For several years I’ve been interested in shifting my
grading practices to focus more on learning than on the kind of content
knowledge that frequently rewards prior knowledge and privilege. The move to
CR/NC grading in Spring 2020 gave me an opportunity to experiment with this
further. The key concern that I and many
other K colleagues had, though, was whether a CR/NC grading system would lead
to less motivation and less engagement among students.
My experience this spring convinced me that lower stakes
grading does not have to lead to lower levels of student engagement. In fact, two experiments were so successful
that my CS colleagues and I plan to continue these approaches across many of
our classes, whether remote or in-person, and whether CR/NC or letter-graded.
The first 6 minute video talks about turning rubrics that
awarded points for required criteria into ones that awarded checkmarks,
dramatically reducing the number of points per assignment. This approach is
essentially a very mild form of gamification. (It is also somewhat similar to
specifications grading.)
Low Stakes, High Engagement: Part 1 – Many checkmarks, few points (Mild gamification)
The second, 6 minute video discusses a move to replace
traditional homework assignments with structured reflection assignments. My original motivation was to reduce grading
time, since the class was significantly over-enrolled. I feared that some content learning would be
lost, but found that the weekly writings encouraged students to develop and
articulate greater depth and integration than the older homework assignments.
Low Stakes, High Engagement: Part 2 – Structured reflection instead of traditional homework assignments
The Chat option in Microsoft Teams turned out to be an effective way to communicate with students, to the point that we decided to use it instead of email communication.
It offered casual and immediate exchanges (many of us installed Teams on our phones) and I would usually reply right away. It was convenient for students in both my Basic Drawing and Digital Art classes to reach out to me, or to the rest of the class in the group chat we set up early on, with questions as they worked on their projects.
Drawing students could send pictures of their in-progress drawings for feedback. Digital Art students were able to ask questions which would often lead to an impromptu video chat in order to share their screens with me.
It allowed me to see what they were working on and either help with technical issues or offer feedback. I found Teams Chat to be efficient and timesaving, but most importantly I felt it was the closest thing to being together in a studio classroom where I am there to answer questions and help students as they worked on their projects. It was also a quick and easy-to-use tool for me to reach out to students and was surprised by their prompt replies.
Both courses were taught asynchronously and incorporated different platforms. Moodle served as the main repository of information while Padlet served as an interactive collective space (see Sarah Lindley’s post). We also held optional Zoom meetings every week and I found that reminding students of the meeting through a chat message a few minutes prior offered good results.
I know, it isn’t for everyone. But if you need to typeset a math symbol, you need it to be easy to enter and correctly formatted. Moodle has a built-in capability to interpret math symbols using the LaTeX typesetting language.
All that’s needed are double dollar signs, like in this little example: I created an assignment call “latex sample” and typed the following in the assignment description:
The coefficient of $$x^2$$ is $$\pi$$.
That displays in Moodle as
If you aren’t familiar with LaTeX:
Here is my top-ten list of most needed LaTeX symbols.
Subscripts use _ (underscore): $$a_1$$, $$H_a$$, $$k_s$$, etc
Exponents and superscripts ^ (caret): $$x^2$$, $$e^x$$, etc
Greek letter are preceded by \ (backslash): $$\pi$, $$\alpha$$, $$\mu$$ etc
Fractions use a special construct: $$ \frac{ }{ } $$ For example “pi over 2” would be entered as $$ \frac{\pi}{2}$$
Numbers and lots of symbols correspond to their typical keyboard symbol: prime = apostrophe, absolute value = vertical bar on backslash key $$ |x| $$, parens = (), as well as the operators +, –
Integrals use the construction $$ \int $$, for example $$ \int_a^b f(x) dx $$
Multiplication: use \cdot like this $$ x \cdot x^2 = x^3 $$
If you want an old-fashioned “multiply by” symbol, use $$ 3 \times 2 = 6 $$
If you want an old-fashioned “divided by” symbol, use $$ 6 \div 2 = 3 $$
Beware of Percent Sign and literal Dollar Sign: They need to have a backslash $$ 21\% $$ and $$ \$21.99 $$.
