Synchronous Instructor Presence with Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, Enoch Park, and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic

In the summer of 2020, the Oregon State University Ecampus launched a research seminar that gathered educational researchers from around the world who were curious about the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. After all, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most online education was asynchronous. How important were all those Zoom meetings for student learning, really? 

 Today on the podcast, I welcome three members of that research group who are presenting their findings at the Distance Teaching & Learning Conference hosted by UPCEA, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My guests are Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, director of the Ecampus research unit at Oregon State; Enoch Park, senior instructional designer and online learning specialist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, lecturer in psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

These three represent a group that conducted an extensive meta-analysis of the existing literature about online learning, looking for studies that examined the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. Spoiler alert: They didn’t find much! So if you’re looking for an answer to this big question about synchronous instructor presence, you won’t hear it. But we do have a great conversation about the question itself, their research methods, and what advice they have for others engaged in educational research. 

Episode Resources:

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/staff/bio/dellostm.htm

Enoch Park, https://professional.charlotte.edu/directory/enoch-park

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lidija-krebs-lazendic-3a4a8323/?originalSubdomain=au 

Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), https://conferences.upcea.edu/DTL-SOLAR2023/ 

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Transcript

Derek Bruff 0:06
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

Back in 2020, when colleges and universities moved their courses online during that period of emergency remote teaching, many instructors who were new to teaching online leaned into Zoom and other video conferencing tools in an attempt to replicate their traditional onsite classroom environments. That summer, though, as instructors took a little more time to plan their fall online courses, they tapped into a lot of existing literature about online teaching, which was in fact largely asynchronous. Prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, as I was working with instructors that summer, helping them get ready for the fall, I found myself wondering how important those Zoom meetings were to student learning and student success. After all, online education had been very successful for years without any kind of synchronous component.

I wasn't the only one wondering that back in the summer of 2020. The Oregon State University Ecampus launched a research seminar that summer that gathered educational researchers from around the world. And they, too, wondered how important it was for online courses to have a synchronous instructional presence. Today on the podcast, I welcome three members of that research group who are presenting their findings at the Distance Teaching and Learning Conference hosted this month by UPCEA, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and also by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My guests are Mary Ellen Dello Stritto , director of the Ecampus Research Unit at Oregon State; Enoch Park, senior instructional designer and online learning specialist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte; and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, lecturer in psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

These three and their colleagues conducted an extensive meta analysis of the existing literature about online learning, looking for studies that examined the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. Spoiler alert: they didn't actually find much. So if you're looking for an answer to this big question about synchronous instructor presence, you sadly won't hear it on today's podcast. But we do have a great conversation about the question itself, their research methods, and what advice they have for others engaged in educational research, especially on online teaching and learning.

Well, thank you, all three of you for being on the podcast today. I'm excited to talk to you about your project and about instructor presence in online courses. Thanks. Thanks for being here today. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 2:49
It's great to be here. 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 2:50
Thank you for inviting us. 

Enoch Park 2:52
Thank you for having us. 

Derek Bruff 2:53
So I'm going to start with my standard question, which is not about your project, but it's one that I find helpful in getting to know my guests. Can each of us can each of you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 3:07
Okay. 

Okay. I'll go first. Okay. 

Derek Bruff 3:13
And this is Lidija. 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 3:15
Yes. It was a long time ago when I was doing my undergraduate studies. And I at that time, I was going to be and I was sort of a schoolteacher. It was just for a year, a little bit over a year. I... at that time, I wasn't sure that I was going to continue my education, do a Ph.D. and do teaching university level teaching. But that was a time that I realized that education is important, that the teacher's role is important. And I also realized that I loved my job, even though it was a short year and I was very young, I'd just graduated. So. But I knew that was what I was going to do in one way or another. 

