About Learning Support. Learning Support is committed to helping EHE faculty and staff to support learning across the College. We do this through connecting with EHE stakeholders, bringing awareness to learner needs, and assisting with self-study and evaluation efforts to enhance what we already do for our community of learners.
Each month, we share the Learning Support Briefing to update you on current projects and initiatives. For those involved in distance education or remote work, check out the monthly Support Shape-up with learning support and wellness tips for the EHE online community. This month’s focus is on enhancing your online meeting experience. Read on learn more and see what we’ve been up to!
October Learning Support Briefing
The Learning Support Briefings provide monthly updates and progress reports on area initiatives. Have ideas for us to consider? Submit a suggestion or request a consult!
EHE Online Student Services Group.Learning Support has continued with the evaluation of EHE’s online student services, and the project has now wrapped up data collection. Analysis and interpretation are underway and draft conclusions will be shared at the October 25th committee meeting. We look forward to sharing the outcomes with you in the November newsletter! Contact Dr. Tracey Stuckey at stuckey.113@osu.edu for more info about this initiative.
October Learning Support Shape-up
Your Monthly Learning Support Shape-up consists of a learning support tip for distance education accompanied by a wellness tip for remote workers. Learning support tips are pulled from scholarly and practitioner journals. Wellness tips come from everywhere! Citations and links are provided for all tips. While being excellent for EHE, we want you to remember your own self-care. This month’s tips focus on the online meeting experience. Read on!
Learning Support Tip
The Parallel Chat in Online Meetings: Friend or Foe?
You’re running a class session and all the while, you notice the chat is quite lively—complete with link sharing, commentary about the main discussion, and laughter (via emoji, of course!). Are you annoyed, distracted, delighted, or unaffected by the chat conversation that’s happening simultaneously? Does it do more harm than good for learning and attending to the main presentation? Is this parallel chat a good or bad thing? What does the research say?
Well, I know MY experience with the parallel chat—both as an online presenter/instructor and meeting attendee—has been largely positive over my years as a fully online instructor and remote employee. I’ve discovered that learners who may not turn on their mic and speak are often more vocal in the chat. Also, they often share relatable resources and personal insights that enrich the presentation and activities for the class session. This is especially true for graduate students who are working professionals–they are a wealth of experience and the chat is where a lot of it is shared. Although my experience has been largely positive, I’m still curious about other perspectives.
In my curiosity, I conducted a quick Google Scholar search (query: “parallel chat” AND “online meeting”) and found only 13 entries in the results list, so the topic is relatively under-researched. One study (Sarkar et al., 2021) was conducted by Microsoft Research on Microsoft employees during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Overall, the study found that the use of parallel chat during a live, online MS Teams meeting was perceived overall as a “net positive” feature of online meetings. What’s interesting, but not surprising, is that an individual’s perception of the use of the parallel chat seemed to be influenced by many different factors, such as personal habits, meeting type, and group practices. They ended the article by suggesting ideas to help leverage the strengths and neutralize the weaknesses of its uses.
- Set expectations for uses of the chat prior to the start of the meeting.
- Mind the accessibility needs of your audience and adapt the uses of it to their needs.
- Advance uses of the chat that allow lesser-heard voices to enrich and to extend the topic of the meeting.
- Deter uses of the chat that distract from the topic of the main presentation.
- Keep the presenter in the loop of what’s going on in the chat (e.g., questions being asked, etc).
- Summarize key points or helpful information into the meeting notes to disseminate its contents.
Whether you find the parallel chat to be helpful or not, if you allow students to use the chat, consider trying some of these strategies for making it more effective. If you try some of these strategies, I’d love to hear about your experience. Drop me a line at stuckey.113@osu.edu.
-Dr. Tray
Sarkar et al., (2021). The promise and peril of parallel chat in video meetings for work. CHI EA ’21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2021 Article No.: 260 (1–8). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451793
Remote Work Wellness Tip
Dealing with Zoom Fatigue
Today is a work-from-home day and after your third online meeting, you start to feel your eyes aching, mind wondering, and legs growing numb. You start to wonder, “Why is it that I can attend meetings well into the afternoon before tiring while on campus, but I feel myself tapping out more quickly when attending online meetings?” You guessed it—you’re experiencing the relatively new phenomenon called “Zoom fatigue” or videoconferencing fatigue, a type of fatigue that reared its head during the widespread move to remote work/schooling during COVID pandemic. Very soon after moving to fully online teaching, I noticed how drained I would become after teaching for three and a half hours online with a half-hour break in between. When I taught in person, I would feel energized after teaching for two hours and thirty minutes and virtually skip back to my office! The difference was significant. Many people (including me!) already use Zoom and other video telecommunications apps to visit with family and friends in far-away locations and those of us who have moved to remote work spend even more time with faces in screens. The fatigue can become heavy and sometimes tough to understand and combat.
If you’re looking for tips to help, a quick Google search would reveal 495,000 results (WHEW!!! See how common it is!?), so I’d like to share something I’ve found helpful– a 2021 piece from Stanford News about research on causes and fixes for Zoom fatigue. One of the possible causes from the article mentions how being in front of a camera limits the usual mobility we have during phone meetings. We need to remain in one place to be seen and may also feel compelled to keep visible to show that we are truly engaged. The lack of ability to doodle, stand up and walk around periodically, or do other movement helps add to the fatigue we feel.
So, to combat this, I periodically turn off my camera and stand up and move around. My use of Bluetooth headphones allows me to keep listening as I move to refill coffee or grab water. Check out the Stanford News article for more tips to try during your next meeting-heavy work-from-home day. Also, check out the Bailenson’s publication in Technology, Mind, and Behavior upon which the Stanford News piece was based.
Bailenson, J. N. (2021). Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000030
Happy Telecommuting!
-Dr Tray
Thanks for reading this month’s Learning Support News. Check back next month for more!