








































Journal of Teaching and Learning with Technology, Vol. 10, Special Issue, pp. 365-372. 
doi: 10.14434/jotlt.v9i2.31412 

Reducing Uncertainty and Podcasting Engagement: An HR 
Classroom Response to COVID-19 

Jared Law-Penrose 
Indiana University Southeast 

jlawpen@ius.edu 

Abstract: The rapid spread of 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has radically reshaped the 
human resource (HR) management policies and practices in organizations of all sizes across the 
country. Additionally, COVID-19 has had a major impact on the way in which faculty members 
teach our classes. In this case study, I discuss the way in which I responded to these changes in the courses 
I teach related to HR. I start with a description of the way in which COVID-19 has impacted not 
only the course content, but also the pedagogical approach I use to engage students across my classes. I 
describe my attempt to foster trust despite the uncertainty associated with individual experiences related 
to COVID-19. I also explain the process for rapidly transitioning to a virtual classroom setting. I 
describe how I combined courses for instructional purposes and the way in which I pivoted the 
curriculum for each course. Specifically, I created time-relevant podcasts for students to use across 
different courses while maintaining distinct learning outcomes for each course. A sample podcast will 
be provided upon request for those interested. 

Keywords: podcast, COVID-19, uncertainty, engagement, non-traditional students 

Challenges 

As a professor of HR, students in my classes track the national unemployment rate as an important 
factor in developing effective employee recruitment and compensation practices. Early in the spring 
2020 semester, unemployment rates hovered at near record low levels (BLS, 2020). According to the 
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the overall unemployment rate was 4.4% in March of 2020 (BLS, 
2020). One month later, the unemployment rate increased to 14.7%. For context, this is the highest 
unemployment rate since the BLS started reporting unemployment rates in 1948 (BLS, 2020). In a 
matter of 30 days, greater than one out of every ten employed individuals were out of a job. As an HR 
professional, this has far reaching policy implications for organizations of all sizes. As a professor at a 
regional institution, this change created a high degree of uncertainty within my students. 
My institution is a regional university with approximately 4,500 students. Additionally, 22% of the 
undergraduate student body is non-traditional (< 25 years old), and 29% of the student body are first-
generation college students. In practical terms, this means that many of my students are employed in 
full-time jobs as the primary income earner for their families. Moreover, it is not uncommon for my 
students to have children of their own that are in primary or secondary school. On top of this, the 
public school districts in the area moved to asynchronous classes, causing an even greater degree of 
uncertainty and anxiety amongst the non-traditional students in my classes. When my institution made 
the decision to move fully online for the remainder of the spring semester, more than a quarter of my 
students expressed their concern about maintaining their course work in light of the economic, social, 
and schedule changes necessitated by the spread of the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19). While 
this is purely anecdotal, it was clear that I had to proactively respond to these changes across all of my 
classes and pivot not only the content, but also the context of my classes to ensure that students in 
my courses would be able to meet the learning outcomes of the course and be prepared to enter a 
radically different work context in light of the high degree of uncertainty we were all facing. 



Law-Penrose 

Journal of Teaching and Learning with Technology, Vol. 10, Special Issue, jotlt.indiana.edu 

I began to consider the ways in which I could rapidly change my courses to respond to the 
situation. The major challenge I had to address was how I would help my students through an 
incredibly ambiguous and uncertain period while preparing them to effectively respond to an uncertain 
work context. As an HR professor, I had to realize that my role was not to provide information but 
to foster an environment where my students could creatively respond to changing situations. 

Whether a result of increased physical distance or fewer opportunities for real-time interaction, 
increased distance allows for fewer social cues and norms (Antonakis & Atwater, 2002). The move to 
an online classroom format undoubtedly increased the ambiguity my students were facing. Berger and 
Calabrese argue that individuals are motivated to decrease uncertainty in all situations (1974). In fact, 
when individuals are not able to reduce uncertainty, it can lead to greater emotional and physical 
withdrawal (Berger, 1986). Completely reducing uncertainty for my students, however, would 
negatively impact their ability to develop creative solutions to their individual and collective situations. 
Berger and Calabrese hypothesize a positive relationship between uncertainty and information seeking 
(1974). As ambiguity is reduced, motivation is also reduced. Similarly, increasing ambiguity also 
increases reliance on individual heuristics and decreases the willingness or motivation to take risks 
necessary to succeed in the classroom and beyond (Frishammer, Floren, & Wincent, 2011). 