As suits this extra tip: infinity is entered with this sad misspelling: $$ \infty $$.
The Activity Completion feature in Moodle helpful for students to keep their work in your course organized, and can be motivating for them: there’s a feeling of accomplishment when checking those boxes!
After a week of doomsday scrolling in March 2020, it was time to get to work. But what work? The technology options, activity alternatives, and advice for virtual classes were overwhelming. I made some choices and they ended up aligning well with a list of recommended practices published in July 2020:
RECOMMENDED PRACTICES FOR ONLINE INSTRUCTION from Means, B.; Neisler, J. Suddenly Online: A National Survey of Undergraduates During the COVID-19 Pandemic; Digital Promise: San Mateo, CA, 2020.
Assignments that ask students to express what they have learned and what they still need to learn
Breaking up class activities into shorter pieces than in an in-person course
Frequent quizzes or other assessments
Live sessions in which students can ask questions and participate in discussions
Meeting in “breakout groups” during a live class
Personal messages to individual students about how they are doing in the course or to make sure they can access course materials
Using real world examples to illustrate course content
Work on group projects separately from the course meetings
Without knowing that I was doing it, my class was constructed using aspects of Design Thinking. Our class had five major themes – Energy, Efficiency, Fuels, Climate Change, and the Ozone Hole – I thought the major themes would keep the students (and the instructor) interested. Assignments and activities were geared toward understanding the major themes using the standard physical chemistry that we have done at Kalamazoo College for decades.
Our class had asynchronous components aligned with the MWF schedule, with online assignments due each day. Some of the asynchronous activities in Spring 2020 were the same as if we would have met in-person: recorded flipped lectures linked on Moodle, targeted textbook reading, Moodle quizzes on the flipped lectures, Moodle quizzes on the targeted reading, and electronic homework. Students did one assignment looking at aspects of energy they thought would be interesting for the professor to learn. I collected laboratory data and asked the students to analyze it in the same way we would have done in-person.
The synchronous components were weekly problem solving sessions over Zoom. The students showed up, did a warm-up activity, solved problems in breakout rooms, then came back for a closing activity.
Here is how I implemented the recommended practices for online instruction:
Sessions involved an ice breaker, some problem-solving in
breakouts, announcements, and a low-stakes quiz using
Kahoot!
Add more accountability to the live sessions.
Collect materials from students
Add a variety of materials in the live sessions including
Applications of the material
Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning
activities (POGIL))
Need comprehensive instructions for all activities
5. Breakout rooms during class
Easy to do in Zoom
Instructor emailed the problems to discuss before live
class started
When I popped into some breakout rooms all the microphones
where muted. I need to assign roles to the groups and have
somebody report out the results from the group.
A helpful resource for groupwork
6. Personal messages
With lots of online work, professor can see each student’s
progress. Students who were falling behind got messages
either email or instant messages through
Remind
or Slack. More
students chose Remind than Slack.
Remind
will allow the instructor to send out a message to
everyone, which could be a way to check in with the class
A problem even in face-to-face is how to interpret the
silences
7. Real-world examples
Created a
pre-class movie trailer
to describe the applications using
iMovie
that was sent to all of the students. Putting out the
applications that we would study made it important to work
them into the class.
8. Group projects
Students chose whether they wanted to work in laboratory
groups.
Should we do more group work?
Pros:
Working online is isolating
Students have 168 hours in a week to schedule a meetup
Students gave feedback that working in groups was helpful
Lots of people wonder how it would be possible to teach ceramics and sculpture online. It turns out that giving up the messy materials of clay and plaster was less disruptive than losing the group discussion and shared workspace that are essential to a sense of community and rapid artistic growth. This 5-minute video shows how I used the interactive platform of Padlet to introduce assignments, emulate a shared workspace environment, and foster asynchronous discussion. Padlet is colorful, easy to use and edit, and encourages creativity. It’s also nonlinear (unless you want it to be), and nonhierarchical. I used my own $10/month account to create all the Padlets, which meant students were able to use a free account for the entire term.
