Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast, Season Three, Episode Nine: dealing with overwhelm and ending your semester.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech podcast. I am Tim Van Norman, the instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So, since the last time we recorded I traveled about 5000 miles. What’s new for you, Brent.

Brent Warner
Yeah, 5000 miles. That’s pretty great. You know, how was the trip?

Tim Van Norman
It was good. We drove lots of driving. I had said that we would be driving straight through so yes, we drove my son and I drove straight through from here in Aliso Viejo, California to Nashville, Tennessee. 5000 miles, and we took two hours off the road because of rain. It got so bad that we couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. I didn’t feel safe driving anymore in that so you parked or something? No, we did not do the bridge. We just stopped at a gas station and got gas and just both of us laid down to sleep for a couple hours set an alarm for two hours later and and stuff.

Brent Warner
So true road tripping.

Tim Van Norman
Yep, driving, it was a good drive a long drive and glad to be home. Good. But yeah, so you do anything fun for Thanksgiving, or?

Brent Warner
I had some family time with for Thanksgiving. So that was good. Today is a perhaps a landmark day, which is that I picked up my first prescription glasses. So I am I am now on the team, too.

Tim Van Norman
Oh man, you didn’t realize that that is a cliff. Once you go over you probably can’t go back.

Brent Warner
Yeah, no, but I will say like, so they’re – my eyes are for distance, right. So. So it’s not reading, but it’s for like, you know, driving or maybe watching TV or something like that. But yeah, I did certainly notice that the signs were a lot clearer than I had expected when I started driving, because I picked them up just at kind of at dusk, right? And so it’s just starting to get dark and the lights are coming on. And I’m like, Oh, I can see everything here. It’s like a magical world. So here I am. In my 40s

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to that world. Yeah. I did that a lot earlier than 40. So,

Brent Warner
Yeah, no, I’ve been my eyes like overall have been pretty good. So I shouldn’t complain too much about it. And, you know, even the optometrist said, Oh, that’s not too bad. Like, you know, you’re getting to the age where your glasses are normal, but it wasn’t as as horrible as it could have been so.

Tim Van Norman
So yeah. Congratulations.

Brent Warner
You know, I look more professorial, I think when I get the glasses on, so that’s nice. There you go. There we go. Let’s jump into it. And we’ve got a couple things to talk about. Yep. All right. So Tim, we kind of had a little pre discussion, and we were talking about a few different things. But I think we decided this topics fairly important. And it’s not exactly tech, but it’s a tech adjacent conversation, which is this semester, a lot of teachers are just, and students and everybody are just really dealing with overwhelm. And I think we’ve seen this before, like, we’ve seen it in this a lot in COVID. And, and people have kind of dealt with things in different different ways. But I feel, to me, this is the this semester is the most build up, at least at our school or, you know, with my experiences a lot of lot of overwhelmed teachers, a lot of kind of people who are, you know, taking deep breaths these days.

Tim Van Norman
That’s true. And a lot of students who are in that same boat, there’s there is kind of a chicken and egg type of concept, which came first the chicken or the egg, and, you know, are the teachers getting overwhelmed, it’s causing the students to be or the students getting overwhelmed. It’s causing the teachers to be I don’t know the answer to that. Not going to try to go there. But definitely seeing all all over the place. And I think part of it is actually that we many people expected that Oh, when I can get back in the classroom, all of the error issues and problems I had online are going to go away? And they’re not? Oh, weird, for some reason, you know, but and I think, by the way, I think that was both teachers and students that felt the moment I get back face to face, life is going to be perfect. Right. And, you know, I remember when I was at the University, life wasn’t perfect. So we didn’t have online. So, yeah, but there’s a lot of different parts to this. And one right now, especially, I think, is midterms grading anticipation of the end of the semester, it’s become a lot of things. For a lot of people, it’s become a big hurdle. Yeah, or it feels like it. This is the time when the projects that you’ve been working on all semester start getting handed in. And now, as a teacher, you’re looking at having to grade something that has taken the students all semester to work on. The students are now writing that five and 10 page essay, that, that they’ve known all semester, but now all of a sudden, it’s here. Most midterms, for us in the anyway have been completed, some of them as of last week, but it’s, you’ve just finished it midterms. And you got three weeks left, for us anyway, IVC, three weeks left of the semester. Now, what are you going to do? And then it’s the big one, right, the big test, the big, that type of thing.

