Abstract
In this article, the author describes the use of a storytelling approach in a learning design with significant asynchronous elements. This approach was introduced in an upper-level international trade course with close to 200 students in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As most live “lectures” took place online and were subject to disruption due to Internet issues, the bulk of the content delivery was asynchronous, with the storytelling approach using “Sways” to address some of the common issues about engagement with asynchronous learning elements. The grade distribution and student feedback indicated that this approach was effective in achieving the stated learning goals. Finally, the author discusses how to adapt this approach to courses at other levels.
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, universities around the world scrambled to move their education online almost overnight, something that was possible only due to a super-human effort on the part of instructors and other staff to both produce appropriate material and activities and to support the use of these from a technological and pedagogic point of view. I describe the use of asynchronous learning as a core part of an “adaptable” education model, supplemented by synchronous activities. This was initially a response to the emergency change required in the teaching and learning model, but it can clearly be a way to make our education models more resilient to such shocks in the future. In particular, while there is a high upfront cost to this kind of model of teaching, marginal costs are relatively low so that if the next shock to the education system is another aggregate one or more idiosyncratic ones with the instructor or student falling ill or having other constraints, the disruption to learning is minimized.
The particular asynchronous innovation described in this article involves storytelling as a way to teach an upper-year undergraduate international trade course. Much of the content delivery in this approach is asynchronous, with the live sessions being used for discussion, clarifications, and applications of the asynchronous content. This model is, in essence, a flipped classroom (Wozny, Balser, and Ives Citation2018), with the main difference from most flipped formats being in the design and delivery of the preparatory materials students were given before the live session. Most flipped classes receive a recorded lecture or a set of readings to go through ahead of the flipped session—the key contribution of my approach is in terms of the design of these preparatory materials. In this course, instead of a traditional reading list, a narrative was constructed for each week’s learning with readings from the textbook and journal articles, publicly available videos and podcasts, and short videos made by the instructor where nothing suitable was readily available. Sway, Microsoft’s storytelling app, was used to do this, embedding these multimedia resources within a commentary on each topic written by the instructor. The bulk of the content of the course was delivered through this storytelling format, which freed up time during the weekly live sessions to engage in active learning. Rather than being traditional lectures mostly focused on delivering content, these sessions involved a question-and-answer section to clarify the content from Sway and exercises designed for students to extend this content and apply it to real-life questions.
The response to the pandemic—Focusing on asynchronous learning
The storytelling innovation was introduced in an optional undergraduate course on international trade. This course had certain challenges, which meant that there was a significant amount of innovative learning design, particularly involving technology used even before the pandemic. Apart from being an upper-year course and, therefore, quite technical in content, it has always been a relatively large course (between 150 and 200 students each year). Various innovations such as online assessment, in-class “clicker”-type questions and answers, and significant amounts of content on video were already used in this course, and therefore the introduction of the storytelling innovation was a natural next step in response to the pandemic.
Institutional context and the pre-pandemic learning design
The university where this innovation was introduced is a large research-focused one in central London, with nearly 45,000 students, about half of whom are undergraduates. When students apply for a university place in England, they do so for a particular degree programme. So unlike in the United States system, students choose their majors before they start university. The economics undergraduate cohort at this university is just under 300 students per year, with more than half of the student body being from outside the United Kingdom. The undergraduate degree is usually three years long, with students taking required microeconomics, macroeconomics, mathematics, statistics, and econometrics in their first two years and an assortment of field courses in their final year. The final year also has a “research-based” (Carnell and Fung Citation2017) requirement where students have to take a minimum number of courses involving independent research. The course discussed here satisfies this requirement via an empirical research project for assessment.
In terms of content, the course in question is a fairly standard international trade course (the main texts are by Krugman and Obstfeld, and by Feenstra), with the prerequisites being intermediate microeconomics and introductory statistics. About two-thirds of the 150 or so students enrolled in this course are economics students (the others are students on a different “joint” degree programme, such as a combination of politics, philosophy, and economics, which requires a minimum number of economics courses to be taken). This meant that this course had the triple challenge of a relatively large class size, a very international student body, which may be entering the course with different backgrounds, and a premium on physical space given our location in the heart of a global metropolis. So even in pre-pandemic times, the characteristics of the course and student body provided motivation to harness the power of educational technology and course design to optimize the learning experience.
