Luke Stein on Teaching with Teach
Resources
Link to razor webcam https://amzn.to/31QeKI2
Link to 922X webcam https://amzn.to/31OXvXO
Link to Academics are not content creators article https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/academics-arent-content-creators-and-its-regressive-make-them-so
Luke’s main social media:
Luke’s Teach from Home Tech Kit http://gear.lukestein.com
Link to his research page http://lukestein.com
Observation form- A Primer for New Teachers of Economics https://www.jstor.org/stable/23809654?seq=1
BIO
Luke Stein is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Babson College. He earned his PhD in Economics from Stanford University, and an AB in Applied Mathematics with a Citation in Japanese Language from Harvard University.
Prior to joining Babson, Dr. Stein taught finance and economics courses at the high school through PhD levels at Stanford University and Arizona State University. His commitment to students has been widely awarded, including with Stanford's Gores Award, the university's highest award for excellence in teaching. Dr. Stein is also a recognized leader in helping college faculty around the world implement technological solutions for effectively teaching from home.
His main research interests lie at the intersection of corporate finance and labor economics, including work on financial history, entrepreneurial finance, financial uncertainty, and the economics of discrimination. He has published peer-reviewed papers in the Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Corporate Finance, and Economic Journal.
Dr. Stein worked in New York and Tokyo as a consultant on corporate strategy and private equity due diligence with Bain & Company. He also served on the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team, and in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the New York City Department of Education.
Transcript of conversation
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, online, teaching, students, babson, research, conferences, content, class, learn, video, thinking, classroom, view, computer, world, webcam, microphone, audience, asynchronous
SPEAKERS
Luke Stein, Abdullah
Abdullah 00:00
All right. Well, I'm excited to have Dr. Luke Stein today on coffee with Dr. A. Luke, thank you for being here. I'm excited to learn more about your career. But I'm also interested in learning about your transition to online education. from Twitter, you've been an advocate for using tech effectively when teaching online. And I'm actually dying to know more about your setup and the what your students see from their standpoint. So today's conversation is just to know more about your tech views and how to transition effectively to this online teaching world. So, Luke, thank you for being here.
Luke Stein 00:36
It's really a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation. And you know, we've we've been, we've been having what feels like an ongoing conversation, on Twitter, on YouTube on on Instagram. I've been learning a lot from you. It's been fun to feel like this conversation started a few months ago, but that we get to pick it up in this in this format. So thanks. Yes,
Abdullah 01:00
I think we first started talking in or exchanging ideas. And in the summer when life kind of changed for all educators and sharing tips. And you've been a huge advocate for people that know that they need to do something differently with respect to their tech setup, but they don't know where to get started. So we'll tackle those tips. But before we get there, one thing that I really want to know about you, I try not to introduce people because I don't want to do well. I want to allow people to define who they are. So how do you tell the world who you are Luke?
Luke Stein 01:35
So I am a I am an economist. I'm a financial economist. You know, I it's not that it's not that I always defined myself by my job, but it's it's kind of an easy way to start. And so I teach now at Babson College, which Babson is is a is a really interesting school and a really unique one in at Babson for, you know almost a year and a half now on an I joined Babson from Arizona State University. So I moved from, you know, a large public research university in Arizona to Babson, which is is a smaller, largely undergraduate business focused college. And in some ways, what's really cool about the model at Babson and I think makes it, you know, such a great place for me, is it's a, it's a business school, but it's a business school that also has some kind of liberal arts college, on blood throwing, flowing through his veins. And part of that is just about the size of the school and, you know, the sort of the campus model, which is, you know, a largely residential, and largely undergraduate focused Business School. So I, I sort of came there from a very different place. And I'm a research economist. So my, my research work is sort of centered around the intersection between labor economics and corporate finance, on my training is not graduate school training is not in on in finance, I was trained in an economics department, and my PhD advisor, Nick Blum is a guy who has sort of an extremely diverse set of research interests and sort of places where he's done worked. And, and that was part of, you know, I would say, that rubbed off on me, it's also what, what sort of helped me match with him as a student advisor. And so, you know, my work sort of centers around that, that labor finance intersection, but also I have some work, which, you know, has a more purely economics feel to it, including some work in, in economic history. And then I have some work that, you know, that also has a more purely finance field, including, you know, a little bit of asset pricing research. So on the research side, you know, I sort of that's the Center for me is that that labor, corporate finance intersection, but it goes off in a couple of different directions, including, you know, a research agenda around racial discrimination, and stratification more generally. And then some sort of history interest. And then, and then some more traditional finance topics. But that's kind of my research life. It, it connects to, it connects to some of these more teaching oriented topics on in, in kind of an interesting way. So, at ASU, I would say, you know, I, I really was, you know, I was I was doing both, and I continue to do both, but in terms of the way I approached my teaching, um, I wasn't drawing as, as explicitly on my research background, in thinking about my teaching, and, you know, my research agenda wasn't you know, oriented towards or organized towards my teaching in any way. It was kind of a, you know, I did both. And I do think that, you know, at Babson I'm sort of excited to look for more ways. I've had more chances, for example, to talk about, you know, my research to students in the classroom in the last year or a year and a half than I had had before. And part of that