Ultimately, it seemed as though I was facing a dichotomy: I could continue with the same 
curriculum—though now outdated as a result of the changed economic and social context—to reduce 
the uncertainty my students were facing and risk decreasing their motivation, or I could modify the 
curriculum to reflect the new economic and social context, potentially increasing the uncertainty in 
my students and risk decreasing their motivation. Thankfully, this is a false dichotomy. Too much and 
too little uncertainty does indeed negatively relate to a performance decline. The challenge is finding 
the appropriate level of ambiguity. 

Individuals are motivated to “make sense” of the world around them and consequently 
attempt to reduce uncertainty in their relationships by retroactively and proactively constructing an 
interpretable pattern of behavior of their partner (Heider 1958; Berger & Calabrese, 1974). However, 
on the basis of activation theory, complete disambiguation does not always lead to positive outcomes 
(Gardner 1986; Gardner & Cummings, 1988). A critical concept of the theory is activation level, which 
Gardner defines as “the degree of neural activity in the reticular activation system, a major part of the 
central nervous system” (1986). Activation theory hypothesizes that there is an inverted U-shape 
between an individual’s experienced activation level and task performance (Gardner & Cummings, 
1988). The result is that performance suffers when activation level is both high and low, and 
performance is optimal at a moderate amount of activation. Thus, the most effective performance of 
my students would be found in the ‘sweet spot’ of moderate levels of ambiguity. 

Changes 

During the spring 2020 semester, I was teaching two separate courses within the same plan of study. 
The first course is a 400-level HR course that operates like an in-depth survey of each of the functional 
areas of HR. This course is usually taken in the second semester of students’ sophomore year or later. 
This course is also the prerequisite for all other advanced HR courses. The second course I was 
teaching is a 400-level Wage and Salary Administration course where we cover topics that include 
labor market economics, benefits administration, employee motivation, and wage administration. 
While there is some overlap in each of these courses, they have very distinct learning outcomes. 
Against the backdrop of COVID-19 and having made the decision to adjust the curriculum to respond 
to the changes necessitated by the pandemic both logistically and economically, I had to determine 
my next steps. I decided to combine the courses for instructional purposes only while maintaining 
separate learning outcomes for each course. The key change I made to the curriculum was to reach out 

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to professionals across a broad spectrum of industries and record podcast-style interviews. These 
interviews would then serve a significant instructional aspect of the course. My hope was that engaging 
working professionals across a variety of industries would demonstrate that the experiences of 
uncertainty and ambiguity were not unique to my students and thus engage their activation level by 
normalizing the amount of ambiguity they were facing. In other words, hearing from working 
professionals could moderate my students’ perception of the amount of uncertainty they were facing. 
This would then hopefully lead to improved efficacy and performance as we worked toward 
accomplishing the learning outcomes in each course through an updated curriculum. 

To be clear, both courses had unique learning outcomes that had to be maintained despite the 
fact that I combined the two courses for instructional purposes. What this meant is that I had to 
manage each course independently from an administrative role. In other words, each class section 
used the changes in organizational HR policies and practices as a result of COVID-19 as the case 
study for their particular learning outcomes. This is similar to using The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 
in both an American literature course and a course focusing on pedagogy in secondary education. 
Alternatively, this would be similar to using an archeological sample in both a geology course and an 
anthropology course. This is important in that the students from each individual class had the 
opportunity to explore the content provided by the unique situation of COVID-19 through the lens 
of the learning outcomes for each course. This could have been done with each class individually since 
podcasts were recorded and available asynchronously. However, based on the uncertainty theory 
discussed previously, combining the courses for meetings and instructional purposes created an 
environment designed to foster a higher level of engagement in light of the challenges students were 
facing in their personal lives. The result of combining the classes for meetings did not eliminate the 
need to take the other course as the outcome and lens applied to each course was unique. 

