By Scott Edger
Little Apple Post
Delivering quality education in rural, isolated places has long been a challenge in Kansas and elsewhere. It can be difficult for teachers in rural communities to earn the credentials they need to advance and develop their careers.
The Rural Education Center at Kansas State University offers a fully-online Master of Arts teaching degree. The REC program is national in scope, so it always has several out-of-state students.
Typically, K-State College of Education instructors provide students with remote supervision when they are doing student-teaching in their home locations.
The REC had a difficult time finding a student-teaching placement for one student in Georgia a couple years ago.
BOLD MOVES REQUIRED
Clay Center is a partner district in the Center’s Rural Professional Development network, so Dr. Todd Goodson, KSU assistant dean for Teacher Education and Accreditation, spoke to Matt Weller, Clay Center Elementary School principal, asking him about the possibility of trying remote student-teaching.
Pre-COVID, virtual teaching was “a pretty bold thing to try,” Goodson said.
Weller told him, “Get a double robot and we could make it work.”
“What’s a double robot?” Gibson responded.
It turns out that “Double” is a unit from Double Robotics, a 2012 startup out of Burlingame, California that is now the leading producer of telepresence robots for online or hybrid classrooms and meetings.
The robots look similar to a Segway with two wheels on a base that supports a vertical post with a monitor, camera, and microphone attached at the top.
Once the details were hashed out, the grad student was able to do all of her student teaching in a Clay Center classroom from her home in Georgia.
“So we congratulated ourselves because that all seemed really out of the box,” Goodson said, “and then COVID came along and all of our student teachers became remote student teachers.”
Using the robot advances the concept of co-teaching, where a less experienced teacher works closely with a veteran.
“They have to work hand-in-glove.” Goodson said, “and maybe the veteran is cueing up things on the screen and monitoring behavior and so forth, while the novice might be wheeled over to a table with a small group working on a problem-based learning experience.
“You're only limited by your imagination.”
INTERNATIONAL PRESENCE
In conjunction with the COE’s Global Education Outreach office, the robot program has expanded and enhanced its capabilities, going international to Ecuador.
The GEO has a freshly-inked contract with universities in Ecuador to provide professional development for their faculty, and working through the institutions KSU placed these robots in two public and two private schools in Ecuador.
An Ecuadorian native and university professor, Dr. Éder Intriago-Palacios earned his doctorate from K-State and is a COE postdoctoral researcher. Dr. Intriago-Palacios provided the impetus to take the initiative to South America.
A contingent from K-State, including Dr. Intriago-Palacios, delivered the four robots to Ecuador and set them up.
The robots rolled into the Ecuadorian classrooms just this week, so it is yet to be seen how they will perform, but the project already generates multiple learning opportunities.
A group of students in the COE instructional technology class is doing a service-learning project this semester through program in Ecuador.
And a group of KSU faculty are working on a corresponding research narrative examining the robot project through a social justice lens: what can students learn about culture through an international field experience? The research also looks through the lens of instructional technology in terms enhancing teacher education through telepresence technologies.
Ecuadorian educators are excited for the programs.
“They feel that they are privileged,” Intriago-Palacios said. “They say they are fortunate for participating in this project. These are young teachers with two or three years of experience so they see this as an opportunity for growth.”
The program is not only an opportunity to grow professionally, but also linguistically.
“They're very excited about having native English speakers in the classrooms,” Intriago-Palacios said. “They feel this is definitely extraordinary.”
FUTURE POSSIBILITIES
The effects of COVID continue to linger, with society seemingly always on the verge of another lockdown, so K-State's foray into robotic, remote education only a few years ago may ultimately prove wildly prescient.
“I think we're going to see an acceleration of the research in this field,” Eileen Wertzberger, coordinator of the COE Office of Field Experiences, said. “We see it as a potential solution for some of the struggles that we faced with COVID.”
She said the robots are clearly not the answer for every obstacle, but their utility rests beyond the pragmatic.
“Regardless of the of the distance or the proximity,” Wertzberger said, “as technology moves forward and people want more on-demand, being very familiar with this technology will be super important for educators.”
KANSAS SCHOOLS
Goodson, himself a product of small schools in rural Missouri, said the initiative is another link in the rural distance-learning network the Center is developing.
The network can facilitate more equitable educational access for rural, underserved, or low socio-economic communities.
According to Wertzberger, Kansas districts are warming up to the idea of using the robots.
During the pandemic districts found many opportunities to utilize the technology - helping students who couldn't be in school or a quarantined teacher to deliver content with substitutes or other supervision in the room - and allowed Kansas high school seniors to finish the credits they needed to graduate.
Wertzberger said the robots can take a teacher to rural areas, but they can also bring a rural, or international, perspective to the teacher.
“Now we're using it with our on-campus students,” Wertzberger said, “to give them exposure to rural schools, and a much more global perspective. It's been really positive in terms of opening their eyes to what education can be.”
Wertzberger said the rural and international connections are encouraging education students on campus to appreciate and embrace new perspectives and practices.
“There's really excited, too,” she said. “They see this as an opportunity for their growth as a teacher, and they're waking up to this idea of being in education they get to be a part of something a little bit bigger.”
From “what's a double robot” to fill a critical need... to international research initiatives with partnerships and collaborators thousands of miles apart. The robots allow KSU to put new people and new technology in places that otherwise do not often receive either.
“To me, that’s the story,” Goodson said. “Our students in Kansas are getting experiences across cultural boundaries that they would never otherwise be able to.”
There is a short documentary on the robotic student teacher that's on the college YouTube page.
These maps show the locations of the school districts served by the Kansas State University Rural Education Center's RESET program, supported by a USDA Distance Learning and Telemedicine Grant (bottom), and the College of Education's Professional Development Network (above).