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Teaching Online

How to Create Richer Experiences Using Group Work

7/22 at 10am
Research has shown students can benefit from group work in several ways. But not everyone is a fan. In this session, the panel describe effective tools and techniques to enhance the group work experience. The session will outline the chief problems associated with group work along with ways to address them. Faculty and students will also be on hand to discuss how they’ve successfully implemented group work and how it’s evolved over the years.

  • Benefits of Group Work
  • Problems associated with Group Work
  • Potential Solutions
  • Results (instructor perspective)
  • Results (student perspective)

Benefits of Group Work

  • Plays to Human Nature (being social significantly enhances learning)
  • Improved Peer Relationships (once you get past forming/storming)
  • Increases in Engagement (active learning)
  • Sense of independence
  • self-directed learning
  • learn to operate in relationships
  • Collaborative exchange
  • Enhance Problem solving
  • Peer Learning

Problems Associated with Group Work

Why students hate it:

  • Various student skill levels
  • Dealing with dominant/passive personalities
  • self-selecting group issues
  • grading discrepancies and issues
  • unclear purpose
  • undefined student roles
  • unclear instructor expectations
  • Vagueness of accountability and fairness
  • Difficulty with meeting and communication
  • Difficulty using various technologies
  • Difficulty pacing project work
  • Difference in opinion of final product

Potential Solutions

Start of Group work/project

  • Purpose and instructions (importance of group work in real life included)
  • individual contract (have students agree to certain terms – using bb quiz) Students don’t agree it doesn’t open up project.
  • Timing of implementation
    • back half of semester
    • mimic earlier assignment (make it familiar for students)
    • accurate group distribution

During Group work/project

  • Group Contract with Defined Roles
  • Mandated live sessions
  • Documentation of Communication
  • Instructor Presence (feedback along the way is essential)

Grading the Group Work Project

  • Grading based on 60/40 split
    • instructor: grade project 60%
    • Students grade peers 40%
  • Grades adjust from review of documentation
  • Role dependent grade adjustments

Results – Instructor Perspective

  • Started with high anxiety of project
  • High growth and interaction
    • live sessions crucial
  • questions were content focused
  • One one student not involved
  • Projects were very strong
  • Student feedback surprisingly positive

Results – Student Perspective

  • Contract with spelled out exactly ( no one could say I didn’t know)
  • Groups were assigned
  • Knew instructor was paying attention and that did make a difference (recordings of live meetings)
  • Grading yourselves made a difference
  • roles made division of work excellent

What we learned

  • Implement on back half of course
  • Mimic earlier assignment for familiarity
  • Individual/group Contracts
  • Mandate Communication
  • Force student voice in participation

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Quickly Provide Audio/Video Feedback in the Blackboard Grade Center

Quickly Provide Audio and/or Video Feedback in the Blackboard Grade Center

Instructor presence in online courses is crucial for student success.  The instructor plays an important role in student satisfaction in online courses.  SHSU Online instructors interact with students in discussions, virtual office hours, feedback, and other important ways.  One facet of instructor presence in online courses is feedback for the student’s submitted activities/assessments.  Most of this instructor feedback has been textual in nature.  Instructors generally type in their comments and try to personalize the text they use when doing so.

For some time now, Instructors have had the ability to provide feedback with other tools (audio/video/etc.), but it has been a kluge.  Recording a video somewhere else, selecting a mash up, or pasting embedded code in the appropriate place was how more personalized feedback could be given.

Blackboard’s Insert Recording Feature

One of Blackboard’s latest feature releases allows instructors to record and insert an audio or a video recording right into the feedback area for a Blackboard gradable item.   Watch this short video to learn how to provide audio and/or video feedback to your students seamlessly with the Insert Recording tool.

