1. Ask us for help

Do you need help finding a book, film, or other resources for your class? Having problems accessing library databases or an article or eBook? Any questions about library services? Email us at Library@kzoo.edu.

2. Course Materials

Librarians are happy to talk with you about materials for your courses. We can help with off-campus links to articles and eBooks to make it easier for students to access the materials you assign. The library may have relevant eBooks, articles, and videos already in our collections, and we can suggest open access alternatives that may fit your course needs.

3. Customized Library Course Guides

We are more than happy to work with you to create a Library Guide tailored to your specific assignments. We can include video tutorials to walk students through how best to use library resources. Examples of Course Guides: BUSN/ECON 380 and HIST 242. Additional research guides include discipline specific research guides and the general Library Research Toolkit.

4. Embed a Librarian in your Course Moodle or Teams Site

Having a librarian partnered with your course is another way for students to connect with a librarian. We can answer questions from students and share appropriate resources in your course site.

5. Research Instruction via Teams, Zoom, or Stream

If you are holding synchronous class sessions, we can demonstrate resources and facilitate a discussion about research or information literacy. For asynchronous classes, we can recommend or create instructional videos to help your students understand how to access the library’s online resources. Individual students can sign up for Research Rescue through Teams or Zoom—thank you for continuing to send students our way!

Just ask!

Your librarians are available and willing to help make your classes this fall a success. Email reference@kzoo.edu or schedule an appointment to talk about your class needs.

1. Moodle is not connected to the Registrar

That means students will not be automatically added to your Moodle site.  The easiest solution is to copy and paste the URL for the course and email this to students.  That will lead them directly to your course.  They can also navigate to it in the categories at the College’s moodle home page.

2. Moodle sites are made up of Activities and Resources

You can add two types of elements to a Moodle courses – Activities and Resources. You might think of Activities as where students provide the content and perform tasks (Forums, Assignments, Quizzes, etc.) and Resources as elements provided by the instructor (Files, URLs, Lessons, etc.).  You can add these to any of your week modules and move them around as needed by drag and dropping.

3. Everything in Moodle has settings!

This might sound obvious, but as a community-build, open-source project, Moodle tries to be everything to everyone.  There are a number of settings for any particular element and most of those settings you will not need to worry about.  However, it is useful to be aware that the gear wheel icon ( ) on the main page of the course includes the settings for the class, while elements like Files, Forums, and others have their own “Edit” options to access the settings.  Don’t hesitate to ask if you have a question about what a setting does!  Also, Moodle’s question mark icons ( ) can be useful quick references.

4. The default format shows a preview of each week, not all the content.

Old Moodle themes used to place all the content in one long list resulting in what was commonly called the “scroll of death.”  Our Boost theme shows the name of the section and displays any text written in the week’s header (that’s what you access when you click “Edit Week.”)  Students can click the title of the week and that will take them to the Activities and Resources for that section with the General (top) section above.  This reduces the scroll considerably as the quarter goes on.  To maximize the value of this design, avoid putting too much content inside “Edit Week.” Use Labels and other Moodle resources within the section instead.  Place important material like the syllabus, non-time specific content, and course-long material in the persistent General (top) section.

5. Don’t go it alone as you start on the Grade Book

With some preparation and organization, the Moodle grade book will provide accurate grades for the instructor and to each individual student.  However, it isn’t completely intuitive in every situation.  Save wasted time and headaches by asking for my help with the grade book . That is what I’m here for!  If you want to jump in alone, please preview this video Moodle Grade Book – The Basics.

I spent what felt like a lot of time this summer in online workshops about how to teach online. I learned a lot of things — both by positive and negative association! — that will help me make my fall courses have better online content. Here are 5 big things I have in mind.

1. Community of Inquiry Framework in online course design
2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and Synchrony
3. Same Goals, different modalities
4. Variety in instructional modes
5. Sit in an online course yourself

1. Community of Inquiry Framework and Supporting Discourse

Like a lot of instructors at K, I’ve been thinking about how to foster community and support discourse among students in my classes. I’ve found myself stuck on that question and honestly discouraged by what felt like a lot of disconnected student experiences in my spring class. I gained some insight during an online session this summer centered on the Community of Inquiry Framework. In particular, my breakthrough moment came from looking at the pair-wise regions of intersection between the “Presences” — Teaching, Cognitive, and Social:

• Selecting Content
• Supporting Discourse
• Setting Climate

In the spring I gave a lot of thought to Selecting Content, and in struggling with ways to Supporting Discourse, I hadn’t fully considered the role of my teaching presence in Setting Climate. As an example, is his piece at the TLC Summer Teaching Development site, David Rhoa talks about how he noticed that students, if left to make that decision on their own, would often turn off their web cameras during synchronous video group meetings and by doing so be effectively absent from the discussion. He says if he had to do it again, he would set the expectation that students take part fully by keeping their cameras on. That’s Climate Setting! Now that we have some experience about how things can tend to happen, we are in a better place to set climate from the start to support discourse.