is about the Transition to Babson for sure. But part of it is also really about opportunities that that the move to online. Yeah, cause heart. And so, you know, there are there are guest classes that I've been able to do or, or seminars that I've been able to do, which are research seminars, but research seminars that include a student audience, you know, that are not necessarily opportunities that would have made sense, either for me or for the people inviting me, in a world where, you know, you're talking about flights and hotel rooms, you know, for better or worse, our, our profession is not one that's necessarily organized around, you know, people flying across the country to talk to an introductory undergraduate class about, you know, a peer reviewed paper in a in a finance journal. And yet, like, that's the kind of stuff that I've been able to do in the last year, because, you know, I'm more I'm ready to talk about this work. I, you know, I love it, I'm excited about it. But when it's when it's a question of $0, and, you know, a few hours prep, and an hour or hour and a half on zoom, you know, it's, it's, there's a lot of greater opportunities that are available in that world than would have been available in a world where you sort of were asking people to take, you know, two days and a few $1,000 of institutional money to bring them into the room.
Abdullah 06:22
And that's a great segue to an article that I read today about, it was a request for conferences to go back to in person, because there's some conferences that are debating if they should be remain online, or have a component of it online, or go back 100% to in person when life gets back to normal, whatever that is. And I found myself torn by that because I know I've had more opportunities in the past year to attend conferences that I previously couldn't, financially couldn't afford them. We didn't, we don't have the research budgets at receptor that researchers tutions have. And then to timewise I mean, that teaching institution, my teaching load is three, three, so you can't get away from the classroom. And then, like you said, the the marginal cost of inviting somebody is much lower now. So I'm making these pop up appearances. So I'm torn. I don't and with respect to conferences, I missed the social aspect of conferences, but I'm able to attend more conferences and present at more conferences. So we're like that calculus, the trade off? I'm not sure where it is, I think,
Luke Stein 07:37
I think it's, I think it's a really good and really, really hard question. Like so many things about our jobs, you know, conferences are kind of a weird bundle. And, you know, that bundle partly exists because of just kind of historical accident. And partly, it exists because there's some cross subsidy. And so, you know, there's the goal of the conference, and the experience of the conference includes, you know, there's investment in there's consumption, and the people who are presenting work on the research side tend to be looking for feedback, but also just looking to promote the work and they're looking for the, you know, the credential of having where the certification of having made it on to the conference, even if the audience of the room is sometimes fairly small. And so sort of, you know, I think that that with the shift to, to kind of a, you know, a less travel more online world. It's not that, that it's not that that has necessarily gotten unbundled, but you know, but the bundling has, has just gotten very different. And so one of the things that I feel like I found, you know, with, with conference presentations, and attendance and, and travel this year, is, you know, that the attendance at a session when you're presenting a paper, you know, actually seems to me, like it's way up relative to what it's been in the past, I mean, the cost for people to attend, in a sense, the time cost is, is is much lower at the same time. There are there are a set of people were kind of, you know, the deal before might have been if they're going to a conference to present a paper, they're then going to sort of also be in the room for other papers and, and that, you know, that deal is a little bit out the window. Now, when, you know, it's easier for people to sort of not be there or, you know, people are at home and they're fitting a conference in among their other regular obligations anyway. And so, you know, I think that interacts in interesting ways with kind of, you know, institutional perceived prestige relationships and you probably have, you know, some substitution towards having larger audiences, but larger audiences that don't, you know, necessarily always include the same on people who have the same range of avant, you know, experience and titles and prestige and seniority in the profession and whatever, and I don't know what's better, and what's worse, but it's, it's definitely different. Um, it's definitely, you know, it's different. And I think it will be really, really interesting to see how things evolve, how things evolve, when you know, when travel becomes more of an option, again, people will really have to make decisions about what they want to attend in person and what they want to attend online and what they don't want to attend. Um, I think I think, I think there's one piece of this, which, in my view, you know, a lot, a lot of that was kind of complicated and ambiguous. In my view, there's one piece of this, which is sort of unambiguously good, which is, every single teacher, scholar, student, in our profession, broadly conceived, everyone now has sort of some level of comfort with the idea of doing online interaction, right? Everybody's been on zoom, or WebEx, people understand, even if they don't have kind of necessarily the words for it, you know, people understand the difference between synchronous and asynchronous, they have an intuitive understanding that there are pros and cons to those things. You know, I think, since everyone's been in the audience, you know, people have a much greater empathy for the degree to which an online presenter needs to demand attention. And, you know, the power of distraction. And so, I hope that, you know, it leads to a world where everybody is better on everybody's better as an online presenter as an online audience member, you know, now than they were a year ago, and everybody's even better six months, or 12 months from now. And then we're going to figure out how we use you know, how we use this, this new orientation and these new skills, and the new tech. But you know, but I love that. It's now okay to, you know, you can invite someone to give an online presentation. And they may say no, but they're not going to say no, because they think the idea of doing an online presentation is weird, or crazy or confusing. And I think that piece of it is is not going to go away. I think that's a knowledge that we now collectively have built up. And I don't think we're going to lose it.