Pre-pandemic, the course followed the structure of most undergraduate courses in the Economics Department over the 10 weeks of term, comprising one 2-hour lecture per week as well as a 1-hour tutorial with a teaching assistant every other week. Students were assigned textbook chapters and journal articles as well as the occasional video or podcast to prepare for each week’s lecture. In order to encourage active learning, during the in-person lecture, students were asked “clicker”-type questions on the material being discussed. These in-class questions accounted for a small part of the final grade and were, in essence, a participation or effort grade. The two other assessment components contributing to the course grade were a final quiz and an empirical research project, with all these components being entirely online and carried out without proctoring. Students were also assigned problem sets to be discussed in each tutorial, but these did not count toward the course grade.
The in-class clicker questions were a relatively new initiative to encourage students to prepare ahead of the lecture so that the instructor could assume student knowledge of the basics coming into the class and use the lecture time for more interesting or challenging material. These were also a way to make the class more interactive, and the technology made it possible to use open-ended questions, which served to start the discussion on specific topics as well as to uncover any confusion with the material taught. All large classes in the university are in auditoriums with fixed seating, which makes it hard to do many kinds of interactive learning; hence, the dependence on clicker technology to facilitate interaction in the classroom.
The university’s response to the pandemic was a move to a blended model in 2020–21, which for this course was a less dramatic change than it would have been in a more traditional course with less initial use of technology and active learning design elements. The most important modification to the course was the change in the balance of the course toward more asynchronous learning and a shorter synchronous element. The structure of the course was set up in terms of a learning “week” that went from Friday to Thursday, as the scheduled live session (“lecture”) was on Thursday. These sessions were initially planned to be in person, with the option to move online if forced to do so by the pandemic. The duration was also shortened from the usual two hours to one hour, in line with the research on the waning impact of live online learning sessions beyond a certain length (Geri, Winer, and Zaks Citation2017).
The live session was designed to be fully interactive using the clicker technology utilized pre-pandemic and run as an extended Q&A session based on clarifying doubts about and extending or applying the content in the asynchronous elements. This structural choice was driven by the research on active learning, which was particularly apt for online learning, where engagement was even more of a challenge than in the in-person sessions (Khan et al. Citation2017). This course structure with the 60-minute live session once a week meant that a lot of the learning had to happen outside this session, and, specifically, the bulk of the content needed to be delivered in an asynchronous setting as the basis for the discussions and questions in the live sessions. This meant that an asynchronous method more dynamic than a traditional reading list was needed to motivate students to engage with the content because there was less time to cover key components of the material in the synchronous sessions (Rizvi et al. Citation2022). The bottom line was that the same content needed to be covered, with the same learning outcomes achieved, but with a much shorter synchronous session. This need inspired the asynchronous learning design described next.
Moving to a “digital-first” asynchronous-focused learning design
Pre-pandemic, the lecture in this course largely comprised a presentation on the preparatory materials, expanding and building on them as appropriate. The move to shorter live sessions during the pandemic meant both that there was less time to do this and that it felt like a waste to use the precious contact time to deliver something that could easily be delivered via video instead. Because of this, some of the proofs and graphical analyses the instructor would have normally covered in a live session were prerecorded and divided into a collection of short videos, each focusing on a single concept or issue. A key concern was how to bring these prerecorded videos, the textbook and other readings, and other learning materials together in one place in a way that both engaged students and made clear to them the connections among the different resources and between the asynchronous and synchronous components of the learning design. This “digital-first” approach, referring to the fact that the education model was designed to be delivered without in-person interaction if required, meant that many of the engagement problems that MOOCs face were relevant here as well (Xiong et al. Citation2015).