2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and Synchrony

Synchronous or Asynchronous? That’s a question I’ve spent a lot of discussion time on, often framed by various concerns that don’t pertain directly to teaching and learning: Students scattered across many time zones and other scheduling difficulties, technical challenges of large live video meetings, technical challenges of producing compelling video content, etc.

I had a pleasant aha moment last week when a participant in a big teaching seminar mentioned this paper in passing. The figure below is modified from that paper. The idea that grabbed me was that in organizing the kinds of learning I want students to achieve using Bloom’s Taxonomy, the timeline of learning activities seemed to fit very neatly:

At the base of the pyramid, it seems clear to me that students read, hear, remember and understand concepts at highly individual rates. Those activities are perfectly suited for outside of class reading assignments, pre-discussion activities, and my recorded video lectures — all things that students can do at their own speed and in their own time.

The middle layers of the pyramid are better suited for real-time interactions: Discussions with and between students that suggest and interrogate connections and contexts for ideas.

Finally, the tip of the pyramid takes repeated concerted attempts and lots of time — more than can be sustained in a Teams meeting. That’s where asynchronous delivery returns.

I’ve heard Josh Moon say many times that real-time interaction with students should be spent checking in and having conversations. One-way communication of content is best done asynchronously.

3. Same Goals, Different Modalities

There’s a lot to be said for designing an online course using Backward Design Principles. Sometimes though I find myself thinking backwards in a bad way: I sometimes look at what a technology platform is capable of doing and then try to build a teaching and learning activity with that as the basis. I sometimes forget that effective teaching and learning activities aren’t good only because they’re in person and face to face — that just happens to be the only modality I was really fluent in before Covid 19.

This idea — adapting existing active learning practices to online delivery modes — is at the heart of this handy table which lists teaching goals, traditional classroom active learning strategies and then suggests adaptations to online asynchronous, synchronous virtual online, and physically distanced face-to-face environments. I’ve excerpted a few rows of the table below:

4. Include a Variety of Practices

A piece in the July 8 issue of Inside Higher Ed discusses results of two nation-wide surveys — one of college and university students and another for instructors. The former study identifies eight effective online teaching practices and reports data that seems to make a strong connection between student satisfaction with the course and the number of these practices incorporated. In his piece in the TLC Summer Teaching Development collection, Jeff Bartz looks back at his experience online in the spring through this framework.

5. Try it yourself

I don’t really think of myself as a person with a bad attitude. That changed this summer. To prepare better for my work with TLC on the Summer Teaching Development resource, I registered for a number of multi-day online seminars for college teachers in the emerging world of online instructors.

I was already starting to feel a skin-crawling discontent by the time I logged in at the website for the first seminar! Before I even knew my registration was successful, my email inbox began rapidly filling with dozens of “get to know me” emails from the other participants: “Hi, I’m Matt from Plynthville College, Looking forward to the seminar!” Upon signing in, I learned that the first assignment of all participants was to type a message board introduction myself and comment on several others: “Nice to meet you Matt. I’ve heard great things about Plynthville.”

Over the following few days, I learned that it is really hard to sit in front of the screen and stay connected with my 30 classmates during a 90 minute video lecture. I learned that “enter your response in the chat” in a group that size results in a rapidly scrolling stream of consciousness with only the first and last entries, or those that already contain the vocabulary we’re trying to learn, gaining the attention of the instructor. I learned that the “raise my hand” feature works just as well or poorly as in any other large lecture: unless carefully managed, the same person raises their hand and talks repeatedly, day after day.

I learned from that experience the powerful lesson that there are lots of online teaching practices that I don’t want to use in my own course! As they say “experience is the best teacher.” But as a person who is really curious about how effective teaching works, I think I discovered how to do some of those things better. Try it. What you don’t find helpful might be the most useful thing for you to learn.