Brent Warner
And I think for a lot of the teachers and students, right? It’s like, okay, you know, different people have different schedules for how their classes are working. But regardless, as we’re stepping into finals, a lot of things start kind of, you know, piling up, and maybe we have, oh, I didn’t quite get to that paper yet, but I’ll get to it next week, I need my weekend off, I need my you know, like these things where we’re trying to be kind of kind to ourselves, but it’s also snowballing in the fact that, like, we’re falling behind with grading, or, you know, we’re not necessarily doing as good of a job of reaching out to our students to do checks on them. And, you know, all of these types of things that are, you know, they, they just build up quite a bit. And so I think there’s a lot of teachers out there who may be feeling stressed, I certainly am feeling it. But also, you know, I think I’m in a lucky position where I have, you know, great colleagues that I can talk to, and kind of deal with some of those things. I know that some of the faculty members don’t necessarily feel they have other people to talk to, or, you know, they’re adjuncts around, you know, all around the state and all around the country who are just driving in or logging on and doing their work and then logging off and not, you know, they have no communication and No, no one to sympathize with them. And so part of this was just to say, like, to anybody listening, hey, we’re struggling to like, you’re not, you’re not alone. There are definitely lots of teachers who are kind of dealing with some of these things. So we just thought we might cover kind of how we’re feeling. And you know, from my perspective, as a teacher, Tim, from your perspective, as instructional technologists, and interacting with other teachers, and all those types of things, I thought, you know, this is a little bit less formal and structured than we normally talk about things. But I do think it’s an important conversation for people to at least listen in on and kind of recognize.

Tim Van Norman
And also, we want to give a couple of ideas on how to deal with it. Things like you just mentioned, Brent, communicating to your students who might be struggling. There’s things in Canvas that you can send out a message and say to anybody who is less than a C, in your class, hey, you seem to be struggling, contact me show up for my office hours. Let me know what’s going on. How can I help anything like that will help you and your students. So you might find out some interesting stories that are going on and stuff like that, but also, professional development. We, this is the time of year as you and I talked about conferences start coming up. Over break sometimes there’s a lot of different things that are happening, that training sessions and stuff like that. Now might be the time to do the professional development. If that’s what energizes you energizes you, but it also might be the time not to

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah, for sure. For me, like there’s these online conferences and these webinars and all these great things that are being offered and I think it’s all well meaning and I’m, I’m involved with some of these organizations that are offering these things. But at the same time, I’m like, personally, I am not looking to log in to an online conference right now. And I am not looking to jump into a webinar. So, you know, Tim, I know you’ve got your thing coming up kind of over the end of the semester, and starting in the beginning of next semester. And like, for me, I’d be like, Oh, if I was in person, for sure, like, I’d love to be, you know, around people and doing those things. And so I think your setup is great, where people have the option, I think that’s how you’ve kind of got things going on. But, but again, this is not to spread this to anybody else. But my, my thing right now, is like, I need to either be with people in person or not be on, you know, watching a screen and watching a presentation again. And so I think it’s okay to kind of step out of that too. And just say, hey, you know, PD is not what I’m looking for, or, you know, like, like you said, hey, it might be the energizer thing. But it might also be like a thing that a lot of people feel like, Hey, I’m responsible for this. But it’s okay to step away from that and have your break. And so I would, I would point that out. So for as far as PD goes, you know, give yourself your own Christmas gift and decide how you want it. The other one, though, is going back to what you were talking about with your students. One thing that I’ve really liked, and I like my class a lot right now, this semester. And so we’ve been on pronto, and I don’t use it all the time. But I do communicate with my class on pronto with a little bit informal stuff. And so he sent like, you know, here’s a little Thanksgiving dinner picture or something like that. And then some of my students sent their own pictures back of like, what they had cooked. And so it’s just nice to see the human side of them, like, Oh, this is what we’re working on. This is what we’re doing. It’s not worried about class, it’s not worried about like those, you know, all the pressures of, you know, assignments and those types of things. But it’s just a way to kind of do a human touch point. And so, if you have some sort of, that’s why I really like pronto, is because, for me, I don’t set it up as like, Oh, here’s how I’m going to be telling you how to do all your assignments. And you know, it’s another, it’s another school thing. It’s more like, No, we are all people we’re all here trying to learn. But we’re also, you know, hopefully having a friendly relationship with each other. And so I’ve been using that as kind of a community builder, I guess in that way.

