What were the learning goals for this course?
After successfully completing the course, students are able to:
- use internet resources (where appropriate) and legal reports to find significant Supreme Court cases, as well as other cases discussed in the readings and video-lectures for the course, when provided with the standard legal citation for the case;
- identify accurately the relevant facts and various holdings in the significant American state and federal court cases involving free speech rights that are discussed in the readings and video-lectures for the course;
- identify accurately the specific legal principles developed in, and legal precedents set by, the significant American state and federal court cases involving free speech rights that are discussed in the readings and video-lectures for the course;
- apply the legal principles and precedents established in the significant American state and federal court cases involving free speech rights that are discussed in the readings and video-lectures for the course to novel fact patterns that present a specific legal question implicating free speech rights in order to identify a sound and legally defensible answer to the legal question presented.
How did you translate this assignment from the face-to-face version into the hybrid version?
For approximately the last ten years, I have taught this course as a jumbo face-to-face lecture class. Each and every time I taught the course face-to-face I used the classroom response technology Baruch had chosen to support—something called TurningPoint—to enhance my ability to gauge how students were reacting to my lectures and to grade students on their performance during individual classes.[1] TurningPoint allowed me to embed multiple choice questions in the PowerPoint presentations I showed to students during each class, and then to track the answers each student gave to each question, thereby enabling each student to earn points for each class he or she attended. I usually embedded from three to five questions during each one-hour and fifteen-minute class. Additionally, TurningPoint allowed me to know which student answered any given question in the shortest amount of time. Such a student was the “fastest responder.” In addition to earning points for answering each embedded question correctly, the one fastest responder for each question was given the ability to answer a follow-up question worth even more points that took the form of a short answer question. So, for example, I might ask a multiple choice question requesting the student to identify, from a list of five, the Supreme Court case that introduced the concept of “actual malice” to libel law. The correct answer would be New York Times v. Sullivan. TurningPoint would then identify the student who answered this question in the shortest amount of time and project that student’s name on the screen in the front of the room. (Often the margin between the fastest responder and the next fastest responder was less than a second.) I would then ask the fastest responder a follow-up question like, “what is the actual malice standard?” To earn those extra points, the fastest responder would need to say aloud in class to me something like, “Where the actual malice standard is applicable, the plaintiff in a defamation case may only recover damages if the defendant knew what he or she was communicating was false, or showed reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of what he or she was communicating.”
TurningPoint gave me the opportunity to keep my face-to-face jumbo Communication Law and Free Speech course lively and interesting, while also allowing students to earn significant points toward their final grade in every class. Indeed, the points students could earn via TurningPoint amounted to roughly a third of the total points they could earn for the course. The TurningPoint class points the students could earn, coupled with the points they could earn from a midterm and a final (each consisting of a multiple choice section and a short-answer section) comprised the entirety of the points students could earn in my jumbo face-to-face course. Obviously, I could not use TurningPoint (or any classroom response technology) in my jumbo, fully online course. So other instructional methods needed to be investigated and utilized.
In consultation with the Center for Teaching and Learning at Baruch, I decided to construct my jumbo, fully online Communication Law and Free Speech course around four graded assignments. I retained the midterm and the final, keeping them in the same format: multiple choice and short answer. Both of these exams were of course administered online. Because I had students in the course who were located in time-zones literally halfway across the world, I allowed students to take the ninety-minute midterm anytime during a twenty-four-hour window. I did the same for the final. Next, I administered weekly quizzes, beginning during the fourth week of class. Each quiz was multiple choice and covered the readings and video-lecture assigned for the week. As with the midterm and the final, students had a twenty-four-hour window during which to complete each quiz. The final graded assignment consisted of two, five-hundred-word essays. Each essay was a response to a specific question I posted to the Discussion Board section of the Blackboard page for the course. Both essays were randomly chosen from seven essays that students were required to write in response to seven different questions. Thus, the final course grade consisted of a midterm, a final, several weekly quizzes, and two, five-hundred-word essays. Let me say a few additional words about these essays.
I felt strongly that a fully online course needed to incorporate a substantial writing component. Requiring students to write at least seven essays amounting to five-hundred words a piece would certainly constitute a substantial writing component. But how would I be able to comment upon and grade over seven hundred essays of five-hundred words a piece? Fortunately, I had a teaching assistant for this course; and, fortunately, I was able to select this teaching assistant from among the students I taught in my graduate level course in Legal and Ethical Issues in Corporate Communication (COM 9510) during the Spring semester of 2018. That graduate level course dealt with issues similar to the ones I addressed in my Communication Law and Free Speech course, and many of the students in that graduate course—including the student I ultimately selected as my teaching assistant—were extremely intelligent and articulate. Thus, I felt confident in dividing up, between myself and my teaching assistant, the labor of reading and commenting upon (and, ultimately, grading) these several hundred essays. Still, there were far too many essays for even my teaching assistant and myself to evaluate. Hence, I instituted a somewhat intricate scheme that is described in tortuously complex detail on the course syllabus. Briefly, the semester was divided into two halves, with each half consisting of four required essays, from which one essay would randomly be selected for grading. That’s a total of eight essays. But students were allowed to “drop” one essay, resulting in seven essays that were possible candidates for grading. The way this all worked out, my teaching assistant and I were each left with approximately a dozen five-hundred word essays per week to grade. Again, I felt strongly that this assignment must be included in the course. But I felt badly that even though they wrote seven essays, students only received grades and comments on two of those essays. This was entirely owing to the fact that I only had one teaching assistant for the course. If I had been able to utilize three or four teaching assistants for the course, from the very talented pool I had available to me, the students in the course would have had an academically richer experience.