In response to the problem of possible disengagement, a Sway was put together as each week’s one-stop content shop for students. Other “storytelling” apps include Adobe Spark, and most learning management systems also have a “page” feature that has a similar function. The role of storytelling in education has a long history as a way to reinforce learning and build problem-solving skills (Colander Citation2000; Hung, Hwang, and Huang Citation2012; Landrum, Brakke, and McCarthy Citation2019). The framework presented in this literature was used to design each story and connect them across the course. Each Sway started with a very brief overview of the topic or issue covered that week and then provided commentary explaining how each of the assigned readings, videos (including my own prerecorded ones), podcasts, and Web links tell the story for the week. The advantage of using the Sway, rather than just a document, was that appropriate graphics could be added in, videos, interactive graphs, and other links could be embedded, and an index could be provided so that students found it both a less dry and more easily navigable way to go through the content. This setup also made it easier for them to see the full picture coming together much more easily than if they were just to go through all the assigned materials on the reading list for the week.
shows a screenshot of the first week’s Sway, which includes a link to an interactive data report from Our World in Data to establish the stylized facts to be explored in the course, two newspaper articles to set the scene, and a Marginal Revolution University video among other resources to explain the theme for the week (why it is important and interesting to study globalization today). Within the Sway setup, the instructor’s main work was focused on curating the assigned materials and providing a commentary, which addressed three of the essential competencies discussed in Allgood and Bayer (Citation2017). The first competency, “the ability to apply the scientific process to economic phenomenon” (661), can be achieved by students working their way through the Sway to understand how the different materials relate to each other and how they help us to answer the key questions in the course. The second competency, “the ability to analyze and evaluate behavior and outcomes” (661), can be achieved by applying the lessons learned from Sway materials to the most current events in international trade, something students were asked to do throughout the live sessions. Finally, “the ability to think critically about economic methods and their applications” (662) can be achieved by students making their way through my commentary in the Sway critiquing, comparing and contrasting the materials, and having to do so themselves in their research project. Pre-pandemic, much of the development of each of these competencies would have depended largely on students’ independent learning outside of the live session. As students reported engaging more with the Sway than they typically would do with a reading list, and the exam outcome and the quality of the research projects were at least as good as or better than in normal years despite the effects of the pandemic on physical and mental health, the Sway appears to have helped in this process.
Figure 1. Week 1 Sway with links to interactive data reports, readings, and an embedded marginal revolution video.
One important thing to note here is that the focus on asynchronous learning does not imply a need to produce bespoke materials. The instructor’s role in this process was to curate high-quality materials from trusted sources and provide a narrative around them for each week, producing materials only when nothing suitable was available elsewhere. This is like a traditional education model; the best practice role of the instructor is more to guide students through understanding the course material rather than just delivering content already in the text or in other sources.
A potential risk in setting up the kind of storytelling structure described here is that it may feel like an attempt to rewrite the textbook. For this reason, it works best in a course, potentially upper-level ones, where there is no single prescribed textbook and the material is largely focused on journal articles and other sources not primarily designed for teaching. In this case, the Sway acts as the text, curating the resources and providing valuable perspective to students who may struggle to see the connections and therefore lose out on a key part of the learning experience. In the course discussed here, the Sway largely played such a role—even though there were two texts assigned, multiple external resources were required for each week’s topic as this was an upper-year course with a research component. So a key objective of the Sway was to introduce students to particularly easy-to-read journals, working paper series, and video and audio resources that they could then use as sources for their own research projects.
Incentivizing learning in an asynchronous-focused course
One of the key challenges of an asynchronous-focused learning design is that students may not be motivated to learn, given that the bulk of the content is to be learned outside of any synchronous sessions. In order to get around this, a structure was set up in this course that involved designing both summative and formative activities to encourage accountability on the part of the student. Each week, students had a brief quiz to complete before the synchronous session that accounted for a very small part of the final grade and was based entirely on the asynchronous material. In addition, students were asked to complete a discussion forum activity (ask or answer a question, post a link, and so on) directly linked to the asynchronous learning for that week, as well as a lengthier assignment with analytical and more essay-type questions roughly every other week. This formative activity required students to delve deeper into or apply the asynchronous material. Finally, the activities in the weekly synchronous sessions were designed to rely heavily on completing the asynchronous activities beforehand, for example, by asking questions on the Sway material and extending models included in the Sway.