Tim Van Norman
It’s a great idea. And, and that’s part of what we’re talking about here getting some of those ideas, because I yeah, there’s a lot of people feeling overwhelmed. Student engagement, as I heard from somebody today that they had contacted their students, and somebody responded, I’m getting a See, that’s what I want. And to that, that particular teacher, they were listening to that going, I’ve never heard that from a student, you know, in person in even online, they, I was expecting that you’re going to want to get an A or a B, you’re not just going to settle for a C now for some students to see is not settling. But it sounded like in this particular case, they felt that that student was and you know what, sometimes you have to give your students permission to just get the grade that they’re going to get accepted that they’re the students not going to get a specific grade on an assignment. I heard from a student today that you know what, I’m not going to get those points. I’ve just not, it’s not worth it to me to do that. Yeah, well, that’s the student making the decision to get the grade as as an instructor, for me as a, you know, as a helper trying to help students do better. I feel like that’s like a knife to the heart. But the reality is, sometimes that’s what the student needs right now. Yeah.

Brent Warner
And we can’t really control what the students are doing, right, like, as much as we want to, especially like compassionate teachers who really want to support their students or want to kind of get things going on. I you know, I’ve had students who were doing well in class, and they just dropped this, like, in within the last two weeks, right? They just stopped showing up. And it’s like, you’re almost done. You’re like at the finish line in your you’re nearly done here. And they’re just like, sorry, I’m done. Like I you know, like, they’re polite. You know, I hope it’s not about me, of course, but it’s but there’s so many factors outside going on. You know, sometimes you get a little bit of insight to that from your students and a lot of the times you won’t and so you kind of have to just be willing to say like, Okay, I did my part I’m I’m still there if you need help in the future, but but even even here at the very end like I you know, I’m seeing this Things where students are stopping their work or dropping out of classes or, you know, just failing and like, you know, showing up to class but not participating at all, like, they’re just kind of there in, in person, but not, not in spirit, I guess if that’s the right way to say it. So there’s a lot of these issues. And I think that, you know, there’s also a concern for me that with like, part time faculties and adjuncts, and there’s like, then they will think that somehow that’s a failure on their part, and that they will be judged poorly by their departments or anything like that. And I can’t speak for every department, I can’t speak for every, you know, everyone, but, but I certainly just want to reassure people that, like, there are amazing teachers that are having struggles, and there are, you know, there are teachers who have always done really, really well, and they’re, you know, they’re not seeing the success that they’ve seen in the past. And so, I, and that includes me, too. And so, you know, we have to be willing to accept that and kind of say, Hey, I can’t win every time. And these are, these are not normal times, still, they’re not present unprecedented in a lot of ways. And I think a lot of it is like, hopefully, and Tim, I don’t know, if you feel the same way, but hopefully, it’s also part of it is like, light at the end of the tunnel. And we’re like, oh, maybe I can get out of this. But like, it’s so you know, like, when you’re running that race, and you’re like, Oh, there’s the end of this, like, it gets so much harder, when you can see that. Maybe you can see that end there, too. And so, so yeah, there’s just I’m just gonna give a collective sigh for anyone who needs that. So.

Tim Van Norman
And also understand that this is still the time when you may be having technical issues, you might have had technical issues all semester, and you’re just done. Ask for help. We get people all the time, who it’s been six weeks, and I just can’t do such and such. And you go, Oh, I wish you had asked me before because you know, when you click on the thing to the right, just click on the one to the left, you know, and sometimes it’s that easy, but you’re so overwhelmed. Ask for help. Because there are people like me, who are out here ready, willing, and able to help. But we just don’t know, you know, if I knew what your problem was going to be, I’d answer before it was a problem. But I can’t. So deal with that overwhelm, ask for help. Understand, and you’re not alone. And, you know, communicating with your fellow, the fellow teachers, students, the people around you, I think that that’s going to be a really good way to deal with what is going on right now. And frankly, look forward to that future.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. So that light is coming.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely.

Brent Warner
Alright, so Tim, I got a zippy tip, which is, sometimes if you’re in Outlook, and you’re typing in someone’s email address, and then you get like two or three of there’s like, maybe you have their Gmail address, and you’re trying only to send to their school address. Or maybe this one happened to me where I accidentally typed in a wrong email address one time, and I sent it and it bounced back to me. But now it always brings up that wrong email address that I had. Or even, you know, someone gets married, and they change their name or whatever else is going on. So there’s lots of reasons why a name and an email address might change in a system. But Outlook doesn’t, you know, it just kind of keeps on popping up with that old one. And so pretty simple little trick here, which is when you type that up, and you see the wrong email address next to it, there’s a little X that shows up and when you click on that x, then it will stop remembering it for the future. And it’ll it’ll clear that out for you. So I spent a long time with like, Oh, God, this email keeps coming up. It’s like, which one is the right one for this person. And so now I learned that you can just click on that little X next to the wrong one one time, and it will only remember the correct one.