And speaking of academically rich experiences, I hope I will not be thought immodest if I say that perhaps the most interesting and novel aspect of this fully online course was to be found in the dozen video-lectures that I created for the students. These video-lectures varied in length, but averaged between thirty to forty-five minutes. Each dealt with a specific First Amendment topic. I have selected one of these video-lectures as the artifact that I would like to submit. Let me now say a few words about my video-lecture artifact.
[1] N.B. Beginning in the Fall of 2018, Baruch switched its supported classroom response technology from TurningPoint to something called TopHat. I used TopHat in my face-to-face jumbo COM 3070 class [Persuasion] in the Fall of 2018 and found it to be roughly similar in functionality to TurningPoint. I have not taught a jumbo COM 3045 course as a face-to-face class since the switch from TurningPoint to TopHat was made, but I imagine that when I do teach COM 3045 again as a jumbo face-to-face class I will use TopHat as my classroom response technology.
What have you learned about teaching in the fully online environment?
Content is Still King: Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” I admit that’s a far too dramatic quotation to make the point I now want to make, but I did in fact have a plan for my fully online course—early on. My plan was simple. As I said earlier, I have been teaching the face-to-face version of Communication Law and Free Speech (COM 3045) for more than ten years now. During that time, I created, tweaked, edited, and polished several dozen PowerPoint presentations that I showed to the hundreds of students who took this course over the last decade or so. I would say that I have at least fifty such PowerPoint presentations, each of which averages twenty to thirty individual slides. My plan was simply to narrate these PowerPoint presentations. To that end, I went out and purchased an expensive Yeti microphone. Then I sat down, fired up my computer, plugged in the expensive microphone, opened one of the PowerPoint presentations I wanted to narrate, executed a few clicks within PowerPoint (the program actually makes it very easy to record voice over slides), and started talking. I tried to pretend that I was in front of a class. I was extemporizing my comments all the way. Sure it was a little rough; what extemporaneous speech isn’t? But it couldn’t be that different from what I did in front of a class all these years. Finally, I got to the last slide and wound up my narration. Then I reviewed what I had created.
It was an unmitigated disaster. The narration did not flow at all. Rather than sounding like a lively, extemporaneous speech, the narration sounded like a disjointed series of confused and rambling thoughts. But the worse part was that the product I created was simply boring. There were large intervals of time (some as long as two to three minutes) during which I would be talking but nothing would be happening on the screen. I couldn’t imagine a student watching this narrated PowerPoint and not falling asleep. Indeed, the few individuals with whom I shared this first attempt at developing online content were all in unanimous agreement: what I had produced was somehow less than the sum of its parts. The narration actually detracted from the information on the slides. That’s when it dawned upon me that standing before a class and teaching, even when using a PowerPoint presentation, is very much a performative act. Take away the performer and the material simply is not conveyed as effectively as it otherwise could be. I might have fashioned a better product if I had gone into a Baruch classroom one night and simply video recorded myself giving that same PowerPoint presentation to an empty room. In fact, a for-profit enterprise called “The Teaching Company” (which might in some respects be our competition) sells a series of video-lectures under the trademark “The Great Courses” which consist of well-known professors standing in front of a simple lectern and essentially reading lecture notes on the topic of the video. Often these videos have no animation at all. They are simply videos of a person talking. But they do seem to be popular.
One lesson I learned from my first, failed attempt at constructing a narrated PowerPoint was that I needed to include more of myself in my videos. So, my second attempt amounted to me sitting in front of a video camera and once again extemporaneously commenting upon the topic at hand—that is, symbolic speech and the First Amendment. When I made this second experimental video I made sure to splice in some PowerPoint slides to augment my presentation, but I also made sure to keep the focus on myself as I was speaking.
The results of this second attempt were better than the results of the first attempt, but still not what I wanted. In particular, I found that while it’s one thing to extemporize a thirty second answer to some question posed by a moderator—as I have done numerous times on various interview shows—it’s something else entirely to extemporize a thirty-minute lecture. I was not able to do that effectively.