Derek Bruff 4:05
That's great. And what about you, Mary Ellen? 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 4:08
So I come from a long line of teachers like my mother and father were teachers and my aunts were teachers. A lot of teachers in my family. And so I heard a lot of: Don't go into teaching! Right, in those in those sort of negative moments. Right when I was younger. So that was kind of an interesting backdrop for me. But when I went to college, I really kind of knew that, you know, the academic life was for me. And I was like, okay, this is awesome. This is really cool. And I went in. I like Lydia. I'm a psychologist. So I went into psychology and, you know, wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with in psychology and then quickly realized that I really didn't want to be a therapist. I didn't really want to go that road. I wanted to be an academic. And so it was long about, I think, that I was, you know, my junior or senior year when I was like, okay, this is what I this is what I can do. I can still be a teacher, but I can just be a professor. And then that will be beyond the rest of my family, right? And so I went on to be a professor of psychology for about sixteen years. 

Derek Bruff 5:13
That's great. That's great. What about you, Enoch? 

Enoch Park 5:19
Okay, this is Enoch Park. Well, that is a great question. Well, thinking back, the oldest interest that I had was some kind of a technology inventor of. So I used to open different household electronics and play with that computers and at that time Microsoft X even. So in college, different from that, I studied French linguists and continued to second language acquisition and instructional technology later. So where at that time various audio visual equipments and computer based instruction became popular. So I found it interesting to talk about different human cultures, stories in society beyond one's native language. So they didn't know much about that and knew that it might be coming from a foreign language, background and linguistics and use technology to connect people and build the new ideas together. So I guess I was somehow interested in becoming an educator in line with the social constructivism and connectivism of some kind. 

Derek Bruff 6:40
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. It does make me curious how the three of you came together to work on this project. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 6:50
Yeah, that's. That's a great place to begin. We got started. Gosh, I think it was even 2019 as a group. And so at the research unit at Oregon State University, we started this program called Research Seminars and we basically chose a topic, put out a call for researchers across the country and in Lidija's case, around the world, to kind of come together and to, you know, to leverage the the collaborative power of people from different places and different, you know, situations in the research world.

And so this is our second group of actually these research seminars. Our first research seminar group did the topic of learning analytics, and this was our second cohort, as we call them. And the idea of these cohorts was to bring together a group of people for a period of three years, bring them to Oregon State University for a weeklong, a weeklong session in the summers across three summers, and to do these sort of large scale projects. And so this is the meta analysis group that you're talking to today, at least some of us. We started out with a much larger group.

We met virtually for the first time in the summer of 2020, wasn't what we planned. We wanted to be here here at Oregon State. That didn't happen and we came together with the topic of Meta analysis in mind and then spun off into two groups that looked at different topics that they wanted to apply meta analysis to in the realm of online education. And so our topic was, was this question of synchronous instructor presence. So that's how we got together. And here we are with our last summer and the group is coming together for the last time in about two weeks. They're coming to... they came to campus. 

Derek Bruff 9:01
And will you see each other in person?

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 9:02
We came to campus for the first time in 2022 for our week long kind of intensive work week. And because we sort of started in 2020 as sort of as we call it year zero, we extended it into the fourth year. And so the cohort's coming back to finish our projects. 

Derek Bruff 9:23
The first cohort was about learning analytics, which is kind of a topic to be researched. Your group came together around a research method? 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 9:32
Yes, that's right. So that was slightly different. And we and we chose that kind of as a methodology that we thought this would that we thought we could leverage, especially in sort of this long form multi-year project, because meta analyses take that amount of time to do. And so this was a great opportunity for us to take the format of this program and leverage that. 

Derek Bruff 10:01
Very interesting. So so how did you land at synchronous instructor presence as something to investigate as a group? 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 10:09
It's a really good question. One of you want to jump on jump in on that? 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 10:14
Yeah, so do we. I'm trying to remember how how we actually... 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 10:20
This was a long time ago. 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 10:21
This was in 2020! I think we went back and forth between maybe, you know, different topics, but the online instructor presence came somehow came up organically because we moved into online learning during the pandemic years, the popularity of online programs was growing before the pandemic as well, But definitely the last three years, everybody went online and many stayed online. 