The engagement issue highlighted above will be familiar to those who use the flipped model of learning (Balaban, Gilleskie, and Tran Citation2016). In such a model, the role of the synchronous session needs to be carefully thought through—if the content learning is largely happening outside the classroom, what needs to happen within the classroom to incentivize and build on this learning? In the course discussed here, the synchronous session included clicker questions to check students’ understanding of the Sway material, as well as more open-ended discussions on issues that students had commented on in the discussion forum activities. Students soon learned that they couldn’t depend on the synchronous sessions to deliver the Sway content and that, without engaging with the Sway and associated activities before the synchronous session, they were unable to get the full benefit of the learning embedded in the clicker questions and the discussions building on the Sway.
The move to the online modality forced by the start of the pandemic in 2020 has meant that the flipped learning model, with its focus on learning outside the classroom in preparation for discussion-based learning inside it, has come into the mainstream. Indeed, one of the strengths of building a class with a significant asynchronous component is that it is both good practice in terms of students being prepared to learn and make the most of any in-person sessions and also that it makes it much easier to switch to an online or blended setup at short notice that in itself is an asset in uncertain times. But this requires that students are incentivized to engage with the content deeply enough on their own outside of the synchronous sessions. In the course discussed here, the traditional 2-hour timetable slot was maintained, but the synchronous sessions were designed to take no more than 75 minutes. The rest of the slot was then unstructured time when the students could either ask the instructor any clarifying questions about the week’s content or their research project. In addition, the synchronous session included open-ended clicker think-pair-share questions to stimulate discussion on hot-button issues related to the course area, such as Brexit, using the models and other tools developed in the Sway. This facilitated the final essential competency discussed in Allgood and Bayer (Citation2017, 662): “the ability to communicate ideas in diverse collaborations.” Because students had to complete a research project as part of the course assessment, they quickly realized that these discussions helped them in the research process and that without the Sway preparation, they were unable to participate fully in the discussion. The effect of this was visible within the first couple of weeks of the term when students’ participation in the formative activities and their preparedness, as evidenced in the live session discussions, improved dramatically.
Effects of the move to an asynchronous-focused learning design
The asynchronous-focused learning design through the Sways and the structure put into place to incentivize learning in such a model were very unfamiliar to most students. Despite this, the physical and mental stress caused by the pandemic, and the fact that the synchronous elements (“lectures”) were halved in duration in 2020–2021, the qualitative and quantitative evidence shows that while there are heterogeneous effects, this approach does not harm any specific group of students, ceteris paribus, and may benefit some who would have been left behind otherwise.
Quantitative evidence on the effects of the Sway learning model
Because many of the learning activities were carried out through the learning management system (Moodle), a rich set of data was available to measure students’ engagement and outcomes using the Sway-based learning model. Based on these data, it is clear that engagement, measured as viewing or downloading any of the material on Moodle and at least partial completion of the Moodle activities, as well as attendance in the synchronous session and participation in live activities, was on average as high as in previous years. In addition, compared to other courses that used other types of asynchronous approaches (reading lists, prerecorded lectures, and so on), engagement was higher in the course discussed here.
At a more granular level, engagement with the Sways consistently ranked highly among all other materials and activities on Moodle, with only quizzes and assignments ranking higher. It is worth noting that quizzes in most courses counted toward the final grade, and while assignments did not, they are often viewed by students as exam prep and typically have high engagement levels even in pre-pandemic times. The fact that engagement with the Sways is ranked almost as highly as these elements shows that students are taking these seriously, compared to other asynchronous modalities. Interestingly, attendance at live sessions (about 70% of the class on average) was somewhat lower than engagement with the Sways or completion of quizzes and assignments (close to 90% of the class on average). One way to interpret this is that it highlights the benefit of asynchronous elements compared to live sessions that might be disrupted due to Internet issues for the online version and transportation issues for the in-person version.
Finally, the grade distribution in the course remained remarkably similar to pre-pandemic times, showing that this new design of curated asynchronous content delivery did not harm students’ learning as measured by the assessment results and could even be interpreted as having helped them as the severe disruptions of the year would have, ceteris paribus, been expected to worsen student engagement and outcomes. The only difference in the grade distribution was at the lower end, with fewer students doing very poorly. This may represent the benefits of the flexibility of the Sway-based learning model, which allows students who need more time to learn at their own pace.
