EP 11 - OLC Design Thinking Session Wrap-up: How Might We Humanize Online Learning?

In this episode, John and Jason talk about their OLC Innovate 2023 Design Thinking workshop which asked the question: How Might we Humanize Online Learning?

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Resources:

• The JumpPage with the results of the design thinking session at OLC
• Michelle Pacansky-Brock https://brocansky.com/ and article: Pacansky-Brock, M., Smedshammer, M., & Vincent-Layton, K. (2020). Humanizing online teaching to equitize higher education. Current Issues in Education, 21(2), 1–21. https://cie.asu.edu/ojs/index.php/cieatasu/article/view/1905
• The book chapter “Humanizing the Online Classroom” by Renée E. Weiss found in Principles of Effective Teaching in the Online Classroom (2000)
  
• The idea of "Dehumanizing" education found in Paulo Freire's “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and a more current 2020 article here "A Critical Approach to Humanizing Pedagogies in Online Teaching and Learning"
• One article discussing Transactional Distance Theory in the online classroom
• Also Whitney Kilgore, 2016 looking at Humanizing online MOOC experiences 

And every educator should pick up John Nash’s Book: Design Thinking in Schools: A Leader’s Guide to Collaborating for Improvement

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Transcript:

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[00:00:00] Jason Johnston: It's Monday morning. What can we banter about today as we begin?

[00:00:03] John Nash: That's a good question. What do you want to banter about?

I'm sure—

[00:00:12] Jason Johnston: It'll come. I'm sure it'll come.

[crickets...silence]

Introduction

[00:00:18] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason—

[00:00:20] Jason Johnston: Johnston. Hey John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the Online Learning podcast.

[00:00:27] John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot still isn't. And so, we need to get to the next stage. How are we going to do that, Jason?

[00:00:43] Jason Johnston: And that is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?

[00:00:47] John Nash: Let's do a podcast and talk about it. Let's do an episode on what are we going to do today?

Main Discussion

[00:00:53] Jason Johnston: Hey, let's talk about our design thinking workshop at OLC Innovate. I thought that was really great experience for us, and we just wanted to spend a little time to wrap it up. Sound good?

[00:01:06] John Nash: Yeah, that sounds really good. I think we should talk about that. I think the workshop exceeded my expectations, given the constraints. Yeah. And so, it's going to be—yeah, let's talk about what, what occurred, because it surprised us.

[00:01:17] Jason Johnston: Yeah, it did. And you are the design thinking expert. You have an actual book. This is a great time right at the front of the episode. Why don't you plug your book, John?

[00:01:27] John Nash: I have an actual book, not a virtual book or a fake book. It's an actual—

[00:01:31] Jason Johnston: It's also virtual though, right? You could also—

[00:01:33] John Nash: Get it virtually. No, my, the publisher will not put it out on Kindle. What? I don't—yeah, and some publishers go right to Kindle for authors. In this one, it's Harvard Education Press. They're no slack. I'm proud to have been a part of their—yes, their work, of course, but I don't think it's out on Kindle yet. But the book is called Design Thinking in Schools: A Leader's Guide to Collaborating for Improvement. And it came out in 2019. And it's a, yeah, it's a handbook with some stories and examples and how-tos for leaders that want to use design thinking in schools. And that's, yeah, Harvard Education Press. You can get it on Amazon and get it from their website. Yeah.

[00:02:10] Jason Johnston: Yeah. And it's very good. I'm not just saying that because I like you and we're friends, but I like that it's a very practical book if you're in education and with a lot of talk around design thinking about using design thinking. And I think it was a nice model within that, the—a very manageable book, I will say, in terms of size. I think in—I think quite concise. And you're also a great writer. Enjoyable to read. Thanks. But I think it just was very clear about what the process was. I think once you've gone through the book, even if you've never done anything with design thinking before—

[00:02:46] John Nash: Yeah. Every chapter is a step in the process. And, and you're right, it's no tome, but it's no pamphlet either. It's sure, yes. It's sufficient. It really does—it gets you into the details. So, that's why when OLC decided to have sessions that were actually called Design Thinking Sessions, I wanted to jump on that. I'm always interested to see how different organizations are interpreting design thinking. And you're right, design thinking is popular and more and more organizations are thinking about it, but how they describe it or operationalize it can vary. So, I'm also always eager to see how a session like they had would fit with our visions of what design thinking—

[00:03:24] Jason Johnston: Could be. Yeah. And I was really glad to partner with you on this partly so that I could learn more. And so, we approach the idea—every design thinking problem has a wicked problem, you'd say, right?