Abdullah 12:33
I agree, I am interested to see how we harness this new innovation. I mean, it's been around but for us as educators, researchers, wasn't part of our day to day or even semester activities. So we'll see what happens. But, you know, same thing with respect to research, our teaching has totally changed. And you have, I mean, if anybody's watching this right now, they already noticed the difference with a with the camera quality, you invest a lot of time. One, why do you invest so much time in figuring out this online thing? And then I also want to know, what your advice or what are the common mistakes you see people making when they're transitioning to online? So these are very loaded questions go with?
Luke Stein 13:21
No, I love them. So so any, any question about why is, you know, a why question is a causal inference question and things have things have lots of causes. So
Abdullah 13:34
yeah, um, so I'm
Luke Stein 13:36
going to, I'm going to give at least kind of two explanations for why I am investing the way that I am on in trying to, to do what I would consider sort of high production values. And I want to be clear, you know, you, you and I, I know are very much on the same wavelength about this. But in my view, you can be, you know, you can be a good or a bad teacher with high or low production value. I think that these things are, you know, are they're separate, they're not orthogonal, but they're, they're separate. And so, you know, I try to be, you know, a good teacher, and I try to have good production values. And I think that I think they're not, you know, aiming for one helps me succeed at the other arm, but but they're different. So, so, let me let me give two sort of explanations for why because your question was why. So the first is is kind of a historical on personal history. So I and it has to do with with my move from ASU to Babson. So I, I had been on the faculty at ASU as I mentioned, I gave a research seminar at Babson which, which was great. I love giving research seminars, and I love invitations and I have family that that lives. You know, 10 minutes away from Babson campus, and I was already visiting family and had a contact with a now colleague Vera who said, hey, you're going to be in town, we'd love to have you by for lunch. And to give a talk. And you know that they say every presentation as a job talk, it turned out the lunch turned into a talk the talk to him into a job offer. That job offer was off cycle. You know, it wasn't through, it wasn't through a traditional job market process or timing. And because of sort of institutional needs, Babson made me this offer, which was so great. And I was so excited. I love the people. But this was in May of 2019. And they said, We need you to start this fall. And I said, I can't I can't start this. Well, I, um, I have two kids that are in school. And I've you know, I've been in preschool, I paid tuition, I have a partner who works a full time job and we have a house and we kind of were not ready to move in a few months. And the sort of the the solution to threading this needle because Babson couldn't sort of wait a year was for me to start teaching at Babson in January. So I taught in the fall at ASU and then I taught him to spring at Babson and for me to teach, starting in the spring at Babson online, only. So this was pretty COVID. But kind of in order to make my my move, work on the timing that they needed, and the timing that I needed, um, there was a disagreement that I could I could teach my first semester of bouncing fully online. And I, I was thrilled that they had accommodated me this way. And I said, I am going to just do my best to do a great job at this, like I don't, you know, they are making a special arrangement, a special accommodation to help me do this. And I want my colleagues to, you know, to see me do a great job, I want the administration to see me do a great job, I want my students to be thrilled. So I had been teaching face to face, you know, I felt you're always trying to do better. But I felt like I was doing well, teaching ASU and I had done well, I think teaching as a grad student, as well. And so I was like, I'm going to try to learn how to do a good job of this. And, you know, so I started from zero, this is kind of, you know, December 2019, January 2020. And I was trying to figure out, like, what's the right kind of webcam to get? What's the right kind of microphone to get? How am I going to share slides, but be able to write on them the way that I would like to in the classroom? and and you know, there are there are experts in this stuff. I mean, I am, I am not, I am not an expert. And I was trying to learn from experts. And some of those were instructional technology experts. But some of those were also people who were posting, you know, YouTube reviews of what's our favorite webcam, or what's our favorite microphone. And so I sort of said, I'm going to try to put this together and do it right. And so I not only had the experience of trying to learn to do a good job with this stuff, but I had the experience of trying to learn to do a good job, having not done it before wanting to really do it right. And say, Okay, I have like, six weeks to figure this out and get this stuff together and buy what I need and learn what I need and do it. And then a few weeks after I started my spring classes at Babson everybody else, was trying to figure out the same thing. And so I came to this from the perspective not of I'm a guy who really knows what I'm doing. But from the perspective of I'm a guy who just spent some time trying to quickly come up to speed and synthesize what I can learn from people who have been thinking about these issues in a deep way for a long time. And having concluded like, this is the camera to buy, and this is the microphone to buy. And this is the way to think about whatever, let me let me tell you what I've learned,
Abdullah 18:59
you had recently gotten through it. So it's easier to share your your struggles and what you've learned.