How I used Padlet in my courses. A 5-minute video by Sarah Lindley
Watch this 8-minute “how to” video to see how easy it is to start using Padlet and visit the Padlet from the video to see how it works.
Getting started with Padlet. An 8-minute video by Sarah Lindley
I don’t like the ads and lack of security with Youtube, so I tried using Vimeo for streaming videos at the beginning of the term. After some consultation with the Amazing Josh Moon, I realized that Streams was easier and better than Youtube, because
you can create the video so it is available to the entire college community, just your class, or just a few people
you can see how many times the video has been viewed
Streams automatically develops text captions for the narrative
no ads
no subscription fee
Alternatively, I also found OneDrive to be very useful for short videos. OneDrive tells you WHO watched the video. That was helpful for having keeping track of engagement.
The focus of this site is going to be links to external long-form sources as a complement to the growing wealth of college-created blogs and videos at the Teaching Commons. At this Moodle site you’ll find links to articles, podcasts, videos, graphics and other content. The emphasis is on topics about which we’ve heard the most feedback over the course of the spring.
In this video, Ann walks us from beginning to end of the process of using a program called Explain EDU to record lectures . It works on iPhone and iPad. You can import pdf files of your PowerPoint lectures — one slide per page — and then narrate the slides. You can do the narration slide by slide, avoiding having to make one continuous recording. It allows you to draw on the slides as you narrate.
Hi Everyone, I’d like to start by thanking all of you for the effort you are putting in this summer to prepare for the fall term. Particular thanks are due to all members of the Teaching and Learning Committee and especially Rick Barth, Alyce Brady, and Josh Moon, for their work in putting together additional resources and information at #KTeachDev2020 to help with course planning. As you prepare for the fall term, please keep the expectations below in mind, regardless of the format(s) of your courses:
Every course for fall should have an online backbone. This is essential in case you need to shift format of your course during the term due to changes in the general public health situation or your own specific need to self-isolate after travel or exposure to COVID-19. This will require that you build your courses around a core of online-delivered content and assignments with any planned in-person interactions designed so as to allow for meaningful online replacement if needed.
To facilitate the online backbone, all courses must have an active Moodle site. Josh Moon and TLC have provided a number of Moodle templates as part of #KTeachDev2020.
The Higher Learning Commission requires that all faculty have regular and substantive interaction with students. “Regular” means that interaction is on a regular and predictable basis over the course of the term (e.g., in person interactions or virtual activities such as weekly check ins, virtual office hours, recitation type sessions, and the like). Please include information about these interactions in your syllabus and at your Moodle site so that students know what to expect and so that we can provide evidence that this requirement has been met. For “substantive”, the key is that the interaction deals with the course content (not just on procedural or organizational issues), so it would include activities such as direct instruction, responding to questions, facilitating group discussion and the like. There is no stipulation that regular and substantive interaction must be synchronous.
Clear statements for students about course expectations, including schedule, assignments and absence policies are always part of excellent pedagogy and are even more essential with the potential for change within the term, so these need to be part of your syllabus, Moodle site, and other course materials. Faculty are encouraged to reach out to students in fall courses via email in advance of the start of the term to share information about course expectations and format. All faculty currently have access to their class list aliases (for example DEPT101-1-2020fa@kzoo.edu) and can also email students through Web Advisor.
A specific note on attendance policies: All students and employees will be required to stop participating with in person activities if they have any signs of illness. There may also be challenges for our international students in arriving in Kalamazoo for the first day of classes. Attendance policies should be flexible in recognition of these and other contingencies that might arise during the term.
Synchronous Required Course Activities: The Academic Planning Task Force recommends that most classes will be well-served if there are at least some synchronous elements in online courses and some asynchronous elements for in person courses. It is important to note that planning for any required synchronous group activities need to include an option for students to choose the time slot for which the class is currently scheduled in order to avoid course schedule conflicts for students. If you plan to have required synchronous activities and need to explore moving your class time, please contact the Registrar to discuss options.