Yeah.

And something that's very difficult. It's not a clear-cut answer. And so, our issue that we were talking about at OLC was: How might we humanize online learning? And what was really cool too is we got a room full of practitioners. We had four tables full of just really amazing people—instructional designers and administrators and some faculty there who were really interested in the problem. And what I was amazed at was how they just dug into it like right away. They just went—

[00:04:13] John Nash: For it. We didn't offer them any chance to really get a preamble from us on what we were going to do. We just went to work. And so maybe for the benefit of the audience, we can describe that. What OLC gave us was about a 45- to 50-minute session in which Jason and I decided to do a full design cycle. So, that means we were going to have people come in and immediately start doing some empathetic interviews with each other, some need-finding in a rapid fashion. And then they were going to brainstorm some solutions to humanizing online education based upon what they learned from each other by understanding their unmet needs, what the problems were in their lives around online learning. And so, the brainstorm yielded scores of ideas in about five minutes, and we can talk some more about what those were. And then they harvested the brainstorm and actually prototyped on chart paper their solutions. And we had some interesting solutions that are now not just built out of whole cloth somewhere in someone's head but really generated from people who are in the mix, who had unmet needs that the challenge was going to address those needs. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's important to talk about design thinking as a solution-finding process, not a problem-solving process. And so that's what made this nice was getting people to talk together about finding solutions to challenges, not just trying to fix a problem.

[00:05:38] Jason Johnston: Yeah, and really our ideal was not just to talk about humanizing online education, but to display a design thinking process they can continue to use that process to, to solve their own problems back in their own context. Right. Yeah.

[00:05:53] John Nash: We had a twofold outcome, which was to inspire some new ideas for thoughts around humanizing online ed, but also build capacity amongst the participants on how they could use this solution-finding process that's generative and, mm-hmm, learner-centered, and they could use that back in their home institutions.

[00:06:13] Jason Johnston: Let's take maybe a little bit of a step back and talk about what the idea is of humanizing online education. Now, for the benefit also of our listening audience, we did not give a lot of description to what this meant.

No.

We allowed people to use their imaginations and think about what this means. That's right. We've talked about it here without a lot of definition. In some ways, humanizing online is a bit of a paradox, right? Because we are working at a distance. Distance education is when there is a physical separation between the student and teacher. And we use the means of technology to try to bridge that distance. And bringing a human element to that is a bit of a paradox. Is there a way that you would like to conceptualize in a few words what you are thinking about when you think about humanizing online education?

[00:07:06] John Nash: When I think about humanizing online education, I firstly think about trying to stay learner-centered and getting learner input into the teaching process. Yeah. So, certainly as a teacher, I have goals that I want my students to achieve, but I also want to get their feedback, input, and ideas on how they like to achieve those goals with me and maybe also fill some gaps that I haven't noticed yet that they have, that they'd like to achieve.