Both courses where originally scheduled to meet on Monday’s and Wednesday’s. As we moved 
fully online, it was clear based on communication from many non-traditional students that they would 
not be able to attend two weekly synchronous class sessions as a result of issues either with child care, 
changed work schedules, or internet access issues. What I decided to do was to hold two synchronous 
sessions via Zoom each week. The first was scheduled during one of the course time slots on Monday, 
and the second live session was scheduled for the other course time slot on Wednesday. Each Zoom 
session was recorded and posted in Canvas. Students were responsible for content provided in both 
live sessions and were expected to attend at least one of the live sessions each week for the remainder 
of the semester. Logistically, this had the effect of providing a variety of times for students to engage 
with the content and allowed each student flexibility in attending the live session that worked best for 
them given their individual constraints. 

Combining the courses for instructional purposes also had the unintended positive outcome of 
further normalizing the individual experiences of students based on the structure of the live Zoom 
sessions. I would start each live Zoom session with a brief personal story about my experience during 
the week and my own experience with uncertainty. For example, during the first live Zoom session, I 
shared about my own challenges as a working parent during a time when my children’s school closed. 
I then dedicated the first seven minutes of each class to Zoom breakout rooms and asked my students 
to share a similar story with two or three of their classmates. Because the courses had been combined 
for instruction, these breakout rooms would occasionally group students together who did not know one 
another. Since I first modeled the behavior as the instructor and then introduced new students to one 
another, students from both classes began to show a collective interest in the experiences of one 
another. While I did not have the tools to measure “the degree of neural activity in the reticular 
activation system” (Gardner, 1986), it became clear that this short activity stoked student curiosity 
about the experience of others during an unprecedented time. This led to what I believe is an increase 
in affective and cognitive trust amongst my students, which resulted in a higher overall tolerance for 

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ambiguity, in turn improving their activation level. Put differently, students began to trust one another 
and became genuinely interested in the experience of others as a way to normalize their own 
experiences. Ultimately, my students became increasingly curious about each other, which seemingly 
led to an increase in curiosity about the course content. This was made manifest in the discussions 
around the podcasts I recorded with working professionals. 

I pivoted the curriculum by recording a series of weekly podcasts with working professionals 
from a variety of industries. These podcasts then became the topic of conversation for each of the 
subsequent Zoom class sessions. The synchronous time in class via Zoom was dedicated to analyzing 
the changes that had to be made in each of the industries as a result of COVID-19 and the impact 
these changes had on HR policies and practices. Using podcasts as an educational tool is not an 
innovative development. In fact, podcasts have been utilized in the classroom for at least the last 
decade (Goldman, 2018). The podcast has become one of the most ubiquitous forms of information 
since the turn of the century. Google currently has over 2 million registered podcasts (Jovic, 2020). As 
of 2018, there have been 50 billion podcast downloads (Locker, 2018). The appeal of podcasts for 
younger generations is exploding. According to Billboard, podcasts now represent more than 10% of 
everything Millennials listen to (Cirisano, 2019). Consider these statistics published by PR Neswire 
(2019):  

60% of Gen Z and 52% of Millennials usually listen to podcasts that are at least 26 minutes in 
length… Millennials and Gen Z were also 5% more likely to listen to podcasts for professional 
reasons often or very often compared to older generations… a third of Millennials listen to 
podcasts daily. This trend is only likely to grow given that three-quarters of Gen Z respondents 
have a paid subscription for a streaming audio/music service compared to 60% of Millennials 
and only 52% of those over 35. 

To be clear, the appeal of podcasts in a college classroom setting is not their ability to replace 
the traditional PowerPoint-driven lecture. In fact, podcasts are “associated with little increase in 
performance…and little increase in learning gains” when used solely as a lecture replacement tool 
(Moreavec, Williams, Aguilar-Roca, & O’Dowd, 2016). Rather, the use of podcasts is effective when 
they are used to augment the learning process, not replace it. As a professor facing an uncertain 
classroom dynamic, I had to find a way to engage with my students in a way that is native to their 
technological lifestyles. Recording a high-quality podcast has a relatively low barrier to entry. Simply 
creating the podcast is not difficult; rather, the challenge lies in effectively using the podcast to help 
students achieve the learning outcomes. 