We, I believe some of us at least, if not everyone, had anecdotal evidence from our students and colleagues about instructors presence and the need for instructors presence. And and when you're discussing the topic, I think we realized that probably this is a good place to start researching evidence on online learning. And then it took us maybe a couple of months to figure out the research question and hypotheses, that part was easy, once when we decided that actually we should start from that maybe biggest component of online learning and that is instructors presenmce. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 11:45
And at Oregon State in particular, you know, we have we've been continuously doing asynchronous and nothing but asynchronous online education. And there there was some discussions about, you know, how is the pandemic going to change our whole discussion of modality. And we saw that happen three years later. Here we are right? And so we thought that was this was a good moment to sort of look at that question in terms of like what is out there? Right. We had all of these kind of discussions about, you know, this this synchronous kind of component. And so that was kind of the curiosity of our group in terms of like, well, what what is the research out there? Is there a benefit to kind of incorporating some synchronicity into these, you know, primarily online or asynchronous online courses? 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 12:34
Yeah. And also we were thinking if there is a benefit, how how would that the synchronous components should be should be integrated it in terms of the frequency time, the kind of interaction, the kind of support that instructors should give their students. So we're hoping to answer all these questions then at least somewhat these questions. 

Enoch Park 13:01
Like other researchers or so again, even though we started before pandemic, the ideas that we brought up was looking at looking through the history and then the last decades of online learning from 2010 to 2020, we noticed that there was an increased interest in synchronous learning. But right at the moment, again, with the pandemic, that point become much more emphasized and many people were believing it needs to be synchronous. As soon as we get over this remote online teaching, we need to have an online learning. That's a sound approach. But on the other hand, also there was a much bigger emphasis on it needs to be synchronous. So we are definitely thinking about that, like is it really effective or not?

So we're starting from the question where no bias, whether that is negative or positive or not statistically significant, but we need to see, you know, at the the the foundational ground that whether that is meaningful and significant enough that we can see. And if that is so, then we will see that intentional use of the synchronous instruction. And for that reason that we are specifically looking at the synchronous instructor presence, because not just the modality or the tools, but what is going on, what is planned and going on, would it be more important? So we wanted to narrow down that perspective. 

Derek Bruff 14:57
And in 2020 I was at Vanderbilt University running the Center for Teaching there, and we had very few faculty on campus that had any online teaching experience. And so they were coming from the kind of face to face on site experience. And quite naturally they wanted to kind of replicate what they knew. And so I was there saying, because I knew the literature and I knew the landscape, you know, online education has has largely been asynchronous for the past decade, and it works pretty well. But they were thinking, no, we have to have that synchronous component. And so it was it was a strange time to kind of navigate those those decisions.

And maybe the follow up on what you just ended with, Enoch, what do you mean by instructor presence? How did you do you have a definition of that or did you operationalize that or or how do you think about that term? Instructor presence? Because it's not just about the modality. There's there's a kind of teaching and learning dynamic that you're referring to, I think. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 15:53
Absolutely. Anybody want to jump in on that one?

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 15:59
I think we were hoping that the literature would tell us. I think we are looking for operational definitions in the published papers and unfortunately we didn't get that. 

We didn't find the answer we were looking for. That might be maybe even the first roadblock. I don't remember. Again, there was so many roadblocks. I don't remember the chronological order. But then, you know, we realized that instructor presence was defined differently and implemented differently in in teaching. So I believe for us, the instructor presence initially was the teacher's synchronous communication between the learning context with the students, right. So just by rote, we didn't really focus on frequency of the synchronous component. We didn't focus on on, on the kind of of communication and maybe the content coverage. So it could be lectures or tutorials or maybe consultations face to face, assessment support, any kind of interaction between the the course instructors, teachers and the student. Right. As I said, we hope that the literature would give us, you know, a more definite definition. And it didn't. 

Enoch Park 17:34
Adding to the instructor presence again, that we started with the Community of Inquiry model from Garrison Anderson and Archer. So we were focusing on that, the interaction with the students being in the online learning environment, whether they are interacting with the faculty, other students and knowledge and the modality of an asynchronous asynchronous modality is, but especially with that components with the Community of Inquiry model, then the teaching presence, which again as Lidija mentioned, that that's a little bit less defined in that the presence of the instructor as a person and also the teaching presence as the combination of a cognitive social combined overlapping areas. So with the... the current literature has more actually studies in the social presence and cognitive presence, in those perspectives. So we wanted to kind of separate and clear out a little bit more narrowed down to the actual instructor's presence within the online environment as part of the teaching presence. So that's what we approached on it.

