EP 33 - Flower Darby on Improving Online Teaching: Small Changes, Outsized Impact

In EP 33, John and Jason talk to Flower Darby about small steps for inclusive, equitable, and humanized online learning, and explore the transformative power of community, connection, and compassion in digital classrooms while tackling the future of AI’s role in education.

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Resources:

• Flower Darby Website
• Small Teaching Online (book)
• The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching
  • Request a free copy: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/equityguide
• Karen Costa’s 99 Tips For Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos(book)
• Steven Covey - Circle of Control - Circle of Influence
• Flower’s Recent article in the Chronicle: https://www.chronicle.com/article/5-small-steps-for-ai-skeptics
• I’m a Doctor. ChatGPT’s Bedside Manner Is Better Than Mine. 

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!

False Start

[00:00:00] Flower Darby: It's always fun to talk to interesting, intelligent people who care deeply about our work. So I've, enjoyed our conversation.

[00:00:11] Jason:. So that's our,that's a lot of our main goal here, really, John, is to get to that point. Where people say nice things about us. And to know it's coming from a real person. I mean, ChatGPT loves everything I say, NotebookLM. Absolutely adores every article I've ever written and every line, but to know this is coming from a real person makes a difference for me. So thank you.

Real Start

[00:00:34] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:37] Jason: John. Hey, everyone. And this is online learning in the second half, the online learning podcast.

[00:00:42] John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look,

online learning's had its chance to be great and some of it is, but there's still some that isn't. So can we get to the next stage?

[00:00:56] Jason: That's a great question, John. How about we do a podcast to talk about it?

[00:01:00] John Nash: I think that's a great idea. What do you want to talk about today?

[00:01:04] Jason: Well, you know, one of the great things about being able to do a podcast is meeting cool people and people that can help us answer this question about, you know, what are we going to do in the second half of life as it comes to theonline podcast?

And maybe the second half of our lives too. I don't know, John. We could, I guess we could that into some of our podcast, actually get some, get some life coaching or something from the, from the guests as they come in.

[00:01:32] John Nash: if that involves me divulging my age. I'll, I'm not doing that yet.

[00:01:36] Jason: Okay. All right. Well, I think I just did a little bit, so, in just in a general sense. So that's good. Well, we have Flower Darby with us as a guest. And so I'm really excited to

talk to Flower. Hi Flower. How are you?

[00:01:51] Flower Darby: Hi, Jason. I'm so good. Hi, John. Thank you so much for inviting me onto your podcast. It is always a pleasure and a privilege. I don't take that for granted at all, but anybody cares what I think about anything. So thanks for having me.

[00:02:05] Jason: Yeah, well, thank you so much. Yeah. How would you like to introduce yourself, Flower? I mean, we could read some of the things off your bio, but what would you like our audience to know about you that might be helpful for them to understand our conversation today?

[00:02:21] Flower Darby: Sure, let me just quickly and conversationally sum up my background I don't, I'm not a fan of reading a bio, people can look that up themselves if they would like to get more information, right, But I have been teaching in higher education for coming up on 29 years, this January, it'll make 29 years, I have taught lots of different things, includin