We’ve had one term of practice with online learning at K College. The lessons learned will be needed right away as we plan for a future of hybrid course design and delivery that we hope will be robust in the face of uncertain public health environment in this time of Covid-19. Throughout the spring quarter, we heard feedback from students about what was working for them. Much of their feedback fits into five big categories:

1. Social Presence in a time of Physical Distancing
2. Frequent Assessment with Rapid, Detailed, Personal Feedback
3. Multiple instructional modes
4. Transparent and frequently-repeated explanation of course structure and requirements
5. Explicit attention to the new ways of learning students need to develop in order to achieve learning at a distance

Not surprisingly, the things that worked best for students are in many cases consistent with and predicted by work in the pedagogy literature. Here we weave together summaries of student feedback with a piece by Michelle Miller: “Online Learning: Does it Work?”

1. Social Presence:

Throughout the spring term, we heard feedback from faculty about their sense of uncertainty in the absence of in-person face-to-face feedback from students. At the same time, students who reported positive experiences in their spring online courses comment again and again about instructors who found ways to create a sense of community and connection despite the distance learning format.

In her 2017 chapter “Online Learning: Does it Work?”, Michelle Miller writes:

Social distance is the flip side of the “social presence” concept first
articulated in the early days of telecommunications. It has to do
with the exchange of social cues and the feeling that one is authentically interacting with another person in the virtual environment. Creating social presence is another thing that online instructors need to pay special attention to, for example by encouraging students to offer personal information, eliciting supportive communications between students, and using communication tools that transmit facial expressions and vocal tone. Going the extra mile to do this doesn’t just make the class more pleasant, but is also an important predictor of success in the course.

The social feedback instructors get from students is also radically
altered in an online environment. In a traditional classroom setting,
students’ faces give you an instant read on confusion, disengagement, and other important problems. Students stop by before or after class to clear up muddy points or talk in-depth about topics that caught their interest, and the give-and-take of an interactive lecture gives you a good grasp of students’ level of understanding, at least for the ones who speak up. Online, these interactions are usually heavily time-delayed and mediated by text, particularly e-mail and discussion posts — two communication formats that have a well-known propensity to misrepresent emotional tone. To compensate, online instructors need to make formal inquiries to students about how the class is going, as well as keep a close eye on data such as frequency of log-in, late assignments, and assessment scores so that they can form an accurate picture of how students are faring.

Miller, M. D. (2017). Chapter 2: Online learning: Does it work? In Minds online: teaching effectively with technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

2. Frequent, Rapid, Informative Feedback

Students who reported the best experiences with online courses at K often singled out their appreciation of prompt, frequent, detailed and personal feedback on their work products. They often call out as a challenge those courses in which work that was graded as simply “credit” or “complete” without thoughtful formative feedback. In a format that brings challenges in traditional social connection, students found it very powerful to interact with their instructors through assessment products. Quizzes, short written pieces, class discussion forum posts, as well as longer more integrative work. As we put thought into the design of our fall courses, it will help instructors and students to develop assessment tools that allow for this deep engagement. For this to work, the balance of instructor time likely shifts from activities traditionally associated with “in class” to an intentional workflow of managing frequent, rapid, informative feedback. In addition to written feedback, some instructors at K this spring found found that Moodle’s audio recording instructor feedback tool lightened the burden of providing detailed feedback while simultaneously providing a socially present alternative mode of interaction with students.

Miller writes:

This traditional “best practice” is widely cited as one of the things
instructors should spend as much time and thought on as possible.
Teaching experts Eric Mazur and Carl Wieman have been passionate advocates of providing a more dynamic, feedback— rich experience in traditional lecture classes. Similarly, rapid feedback is a key feature of the best online learning experiences. There are myriad ways to accomplish this online, including peer feedback, auto-graded quizzes, and branching lessons that present varying content based on student input.

M. D. (2017). Chapter 2: Online learning: Does it work? In Minds online: teaching effectively with technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

3. Multiple Modes of Instruction

Students gave feedback that was, widely varied and on the surface contradictory: “Readings were perfect”, “impossible amount of reading”, “Loved asynchronous video lectures”, “Video Lectures were the worst”, “Loved synchronous class meetings”, “Synchronous classes were awful”. A more careful reading of this feedback suggests to us that students found success with many modes of instruction, but with some caveats:

• 75 minutes isn’t what it used to be: Whether live or recorded, shorter (up to say 20 minutes) lectures were much more likely to be reported as helpful to students’ learning than attempts to “fill” the traditional class meeting period.
• Variety was greatly appreciated: detailed instructor emails in a course structure containing other forms of interaction were highly appreciated. As the only form of interaction, students frequently reported with vehemence about the unsuitability of a “course by email”.

