Tag: technology

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Online Group Projects to Build Community: Platform Options

As the fall semester bears down on us and many schools are finally admitting that yes, there will be a substantial amount of online courses (either fully, blended, hybrid, hyflex, etc), I imagine many faculty are experiencing some amount of panic about having to once again suddenly move their courses online. In particular, faculty are concerned about building community in their classes. Online courses can feel very isolating; without physical interaction before and after class, students may not feel connected to either you as the instructor, or their fellow students. One way to combat this and build community is to use team-based learning, where you have set groups working throughout a term on one or a series of projects. This can give students a small group of people that they can come to know well, even if they only work asynchronously with those students. Whether you are interested in adopting a team-based learning model, or just want to use the occasional group project, it’s a good idea to look at what options we have to do this online. On general approaches, I will direct you to this article by Stephanie Smith Budhai in Faculty Focus; here, let’s stick to recommendations on platforms for group or team learning.

First, a caveat: you don’t have to always dictate what platform your students use to collaborate. If all you care about is the end-project or outcomes, then let them use whatever platform they feel comfortable with. Give them options, certainly, but don’t dictate–let them communicate in whatever way is going to make it easy for them to work together, whether that’s on a social media platform, texting, WhatsApp, or something else. The main reason to ask students to use a particular platform is if you want to be able to check in on their work in progress and to see how things are developing. Each of the below options would allow you to do that (although students may need to grant you access!). Just be sure to explain why you’ve chosen this platform, take some time to train students in how to use it, and be clear on how and why you’ll be dropping in to check on their progress.

Let’s talk about several platforms you can use for group collaboration or team-based learning.

Continue reading “Online Group Projects to Build Community: Platform Options”
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Tips for Moving Instruction Online

Still this?

Higher Ed is in crisis mode in much of the USA, with faculty at a growing list of universities being told that on-campus instruction is suspended until further notice. If you work at one of these institutions, here’s some advice:

First, a great analysis by Rebecca Barrett, assistant professor of sociology at Arkansas State University:

Please Do a Bad Job of Putting Your Courses Online.

Some mundane advice from me:

Design according to student learning outcomes

  • What activities will help students learn what you want them to learn? There are multiple options that serve the same goal, and some function well in an online environment.

Students benefit from consistent difference

  • Organize the course as a series of similarly-structured modules that include varied tasks; for example, readings + writing assignment + graded discussion + quiz in each module. Spaced repetition of activities with different cognitive demands aids learning. Students appreciate a routine — it helps them develop a schedule in a new environment.
  • If your students are (or were) full-time residential undergraduates without families, set deadlines for 10:00 pm so they aren’t awake past midnight.

Use a variety of content delivery methods

  • Convert lecture notes to brief essays or outlines. Create visual presentations with PowerPoint or Prezi. Assign e-book chapters or journal articles in the library’s databases.
  • Producing high-quality video is very labor intensive and nearly impossible to create on short notice without professional expertise. Audio must be captioned for the hearing-impaired. Instead use existing resources like Crash Course.

Include opportunities for student-student interaction; e.g., discussions

  • Require that students post substantial discussion comments by the halfway point in each week/module, and that they meaningfully respond to the comments of others.
  • Interact with students by regularly posting your own comments in discussions.
  • Grading discussions in Canvas is easy with a rubric and Speedgrader.

Testing

  • Your university’s learning management system (LMS) will grade multiple-choice and true/false tests for you.
  • Create a question bank first, then draw questions for a test from it. This will save time and effort in the long run.
  • Timed tests where students have on average only 1-2 minutes per question will minimize cheating. Some universities have purchased tools that are integrated with the LMS that lock down browsers (to prevent new windows from being opened) and monitor students activity during tests.

Writing assignments

Short, frequent writing assignments (1-2 pages per module) are better than only one or two longer assignments. Frequent practice and feedback = better student work.

Time spent grading can be greatly minimized with rubrics.

Specify file types (doc, docx, pdf) to ensure that you can read what students submit.

Build support networks

Your colleagues down the hall and across campus are valuable resources. Benefit from them. Someone probably knows a solution to the problem you’re struggling with, whether it be a technological obstacle or carving out work time at home when your child’s elementary school has closed.

These actions also improve your teaching in on-campus courses by making it easier for students to learn and by reducing the time and effort you expend on unsatisfying tasks.