[00:07:39] Jason Johnston: Yeah, that's good. Learner-centered. Mine's very similar. I think much of mine comes from some of the writing of Paulo Freire and the idea that often education can be dehumanizing—not just online education, but face-to-face education can be dehumanizing—and figuring out ways in which we can rehumanize education, have a critical approach to our educational pedagogies, so that we are thinking about ways that bring more freedom, liberty, agency to our students. So, I think in that way it's very similar in terms of that kind of learner-centered approach. And we bring this up on the front end because we don't want to pretend—not that anybody would think this, John, but—oh, we did not come up with the idea of rehumanizing or humanizing education or online education. There's some people that came before us, and we'll put links in for Paulo. If you have not read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that is probably for me the book that turned me on to education in general, me wanting to be an educator, was that book. Yes. That may—that kind of opened my eyes to say, wow, education is a way for people to find liberty in their own lives. So, we've got Paulo. There's a few other people as well. I wanted to mention on the front end, currently right now, Michelle Pacansky-Brock—and we'll put a link into her website—she does a lot of active work on what she directly calls humanizing online education, caring a lot about equity and who's being included and who is not being included. And yeah, and she's doing some great work there. There's the first—I was looking back a little bit. I was not familiar with this article, but I was wondering if I could find the first instance of an article that talked about humanizing online. And actually, I found one in the year 2000. So, we're looking—it doesn't, 2000 doesn't feel that long ago, John, but it's nearly a quarter century. I know. I know. And so, we had—in the year 2000, there's an article from a book, actually. The chapter in the book is called "Humanizing the Online Classroom." And within that, Renee Weiss, I think—Weiss—suggested that professors can use various techniques like creating a welcoming environment, using humor, sharing personal experiences and so on to help humanize an online classroom. And I think that's right in line with all the things that we're learning and talking about and wanting to hit.

[00:10:14] John Nash: Yeah. I also, when I think about humanizing the online classroom, I think about opportunities for students to be assessed through more constructivist activities and, yes, hands-on work where they create knowledge and learn together and also with their hands and their minds. I think that's—and that's becoming more and more important as we think about trying to assess learning outcomes in the wake of the advent of large language models and generative AI. We are—we're having to totally rethink the way we assess now as these tools start to become more and more in vogue.

[00:10:50] Jason Johnston: Exactly. Side note: where were you during Y2K? Were you, uh, huddling down in a bunker? Did you have some canned goods?

[00:10:58] John Nash: Exactly. Yeah. That's funny. Isn't that funny? I was—it was a big deal, and I was in Silicon Valley. I was working at Stanford. Oh, wow. And yeah, we were all freaked about Y2K. And are we prepped? Is the university prepped? I was working in a lab that was interested in the integration of technology into the undergraduate curriculum at Stanford. And online learning was a big deal at that point in time. And yeah. And then, yeah, nothing happened. We—

[00:11:20] Jason Johnston: Just—and then nothing happened. Yeah. We had this idea that—and for the younger folk listening to this podcast that didn't live through Y2K, the scare of Y2K, there was this idea that when all the dates on computers switched over to 2000, it was going to create major chaos. And there was hardly anything. We thought planes were going to fall out of the sky and our grids were going to go down and everybody was going to have to huddle for protection within their communities. And yeah, I wasn't a prepper by any means, but there was certainly a group of friends that we had backup plans to, to meet up at each other's homes or whatever, if we needed anything, if everything went down—just in case. But just in case—yeah, in some ways wasn't surprised that, no, the world continued on January 1st.

[00:12:08] John Nash: I think those are good examples of what we mean by humanizing online ed, and maybe it's a good place for us to point our listeners back to our first episode where we talk about this a little more in depth. Yeah. And what the—why the podcast is called what it's called, and what our thoughts are on trying to humanize online ed.

[00:12:26] Jason Johnston: Yeah. And in the second half of online life, one of our aspirations is that it becomes more, not less, human. Absolutely. That it would become less mechanized, less industrial, less dehumanized, more human. Yeah. One more article I just want to highlight—and we'll put all these links in our show notes—is by Whitney Kilgore, who's a fine person and scholar who did an article in 2016 looking at MOOC experiences, those MOOC experiences, and trying to figure out ways to humanize online learning through those very mechanical, in some ways—it's scalable—experiences online. And so that's a very, yeah, interesting—a handbook as well within that—looking at, if you're going to start a MOOC, here are ways that you can do it without being completely dehumanized. Yes. All right. Should we go into a little bit of a summary of our session there? Kind of walk the listeners through our session and let them know what some of the outputs were?