Tim Van Norman
Excellent. So back in season one, we talked about end of semester tips, and was interesting as we were looking at, okay, what do we want to talk about today? This came up and well, when is the last time we talked about it, but there’s a lot of really neat things to just remember as you’re ending the semester. Yeah. And so we thought we’d go over a number of them and kind of a hopefully a little lighter end to the to this podcast in the beginning part

Brent Warner
was Well, I think also, we want to point out that like, if you’re feeling that overwhelmed, maybe this list of things can help you just to like, Hey, I don’t have to remember it all, you can go check the show notes. And you can have a little checklist there for yourself. So you don’t have to kind of how, because Tim, for me, and we talked about this pre show, when I do something every week, I’m like, Cool. I remember how to do it when I do it once a semester, I’m like, what are all my steps? What are all? Like? How do I get through this one more time, and it kind of adds up time and effort. And it kind of is like I, you know, and you’re so ready to be done. So I think like, I think just running back through some of these ideas and adding a little bit on what we talked about a couple of years ago. I hope it’s useful for people. So let’s jump into some of these.

Tim Van Norman
So here’s the first one that you can actually forget. And that is you have no need to unpublish your course. And by the way, please do not conclude your course. So in other words, forget to unpublish because there’s no need for it. Basically, Canvas handles that for you. In a little bit, we’ll talk about some things that happen because of it. But if you just simply let your course be at the end of the semester, you’re done. No need to unpublish it or specially don’t conclude the course. So,

Brent Warner
next one was show your students how to use the what if grades. Now, we are, you know getting towards the end of the semester. But if you have a final for example, with worth a lot of points, they end it’s already kind of up there and available for them to see the value of it, they can go into the what if section in their Gradebook, type in their potential grade and see what that might give them as a final possible grade. Right? So a good way for them to kind of get a sense of where they need to be in order to to achieve their goal for the class.

Tim Van Norman
Exactly. So back to one of the things you said before, remember to ask for help on those things you only do one time a semester. Don’t assume that well, I’ve done it three times, I should remember it, maybe. But you’ve done it three times over the course of three years. Give yourself a little grace, ask for help. And typically, they’ll say, Oh, if you click on the Grade tab, and you’ll go Oh, yeah, that’s right. I remember. Right. Okay. But sometimes it just takes that little help to get you through that. Remembering to ask for the little things.

Brent Warner
Yeah. So next one is paying attention to your emails, it is very easy to let the emails slip at this time, but there’s, you know, you’ll get a handful of really key ones that will say like, Hey, this is how and when you need to submit your grades by this is how you’re, you know, this is what, uh, you know, if your school has excused withdrawals or something like that, and you’re like, I can’t remember what the rules for that are, what do I need to do. And it’s almost definitely in your email from someone who is, you know, making sure that you know, these options are available and a reminder, so we always kind of get reminders at the end of the semester, and they’re pretty timely. So you know, they’ll usually give you a couple weeks ahead of time to make sure you’re reminded. So keep an eye on those and maybe save a few where they’re easy to access, you can pin them or double check them quickly.

Tim Van Norman
So in your course one of those things that you might only do once a semester, under settings in Canvas, you have the ability to change the date, the end date for your course. So definitely, if you want your students to have extra time to see your course, extra time to submit assignments, whatever it is, make the change in there and make sure you check the box for making students only able to access during those dates. There’s a couple of different boxes there. But this is something that is easy to change. And it puts you in control. When you do that. Remember 12am is midnight, the night before it’s 1159 the night before plus one minute. It’s not noon, and that’s one of the biggest mistakes that I get is somebody will put oh, I want everything due at 12 at midnight or at noon, and so they put in 12am so do check that out. But it’s that’s just Canvas will warn you by the way if you do that, but you can change that date. It’s kind of a nice feature to know about.