Best Practice Alert

You don’t have to do a video/audio feedback recording for every grade!  Limit how many you do during the semester.  Here are a couple of strategies to get your started:

  • Make a list of your students and decide how many times you will leave video or audio feedback during the semester.  Use check-boxes to keep track.
  • Select a small number of activities where you will provide this more personalized feedback and use the tool on them.
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Connect with Larger Blackboard “Community”

Blackboard Community Logo

Have you heard about Blackboard Community? Blackboard Community is a community of instructors, instructional designers, admins, Blackboard staff, and educational leaders who interact in one place so that everyone involved can benefit. Becoming a member of community.blackboard.com allows instructors and others to:

  • Connect with Blackboard instructors, instructional designers, Bb administrators, & educational leaders around the world
  • Make suggestions and vote on product enhancements that matter to you
  • Contribute to a Teaching & Learning forum that allows you to ask questions, share ideas and be a part of the Blackboard Community
  • Have conversations that matter over topics that mean something to you
  • Learn from industry experts as well as colleagues in the field
  • Make your own mark in the Teaching & Learning community

This resource is for anyone that uses Blackboard, not just online instructors. I would encourage you to join this growing community and take part in the cognitive surplus of ideas, resources, and conversations around eLearning. Visit community.blackboard.com to join today!

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“Intuitive” is in the eye of the beholder.

intuitive_cropped

So I felt the need to compose a blog that reflected on an experience that we just had at our office and how it relates to how we approach our jobs supporting online/face-to-face/hybrid students and faculty. Our office recently relocated to a “new-to-us” location.  We really love the location and appreciate the way it improved our “esprit de corps”.  We did however notice one issue that had us perplexed.

You see, we couldn’t figure out how to lock our inner-office doors.  There was a door knob, and a place to fit our keys to unlock our office doors, but we couldn’t lock the door using our keys.  We tried it with our individual keys, with our office master-key and even tried it on different doors, but to no avail.  We couldn’t figure it out.  Finally we just decided that the locks must be broken.  After all, why give us keys and a key hole, but no way to lock the doors that these key holes belong to.  Confident in our assumptions, we put in a ticket with facilities and asked them to come fix our problem.

Well later that day a gentleman from facilities showed up and check out the doors.   He took one look at our “broken door-locks” and asked, “Did you push the button?”  The button?  We couldn’t find any button and we told him so.  Finally, he directed us to where the latch comes out of the door and told us to press in what we thought was part of the latch and low and behold, the doors locked!  Who would think to look for a locking mechanism on the side of the door, rather than make it part of the knob?

What was intuitive for the facilities employee was NOT intuitive for us.  Now, in the moment, we all laughed and rejoiced in our new found ability to lock our inner-office doors.  A few hours later as I was sitting at my work desk, I realized that this situation related well to our jobs as instructional technology guides, helpers, trainers and designers.  What do we think is intuitive?  The learning activity, proctoring software or the LMS?  We live and breathe this stuff day in and day out, while our students and faculty may be experiencing it for the first time.

We should be putting all of our documentation, course work, and interactions into this context.  Are we we forgetting the mechanical instructions when we design learning activities and just putting in the academic?  Do we design technology how-to documentation with an assumed level of experience?  Would taking this into consideration change how we approach support calls from students or faculty?  I think it would.

 

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Importance of the Virtual Office

virtual_office_infographic

In face-to-face courses, students have the luxury of benefiting from questions asked while in the classroom or the ability to stop by your office to discuss an issue they might be having.  In both cases they get the chance to interact with you and possibly some of their fellow classmates.

Sometimes, students find it challenging to find that same connection in an online, hybrid or web-enhanced environment.  The good news is that with Blackboard and other learning management systems, you can create a virtual space where your students can experience the same kind of connection and feedback they receive in their brick-and-mortar classrooms.

Using a virtual office in your online/hybrid/web-enhanced courses provides many benefits. For the purpose of this blog post, we will focus on three.  Using a virtual office:

  • puts the instructor in the course
  • cleans up email inboxes
  • promotes the use of Blackboard (the LMS or Learning Management System)

The virtual office puts the instructor in the course

Placing a photo of yourself, your contact information and a little biographical info can go a long way toward helping your student see you as a person and not some synthetic-robot version of yourself.   If you want to go the extra mile, replace the photo with a quick Intro or Welcome video that can bring out your personality and help the students get to know you.

By subscribing to your own virtual office discussion forum you will receive prompts when questions are posted.  These prompts will help you engage with your students in a timely fashion and make the students feel like you are in the course.