[00:13:26] John Nash: Yeah. Let's walk through the session and talk about what folks did. So, we proposed and executed a design thinking cycle in 45 minutes at this conference. And if any of you have been involved in using design thinking, it can be a deep dive for weeks upon weeks. You could—I teach a course over 16 weeks on design thinking. We use the same steps. So, to do a full cycle in 45 minutes was quite a feat, but it also turned into something that was very active. And actually, in the back end, when we got feedback on the session, people were actually quite refreshed by it because it's not a bunch of talking heads, but it's actually them doing some hands-on, heads-down work. We started with something we call "need-finding," or it's this part of this empathetic interviewing process where we asked the people at each table to take a few minutes and talk to each other about a few key questions about what was challenging about online education. Have you taken an online course lately? A lot of people that design courses and teach online courses haven't themselves taken an online course. And so, we asked them to try to describe what that was like for them in a three-word sentence to quickly capture experiences and feelings. We asked them to think about: What is something an instructor of online courses should know but doesn't? This is always revelatory because learners don't often get a chance to give feedback in that kind of way to teachers, but they're always thinking, "Man, I wish the teacher knew this," or "Wow, I wish the professor knew that." And so that led us to think about asking them to consider blind spots that might be present even among savvy online course instructors and instructional designers. And so: Have you noticed any blind spots lately in yourself or others? And what should course instructors and instructional designers start doing, stop doing, turn up and turn down in their own work as we think about trying to humanize online ed? And so, they chatted about this. We gave them about eight minutes to have these conversations. Someone in the group was a scribe and they captured everything on Jamboards that we provided for everyone. And they came up with a lot of great issues—things around student technical issues and planning time issues, accessibility, different levels of technical savviness among the students, and then how much time it takes to create—the time-intensiveness of course design—and not being in a fixed mindset. Many courses get designed, they thought, from a one-angle approach, and one size does not fit all. So, how do you think about those sorts of things? Good design and rubrics and thinking about tying outcomes to the actual lessons. Those were some of the big things that teams were picking up in this time that they had. It was pretty, pretty intense. Yeah.

[00:16:17] Jason Johnston: Yeah. And I was just looking at some of our notes on that, or the team's notes, and they were talking about a couple things from the teacher standpoint as well. Fixed mindset would fit into that, but also about kitchen-sinking everything, how easy it is in online courses. Yes. That we've talked about before. Just putting everything in and it being overwhelming. Being able to have good-quality videos for people, thinking about the student from a design standpoint.

Yeah.

[00:16:44] John Nash: Yeah. And so, after we had them get to know each other a little bit and consider what the responses were to these prompts, we moved them into a brainstorm activity. And we gave them five minutes and asked them to shoot for a goal of 50 ideas to answer the following question: How might we humanize online education? And they were to use the conversation they had prior to the brainstorm as inspiration for coming up with ideas. And I'm looking at one of the team's Jamboards here, and they had 32 ideas in five minutes on how to humanize online education, and that's pretty impressive. Very impressive.

[00:17:24] Jason Johnston: We really should have brought prizes for teams with the most ideas, but we did. Yeah.

[00:17:28] John Nash: And these ideas ran from having a syllabus quiz to ungraded activities to being empathetic with your announcements to just publish your policies. Some of these things are incredibly simple and low-threshold but get picked up on because—and these ideas don't show up out of thin air. They suggest—oh, we should have a late-submission policy posted because professors don't have a late-submission policy. And that, that really dehumanizes the process. Low-stakes or formative assessments, subtitles or transcriptions for videos. So, some universal design issues to just regular—just be a human being. So, yeah, those were—it was really interesting. And so that was just one team. And I—as I said, we had—I don't know about, I'm looking at my list here, and the—our main document—67 ideas, unique ideas, were brainstormed by four teams at the tables.

[00:18:22] Jason Johnston: Yeah, and we'll provide a link to our jump doc. So, if anybody wants to check out to see some of the outputs and this whole list of five-minute brainstorming sessions are there, you're welcome to, to walk through and see which ones maybe you'd like to run—

[00:18:35] John Nash: With. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about what we did after that.