And so, at the end of the day, I decided that I needed to buckle down and actually write out, verbatim, the narrative of what I wanted to say in the video I was constructing. The video-lecture artifact I have submitted is thirty-four minutes and twenty-two seconds in length. The narrative I am reading in the video is exactly 5,341 words in length. I ended up reading the narrative off a computer screen in front of which I placed the video camera I used to record the actual video. This is a poor-man’s teleprompter, I suppose. But I thought it worked reasonably well.
By far the most important point I want to make in this section—indeed, the most important point I want to make in this entire submission—is that, for me, the process of actually sitting down and writing out in a coherent fashion the substance of what went into each of my video-lectures was simply invaluable. During the course of the semester in which I taught my online free speech course I created exactly twelve video-lectures. Those video-lectures varied in length from the very short (five minutes) to the very long (just under one and a half hours). For each of these video-lectures I wrote out a narrative. Thus, I now have roughly 50,000 words on First Amendment law that has been distilled from the various lectures I have given in my COM 3045 class over the last decade or so. Those 50,000 words represent a sizable chunk of what could become a textbook on free speech. Just because I taught a fully online COM 3045 course last semester I now have a very significant amount of written content regarding free speech: and content is king. It’s the content that matters; it was the content that was most difficult to create; and, I hope, it’s the content that the students in my course found most valuable.
Let me conclude this section by noting that before I taught my fully online course last semester I had never created any sort of video-lecture of myself (or of anyone else). I was not sure what to expect with respect to the computer program or programs that I imagined I would be using to create the video-lectures that I knew I wanted to create. As I will discuss in the next section, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the computer program I used to create all of these video-lectures—a program called Camtasia—was very easy to learn. Despite my preconceived notions about how my first online teaching endeavor would unfold, I did not find myself slaving over a computer for hours trying to create video-lectures. In fact, as I have already said, creating the content that went into these video-lectures was much more difficult than creating the video images and animation that went into these video-lectures. By way of illustration, the video-lecture artifact that I have submitted is, as I said, roughly thirty-five minutes in length. I would guestimate that it took me around twenty hours to create that video-lecture. Of those twenty hours, I am sure that more than half were spent writing out what I was going to say in the video-lecture. That process of writing down the material I would present in my video-lecture was not dissimilar to the process of writing a short article. Indeed, the longest video-lecture I created—a video-lecture on constitutional interpretation—clocked in at just over one hour and twenty-one minutes and was based on a narrative that ran to 13,169 words, which is the size of a fairly long article.
So, once again and finally, content is key. Before I began teaching my fully online course, I did not think that I would need to write out what I was going to say in the various video-lectures I created. But I found that I did need to do the intellectual work of writing. Conversely, before I began teaching my fully online course, I thought that it would be very difficult to understand the computer program I would need to use to create the video-lectures. But that turned out not to be the case. In fact, as I explain in the next section, the computer learning curve was not too steep at all.
Can you describe the artifact?
This artifact is a thirty-five-minute video-lecture that I created for my fully online COM 3045 course in Communication Law and Free Speech. The video-lecture covers a specific topic in First Amendment law: symbolic speech. The video-lecture focuses on the 1968 case of U.S. v. O’Brien. That case involved a nineteen-year-old individual who, in 1966, burned his draft card on the steps of the South Boston Courthouse in protest of the Vietnam War. In deciding the case, the Supreme Court for the first time articulated a “test” to determine when so-called “symbolic speech” is protected by the First Amendment. That test is now known as the “O’Brien Test.” The “O’Brien Test” is to First Amendment jurisprudence what Hamlet is to English theatre or the Krebs cycle is to biology: it’s that important and that central. Finally, it always interests my students to know that the individual at the heart of this case—David P. O’Brien—is today a tenured professor in the psychology department at Baruch College.
Assignment link
View Professor Gander’s video here.
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Eric M. Gander is Associate Professor of Public Argument in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, CUNY. He earned a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in Rhetoric and Communication Studies from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Northwestern University.
His research focuses on improving public argument by critiquing public discussion and debate on a wide range of issues in domains like science, political philosophy, law, and ethics. He is the author of several books, including On Our Minds: How Evolutionary Psychology is Reshaping the Nature versus Nurture Debate, published in 2003 by Johns Hopkins University Press. The Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has described On Our Minds as “lucid and thought-provoking…clear and lively enough to interest a general audience, while containing novel analyses that should be considered by the specialists.” Professor Gander is also the author of The Last Conceptual Revolution: A Critique of Richard Rorty’s Political Philosophy, published in 1999 by SUNY Press, as well as numerous articles, book reviews, and convention papers. His work has appeared in both the academic and popular press, including The Journal of Communication Studies, The University of Illinois Law Review, and The New York Times. He has also appeared on various television talk shows as an expert commentator on political and social issues.
Professor Gander teaches undergraduate courses in Persuasion, Argumentation and Debate, and Communication Law and Free Speech. He teaches graduate courses in Theories of Persuasion, and Legal and Ethical Issues in Corporate Communication.