Luke Stein 19:05
Yes. And the other thing is that my experience trying to read and learn from the expert advice and consensus was that a lot of it was not like it. A lot of it was not put together in the way that I found as useful as I would have light. And I you know, I didn't I didn't I haven't read everything. I haven't talked to everyone. There's again, there's people who are many people who are deeply expert in these things, and have been thinking about them for an extremely long time. But my feeling as kind of an amateur consumer of advice was that, you know, there was a set of advice for people who were aspiring towards being, let's call them streamers, you know, largely It was kind of twitch focused. A lot of it was gaming focused. So there was a lot of thinking and advice about, you know how to maximize performance from a computer without having to spend 1000s of dollars on a GPU. But also, a lot of that was around trying to help people think about how to maximize earnings potential, and, you know, get get sponsorship on YouTube like, and that that wasn't, you know that that was a different set of, of goals. And there was also a lot of really good and really interesting advice from people who are coming from more of a research grounded instructional technology background. And those people are amazing. But I think a lot of what I at least was exposed to coming out of, of, you know, that area of expertise, was thinking about people who were basically offering advice for people who are basically thinking about how do I design technology intensive courses from scratch, in order to maximize learning. And that's great. But it's not what I was trying to do. Like, I viewed this as I'm going to be teaching for a semester online. And maybe I'll do some online teaching in the future. And I want to do a good job. But I'm going to try to figure out sort of online learning focused instructional design and reorient everything around that modality. I'm trying to figure out like, Where is the low hanging fruit? Yeah, where's the low hanging fruit? So that's, I realized I'm getting a long answer to this
Abdullah 21:29
isn't perfect, I appreciate it.
Luke Stein 21:31
So that was like, one whole thing was like, I want to, I want to do a good job. And I'm going to read about it. And I had read about it, and let me share some of what I've learned. The other part of it is that I am a little bit of a nerd, and I like music. And I used to play more music. And I, you know, I used to have a longer commute. And I listened to a lot of podcasts. And you know, I've occasionally gotten bit by hobbyist bugs and spend some time thinking about photography and spend some time as like a very low grade audio file, which is the best kind of audio file to be is, is liking quality, but not having the money to spend on expensive stuff. And so, you know, I had, I had developed a very amateur taste for, you know, photos and videos that were really well, audio that sounded good. And I knew from what I was hearing and seeing, I wasn't a student, right, it wasn't I wasn't taking online classes. But, you know, we moved to a world where people were doing more zoom meetings, more WebEx meetings, more Skype more, whatever. And, um, and I, you know, I was like this, this is terrible. Um, you know, sitting in a, sitting in an hour long faculty meeting, again, pre COVID, right, yeah, but I was I was distant from Arizona, and all my colleagues were on the ground in Wellesley, and sitting in an hour long faculty meeting where everybody's in the classroom. And I'm on my computer at home listening. And I was like, this is I, you can't, I can't engage with this easily for an hour. It just, it sort of it sounds bad, it the visual isn't good. And so, you know, it was really like, how, how can I try to give my students I'm not aiming for a first class experience, but like, I you know, second class would be okay. I just don't want them to feel third class having the online guy in Arizona, rather than the on the ground instructor.
Abdullah 23:48
It sounds like the motivation was a chip on your shoulder, making sure that hey, you know, I'm giving this opportunity and I want to prove that I am the right person for it. Right, which sometimes is a great motivation. But you took it a little bit further with with the with all the visuals. So what was the first thing that you invested in?