Then again, you know, in the context of an intentional teaching and learning that what was intentionally there, not just that teacher was captured in the video, you know, just standing there. It's not presence, but what are they doing it. We didn't go too narrow in that their activity level, but at least we wanted to see the instructors are actively engaged and the actively inviting and engaging students in some sort. And that was the criteria that the teacher was present or not. And for that reason it was very hard to find studies that has that much detail descriptions, although we wanted to see the actual nature of that instructors presence we were looking at. In some we found it, but many of them we have to really see what what really happened and decide. So that's what we came down to. Very small number of studies to calculate actual effect size. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 20:19
Yeah, we started out with seven... I can give you the number exactly 7590 studies. This is where... These are the things that we examined at least basically, right, in terms of titles. And we started out and we thought, okay, well that's a good start. 7000 studies, right? Yeah. Well, what we spent the bulk of our time doing, which you do in meta analysis, right, is the meta analysis itself is, is relatively easy. It's actually all the screening that you have to do and all the coding that you have to do. But as Enoch said, we slowly kind of started going through each of these and realizing that one of our biggest problems was we couldn't identify where the instructor presence was in these studies. And so we had to kind of go, you know, go through and, you know, sometimes it took us a few passes to realize oh, this isn't going to make the cut. You know, this is not going to give us what we need. 

Derek Bruff 21:23
So it's not enough for a study to kind of look at modalities, right? Synchronous versus asynchronous, You need to have some notion of assessing the instructor's presence. And it sounds like it's not even enough if they just look at the social presence. But the kind of instructor presence as as distinct from that.

I remember, I'm glad I mean, I'm glad you started with the Community of Inquiry model. We use that a lot that summer and try to help our faculty again, who had taught face to face to help them think about what needs to happen when they teach online. And I would often say instructor presence was the kind of unknown unknown for those faculty, right? Like, like the the social presence was the known unknown. The faculty knew they wanted to have social presence. They didn't know how to get there in the online environment because they had done it before. But instructor presence is something that happens, I think so intuitively or implicitly in the physical classroom. Like you walk in and you're there and you have a plan and you put learning objectives on the board and you're the one with the slides in the handout. So clearly you're the instructor and you are kind of guiding students through this learning process. 

I found that when faculty moved online, they just they didn't do any of that intentionally. And they had to they had to know that that was a thing. And so when I think of instructor presence, I think of a lot of different things, right? Some of it may be me in an office hour with the student going back and forth live on Zoom. But it could also be the way that I lay out the modules in my online course to help students kind of move through them in a coherent manner. Right? That's another way I see instructor presence that's coming out. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 22:58
Yeah. And so we were looking to see, you know, so our question was, is does that synchronous instructor presence actually impact course outcomes? Right? 

Derek Bruff 23:08
In student learning, student satisfaction.

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 23:11
So we zeroed in on course outcomes and we found quickly from the literature it seemed that there was some emphasis on grades and some emphasis on satisfaction. So we we zeroed in on those two things being, you know, the two outcomes that we saw that were were relatively consistent and not so consistent, we can would say they're totally consistent. 

Derek Bruff 23:37
Right. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 23:37
Right, but at least as constructs they were out there in the world. 

Derek Bruff 23:41
So so you mentioned having 7000 some odd studies to start with. What did you end up with? 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 23:48
This was this is the fun part of the story, right? So we ended up with seven studies with 11 outcomes. Right. So of course, some studies have multiple outcomes that you can measure. So yeah, so we landed from 7000 to 7 studies and 11 outcomes, which was a bit of a shock. And last summer, last summer when we were all together, we were kind of weeding through these and eliminating them and getting more and more discouraged. As we were doing this, it was it was a surprise. And you know, what we can probably talk about next is all the barriers that we saw in terms of why we only ended up with seven studies and 11 outcomes. 