Online courses can be designed with an emphasis on alternating text with other forms of delivery, such as animated narration or Skype conversations, but it is difficult to get around the need for a great deal of written communication. This contrasts with the typical face-to-face course in which lecture, audiovisual demonstrations, and spoken discussion are a major part of the learning activities.

Students who aren’t strong readers, or who just prefer non-text
modalities, are at particular risk of falling behind in a text-heavy
environment. Unfortunately, we don’t have many solutions for these
less-proficient readers. Minding the reading level of material, keeping it to the level of a newspaper or lower, is one basic strategy.
When using synchronous, fast-paced activities like real-time chatting, it’s also important to weigh any potential benefits against
potential difficulties for slower readers. Building in lots of those
aforementioned alternate forms— narration, audio, and video— can
also give a boost to less-proficient readers.

M. D. (2017). Chapter 2: Online learning: Does it work? In Minds online: teaching effectively with technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

4. Transparency about Course Structure and Requirements

When students gave negative feedback about their experiences with online courses, it was often in the form of comments about not have a clear idea about what they were meant to be doing and when they were meant to be doing it. Frequent assignment with rapid feedback is only as effective as the students understanding of the details of the assignments.

This factor might fade as more students get experience with online
coursework and as online-course designers begin to converge on
commonly accepted conventions for course structure. In the meantime, though, students often come to online coursework with a less developed sense of how things work than they would for a traditional course. Traditional courses superficially resemble high school classes, in that they are organized around set times and places for meeting, textbooks, and schedules of deadlines— so even students with little or no college experience can fall back on this familiar script to figure out what to do next. Just showing up for class can assure these less-experienced students that they will probably get by. But how do you “just show up” for an online class? In an online class (or the online parts of a blended or combination online/traditional class), it may not be clear where to start, how to spend one’s study time, or when the work is due. Good design, of course, offsets the problem of orienting students to the layout of the assignments— but even in a well- designed online course, students as well as teachers have to work harder to establish a basic understanding of how the course will work.

M. D. (2017). Chapter 2: Online learning: Does it work? In Minds online: teaching effectively with technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

5. Help students explicitly develop the new learning approaches they’ll need for online courses.

A number of students who gave positive feedback about their experience in online courses at K in the spring reported a growth experience in their awareness of their own learning processes: The shift to online courses was difficult in the beginning and became more manageable as the students began to examine their own role as independent learners in environments that offered much less structure and many more distracting features.

Miller has a very thoughtful account of this:

More so than in the traditional classroom, students can seriously underestimate how much time and effort is required to succeed in online learning. Part of this problem may have to do with the much- vaunted “flexibility” of online coursework.

If the idea is that online learning fits in between family time, paid
work, travel, child care, and everything else in life, it likely ends up
an afterthought tacked on after all those other life activities are
addressed. And as we all know, exhausted, distracted, time- pressed students are unlikely to achieve stellar intellectual gains in any instructional format. Some experts argue that online learning’s tendency to become a “third shift”— i.e., something tackled after work and family duties are done— places a particular burden on female students, given their greater responsibility, on average, for the “second shift” of family work. Furthermore, in face-to-face teaching, you can ensure that some bare minimum of time is devoted to classwork (by policing attendance), and you can schedule classes when students are likely to be fresh (i.e., not in the middle of the night).

Neither of these basic strategies for ensuring maximal engagement
is easy to do online.Like many other quality issues, the third-shift problem can be addressed through forethought and savvy design choices. One good place to start is with a heavy dose of socialization at the beginning of the course about your expectations for student time commitment. Simply exhorting students that they will have to work hard and put in time has limited impact, but at least you can get your expectations out into the open early. Following through on your stated expectations, by having some small-stakes work due early in the semester, is another good practice for getting students into the right mindset.Beyond laying out your expectations and following through on them,
you can consider scheduling some synchronous-style work if you are concerned that students are just squeezing in little bits of work at odd hours. This approach has costs (such as potentially disadvantaging slower readers, as mentioned previously) and may be perceived as user-unfriendly by students, but it’s a clear way to exert more control over the pacing and timing of work.

M. D. (2017). Chapter 2: Online learning: Does it work? In Minds online: teaching effectively with technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press