Podcasts and Learning Outcomes 

I first had to identify various professionals that would be willing to share their experiences via a 
recorded podcast. For this process, I relied mostly on my existing professional network. Guests were 
made up of colleagues from a previous career, former students, and other professionals with which I 
had an existing relationship. While this is not necessarily ideal for all disciplines, it allowed me to rapidly 
create the content needed to create the podcasts. The podcasts included the following guests: an airline 
cargo pilot for UPS, a corporate recruiter for YUM! Brands, a city commissioner, the foreman for a 
construction company, a recent HR graduate working as a trainer for a manufacturing company, and 
an engineer. These podcasts followed the same general outline. We would start with a brief 
introduction where the guest would talk about themselves personally and professionally. I would ask 
the guest to then talk about their professional career and how they ended up in the position they are 
currently in. We would then transition into talking about what their job duties entailed before 

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COVID-19. As part of this discussion, I would ask follow-up questions and probe more deeply if 
needed. Next, the guest would share about how their job had changed as a result of COVID-19 and 
the impacts the pandemic had on their professional life. These were general questions that would guide 
the majority of the conversation. Finally, I asked each guest two to three questions pertaining to HR 
and the individual learning outcomes from both courses. These questions were specifically tailored to 
the modules from each class. Once the conversation was complete, I would export the audio file, 
upload it to Canvas, and send out an announcement to my students that the podcast had been 
uploaded. By utilizing the metrics provided by Canvas, I was able to monitor the time each student 
spent listening to the podcast. Overall, more than 80% of the students listened to the entire podcast 
each week. 

As noted earlier, the weekly podcasts provided the content for the synchronous Zoom 
sessions each week. Because two different courses were combined for instruction purposes and each 
class maintained their separate learning outcomes, I had to ensure that we were able to relate the 
podcast back to the content of the course learning objectives. I accomplished this by crafting specific 
discussion questions that related the podcast back to the unique content of each course. This was 
perhaps the most challenging aspect of combining two distinct courses. Prior to each synchronous 
Zoom session, students from the different courses were given distinct discussion questions based on 
the specific podcast from that week. These discussion questions were directly related to each module’s 
learning outcomes for the student’s specific course. As previously noted, the first 7-10 minutes of each 
synchronous class was devoted to normalizing uncertainty and fostering trust across the class. The 
next 15 minutes of the live session was devoted to providing a brief summary of the podcast and 
asking students to share the aspect of the podcast they found the most interesting. Following this, 
students were then randomly placed into discussion rooms of three to five students. One student in 
each room was assigned to be the discussion lead. Discussion rooms lasted approximately 25-30 
minutes. During this period, I would join each room to monitor and observe the conversation. I would 
typically spend one or two minutes in each discussion room to ensure that the students were engaging. 
After checking in on each discussion room, I would return to each room for approximately five 
minutes. During this time, I would take a few handwritten notes on the discussion. After the discussion 
rooms concluded, we would come back together as a group and spend the remaining class time 
debriefing the conversation as it related to the specific discussion questions. I would end each class 
session with a short two to three minute reflection on what I observed about the class conversation 
overall. 

Charting a Course 

Through this process, I learned a great deal about fostering engagement in the classroom and using 
technology to pivot the delivery mechanisms. As I reflect on the experience, there are a number of 
things that worked well. First, as noted earlier, there seemed to be a greater degree of trust and 
connection fostered across the courses. While I had hoped to normalize the experiences of each 
student in the class, I was surprised by the intensity of relationships developed amongst groups of 
students. Despite randomly assigning discussion groups across both courses, students began showing 
up early to the Zoom room to socialize with one another. At least three times throughout the 
remainder of the semester, around seven students were logged into the Zoom room 30 minutes before 
class officially started. When I talked with the students about why they were showing up to class early, 
their response was that they valued connecting with one another and that having a chance to socialize, 
even via Zoom, provided a sense of normalcy that they otherwise lacked. As I probed further, I found 
out that while some of these students had taken classes together previously, they had never socialized 
in a formal manner with each other. Essentially, this group of students built a connection with one 

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another despite the physical distance between them. I take this as qualitative evidence of the course 
format fostering high levels of trust with one another. This independent, non-required interaction 
seemed to also foster more complex in-class conversations. 