Derek Bruff 24:35
Yeah, that was my next question. Why is there so little research on this topic? Because it seems like an intuitive thing to try to investigate. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 24:43
Well, and you hit on it from the top, right? The lack of uniform operational definitions for instructor presence. It was, I think, one of the biggest barriers from the start. 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 24:56
And also I would like to say that there is no lack of research and lack of publication. Over 7000 publications is a good starting point for for a topic and for a meta analysis. And we were really excited. I think we got these 7000 papers from maybe four different databases or something like that. So we really had done really a thorough research and we started with a large number of papers. And as we were closing in on those papers that fit our research question and hypothesis, and then we started looking at the details of the studies described in these papers and statistics reported and all information we needed for our meta analysis. We realized that there was a lot missing in those papers or in the methodology of the studies reported in the papers or both. 

Derek Bruff 26:03
Can you share some examples of that? Yeah. What like, like what would be a study that's maybe close to what you were looking for but didn't... but was missing something important? 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 26:12
For example, we would do a screening a few times and pass this study thinking that everything is there and then we would have a close look needing maybe a sample size to calculate the exact. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 26:30
Group size. 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 26:31
Group size. 

Group sizes, Yes. And then they would. It wasn't that the group size was reported. So that's something that skipped our initial screening because the statistics section was there that, you know, there are numbers to use there and we just missed fine detail. So that's the level of of, of details that was very often missing it. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 26:57
And we also had a situation where we at least one study didn't provide a standard deviation that you usually report within with a mean. Yes. And we needed that in order to calculate an effect size. 

Derek Bruff 27:08
Sure. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 27:09
Yeah. So that's another example. 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 27:11
Very often. Yes, exactly. Or the synchronous component was mentioned in the abstract. The synchronous component was described in explaining an introduction. And then when we got to the methods section it turned out that there was actually no synchronous component to that. The authors' definition of synchronous component were some different. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 27:43
Yeah. And it also was the problem that they didn't really, in many of these studies describe what was actually happening in the classroom or even in the synchronous component or or going on in the course. The level of of the methodology reporting was so weak that we we at sometimes were saying, well, we can guess this happened, but we have no evidence of what actually happened in these classes. And that was very frustrating. 

Derek Bruff 28:09
Sure. And especially when you're looking at instructor presence, you need to know some details about what the instructor is doing asynchronously or synchronously. I'm reminded. So my first book was on teaching with classroom response systems, which we used to call clickers, the little ABCDE things. And I remember seeing so many papers that would try to make an argument about how effective clickers were in the classroom without showing one single example of a multiple choice question they had use with their clickers. And I'm like, The type of question you ask is going to matter a lot to what kind of outcomes you see. And if you can't describe, you know, did you have students turn to their neighbor and talk, did they not? What level of questions were you asking? Yeah, without that level of detail, it's not a helpful paper. I can't take anything from it. And it sounds like you ran into similar situations where you there just weren't enough details there to know if it even addressed your research questions. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 29:05
That's exactly what we had.  

Enoch Park 29:10
Yeah, so the, the number of studies are plenty and out of that in how we can actually make a reasonable conclusion if you want to or some the data that we can inform us. That was the hard part. In 2010 and the DOE study a meta analysis by Means et al that had 522 studies narrowed down to 176 to see the big question on is online learning effective or not? And after ten years, actually 13 years after, we have much bigger volume of the studies, 7000. However, when it gets to the really informing with the data, it was still hard. So that's a point that we wanted to contribute to the field. 

Derek Bruff 30:14
Yeah, so let me ask about that. So if you were to advise someone on the design of a study that might help you answer your question, what things would you point them towards or what requests would you make? 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 30:27
Oh wow, that's a very good question. 

Anyone want to jump in on that? Lidija, you have a thought. I can see it on your face. 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 30:37
Yeah. Well, first I would say start with good operational definitions. Explain what you mean by the terminology you use so that we know that we are, you know, discussing the same thing. Obviously, online learning and, you know, the entire field of online learning and the instructors presence is particularly question of instructors presence. You know, online learning is quite recent. It's, you know, it's we can say that even though there is a bit of a history of online learning, it's still emerging and that the terminology is still used with a lot of liberty. Probably starting with good operational definitions would be a good starting point.