[00:18:38] Jason Johnston: So, after that, we then moved on into a harvesting session where on their Jamboard they were tasked to harvest the brainstorming. I hadn't seen this before, John. I really liked the way that you put this together, and again, we'll show you examples if you want to go in our links. But if you picture four quadrants or four squares that the teams can grab ideas from their brainstorms and put in each one of these segments. One on the top left is the idea that's the team's favorite. Beside that is the idea that's the rational choice. And then below on the left is the idea most likely to delight learners. And then on the bottom right is the idea that they'll never, ever let us do, but if they did, it would be awesome.

[00:19:30] John Nash: Yeah. And that one's called The Long Shot. A great way for a team to take like these 35 ideas—if we're going to ask you to prototype one of these, how in heaven's name can you select the idea to prototype? So, this is a way to harvest that brainstorm, get it down to four doable ideas, and then from that we ask them to draw one. Yeah. So, the team favorite, the rational choice—that gives even—that sort of gives leaders and systems an opportunity to actually use an idea that was derived out of design thinking. But they don't have to go too far afield. They—oh, that's irrational to do. And it was still derived from human needs and human interests. And so, I think that's what's important there. One that's going to delight the learners, and then this long-shot idea. And it's funny, Jason, a lot of times when people pick a long shot because they believe their institution or their leadership, or in P-12 schools where I work, the principal will never let them do it, it's actually pretty low-threshold and not a big deal to the leadership. But it's—there's this disconnects between what people think they can have and what they can really have. And sometimes they're closer than you think. You just have to get them to reveal it.

[00:20:35] Jason Johnston: Yeah, and I liked the framing of these because each team was very quickly able to pick four ideas. I thought this part—we only gave them five minutes. It happened very quickly, and I feel if the teams had to pick one idea, it would've taken them longer. Yes. If we had asked them: Pick the one best, absolute idea in this whole list. That's right. It might have even taken them longer to come up with something. But this just gave them kind of a framework to think about it in different ways and maybe then they can move forward.

[00:21:05] John Nash: This is effective because it doesn't put the pressure on the teams to pick a value of "best" on any one idea, but rather just give them labels like: Yes, on that one, that would probably be a favorite. It's not—we don't judge whether it's a good idea or a bad idea. It's just that would be favored by the team. This would delight the learners. And that's the, yeah, that's the nice thing about this. It takes the pressure off putting a value on the ideas.

[00:21:28] Jason Johnston: Yeah. A few team favorites were: having personalized, human-touch announcements beyond "here's your course and here's my email"; incorporating more UDL into their work; building community through student video introductions. Yeah. And breaking the audience of one.

[00:21:49] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, I always like to ask what the long shots are too, because they'll usually want to prototype the rational choice or the delight-to-learners one. And I say to people though, "What was your long shot?" And so: complete ungrading—no grades—was a long shot. And that's funny because I think we're going to talk to someone in a future episode that's interested in ungraded courses. And I've been playing with that too, so it's funny that's a long shot. An instant AI quiz generator for quick checks—not graded—that'll never happen. That's a long shot. Problem-based learning—it would be a long shot. And then the last one was incorporating high-quality video and VR capture equipment. So, really let's up our laboratory for creating content. Yeah. Yeah. Those didn't seem like such long shots to me.

[00:22:37] Jason Johnston: They didn't. Depends on the context as well. Exactly right. Like, I feel fortunate to be at University of Tennessee. We have equipment in place that we can test VR environments and record VR environments and move forward just as faculty want to be able to do that. And so, it—that doesn't feel like a long shot to me, but in some places, maybe if they've been said no to so many times whenever any equipment needs to be purchased, then it feels like much more of a long shot. They have their own kind of hurdles to get over in that way.

[00:23:08] John Nash: Yeah, for sure. And so, then we had them select one of those four ideas and prototype it. And prototyping in a design thinking cycle—we prototype to learn, and we like to draw when we prototype or make a physical manifestation of the idea. So, in this case, we asked them to pick one of the four ideas that they harvested and they draw it with markers on a large sticky Post-it note that was going to go on the wall. And we had some constraints. We told them that they may only draw—they may label things with words, but it may not be a bulleted PowerPoint slide—and there was rapid prototyping. They had 10 minutes to work quickly, make a sketch or a chart or a diagram, and then give a little solution name at the top and how it solves the problem of humanizing online education.

