Barbara Means

Justin Reich is joined by Barbara Means, author and executive director of learning science research at Digital Promise to discuss her research with digital learning before and during COVID. “There were quite a few universities that for equity reasons told their instructors, ‘Don't do any synchronous instruction in the spring, just put everything online and let students do it asynchronously, that is on their own time whenever they wanted.’ We found that when there were no synchronous sessions, which could have been either with the professor or it could have been online office hours, or it could have been working with a teaching assistant in a section. But if there were no synchronous sessions, the students were less happy with their course and their learning. So they really wanted that connection with a real person just like many of us do. You call up customer service. And it's so frustrating even if after the fifth click you can get to what you want. You just want to say, ‘I want a real person to talk to me and tell me they're sorry.’” - Barbara Means