The virtual office cleans up e-mail inboxes

Let’s face it, we all “misplace” e-mail.  For some of us, our inbox receives a hundred new messages or more each day.  Why not make life easier on you and your students by reserving course-oriented email for things of a personal or private nature.  Have your students post general course questions to the virtual office discussion forum. When you answer questions via e-mail the only people that see that correspondence are you and the student. If a question is answered in a public space like the virtual office, everyone benefits.

You may have to use the first week of the course as a “training week” where you ensure you point your students to the virtual office for answers to course questions.  Make it a requirement in your syllabus, an expectation on your course expectations page and a question on your Syllabus quiz to ensure students know where to go.

BONUS:  The virtual office builds a course FAQ over the course of a semester that you can then use as part of your next semester’s course.

The virtual office promotes the use of Blackboard (the LMS)

The more time a student is spending in your course, the more connected they are to what is happening.  When your students establish the habit of checking the course regularly, they will be more engaged and more successful.

Encouraging your students to check the virtual office daily will get them in your course and connect them to the information and activities they need to conquer course objectives.

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Seeing is Believing: Let Students See How Online Tools Work

I have posted previously on the importance of showing students what success looks like in an eLearning environment.   Whether via a rubric or by the example of a previous student submission, letting students see how they can be successful with an assignment or activity in your course is generally a good idea.

This post will help you discover how to utilize a tool that your students will use in their activities by employing it to display course content or provide course communication. That’s right, you are getting two for the price of one!

WikisThe Wiki Tool

The wiki tool can be the most rewarding/frustrating tool in your arsenal of activities that you have in your eLearning courses. Providing students with instructions on how to use the tool is definitely important, but many times they don’t end up using it the way you intended. This may be because they didn’t have an example or the 1 page example didn’t really show how a completed wiki should look.

Example: Use a wiki to display course topic or content.

Let’s say one of your course modules deals with Jean Piaget and Cognitive Development/Learning. Create a Wiki to display the content across multiple wiki pages:

  • Page 1 – Wiki Home – Overall introduction of unit
  • Page 2 – About Piaget – Biographical/historical look complete with picture
  • Page 3 – Cognitive Development: Explainer on Piaget’s theory
  • Page 4 – Cognitive Learning Today: Embedded video and text

Leave one page with places for your student to add their own text to the wiki demonstrating how a wiki should work in practice.

BlogsThe Blog Tool

In today’s day and age it easy to make the assumption that all students know how to use a blog or are familiar with journaling due to social media. However, this is generally not the case as most social media posts are micro-blogs (very short 126 characters or less) and full of emojis, text-speak and hashtags.

Example: Use a Course Blog to summarize the week/topic/module, provide commentary on student performance and provide a look into the next week/unit/topic.

This example allows you to demonstrate how a blog works and allows you to communicate important news and information to your students.

Each week make a blog post that:

  • Summarizes what the students went over
  • Provides kudos for student performance
  • Provides encouragement for student struggles
  • Allows for commentary to point out important details about the course content.
  • Gives students a preview/intro into the next unit.
  • Be sure to use multimedia so that students see what the blog can do.

*Use other communication tools in your course (announcements, e-mails, calendar entries) to remind students to check the blog. Be sure to encourage students to comment on your blog posts (a few bonus points for your top 3 commenters across a semester).

Both of these activities will give your students a good idea about how they can use these tools to complete the activities/assignments that you have placed in your course.

This strategy works with multiple types of tools/activities in and outside your LMS. Things like VoiceThread, GoogleDocs, course hashtags and many others are easy to pair with the “Seeing is Believing” idea.

Hopefully, by employing these types of strategies in your online/hybrid/web-enhanced courses, you can reduce student anxiety and increase student success!

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New Semester Checklist – Top 5

top5If you teach online in higher ed, then you are familiar with the effort, energy and involvement it takes to engage with your students in that environment.  If you’ve taught online for more than a few semesters, then you know that you do need to put some thought into your transition of teaching a class from semester to semester.  Thought goes into your course materials, learning objectives and how your class is setup in Blackboard or whatever flavor of LMS you use.

Ask any teacher, course builder or instructional designer and they can probably give you an extensive checklist of items to pay attention to before the semester starts.  This blog post however will cover only our take on the Top 5.