Luke Stein 24:12
Okay, so, the first thing I did was, I got a, you know, I got a decent webcam. Decent, it was a keel razor, it's about a $70 webcam. And, you know, it, it's kind of, you know, it's like the good webcam along with the Logitech. I think it's the C 900 series. It's like the good webcam that you you know, that I was reading about as a recommendation for you know, people who want to do audio conferencing, or whatever. Um, and I got kind of a, you know, a decent USB microphone. It was a USB condenser microphone and I, you know, I read about putting it on a boom arm so that I could get it close to my mouth and a boom arm is, is basically like this and the cheap ones are about $13. Great, let's get them right up close to your mouth. And so that that was where I started was with those few things. And I also, I already had like a decent work computer. But Babson has a very cool program, where they issue like a standard laptop to every faculty member, and also every student gets the same laptop. So I'm part of what Babson students sort of, you know, they pay tuition, of course, but everybody gets the same computer and it's owned by the school, the students basically borrow it or rent it. And that also provides a lot of efficiency around tech support and infrastructure and whatever. But it meant I had two computers, because I have my bachelor's in computer and my work computer. And I was like, Okay, well, you know, I've got one I can use for the calling. And I've got, I can use my Babson computer to do slides and annotation, and I've got this mic, and I've got the camera. And then things escalated, escalated. They escalated a little bit from there. But they actually so on, they haven't escalated as much as it perhaps looks like or hopefully looks. So okay, you know, I am I am doing most of this stuff out of pocket, you know, some of this is is reimbursed out of my research budget, but you know, I'm I am, you know, like I put a $50 lens on my camera. So I'm not using that webcam anymore, I have a standalone camera now and but, you know, I put a $50 lens on the camera, and I think it looks good. And I you know, I like the quality. But you know, it's it's kind of, you know, the, the good, the good lens was, you know, three or $400. And I sort of said, you know, I'm I'm, I mean for 50 bucks, but that's kind of, you know what I mean for for a lens, that's basically going to be my videography lens. And so, you know, one of the things I've been conscious of, as I've been giving more advice to people, which is through Twitter, and through some other stuff that I've, you know, tried to share and post online is, you know, I've gotten bitten by the gear acquisition syndrome bug a little bit, and I, you know, I, I like it, and I have fun with it. But you know, part of this is a hobby for me, and I, I don't, I want to be like I want to give people advice and help them and be a resource without trying to imply or suggest to anyone that they would need to go down this rabbit hole in anything like the way that I have. And that's part of the reason that I try really hard to just, you know, beat the drum about the small number of things that I think are really important on the tech side. So there's a ton that's really important on the pedagogy side. And that's, again, a place where I try to do well, but that's, you know, I'm not an expert there. But you know, I think for example, and we've talked about this, and I've posted about this many times, like I think like you know, a microphone is the one things that everybody needs. And it's really hard for me to understand. Well it's also hard for me to understand what people are saying through a crappy microphone but it's really hard for me to understand the the sort of resistance to spending a little bit of money and a little bit of tech household for somebody to sound decent when they're asking someone to listen to them for five or 15 or 60 or 90 minutes at a time.
Abdullah 28:55
Audio is the usually cheapest and easiest way to improve drastically the quality of your videos your communication and you know, sometimes it doesn't even take a microphone you could use your computer microphones to or phone microphone to to improve it. Just don't use the built in microphone because that picks up a lot of sound and a lot of vibrations. And then the next thing is is video but you know there's a lot of extremes with it with respect to video quality.