I would also say I would probably say the same thing things as we say to to our students in research methods courses. Think of your design, think of your, the question you want to ask and think of your design, study design as a recipe that someone else should be able to follow without filling in missing bits and pieces. Yes, I think we can probably all agree that if you wanted to follow methodologies reported in most of the papers to be reviewed, we wouldn't have been able to do that because there was not enough information. So I would start from basics. Your method section is the recipe, right? It's such that other people can follow. 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 32:25
And I think another, another thing we encountered is that in some ways we saw some poor quality studies, but we also saw some some in terms of the design, I think we saw some good studies, but what failed was the reporting and echoes to what Lidija is saying, right, is that like we could you know, we couldn't really even, you know, assess the quality of it because the reporting was very, very thin. And so that's where I think some of our recommendations are for, you know, journal editors, for writers, for authors, for reviewers of journals to to really think about standards in terms of of things that need to be reported and to kind of reduce this problem that Lidija is describing. 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 33:08
And I think it's also important to acknowledge the difficulties that come with this kind of research. You know, these are not random randomized controlled experiments, so you don't, you know, as a researcher, there is very little you can control. And I think that should be a part of of discussion as well. 

We we have to work with what we have. What we have is very often limited in scope, in number of students, a number of classes per week, per month. However, there are lots of variations between these studies. These are all issues that have to be addressed in not only discussions of of of these papers, but between the community of researchers and again, journal editors, reviewers, everyone who is involved. 

Derek Bruff 34:06
And I can imagine there are some aspects of online learning where there are bigger sets of robust and well-documented studies. But given the centrality that I've seen of the Community of Inquiry framework, which has instructor presence as one of its three big components, I am also a little surprised that there's not more to to help faculty know what does that mean and what are the choices I have and what kind of impacts are those choices likely to have on students? That's kind of surprising.

I know you guys are going to be presenting this at the UPCEA conference this summer. Since your results section is kind of thin, how are you planning to... what are you... what what's next? Right. What are you to do with the conference and what are you hoping will come from that? 

Mary Ellen Dello Stritto 34:57
So at the conference we're going to be just be presenting a lot of what we talked about today in terms of this journey we've been on. You know, we're going to mention the seven studies and the 11 outcomes, and we've got some effect sizes, but we can't draw any conclusions from them. And we're going to have a discussion about what can we do about it and to bring the audience together in UPCEA to brainstorm and find out what do other folks in other institutions, what are they grappling with with this question of synchronous and structure presence? Do they know of any data out there or is there any other studies out there that we should know about? And then get into some of these questions of quality and what we can do as a community of researchers to kind of push for better standards, for better reporting, for better methodologies, for, you know, more reliable outcome measures, those kinds of things. So that's so our UPCEA session is is a little bit of presentation, but more discussion. We've built built it to be kind of a discussion session. 

Derek Bruff 36:01
Well, thank you all for sharing your your journey. That's a good way to describe it, right? We don't always get quite the results we want when we start a research project. But but the journey can still be worth it. So thanks for thanks for being generous with the fits and the starts and the journey that you were on. 

Lidija Krebs-Lazendic 36:23
Thank you. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to to talk about our project. And hopefully with this podcast, maybe we will be able to reach out to other researchers who are interested to collaborate with us or talk to us about their work. So thank you a lot for this.  

Derek Bruff 36:44
That was Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, director of the Ecampus Research Unit at Oregon State University; Enoch Park, senior instructional designer and online learning specialist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte; and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, lecturer in psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Thanks to all three for taking the time to come on the podcast and share about their study.

If you're listening to this episode the day it drops, today is the first day of the Distance Teaching and Learning Conference sponsored by UPCEA and UW Madison, where Mary Ellen, Enoch, and Lidija will be presenting their work. The conference has onsite and online tracks and I bet you can still join the online track if you're listening on July 25th, 2023. I'll be there thanks to a virtual press pass provided to me by UPCEA, and I'm looking forward to spending some time exploring the current landscape of online, continuing, and professional education. There was a time when teaching staff members like me didn't do much with faculty teaching in those areas, but that all changed in 2020, and I'm seeing those old lines blur more and more often. I'm glad to help with that blurring here on the Intentional Teaching podcast.

This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Sign up forum for the Intentional Teaching newsletter, and my Patreon, which helps support the show. For just a few bucks a month, ou get access to the occasional bonus episode,  Patreon-only Teaching Resources, the archive of past newsletters, and a community of intentional educators. As always, thanks for listening.