  1. Copy/request copy of course.
    In anticipation of the new semester, make copies or request copies be made of the courses you are transitioning.  It is difficult to work on getting ready for a new semester if you do not have a place that you can do so without affecting your current students.

    * For those of you who just use the same course and only the students change, it still might benefit you to have a “sandbox” or “working” course where you can develop outside of the production course.

  2. Check your syllabus.
    Go through your syllabus and check for things like:

    • Is the textbook correct?
    • Is your contact information current?
    • Do you have the same office hours?
    • Change any due dates and scheduled activities (course schedule).
    • Ensure learning objectives/activities match with their counterparts in the course (in case you’ve changed them).
  3. Check Blackboard (LMS) content availability and due dates.
    Nothing can be more frustrating for students than to come to content in your course and find they don’t have access to or can’t see the item or activity that is supposed to be there.  Go through your due dates and availability dates to be sure that they line up with the current semester.  Blackboard provides the Date Management tool that does this all in one place.
  4. Update your welcome message.
    Providing a contextually relevant and current welcome, video, audio and/or paragraph will not only go along way toward connecting you to your students, it will demonstrate that you are actively interested in your students.
  5. Update course announcements.
    During the course of a regular semester, you will send out multiple updates or announcements to your students.  Be sure to remove irrelevant course announcements and update/reschedule announcements so that they reflect the correct date or time of year.
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BbWorld16 Session Blog – Enhancing the Learning Environment Using Technology

Venetian H
July 13, 2016
1:30 – 2:20

*Everyone of college credit courses has a Blackboard component.  Every faculty member must go through rigorous online training on how to use Blackboard.

Overview

  • learning Feedback
  • tool integration
  • avatars
  • interactive learning activities
  • collaborate ultra

Featured Technologies

  • Storyline (Articulate)
  • Powtoon
  • Collaborate
  • elearning brothers

Student Feedback – breaks and used different teaching materials, enjoyed the games, fun experience, method of instruction was good, encourages attendance and learning, interactive activities, content was more like a conversation rather than a bunch of words. games you post are fun and help us to assimilate the reading assignments.

-Use Welcome to Course Storyline instead of just video
-jeopardy and other games for self-assessment competency checks

Collaborate Ultra

  • Personalized profiles
  • Whiteboard
  • Application Share
  • Polling – Brand New for July Update
  • Session Attendance Reports – Brand New for July Update
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BbWorld16 Session Blog – Best practices when using video in Blackboard Learn

video.pngJuly 13, 10:30 – 11:30am
Titian 2301 B

Isaac Belcher – Tarleton State University
Justin Carrell – Tarleton State University

Why use Video? – One small step (powerful driver)  How instructors can make themselves known to students.  Making feedback meaningful and personal.

Examples of Impactful videos:

  • Video should be engaging, and real, not overly scripted – authentic (leave the ummm’s in)
  • Video allows instructor to demonstrate complex problem solving (working math problems) Students have ability to watch you work through a problem over and over again…added benefit.
  • Demonstrating how to do something online (taking a test to make students think about the concept faculty was teaching – just demonstrating answering one question from large pool)
  • not just moving a lecture to online environment.

Technical Considerations:

  • Quality – enough to get the job done.  Don’t need lexus when camry will do.
  • Length – students will typically watch a video from 7 – 10 minutes
  • Placement – where do you put it?  (embed)
  • Format – streaming format, not player specific, mobile friendly
  • Storage – on streaming server (kaltura, panapto etc…)

Flipped Classroom – Why Flip (Bloom’s Taxonomy Considerations) Ability to utilize class time for application (Evaluation, synthesis, analysis, application, comprehension, knowledge)

Tools for flipped classroom:

  • Zaption* – affirming knowledge layering quizzing over video(Kaltura has Interactive quizzing that does this) *Zaption is going out of business.
  • NBC Learn
  • Films on Demand
  • Screen captures
  • Bb Collaborate

Stay tuned into your video analytics to make more informed decisions about how to best used media in your online courses.

Studio:

  • Familiar Environment – mimics classroom
  • Computer Considerations – beefy computer to handle video recording and different applications.
  • Audio – boom mic, desk mic, lavalier
  • Lighting
  • Room Design
  • Video Sources
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