Luke Stein 29:31
Yeah so um, I mean I have you know I wound up I wound up in for you know and I have links to exactly what all this gear is that it's online on and really probably include with the with with the episode link but um, you know, I I'm in for kind of a you know, a $250 camera, which is a camera that was probably $400 when it was new but I bought it on when it was already discontinued so I'm you know, I I tend to try to buy a kind of cheap Good enough stuff. And you know, on video, I'm in for a $250 camera, and a, you know, a $50 lens. And then on this like $300 video switcher, which is called an ATM mini and it's, it's your recommendation that put me on, on today 10 Mini. And that's, that's, it's, you know, I would say that's like, that's the thing that appeals more to my, my hobbyist mentality, I really like it a lot. You know, I like that it lets me do things like video overlays. And, you know, I try to do when I'm doing stuff more for conferences, or, or, you know, external video meetings rather than just teaching classes, but, but, you know, I like being able to press buttons to do things like lower thirds, or, you know, other stuff that, that I can use this for. But that's, that's like a really, it's, it's, I almost don't even like to talk about that on Twitter or LinkedIn. Because I really like, you know, I realized that, you know, you add up those numbers, and you're at, you're at 600 bucks for the camera, and all of a sudden, you know, that's, that's an investment. And it's an investment of money, but it's also an investment, and there's a lot of cables, and there's a lot of outlets, and it just becomes complicated. Oh, how? Yeah, you know, we had, we talked, you mentioned earlier in this article on that Nick posted this morning about about kind of whether academics are content creators, and whether academics should be content creators. Um, and I, my view is that academics can be, and some should be content creators. Yes. And that the article, which we can also include a link to, which I think was was good and thought provoking. Um, you know, where I think it kind of overstated its case was, in the arguments that there was something antithetical to the idea of the university about, you know, chopping lectures up into bite sized pieces or aiming for high, you know, sort of YouTube quality on production standards on the video side. And I think that that is an important thing, I think we have to, you know, I think we have to change with the times. And I think, you know, I think what we're going to do, we should try to do a good job of,
Abdullah 32:16
you know,
Luke Stein 32:17
that said, like, I don't really, I don't really see myself as aiming to be a content creator, I think it's great that it's happening. I think it needs to happen. I actually wish more people would do it. Yeah. And so I, for example, you know, I have been recording, I've been recording, you know, pre work videos, to use in not exactly a flipped classroom model. But, you know, I, I've been trying to record more asynchronous recorded content for some of my classes this year. I would love to I, I would love to rely on more high quality content like that, that I hadn't recorded. Yeah, I, um, I think I have, you know, I have a comparative advantage in this relative to many people, but like, I'm not, you know, I'm not editing my videos, I'm not scripting them. I, you know, I don't have a teleprompter, I'm not like, you know, you go see what some of the high quality content looks like, you know, there's good stuff, really good stuff that's coming, come in a variety of places. But if you think about the MOOC developers, on if you think about something like Marginal Revolution University, um, if you think about some stuff that's come out of textbook publishers, although some of that is also very low quality. I'm like, I don't want to be doing that myself.
Abdullah 33:42
But you have some situation
Luke Stein 33:43
where you have to, and if I'm going to do it, like, if I'm going to record myself for an hour, and make that into for 15 minute videos, I'd rather use a good camera and look good. But I'm not aiming to I'm not aiming to do that at the standard of someone who really has to compete for attention. I think someone should, yeah, but I'm not sure I will try to compete for my students attention relative to all of the distraction that they have in their lives. But I am not trying to like I'm not posting my course videos on YouTube and trying to be, you know, the guy who's going to talk about how to calculate a net present value. I just, I just don't think that's my skill and my strength.
Abdullah 34:30
So So I have a couple of things to add here. And I'm going to take a little hot take over here might get crucified for it. But for from my standpoint, academia is no different than content creation. That's just what we're creating is a different. I mean, research is content creation, right? You're just it's a different model. It's a different audience. And then when it comes to teaching the issue that I have with the with the article, I understand that you know, not everybody He wants to be mainstream, but I don't think that's why we're in education. The issue that I had with the article that, you know, was shared today is it assumed that innovations and teaching is marginalizing the role of academia. Right. And, to me, that's one of the reasons that we are in the position we are in today is academia has been slow to take on some of these new innovations from industry. And I'll just share with you the reason why I have invested heavily in online content creation. It's because when I went to, you know, the pandemic hits, I'm on sabbatical when it hits. And I'm thinking about how do I teach a class online, fully synchronous or asynchronous, and I'm learning this language as we go. But the environment, the mainstream language is online education is not valuable. It's not going to do as good of a job as in person education. So we're already battling. It's kind of like your transition to Babson, you there was this assumption that, hey, I have to show that I'm bringing value. So I wanted to show that I was bringing value to the classroom, because this zoom lecture was not, you know, people didn't perceive it positively. And in my effort to find content out there, so I don't have to create my own content. One of the biggest issues that I saw and this is a diversity, inclusion and equity conversation is nobody that's creating economic content looks like Abdullah Al Bahrani, right? And in the world, where the market is thinking that teachers are not teaching, they're just curating content, and letting students learn by themselves, I felt like that would add to that conversation. So I felt the pressure to create my own content. And like you, I have hobbies around, you know, audio and video, and I said, if I'm gonna do it, let me try to do it. Right. And honestly, my, my motivation was YouTube content creators, because the thought process there is YouTube's competition to education. And if that's the case, why compete with it? Why not just belong in that environment? And if that's where my students are going, how can I create content or educational lessons that is in line with what they're already consuming? So we could look at it and say, Hey, we don't want to be that. But at the same time, the environment is changing, and how are we going to innovate, going to innovate, and there's been more reluctance to innovation. And you know, to go back to your statement about the adding pressure for faculty to buy all of this stuff, I'm very conscious about that as well, just because I have the hobby of, you know, the lights and the cameras. To do good online video content and classroom content, there has to be an investment. And what I would like to see is more investment from the administration standpoint, just like we have research budgets, or travel budgets, or teaching budgets, there has to be a budget allocated to taking up right and teaching people how to tech up and use that technology. So the pressure to create content is also have been has been a catalyst for me to create the content.