[00:23:58] Jason Johnston: Yeah. So, they came up with their prototypes and they did a—again, fantastic job. Amazed how quickly these teams worked together, people that had never met each other before. That's right, for the most part. And it shows you what you can do in a short period of time when people are eager to learn and they're there with the right mindset. And team one's solution: they went with breaking the audience of one, which was their team favorite. Where they talked about how they could make it more humanized by removing grades entirely. This is interesting. It was their personal favorite, but another team—it was the one that wasn't—

It was more long shot.

Going to happen. Long shot. Exactly. Yeah. Instead, students are going to set goals for themselves related to their study topic and collect artifacts to show that they've achieved those goals.

[00:24:46] John Nash: Yeah, that was really cool. And when we share these out, we'll show folks how simplistic the drawings are, but they convey very complex, important ideas. And that's one of the mindsets of design thinking: Show, don't tell. Yeah. And another one is a culture of prototyping. And these bring—these together—even simplistic stick drawings can convey a lot because it gives you a chance to talk through the problem, not have someone read the problem and react to it. You look at it together. Yeah. Team two, their solution was pretty cool. It was about building community through student video introductions. And so they wanted to create a sense of community among online learners by asking students to create a short video introduction of themselves, maybe share prior knowledge about the topic they're studying, and then it would be in an online discussion platform—could be in Flip or some other place where it could be a threaded discussion, but with video. So, I thought that was pretty cool.

[00:25:43] Jason Johnston: Yeah. In some ways this one kind of reminded me of the fact that it's not so much about prototyping a brand-new invention. It's the solution that you're looking for. Like, these solutions technically are already out there, but how are you going to implement them? What are you going to choose in order to meet the problem?

[00:26:02] John Nash: That's right. Because all of these solutions are resources that may already exist, but they're offered here in the context of problems that were revealed and challenges that were discussed in the beginning of the session. We might say, "Hey, we should use Flip to introduce students at the beginning of the course," and sure, that's fine. We could do that. But in this case, it's contextually embedded in a problem that we want to solve, and so that's what makes it nice. Oftentimes, we find in a design cycle that the solutions we end up with are common, low-threshold solutions that now have more meaning because we understand why they're important to use now in the context of the challenge we want to solve. And so yeah, that's what makes them different.

[00:26:46] Jason Johnston: Yeah. Team three's solution was "Say Hi," which is a little similar to the previous one where they're talking about a humanized and personalized experience where it emphasizes those videos on the front end—say-hi videos—to help students and faculty get more connected to one another and try to achieve a sense of feeling more valued and supported within the learning community.

[00:27:12] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, the thread throughout all the solutions was a communication and get-to-know-you, create-a-community type of solution. The team four's solution was called "Module Zero," and they wanted to create a more interactive experience for students by having them introduce themselves on a social board. And it—but it was a more general Q&A board that's open throughout the whole semester. So, this builds community but also gives an opportunity for instructors to give surveys throughout the semester, other check-ins that could ping the community and get it back through. So, the module lasts throughout the course in this case. But it is interesting, isn't it, Jason, that all of them really deal with the audience—breaking the audience of one, building community by saying hi, and having a module that threads through the course to keep community going.

[00:28:02] Jason Johnston: Yeah, it's interesting that these are ideas that keep coming up over and over again. I think even in my own work, and as we're talking about online learning in different ways to address those issues. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:14] John Nash: That's good. Isn't it interesting, your comment, though, like: This keeps coming up in my work and we keep hearing it across our conversations in professional circles, so isn't it bloody obvious that we should be—yeah, why do we have to have a whole session to say, "Hey, try this"? I think we can probably just say, "You ought to do these things." But it's putting it in—everybody's got their own view on the world that's got to be honored. And I guess that's part of humanizing the instructional design of online learning too, right?

