EP 29 - Dr. Ericka Hollis - Teaching in the Digital Age: Cultivating Belonging and Excellence Online

In this episode, John and Jason talk to Ericka Hollis, PhD, about silence as liberatory practice, student backchannels, belonging in the online classroom, and leadership challenges with professional development. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com

Join Our LinkedIn Group - *Online Learning Podcast (Also feel free to connect with John and Jason at LinkedIn too)*

Links and Resources:

• Great list of foundational articles on the Community of Inquiry
• ACUE's Effective Teaching Framework for Higher Education
• John’s paper on online discussions: “A Tale of Two Forums: One Professor's Path to Improve Learning through a Common Online Teaching Tool”
• Dr. Ericka Hollis Contact Information
  • ACUE Page
  • Email: [e-mail]
  • LinkedIn
  • Twiiter / X

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

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!

Mic Check

[00:00:00] Jason Johnston: Hey, John, could I ask you will you tilt your mic back a little bit?

I'm sorry to be so mic-picky these days.

[00:00:09] John Nash: Should I talk while I do that? Here's where it was and now I'm still talking and here's where it's going and now it's here.

[00:00:17] Jason Johnston: Yeah, that's pretty good.

[00:00:19] John Nash: I do appreciate your pickiness. I do.

Silence as Liberatory Practice

[00:00:21] Jason Johnston: All right. As you can see, this is pretty pretty tight operation we run here. The Online Learning Podcast. Heh. We basically When we started it, we decided that we would just do what we could do. You know what I mean? And we're having a good time. And I think that, I, we're getting some good responses from it.

I think people that listen and we produce it up to the level that we can manage. And yeah. And this is it.

[00:00:50] John Nash: I especially like the silences. It's a solace, not soul less. It's a SOLACE.

[00:00:57] Jason Johnston: Solace. The silences. Yeah.

[00:01:00] John Nash: Yes.

[00:01:00] Ericka Hollis: One of the effective teaching practices is wait time. Most of the time in education, we don't wait long enough. So for someone to actually think and respond, right? There's research behind that when you jump right in. And so I love awkward silence. I'm really an introvert. Although most of my career, I do things that are very extroverted.

So I'm okay with the pause and the solace, if you will, John. Yeah,

[00:01:30] John Nash: we'll just do Erica Hollis episode and we'll just have it be 40 minutes of no talking.

[00:01:36] Jason Johnston: Yeah. Like John Cage, if you're familiar with his pieces. He sits at the piano and he's got sheet music and it's all blank. After four minutes and thirty three seconds, packs up the sheet music and then goes.

But I feel you on that. I'm an introvert as well. And I'm also, I feel like I'm slower, sometimes slower to respond, especially in a classroom where I'm taking in a lot of stimulus. And so I always found in the face to face classrooms, I would think of really like good things to say, like later two hours later, or good questions to ask, but it was rarely like right in the moment.

It was like, it was always later which is one of the things I liked about online learning is that it was the asynchronous gave some simmer time for me and some time to think about things and to be able to respond some.

[00:02:29] Ericka Hollis: I think that's a fair point. That's one of the reasons I have one of my youngest sister is she has extreme social anxiety, and she has just done so much better in asynchronous online courses, even as an undergraduate student. Just because that works better for her, instead of being like called on in the class, like cold calling, we cold cal