Luke Stein 38:29
I mean, I think that's a really, I think, I that's a really useful perspective for me to hear about. And I mean, everything you're saying resonates for me. Um, I think that there's, you know, so in my view, that the the role that, um, the role that kind of re usable asynchronous content plays, is actually very different from the role that on that sort of high quality technology intermediated synchronous interaction plays on and I think that, you know, there's a lot of overlap in terms of skills, there's a lot of overlap in terms of the tech that's involved. But I think that there is a, I think there's kind of, there should be a different level of individual and institutional investment and, and reward for those two things. And, you know, in my view is, is kind of, you know, the former this sort of reusable asynchronous content. Um, that is, it's not the same as kind of a 21st century version of the textbook. But that's, that's a little bit, you know, how I think about at least some of that content. It's
Abdullah 39:45
fair, you know, when
Luke Stein 39:45
I when I was in undergrad, you know, I did a, I had a lot of classes where it was, you know, before before our next class, you know, read and review chapter 23. And, you know, work through practice problems, one set Have a nine and 11. Um, and, you know that that model of using a written textbook as the source of, you know, asynchronous engagement, you know, doesn't, it doesn't seem to work, or at least it doesn't seem to work as well. And you know why? That question is kind of above the whole, you know, how much of that is, is about how much of that is about a difference in the types of distractions that are available, the sophistication of the student, as a consumer of high quality media, how much of that is about what's happened to the price of textbooks, and therefore, students willingness on to, to invest in, you know, in getting them and having, I think there's a lot of factors that go on. But, you know, there, there have always been, there have always been kind of a smaller number of people who write the textbooks and a large number of people who teach the textbooks. And I feel very comfortable with the idea that there could be a smaller number of people who generate and record, you know, the high quality asynchronous content, and there absolutely should be attention paid and commitment to making sure that those voices are diverse, that those voices are contemporary, that that content is engaging, and, you know, modern, but it's, it's, you know, I don't, I don't know that everyone should feel that they have to do that, themselves. I do think that in a world, and I think we're gonna live in this world for a while, I think that in a world where at least some significant part of the classroom experience involves, you know, a student who's online and, or an instructor who's online. And, and also, you know, this is also true for, you know, research presentations, and other types of presentations. But, you know, the presenter is, is on a computer and or some significant part of the audience is a computer is on a computer, you know, that, that everyone needs to do it. And so what we need to figure out collectively, is how can we ensure that, you know, that nobody is doing a bad job at that? I would love for everybody to do, you know, an awesome job of it.
Abdullah 42:25
Yeah,
Luke Stein 42:26
I think part of the way that we, you know, part of the way that we and and I say we now not just read the whole profession, but we You and I, and you know, the smaller set of people who are interested in working to execute on that goal. You know, I think there's kind of at least two different things we can do. One is, we can try to do a really excellent job of it ourselves, to try to serve as models for people of like, I don't mean to sound immodest, but like, yeah, this is what's possible, right? We're not going to be the best in the world, we're going to try to do a good enough job that it feels like people have models of, of what to learn from and what to inspire reports. But the other thing that I think we can do is, we can just try to help people get empathy, for how bad the experience is, when it's bad. so that people can try to go from bad to good, like, it's great to show people what great looks like. But I think we also have to show people a little bit more of what bad looks like, so that they can avoid it. And this is, this is like another hobby horse of mine. So I hope you will indulge my, I'm with you. One of my hobby horses is you know, audio quality. I just think it's it's crazy that people use some of the microphones they use, and they get really far away from them, and nobody can hear what they're saying anymore. And then they get closer and you can hear them again. And it's like, come on. Um, another one of my hobby horses is about what we in the academy do around giving people feedback on their teaching. Yeah. And I, I I think it's a scandal. I think it's, I think it's absolutely scandals. I ran a poll on Twitter a couple of months ago. Now super informal, like, I'm not this isn't for science. This is just for curiosity. So So I did a poll and I asked people, how often how many times since you started teaching online, has anyone who's not one of your students observed your plants, like giving, you know, giving you any feedback as an observer on your class. And, you know, I think I said, you know, two or more times, one time, you know, zero and I would like someone to do it or zero and I would not like someone to do And, you know, the the modal answer was, you know, zero and I don't want anyone to do it. It is I think it's I think it's a scandal, people we have been teaching online for a year. And it is it is literally it is a 30 minute ask to have a colleague, spend 15 minutes visiting one of your online classes. And then 15 minutes talking with you about it later, like, what was good, what are they not like? The the degree to which people's, you know, people are not seeing what the student experience looks like, because they're not observing others classes. And the degree to which people are not getting feedback on what the experience of being a student in their class is like, yep, to me, is an absolute scandal. And so, you know, what I would say to your audience, on and unfortunately, your audience is, you know, is almost certainly not the people to hear this. Um, but what, you know, my, my ask for every department chair, you know, would be set up a non evaluative feedback system, where you ask every faculty member in your department to spend 30 minutes or 45 minutes or 60 minutes, observing two or three or four classes online, in your department, and then spends 30 or 45 or 60 minutes, giving some feedback to the instructor of that class, you can even kind of do this yourself, if you watch the video recordings of your own class. I didn't pull it, I am willing to bet. I am willing to bet that, you know, 10%, or less of college faculty members have watched a full you no class recording of their own class. I mean, nobody, nobody does it.