And a couple of additional items related to teaching in specific formats:
If you are using online formats for interaction or elements such as video lectures, please keep in mind that research on these formats suggests that 30-45 minutes is a typical length of time that people can fully engage with these activities before becoming disengaged or increasingly stressed. For the sake of your own well-being and that of our students, please consider limiting the length of time (or breaking up a longer session into different types of activities).
For classes with in person elements, there will be face covering, distancing, and sanitizing requirements put into place and students and employees are expected to follow those requirements. Physical distancing will require a minimum of six feet between people whenever possible. Enhanced sanitizing of campus buildings, including restrooms and high touch surfaces such as doorknobs will be part of the services provided by Facilities Management. Within classrooms, pre-moistened wipes will be provided and each student or faculty member will be expected to wipe down their own space (e.g., table and chair, tablet desk, teaching station) when they enter the space.
I know from the student feedback I’ve heard that there were many successes during last spring’s distance learning term and it is exciting to build on those successes to create a fall term that’s even better. Please feel free to reach out to me or to members of the Teaching and Learning Committee if you have questions for fall.
In the Spring, I had students in Taiwan, India, Greece, Spain, and in all US time zones, including Alaska. Their locations, plus complicated work schedules for some students, made synchronous classes unworkable for me. I designed my class to be as accessible as possible, using Moodle.
Pages
My main organizing tool was a Moodle “Page” for each week. This page listed all of the assignments and activities for that week, with links. At the beginning of the week, I would post a short Moodle Announcement with a link to the page; students would automatically get a copy by email. This gave them three places to access the page— their email inbox, the announcement forum, and in the Moodle section for that week.
I used the following structure for each week’s page:
Logistics. This section was about coordination— discussion groups, deadlines, extensions, etc.
Review. Typically, this section had three parts— an anonymous survey on how the week had gone (using Moodle’s Feedback tool); an outline of the topics we had covered the previous week and an ungraded self-test on those topics.
Project. A short weekly assignment that contributed to their longer research paper that was due late in the quarter.
New Content. This section was the longest part of the page. I would embed 3-6 short videos I had made on the week’s topics. My videos were narrated PowerPoints, posted on YouTube. Each video would be followed by a short quiz or short assignment. Readings, either from the textbook or other sources, would be posted here along with required response questions. I would also assign a few questions related to the week’s content to discuss with their small group and post to the discussion forum.
Here, in two parts, is a screenshot of my Week 2 Moodle Page. Click on each image to see them full size:
Deadlines
Everything was due at the same time at the end of the week. In practice this meant, some students worked through everything as soon as it was posted; some spread the work throughout the week; and some waited until just before the deadline to start. (I initially set the deadlines for both my classes at the same time but that was too difficult for me, so I ended up staggering them— one due Sunday night and the other class due Monday night.) I opened the next week’s work the following morning.
Labels
Labels were a really useful Moodle tool that I hadn’t used earlier. I used simple boldface titles to identify related material and assignments on Moodle. I used photos as labels to differentiate my courses.
Review, Enrichment, and Advanced
I included some optional materials on Moodle. Econ 101 was a prerequisite for one of my classes. I linked videos and chapters from online textbooks on topics and models that they needed to remember. Beyond the review materials, each week I would try to provide links for students who had the time and interest to learn more. “Enrichment” materials provided a deeper view into particular aspects of a week’s topics. These weren’t more difficult, but they provided additional insights. “Advanced” materials were for students who were looking for additional challenges. They were beyond what I would require for this level class but would be accessible to some students.
“Selfie” videos
A few times during the quarter, I shared very short videos of myself— walking around campus or looking at the late Spring snowstorm. These were really just greetings, as opposed to course content. My intent was to try to make remote delivery a little more personal.
Overall, this approach worked well for me. It didn’t rely on sophisticated technology and students responded favorably to the organization.
