Page 31 - Campus Technology, May/June 2020

ASU EDPLUS
By the Numbers
• 10 years of experience in online education • 45,000+ online students
• 2,500 online courses
• 175+ fully online degree programs
• 7,000+ online graduates
and spouses. They’re often working part- or full- time. And so the flexibility of an asynchronous schedule is something that’s really important to them. Having said that, the ability to incorporate Zoom, even for students who wish to work asyn- chronously, and to be able to provide office hours, meetups \[and\] chat rooms for the students — I think that’s going to be a real benefit to ASU Online students going forward.
CT: Many folks talk about getting to the point of Zoom fatigue. How can you use what has become an essential tool in ways that minimize that?
Regier: Seven or eight years ago we were testing products that offered the ability to do group work with video, similar to Google Hangouts — with \[small groups of\] people. And the bandwidth just wasn’t there. We tested probably half a dozen tools and used them very sporadically. Students would do synchronous audio group work; but the bandwidth just wasn’t there. And it’s only in the past two or three years and especially at universi- ties that Zoom became possible for 20 people
instead of four or five.
I think it works incredibly well for groups of up
to 20. Once you get beyond that, it’s a different environment. You kind of lose control of chat, things are coming at whoever is leading it pretty quickly. And so my view going forward is that you can do an incredible amount with Zoom. It’s a great tool. But it’s not a substitute for full-blown, well-constructed online courses. It is a tool in the quiver, the arsenal of tools, that intelligent instruc- tional designers could use going forward.
CT: What’s next for the faculty?
Regier: It’s not as though when you roll out \[tools\], faculty suddenly become confident and efficacious users of those tools. At the end of the day what’s interesting about digital delivery is that everything is capable of being recorded and everything is capable of being improved. We’re going to learn a whole lot about how to use them.
Right now there are no efficacy studies that I know of around these Zoom classrooms. Do they work as well as a face-to-face classroom? Or more probably
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