[00:28:40] Jason Johnston: Yeah. In your context, figuring out what works. Yep. As well as just—it's a recognition that we tend to drift from this. Yes. So, we need to remember it over and over again because when left to our own devices, without remembering the learner, without remembering that there's a problem here—if we just stick all our content into the course shell and expect students to naturally connect with one another—then we're going to drift away from it unless we keep doing some sort of course correction. Yeah. To come back to this humanizing. And it even reminds me of—there's theories that I've been working with now for years for working online, which is transactional distance, which is a communication theory originally, which is this idea that when there's a distance between the student and teacher, the more real and human your communication format feels, the closer you will feel together as people. And it seems really simple, seems really obvious, but again, there's lots of different ways to do it and these solutions are also pointing to a reduction of that transactional distance.

[00:29:48] John Nash: Yeah. Yeah. Really good. I think one thing that's nice also is that we demonstrated the ability to use a process to get to ideas that are contextually embedded and it doesn't have to take a long time. I think—I think there would be some fair criticisms out there amongst our listeners and others to say, "You really rushed this design cycle business." And actually, if I was being fair, I would criticize our work by saying we didn't have real learners in the session where—and say instructional designers and instructors are having an empathetic conversation with learners in an online space, learning about their needs. So, in that case, we did not really stay to the fidelity of the idea of human-centered design. But we've given them an opportunity to practice on themselves to say how the process works. And that's really what's important: Do I have a process in place to arrive at solutions that are contextually embedded and help our learners? Yeah, I have that now and I can practice that.

[00:30:46] Jason Johnston: Yeah. That's great. Any final thoughts about this before we wrap it up? We'll certainly provide links to all of these documents so people can look at them themselves and hopefully derive some ideas.

[00:31:01] John Nash: No, I think I just—if we could do this again, and if I put out an urging to conference organizers, I would say add a little bit more time to this and then to let the design process stretch out a bit. And then I would say to presenters, to ourselves and others that want to try this: try to bring real users—we say in the parlance, but the real—bring in people that are living the problem that you want to help solve, and have them be a part of the design. So, instead of having a bunch of instructional designers and professors and instructors in a room, we would have them in addition to students from—could be secondary schools, could be other post-secondary institutions doing online learning—and, and really have a session where you get to talk and learn about what learners are going through and what they feel. That would be really cool.

[00:31:47] Jason Johnston: Yeah, for sure. And again, I'm going to plug John Nash here because he is not going to plug himself, but he also does this kind of work really all over the world. You've done this all over the world, haven't you? Working with people design-thinking-wise? Yeah. And educational situations all over the world. And he is open to some consultations, I'm sure, and working people through these processes, especially if you're really—especially if you're really nice to him. I find if you're kind to John, then he'll be kind to you. Yeah.

[00:32:18] John Nash: I'll give you my obligatory "Aw shucks." But yeah, always love talking about this. I will admit to that. Yeah. Happy to talk with anybody about it.

[00:32:27] Jason Johnston: Yeah. That's good. This has been—it was a great session. I really appreciated working with you on this, John. And I think if listeners out there were in our session, thank you again so much for just diving in and for participating. That was so much fun. And I hope for listeners that weren't there that I hope you get something out of this podcast, and not only about online learning specifically, but also about the process and how really accessible it is to be able to do in your own context.

[00:32:56] John Nash: Yeah. It was great. We couldn't have done it without the humans. That's right.

[00:33:00] Jason Johnston: Absolutely. Which is good, because that's what this is all about, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Don't forget the humans. No. Thank you and make sure you check out our show notes at OnlineLearningPodcast.com. Yeah. If you would—speaking of an "aw shucks" moment, I'm not even going to read it on air because I would just—it would just be too—I would just be turning red through the microphone. We got a very kind review on Apple Podcast that was really nice. And so please check out our website. If you can review us on Apple Podcast, I think that it does help the—the AI.

[00:33:33] John Nash: Please go out and tell the bots that we're worth the—

[00:33:36] Jason Johnston: Time. That's right. That humans—other humans are actually listening. Yes. And that maybe it should be put out in front of other people. We'd love to get the podcast out and join us at our LinkedIn community as well. Just look us up—Online Learning Podcast. And feel free to drop us a message on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks so much.

[00:33:57] John Nash: And what we should be talking about next. Yeah. Thanks. Absolutely.