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The Muddiest Point, Updated

Many of you are probably already acquainted with the muddiest point technique — asking students to identify the one aspect of a lesson or assignment that they are the most confused by. Often this is accomplished by distributing index cards for students to write on. This semester I’m using an electronic version in a 200-level honors course on Asia: a survey on our Canvas LMS, completed in the last few minutes of class on days for which some kind of lecture or discussion is scheduled. The survey consists of the question “What are you most curious or confused about from class today?” Students automatically earn one point toward the final grade by answering it.

With a paperless process, I don’t have to try to decipher students’ handwriting. And I have an archive of students’ responses that I don’t have to transport or store.

Far more importantly, the surveys are demonstrating the difference between my knowledge base and that of my students — which I otherwise would be mostly oblivious to.

For example, my mind automatically defaults to thinking in terms of power, authority, and legitimacy whenever I’m confronted with the task of analyzing an authoritarian state. Or I recall concepts like ethnic identity when discussing nationalism. Or I know that geography is political rather than an immutable law of the universe — as demonstrated by the origins of labels like Far East, Middle East, and Near East. This is not the case with the majority of students in the class, given their survey responses so far.

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Collaborative Reading – Follow-Up Thoughts

Today we have an update from Colin M. Brown, College Fellow in Government at Harvard University. He can be reached at brown4 [at] fas [dot] harvard [dot] edu.

In a post last year, I talked about the potential of using annotation software like CritiqueIt to make the reading process more collaborative. In short, by creating a single copy of the reading that students can mark up together online, there’s the potential for creating discussion prior to and during class, and also for getting students to see course readings as statements in a dialogue.

My first use of CritiqueIt was promising, but I’m less satisfied after having further used it in two undergraduate seminars plus a graduate-level, continuing education course.

Two things have continued to work, probably still making the tool a net positive. First, as a diagnostic tool CritiqueIt makes class prep easier, because it gives me a window into what students find interesting or are struggling with. Students indicate their interest implicitly or explicitly, and they also seem relatively fine with using their comments to signal that something doesn’t make sense—especially useful when they’re having difficulty with something I didn’t expect. Second, they seem to like it. Students seem to perceive it as a cool new gimmick, and I seem to get credit for trying it.

However, while CritiqueIt lets me know what students want the conversation in class to be about, it hasn’t generated a conversation among students on its own. Students have posted a few responses to other students’ annotations, but the kind of exchange I mentioned in the original post hasn’t happened consistently. Students seem to be completing the assignment because it sends me a signal that they have, in fact, engaged with the reading. This provides me with feedback for me, as mentioned above, but was not my ultimate reason for using the tool.

Since I want students to see political science writings as part of an ongoing exchange of ideas, there are three changes that I’ll be implementing next semester, thanks to insights from my colleague Daniel Smail, who has been experimenting with the same tool in his history courses:

  1. Build CritiqueIt into the entire semester. Students need time to get used to the tool, and the expectation that it’s an integral part of their work.
  2. Assign early readers. If everyone reads the night or morning before class, there’s less incentive to start a dialogue that none of their peers will respond to. By dividing up the collaborative readings and having one or two students make their annotations three or four days before class, there will be more time for students to jump into the conversation.
  3. Work CritiqueIt into summative assessment. This also normalizes the use of the tool, and gives students the incentive to develop better commenting skills. Students will need several days to virtually hand the document back and forth so this has to be accounted for in scheduling other assignments. But giving them a longer piece of journalism on the broad course theme and having them react to it, and then to each other, knowing that their comments will be graded on some explicit rubric, might be a better way to tease out their ability to respond critically to arguments—and actually use something they learned from class.

 

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Follow-Up on Slack and Specification Grading

Today we have another post by guest contributor William R. Wilkerson, Professor of American Government and Politics at SUNY-Oneonta. He can be reached at bill [dot] wilkerson [at] oneonta [dot] edu.

Earlier this summer I wrote about two changes that I made to my five-week online summer course, Law, Courts and Politics: using Slack for class communication and specifications grading. Both experiments were a success.

Slack

Slack was a great addition. I found it easy to set up and to use. Students liked it. Thanks to the resources I noted in my earlier post, I created a simple structure: channel for each week was the home of announcements, files, links, and discussion — the center of the course. The introduction channel gave students the ability to practice and the questions forum got some use, especially early in the term.