Abdullah 47:14
I've learned a lot about myself, just editing my videos, just tendencies and times you think you're clear, but you're like, what did I just say? It's not clear that the one thing that I will do is I'll link to a teaching evaluation or colleague evaluation form that I've used in the past. And I like, for so if anybody's interested, they could take a look at it.
Luke Stein 47:40
And we actually say, like, we we have done this in my department at Babson, um, my, you know, my department has organized it, it is non evaluative. Yes, but he's basically, you know, he, he's helped create a system where, you know, anyone who wants to have someone come and observe their class, and then give them feedback. This is specifically, you know, online teaching. And, you know, I've done it, and it's, it's great, like, it's, you, you learn, you learn from having someone in your class and talk with you about it, you probably learn even more from visiting someone else's class, because you get to see a little bit about what that student experience is like. And we think that we have some idea around, you know, because we're all in faculty meetings, or we're all in other kinds of meetings and whatever. But, you know, to kind of really see what it's like to be a student in one of these classes, one of these online classes. It's, it's a, it's a real learning experience. Yeah, um,
Abdullah 48:47
one of my goals was to learn more about what your students observed from your classroom, but we've already hit the plus a 16 minute experience, we would have to probably redo this with, with, you know, with another intention, but I really do appreciate your time. This was a lot of fun.
Luke Stein 49:04
I loved I loved this conversation, and I, I apologize. Um, I apologize if I was kind of went on too long about something. So we didn't get to talk about everything else.
Abdullah 49:15
No, no, not at all. This is this is exactly what this my intentions are with this show or episodes, is to amplify the work that's being done across the country across institutions that I find interesting, but I think other people need to hear so I really appreciate your time, your feedback, and yeah, send over any links that you have, we'll put it to in the description, as
Luke Stein 49:39
I absolutely will. And, um, and thank you for thank you for organizing this today. But, um, but you know, but more than that, um, I've really learned a lot and enjoyed, you know, getting to learn from the variety of different things that that you're doing. And so that includes this video series, but you know, in case not everyone in audience knows, Abdullah is not only running this coffee with Docker, a video series and other video content on his YouTube page on but also has a, you know, a complimentary online presence in in all their social channels and on and I've had fun seeing what you're doing on Instagram stories and seeing what of course you're doing on Twitter, which is where we initially connected. You know, we talked earlier about, you know about scholars, teachers, researchers as kind of content creators. And I think that was a useful in a rich discussion. But I think there's also, you know, there's also a way in which part of what, what some of us are trying to do is to kind of build on to build a brand, frankly, and you I think there's probably some people in our profession who might kind of feel a little bit skeeved out by the idea that that a professor might try to build a brand around around what I don't know, around our teaching around our online presence to run our research on, but I actually think that it's some, you know, I think it's really, really valuable. And I, I've learned a lot from you about seeing, you know, how you're doing that on cancer, thank you and to anyone in the audience who hasn't sort of, I don't want to sound like I'm showing your social media channels, because it's not that I think you need more followers to have more followers. But I think that there, there is a lot, um, for a lot of us to learn about, you know, how to more effectively communicate and market the things that we're doing anyway. And given we're already doing a lot of that stuff anyway, marketing, it may kind of be low hanging fruit and helping it find the right the right audience. So thank you.
Abdullah 51:41
Thank you. I appreciate that. And just to summarize that my views are that we're all creating research, we have something that we're passionate about how do we reach as many people with what we're passionate about and influence, you know, their thoughts or their views or their research? So, with that said, Luke, thank you so much for being here, and I'll see you on Twitter.
Luke Stein 52:05
You will thank you again.