Qualitative evidence on the effects of the Sway learning design
In addition to the usual midterm and end-of-term teaching evaluations, in 2020–21, I introduced an anonymous weekly feedback activity where students were asked to enter any particular positives or negatives of the past week. This enabled the collection of a fair amount of student comments over the term to see how their perspective evolved. At the start of the term, many students noted that the workload was very heavy. This was surprising as I had kept the scope of the course and the amount of content covered almost exactly the same. Comments made in later weeks and anecdotal conversations with students made it clear that the perception of the heavier workload was at least partly due to the fact that the new structure made the learning students were expected to do much more visible. Linking the completion of the asynchronous elements to the synchronous sessions meant that students felt more obliged to complete this work compared to earlier years when they had been given just a reading list. The ongoing pandemic and the fact that many students were feeling isolated away from friends and scattered around the world also possibly contributed to the feeling of cognitive overload.
The midterm and end-of-term evaluations showed that students had gotten used to this new model of learning quickly and really appreciated the structure in which it was embedded. Students reported the Sway as being one of the top features of the course, with many noting that it helped them understand the background of each piece of material, which in turn helped in their learning by providing the big picture on each topic. One student noted that “(the) sway as an overview for tasks of the week makes it easier to keep track of everything that needs to be done before the live session and makes the connection between the different tasks/readings clear.” Another felt that “(t)he use of Sway in harmonizing reading materials and graphical analysis videos in sensible order feels very efficient.” The most common terms used in the context of the Sway in both evaluations were “well-organized,” “structure,” and “clear expectations.” Positive comments about other elements of the learning design, including the synchronous session and preparedness for assessments also indirectly showed the value of the Sway to students: “keeping us working every week with assessments and assignments, help us stay on top of work,” “(t)he lectures are well done in the sense that they aim to complement what we read, and not just repeat them,” and “large group live sessions have been really useful in testing my understanding of the content of the course with the polls.”
Adapting the use of Sways to other courses
So far, the discussion has focused on the upper-level international trade course where the use of the Sway was mainly to tie together and add context to the multiple learning materials used. The Sway-based storytelling approach has also been used successfully in an introductory economics course, with one assigned text: a free online and interactive book including links to outside readings within its chapters. As the textbook itself was similar in format and feel to the kind of Sway used in the international trade course, the storytelling approach taken in this course was to use the Sway as a “route map” for each week’s learning journey. The first aim of this route map was to guide students through the most important or conceptually complex parts of the chapter because students in introductory courses often struggle to figure out what exactly to focus on and how to develop the most effective reading and learning technique from a discipline-specific point of view. Since students in this class were largely in their first year at university, fresh from high school, the role of the route map was probably more important than in upper-year courses. For example, many students’ first response is to read the text passively, like a novel, rather than working their way through the materials, drawing graphs, solving equations, and engaging actively with the content in other ways. The Sway explicitly asked them to engage in these activities for particularly tricky graphical or algebraic models. In addition, the Sway provided students with advice on how to use these materials to complete the tasks for the week, such as quizzes, problem sets, and exam preparation. Students coming straight from high school often believe that they can just find the answer to a problem set question in the text, whereas the tasks we ask them to complete in a university-level course are much more focused on applying the material outside the text. The route map therefore enhanced their “ability to use quantitative approaches” (Allgood and Bayer Citation2017, 661) by providing them with explicit instructions on how to map the models in the text to contemporary situations starting with simple examples and building up to looking at the effects of the pandemic and other topical issues. Finally, the route map served to show students how the current week’s material connected with previous learning in the course as well as to future topics and where there were connections with other courses they might be taking, such as mathematics, statistics, history, geography, and so on. shows screenshots of different parts of one week’s route map (focusing on an introduction to labor markets and incomplete contracts), including guidance on the different parts of the textbook, an associated movie clip to diversify the learning resources as well the assignments for the week.
Figure 2. Unit 6 route map with embedded video, learning activities, and links to later units.