Because Slack has excellent apps for all mobile and computer platforms, I hoped that it would encourage regular communication, which it did. Total posts in the weekly channels ranged from 62 in week 2 to 90 in week 4. I posted reminders and introduced topics, but most posts were from the students. Nine or ten students active each week; one student never posted in the weekly discussion forums. I was pleased that a group of students began posting mid-week and continued through the end of the week. Students picked up quickly on hashtags for topics and connecting to their fellow students via the @ symbol, which facilitated interaction. Posts were fairly long too, especially when you consider they were writing on their phones. I had expected phone use to result in short responses to comments, but that didn’t happen. Continue reading “Follow-Up on Slack and Specification Grading”

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First Impressions

Having wrapped up the first month of another fall semester, here are some reflections on this year’s incoming undergraduates as compared to those from previous years — based on a completely unscientific sample composed of the forty-four 17-18 year olds whom I’m teaching in two sections of a first-year seminar.

  1. Ignorance of basic technical processes continues to increase. This ranges from not understanding that electronic files have different formats to being unable to upload to a server any file, regardless of type. Or, in some cases, students recognizing the need to click on a “submit” button, but then not verifying that what they submitted was what they actually wanted to submit. (Resulting in a grade of zero each and every time.)
  2. When confronted by these technical challenges, students are more likely to react with learned helplessness, making my standard response of “figure it out”  even less endearing than it was previously. (Student evaluations for these seminars average a full point lower on a five-point scale than for other courses.)
  3. The immediate post-high school attitude that learning is a pro forma exercise in “tell me what I need to know” is just as common, if not more so, than it has been in the past. Few of the students start college exhibiting genuine curiosity about a world that is external to themselves.
  4. Male students demonstrate learned helplessness and lack of curiosity much more frequently than female students. It seems we are raising a generation of men who are at risk of living life as unskilled, low-paid, socially-maladjusted drones.
  5. Undergraduates are getting poorer,  more ethnically diverse, and less well-prepared. Although they perceive a college education as the ticket to a middle class existence, they have less understanding of what they have to do to obtain this ticket, and they are more frequently entering college with characteristics that make this objective much harder to achieve. For example, the more hours they expend on financially-necessary part-time employment, the less time and energy they have available for developing the habits and skills that would allow them to overcome pre-existing academic deficits. From the supply side of the equation, these students require greater amounts of financial aid and support services, making them more expensive to educate.
  6. Compensating for all of the negatives listed above is the fact that I am rarely faced with the sense of entitlement that can develop among the wealthiest and best-prepared students. They go to places like Harvard instead.
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Using Slack for Online Teaching

Today’s post is by guest contributor William R. Wilkerson, Professor of American Government and Politics at SUNY-Oneonta. He can be reached at bill [dot] wilkerson [at] oneonta [dot] edu.

As I noted in my previous post, I am teaching Law Courts and Politics as an online course this summer. In the past, I have used email and the Blackboard LMS for communication in online courses. Students don’t respond to email as they once did, and while Blackboard has about every tool you could imagine, discussion forums are clunky and the mobile app is unsatisfactory. After listening to a podcast interview with political scientist Steven Michels, I decided to give Slack a try. My wife uses Slack at work as an officer of a professional association board and she had good things to say about it. Examples of teaching with Slack are described here and here.

Slack is an integrated team communication tool. Only invited participants can be part of a team workspace, and it has tools for group discussion that can be divided into forums that are called channels. Channels can be open to the entire team or part of the team. Slack also has features like direct messaging, file sharing, video conferencing, and tagging of individuals. The free version works great for most purposes and its apps are fully compatible across platforms. Continue reading “Using Slack for Online Teaching”

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Rethinking my digital ban

I’ve long been a diehard “laptop ban” advocate. Basing this decision first on intuition and later Startup Stock Photoson empirical evidence, it was rarely an issue beyond the initial student grumbling. Among hundreds of student evaluations, a very small handful (less than 5) mentioned it as an issue. Although I included the caveat of “if this is problem for you, please talk to me,” no one ever did. Case closed, or so I thought.

As I’m getting ready for a new term, I read with interest this piece in the Chronicle on starting the semester. Basically, I read the whole piece, nodding along until he got to his critique of the laptop ban. I didn’t think too much of it at first; I have always stated that I’m willing to make accommodations, just no student ever asked. But then I read the piece from Digital Pedagogy Lab he linked to and I’m already singing a different tune.
Continue reading “Rethinking my digital ban”

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Pokepolisci

pokemon-1543353_960_720I’d love to be able to tell you about how you can teach political science using nothing more than Pokemon Go. I’d love it, because it would give some semblance of meaning to the past fortnight, the hours spent hunting down Pokemon and wondering whether I’ll even catch a Jynx.

Sadly, I’m not able to. Not yet.

For those who’ve been living under a rock of late, Pokemon Go is the latest incarnation of the long-running series of games from the Nintendo stable, wherein one attempts to catch a variety of monsters – the eponymous Pokemon. Continue reading “Pokepolisci”