Within the field of HR, I often tell students that there are very clear wrong answers but rarely 
is there a clear right answer. Instead, student evaluation in the HR courses I teach are frequently 
assessed on the complexity of their responses, their ability to explain their positions, and their 
justification for stances on a particular topic. The changes implemented in these courses required a 
greater depth of thought about specific topics. This differed significantly from the typical discussion-
based classroom lecture I had conducted in the past. While students were still responsible for the 
course content, the shift in pedagogy away from a text-based class setting toward a ‘real world’ 
discussion seemed to engage a different level of critical thinking in my students. As we made the shift 
to addressing the way in which aspects of HR were manifested in real organizations, students seemed 
to suddenly begin thinking through more complex responses. Rather than relying on a ‘textbook’ 
answer, students were considering implications to scenarios that I as the instructor had not given 
thought to. 

As I move forward, I absolutely plan to use aspects of this approach in my classes. Specifically, 
I plan to continue to record podcasts with professionals and use these as important content/case 
studies across multiple classes. I plan to continue devoting a portion of the beginning of each class 
session to building and fostering trust by sharing and inviting conversation about relevant personal 
experiences. Similarly, there are changes that I made as a result of COVID-19 that I do not plan on 
incorporating in future classes. While combining courses for instructional purposes was necessitated 
by some of the schedule challenges faced by a non-traditional student body, I am not eager to combine 
different courses in the future. Combining students from different courses into the same class session 
posed challenges related to maintaining distinct course learning outcomes. Overall, this made it 
challenging to focus the in-class conversation as specifically as I had hoped on the topics relevant to 
each course. Instead, I found the conversation bouncing between content from both courses. The result 
was a conversation that was relevant to half the class part of the time and the other half of the class 
part of the time. 

A further question that remains is the marginal value of using podcasts over recorded video 
lectures. In this particular case, I opted to use podcasts based on the demographics of my students 
and the fact that many of my students were employed full time and/or cared for children as a result 
of schools being closed. I believed that providing access to podcasts would create more accessible 
content for my students. This is entirely speculative, however, and I am unaware of any research that 
specifically compares podcasts to recorded video lectures as a learning tool. While I suspect that there 
are differences in learning outcomes based on the use of podcasts versus recorded video lectures or 
interviews, this is an open question that future research should explore.   

One of the other inevitable challenges I faced in pivoting to a technology-reliant course so 
quickly was the lack of preparation. By the end of the semester, I was completely worn out from 
spending hours contacting guests, recording and editing the podcasts, and preparing class discussions 
and relevant examples based on each podcast. Each week was an almost endless cycle of preparation. 
While the pandemic necessitated such a change, it is not one that I am eager to repeat. I have become 
a firm believer that podcasts can be an incredibly effective educational tool, but to effectively execute 
and incorporate podcasts within the curriculum, it would be ideal to have at least one semester in 
advance to prepare and relate the podcast content back to the course content. Overall, podcasts are an 
effective educational tool when students have a high degree of trust with one another and are able to 
tolerate a moderate degree of ambiguity. I will likely be using some form of podcast in each of my 
future courses, and I encourage other instructors to do the same. I would be happy to share an example 
podcast upon request. 

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Epilogue 

Now that almost 12 months have passed since moving entirely online, I find that I have continued to 
incorporate podcasts into my classes. I originally noted that one of the challenges was the speed at 
which I had to pivot from face-to-face to an entirely virtual setting. As I am now teaching these two 
courses again, I do in fact find that having additional time to prepare has made the use of podcasts 
more effective. I have now been able to tailor specific discussion questions for each class based on 
the podcasts instead of combining both courses together. This has allowed me to more easily 
distinguish between the learning outcomes for each course and keep synchronous discussions of the 
material more targeted. While I faced some challenges with the combining of classes and the use of 
podcasts, COVID-19 has forced me to reevaluate important aspects of my pedagogy and has provided 
an opportunity to rapidly experiment with new tools. 

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Law-Penrose 

Journal of Teaching and Learning with Technology, Vol. 10, Special Issue, jotlt.indiana.edu 

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