Looking ahead to the post-pandemic world
As explained above, the introduction of a significant asynchronous element into the learning design and the use of the storytelling approach as the key asynchronous element was the culmination of years of efforts to harness education technology and design knowhow to resolve challenges thrown up by the size and diversity of the student body and the restrictions on physical space at this university. This, plus the fact that the “digital-first” response to the pandemic disruptions appears to have gone down very well with students, means that continuing with this kind of a model in the post-pandemic world is a natural next step. The first-year class mentioned in the previous section had more than 750 students, and the international trade class, which is the basis of most of this article, has close to 200 students, so within that size range and also extending from first-year students to final years, the model worked very well. The benefits and general applicability of this approach are thus quite clear.
From the instructor’s point of view, the main issue with the asynchronous storytelling approach, as with most innovations, is that much of the work is upfront, not just in creating the structure and the materials but also in updating, making certain the materials don’t “disappear” over time, and so on. Any such change will therefore need to build in a significant amount of prep time. There are, however, a few ways to economize on resources and effort. First, the qualitative evidence from the two courses featured in this article makes it clear that students do not necessarily need or want all the asynchronous materials to be produced in a bespoke way for them. At a time when so many high-quality and publicly available learning resources are available, instructors can use some of the time that they would have otherwise used for production for careful curation. Indeed, the approach to the Sway in the international trade course was precisely this—the text in the Sway provided the justification for each of the elements selected for the week, with the instructor producing materials only where there was an obvious gap. Second, when instructors choose to produce their own videos, students seem not to respond significantly to production value as long as the video and audio are presentable. Both whiteboard and the narrated-slide type of videos were used in both courses discussed above, as well as “reading videos” in the first-year course that the instructor recorded while going through a journal article, highlighting important parts and modeling a way to read academic papers. For all these types of videos, students reported that any hesitation or misspoken bits that the instructor then corrected only humanized the video, compared to the more professionally produced videos included in the Sway. This can be a particular benefit if the course is being run primarily online so that the students do not get to see the instructors in person very often. Finally, when producing one’s own video, recording short sessions is ideal both because it is quicker to re-record if required, compared to having to go through a longer recording where the probability of making a mistake is also higher, and also because learning science and student feedback implies that shorter videos are better for understanding and retention. As the Sway approach involves several pieces of learning material embedded into the storytelling framework, keeping an eye on the time needed for students to go through each is also important in order to make sure that the students’ workload for each week is appropriate.
From a student’s point of view, while it is clear that engagement and grades were not hurt and may, in fact, have been improved by this storytelling approach, especially if we accept the counterfactual that the disruptions of the pandemic would have otherwise harmed learning, it is also clear that this kind of learning model is new to students as well as instructors. So just as for instructors, there are upfront costs involved for students. In particular, learning how to learn in this kind of model, where the weekly structure requires students to be motivated and organized enough to stay on top of the material and activities in a regular fashion, is a crucial element of this approach. The most effective way to provide support for students in such a model is probably through the course itself, with the instructor clearly communicating early and often why the course is structured as it is and the specifics of what students need to do each week to succeed. There is also a risk that less able students or those less intrinsically motivated will fall through the cracks in this kind of model, which is why often checking in with individual students is also required. One quick and easy way to do this is through using the analytics produced by the virtual learning environment where the asynchronous elements in the course are posted to identify students who are not engaging and may be at particular risk and reach out to them regularly.
The experience discussed in this article suggests that the Sway-based storytelling approach to asynchronous learning design can be very effective for student learning, something that can lead to a rethink of how we use physical learning spaces if much of the content delivery is happening outside of in-person synchronous sessions. Identifying contexts in which there is a clear benefit to being in the same place and at the same time, for example, for team-based learning or other collaborative learning situations, will help universities to optimize the use of their physical space and, indeed, to design that space.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Cloda Jenkins for her detailed input into the use and design of the Sways discussed here and her work on the adaptable learning model in which the Sways are embedded. She also thanks Alexander Courtney for introducing her to Sways, her students for their feedback on the Sways, and the participants at the American Economic Association’s Annual Conference in January 2022 for their comments. Finally, she thanks the editors for their helpful comments and suggested edits to this article.
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