Brent Warner
So this one I do remember specifically talking about it a couple of years ago Tim which is don’t wait for submitting your final grades like this especially The winter grades or the fall semester grades were at our school were given like a weirdly long amount of time to submit them, it’ll be like, you know, kind of like the first or second week of January or something like that I brought the exact time is, but it’s like, okay, so I don’t have to think about it all during, you know, any of the holidays, that whatever I’m celebrating, and all this time off, and Christmas, and New Year’s and, you know, all of those types of things that are going on, do it before trying to get it done inside, you know, like, on the last day of class or within or like, give it or just set aside the one day after finals and just crush everything, if you can, because getting that off of your plate, like, from personal experience, it just hangs over your entire vacation time. If you’re if you know, like, Oh, I’ve got to make the time to go and finish these things. And then you rushed it on the last day. And you’re like, it was a few hours of work to get everything finalized and cleaned up. But like, I let those few hours stretch over two or three weeks, and it kind of destroyed my vacation. So so now I try to be pretty good about getting these in as early as possible. And this semester, I’m hoping to actually be ready to submit on the day or the day after the end of the semester.

Tim Van Norman
We will remember that, especially at this time, there may be a date did you cannot submit before. So that that has become an issue at the end of other semesters in the past. So just be aware of. And I’ve had I’ve had calls saying Hey, how come I can’t submit my grades and I find the email going back to your comment before on emails when you can do things. I found the email that says oh yeah, you got to wait another day. So definitely pay attention to those when you’re submitting the grades. One more thing, related to that, not necessarily grades, but you’re done with the class, remove it from your dashboard and canvas. You can go to the top of the core of that, that card, click on the three dots and unfavored it and it goes off of your dashboard. And now you have a cleaner dashboard for your next semester. Things like that. Just make it so you’re not hanging on to old stuff too long. Yeah, and it’s a really nice way to do

Brent Warner
that. And I’m going to tie this to the next one as well. 10, which is copy your course from one semester to the next. I’ve already started doing that for my spring semester course. And like now I’m like, okay, cool. Like, I now I’m also not that worried about my first week back, like after the end of the semester, because I’m like, Okay, I’ve kind of already got like some of my setup going on, I again, less stuff to worry about when I stepped back into the classes in the spring semester. So I’m, my goal is to truly enjoy my time off for this with this winter semester. So copy that stuff over, you know, again, again, just give yourself a couple hours look through it kind of tidy up a bit. You don’t have to have your entire semester necessarily ready. But if you have your first couple of weeks, and you’re ready to go, like you’re gonna be a much happier camper, you know, jumping into the spring semester,

Tim Van Norman
exactly. As you’re closing off your current course, export your grades to an Excel spreadsheet. A lot. I know a lot of faculty like to just have a copy of their grades available. Should anything happen? Should they ever have a question? It’s really simple. You literally up to the upper left, click on Gradebook, export it done, and it saves it. And you have that if you make a change, you can do it again. Just a simple thing for you to just save. So

Brent Warner
yeah. And then, as we said, you know, bringing stuff over into the next semester. The idea of creating a week zero module for your for your next semester two is a good time to kind of remember or maybe even ask students that are in your class this semester, like hey, what worked for you what didn’t work for you, you could do a little survey, you could ask them what they would have preferred or what would have been more helpful to them. And maybe you can use those as a way to guide and to build some week zero stuff. Maybe their expectations may be there. You know, some brief tutorials, whatever it is, you can start putting some of those things into your week zero module so students can be prepared for the class.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And kind of part of one of the things that we talked about in the first segment here, look into professional development over break. If that’s something that you enjoy, look into something that is interesting to you. Take your mind off of you being the instructor and let let somebody else talk to you, if that is what would work for you.

Brent Warner
And Tim, I’m going to add to that too. Maybe like a personal development. Remember a long time ago, we talked about like, Hey, I’m going to jump on a Coursera. Or I’m going to go do a, you know, a LinkedIn, LinkedIn learners or something like that, right? And so it doesn’t necessarily have to be a teaching related thing, right? You can go, hey, I want to go, I don’t know learn how to play the harmonica, or whatever it is, it’s gonna bring you some pleasure. And that would be a wise investment of your time, I think.

Tim Van Norman
And the last one here, Brent, I’m gonna leave that one for you.

Brent Warner
Take a break! Get off, take a break. Relax, enjoy yourself. You deserve it. I promise you from me to you, I give you permission to take a break.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about dealing with overwhelm, and ending your semester. For more information about this show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you will find our podcast and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts. Of course if you have ideas for future shows, there’s a link over there where you can give us some of your topic ideas.

Tim Van Norman
For everyone at IVC. That’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC tech support at extension 5696 or by emailing IVC tech@ivc.edu. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me Tim Van Norman AT tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
If you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram at Brent G Warner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim VanNorman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner. And we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Have a good one, everybody