resources and being taught by the same teacher.
This model of both online and face-to-face
students learning simultaneously
using the same resources is called synchronous hybrid learning,
and it's slowly becoming the model of choice for many institutions.
To really achieve its learning goals though,
this model must ensure that there
are equal experiences for both the online and the face-to-face students.
And that means addressing issues like accessibility to the resources
and inclusivity of both the online and the face-to-face students.
Let's start by considering the positive side.
It is, of course, the flexibility that this model provides,
not having to be in a certain place at a certain
time to access any of the content.
Well, that sounds great, doesn't it?
But of course, with every positive,
there are going to be a few negatives.
Firstly, the varying degree of social presence
that hybrid learning can afford.
Secondly, a cohort that is spread across multiple time zones,
trying to learn at the same time.
And finally, my area of specialty,
the increased cognitive load for teachers and students
as both the online and the face-to-face students learn at the same time.
So let me set the stage for you.
Setting up a hybrid classroom last term From the get-go,
I ran into some technical issues.
I think we've all been there.
Think of those glorious hybrid meetings
that always start in the same way.
Can everyone hear me?
Can I see my screen?
For me, it was the microphone.
No one could hear me.
Freaked out, further increasing my already high cognitive
load before the lecture had even begun.
With the lecture starting shortly and a myriad of buttons
in front of me that may or may not control the volume,
I felt completely overwhelmed and was just clicking
on anything to try and make it work.
My memory was so overloaded I couldn't even take
a step back to consider what needs doing.
I called IT before I realised to my huge
embarrassment that I was just on mute.
But all that this indicated was the already
high cognitive load required to even
get the room working so that both sets of
students can see here and participate.
Ready for the next hurdle I began talking.
I usually like to move around the room as I engage with the students.
And what we found is that the camera followed me rather weirdly.
Sometimes focusing just on my torso or
sometimes just the back of my head.
Not great for the online students and certainly not an equal experience.
Now, all of this was happening in a room which is meant
to be a dedicated space for hybrid teaching.
The show must go on.
And continuing with the lesson, I found myself mostly feeling frazzled.
Any time I address the face-to-face audience,
I simply forgot about the online students,
which is easy to do as everyone has their cameras off
so it doesn't really feel like there's anyone there.
That is, of course, until they remind me they're
there by madly tagging me with questions.
At which point I'll focus my attention on the online students
and forget completely about the face to face ones.
I left the session completely drained,
minus two water bottles and with a severe case of nervous energy.
Is this now our new norm?
Chatting with others running in hybrid,
it seems that this may well be the new norm.
That perpetual feeling of being swallowed up
by a wave that was felt by others also.
Myself and others experienced what we call in the language
of cognitive load theory the split attention effect.
I was attempting to integrate information that was
completely physically separated in this case,
engaging with the face to face audience
and answering their questions while at
the same time engaging with the online audience
and answering their questions.
And that's not even including actually teaching the content.
This, in essence, caused my working memory to overload.
Just think what happens when you overfill a glass
with water and it starts spilling over the sides?
And if every lecture requires a complete feeling of
anarchy and overwhelm for the teachers working
memory and questions left unanswered for the students,
then surely this is not what is next.
Research into best practices of hybrid teaching suggests that having
dedicated spaces is important for the success of this model.
So not just any old classroom will do.
These special rooms are equipped with technology
that make it much easier to teach
in this format and help to provide a more
inclusive experience for those online.
However, setting up these types of spaces
is expensive and time-consuming.
So how does this scale to the thousands of courses
that are currently being taught at university?
Research has also shown that a class with more than approximately
25 students requires a teaching assistant.
I teach an introductory computing course with over 1000 students.
How many teaching assistants might I need to sustain just one lecture?
And given the budgets and skill shortages
is it even possible to achieve this?
The shift online at the beginning of
the pandemic happened virtually overnight,
with little thought being given to what
would work well in the digital world.
Teachers are still left grappling for solutions,
often without adequate training and hybrid practices,
and with little assistance given to redesigning the learning experience
that was first put in place as an emergency response to the lockdowns.
There's not yet enough concentrated research to support this model.
And given all of these unanswered questions.
Can hybrid learning be the answer?
I would say that it's not the answer right now.
Whilst it may seem like the Holy Grail in our current situation
of having a foot in each of the physical and digital worlds,
we're not prepared yet for hybrid learning to be the answer.
We need to stop trying to make the model fit how
we used to teach and take a big step back
to really consider what is possible with
hybrid and what is just barely workable.
With so many questions still remaining hybrid
learning cannot be the answer right now.